Americans should recommit to one another, our country, and the world

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

“At least they know what they’re fighting for,” I said of the Ukrainians.

I admitted recently to a colleague who specializes in fragile states—places where lawlessness and corruption find safe harbor and lead to mass dysfunction—that I was feeling a strange pang of jealousy at the clarity of purpose now animating the Ukrainian people in their fight against the Russian government. Here in the U.S., we are tearing each other apart over dogmatic political ideologies. It’s becoming more and more common for people who do not report having a religious affiliation to place politics in its stead. This move can come with its own orthodoxies—and in many cases, unfortunately, not much grace or forgiveness. This is the case even as we peaceably live among people with many different religious faiths.

We can tolerate, even celebrate, that our brother has fallen in love with and married someone from an entirely different religion, which may have a contrary worldview to ours. But if that brother does not stand with us on something more mundane—he will not put the right sign in his window, or read the right book, or perform your political liturgy—he is a heretic who must be cast out. We didn’t even unite over a global pandemic; it only entrenched our divides. Nicholas A. Christakis, head of the Yale Human Nature Lab, summarizes America’s existential threat to itself in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.

“[T]he United States seems riven by polarities—right and left, urban and rural, religious and a-religious, insiders and outsiders, haves and have-nots,” he writes. “Analyses reveal that both political polarization and economic inequality are at century-long peaks. American citizens are engaged in vocal debates about their differences, about who can and should speak for whom, about the meaning and extent of personal identity, about the inexorable pull of tribal loyalties, and about whether the ideological commitment to the melting pot of the United States—and to a common identity as Americans—is feasible or even desirable.”

The project manager in me is constantly turning over the feasibility question in my head. Do we teach skills for political depolarization? How do we bring people together? Do we have a scale problem that would be ameliorated by a more regional approach?

On the question of desirability, I am much less equivocal: If the war in Ukraine does not wake Americans up to the idea that an imperfect liberal democracy is preferable to a finely tuned authoritarian regime, we are really in trouble. As an American, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech—these are sacrosanct to me. Even in elementary school, I did not want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, because I thought it violated the principle of freedom of religion; for someone who didn’t believe, it was compelled speech to say the words, “One nation, under God.” I suppose, like many people, I just don’t want to be told what to do—by the government, by my school, by my employer, or by the acolytes of any particular ideology. //

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Opening Salvo // Taking the Wheel