What the People Know

“Americans are good when you meet with them face-to-face.” 
 
It’s true.  As you can imagine I’ve met thousands of Americans over the past five years criss-crossing the country, and can say with confidence that most Americans are good, generous, cordial people willing to give you and others the benefit of the doubt.  I’ve met any number of people who knew they disagreed with me politically – they were Trump supporters in Iowa for example – but were perfectly happy to ask a question or have a beer with me in a friendly manner. 
 
Things break down when you’re not face-to-face, and instead are interacting via cable news narratives or worse yet, social media.  I think of these platforms as a funhouse mirror that is refracting images of us to each other so we start to see caricatures on the other side instead of human beings. 
 
Unfortunately, these forces are now bleeding into reality.  Americans’ attitudes are becoming further entrenched, and the polarization is translating into both real relationships and actions. 
 
“I met a farmer who left the Republican Party in Ohio and all of his friends stopped talking to him,” said Frank Barry, the author of the new book “From Back Roads to Better Angels:  A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.”  Frank took his wife on a seven-month sojourn across the country in an RV hoping to glean a sense of what everyday Americans are thinking about the state of the union.  As you can imagine, it was a profound journey filled with insights from people of all walks of life all around the country. 
 
“Americans sense that we are becoming more divided, and they’re deeply concerned about it,” Frank relates.  “And it’s not just a perception, the divides are becoming more real.  When you ask them whether we will overcome our divides and come together, they say, ‘yes, we will.’  But they have no idea how or what to do.” 

This is pretty consistent with what I hear too.  Frank came back from his exploration both more optimistic and concerned.  Optimistic because, yes, Americans are good people when you sit with them one-on-one.  But very few have a sense of positive actions to take or a community to join, and more people are becoming subject to the forces that are driving us apart. 
 
In my fondest hopes, Forward becomes the answer to both of these questions.  Imagine if that farmer in Ohio had some new people to talk to, and people understood that if enough of us band together we can resist the forces of dehumanization and reform our institutions so that they aren’t rewarded for making us angry about our problems. 
 
It’s one of the strange facets of this time.  We are a good people.  Many of our leaders are actually well-intended.  Yet we are on a path that very few of us are happy about we can’t seem to change.  And there are billion-dollar organizations that are paving the road and profiting at every turn. 
 
Interestingly, one of the things that Frank believes is the answer to what ails us is non-partisan primaries and election reform.  “It’s one of the most direct ways to reduce polarization.”  It made me glad that a fellow traveler like Frank has arrived at the same conclusions.  I’ve spoken to more and more people lately who have woken up to the fact that political reform is the only way out. 
 
For my interview of Frank click here.  For his book click here.  To check out what Forward is doing, click here – John Avlon and John Curtis have their primaries on the 25th so let your friends in Long Island and Utah know!