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How to reunite America around a roadmap for the future

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Erdman is founder and president of the Center for Collaborative Democracy, which is organizing the Grand Bargain Project.

Orekondy is an attorney and community organizer, and is Partnerships Director at the Grand Bargain Project.

American democracy is facing an onslaught of fear and anger — driven by elections that candidates can win just by demonizing opponents, and social media that earn billions by stoking our primal emotions. Those emotions are so raw that frequent calls for civility have failed to work.

Indeed, after the upcoming election, voters on the losing side are likely to lash out more fiercely than ever in our lifetimes. And in January, the two parties are nearly certain to clash incessantly over a path forward, further fueling Americans’ angst, perhaps to the breaking point.


What would it take to replace fear and anger with solid grounds for hope? To that end, the Grand Bargain Project has identified six goals that 90+ percent of Americans see as critical to their future:

  • Boosting economic mobility and growth.
  • Reforming education so students can reach their potential.
  • Making health care more effective and less costly.
  • Curbing the national debt.
  • Powering the economy with clean energy.
  • Making the tax code fairer and simpler.

Are these goals within reach? As things stand, nearly every law is enacted to satisfy some voters, interest groups and politicians — at one point in time. Current policies thereby contradict one another, severely limiting their effectiveness.

So, if common-sense reforms in all six areas were combined, might that produce massive benefits to society?

To find out, we distilled ideas from top former federal officials, think tank leaders, diverse citizens and stakeholders in the six areas. The result: a combination of reforms that struck us as having the potential to improve nearly every American’s prospects.

While each person who has seen the result has found parts they disliked, nearly all have preferred the total package over the country’s current direction, including:

  • 97 percent of attendees at our Braver Angels workshop in June.
  • 91 percent of stakeholders in the above areas whom we have interviewed to date.
  • 92 percent of attendees at a Young Presidents Organization meeting in August.
  • 85-plus percent of high-profile deficit hawks, climate activists, liberals and libertarians interviewed.

Given these levels of approval, we see the potential to build  a nationwide movement large enough for most political leaders to pay attention. To that end, the project is moving forward along four tracks:

1) Bridge Alliance, leaders of various Rotary Clubs and other grassroots organizations are working with us to incorporate the Grand Bargain into their ongoing programs.

2) Braver Angels will soon start hosting workshops to deliberate over the six issues. We too, in cooperation with Living Room Conversations, will begin holding community deliberations — both in person and online — over the content of the Grand Bargain, and incorporate the results into the next iteration.

3) On a parallel track, we have interviewed 23 major stakeholders in the six areas and are scheduling interviews with another 30. We will incorporate their feedback into the next iteration, which we expect to release in early December. We will then ask the stakeholders to publicly endorse the plan.

4) To mobilize the 100+ million “exhausted majority” of Americans who hunger for a better future, but disagree about how to get there — and therefore lack power to affect change, we will broadcast digital-social messages such as:

If just a fraction of us put aside our differences and unite into a movement supporting the Grand Bargain, we could at last exert influence proportional to our numbers.

To further empower the exhausted majority, we are seeking their input on the content of the Grand Bargain, inviting the public to endorse the evolving plan and asking them to enlist their personal networks.

Once we have built broad support from the public and stakeholders,  our advisors who have strong connections to the president-elect and new congressional leaders will ask them to consider the following:
Almost half the country sees each of you as a threat to their future. And each party is certain to block the other’s agenda. If you want to win wide public support — and actually lead this country — your best alternative, we believe, is to adopt the Grand Bargain as your governing agenda. It would, after all, advance the goals that over 90 percent of Americans see as necessary for them to thrive.

Our project is clearly ambitious. But we know of no other credible way to unite Americans across the spectrum around a practical plan to boost economic mobility, curb the debt, accelerate the transition to clean energy, or attain the other key objectives.

We urge you to join us in helping shape this new governing agenda.

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This Isn’t My Story. But It’s One I’ll Never Forget.

Children with American flags

This Isn’t My Story. But It’s One I’ll Never Forget.

My colleague, Meghan Monroe, a former teacher and trainer in the Dignity Index, went out to lunch with a friend on the 4th of July. Her friend was late and Meghan found herself waiting outside the restaurant where, to her surprise, a protest march approached. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t immediately clear what the protest was about. There were families and children marching—some flags, and some signs about America being free.

One group of children caught Meghan’s eye as they tugged at their mother while marching down the street. The mom paused and crouched down to speak to the children. Somehow, Meghan could read the situation and realized that the mom was explaining to the children about America—about what it is, about all the different people who make up America, about freedom, about dignity.

“I could just tell that the Mom wanted her children to understand something important, something big. I couldn’t tell anything about her politics. I could just tell that she wanted her children to understand what America can be. I could tell she wanted dignity for her children and for people in this country. It was beautiful.”

As Meghan told me this story, I realized something: that Mom at the protest is a role model for me. The 4th may be over now, but the need to explain to each other what we want for ourselves and our country isn’t.

My wife, Linda, and I celebrated America at the wedding of my godson, Alexander, and his new wife, Hannah. They want America to be a place of love. Dozens of my cousins, siblings, and children celebrated America on Cape Cod.

For them and our extended family, America is a place where families create an enduring link from one generation to the next despite loss and pain.

Thousands of Americans in central Texas confronted the most unimaginable horrors on July 4th. For them, I hope and pray America is a place where we hold on to each other in the face of unbearable pain and inexplicable loss.

Yes. It’s complicated. There were celebrations of all kinds on July 4th—celebrations of gratitude to our military, celebrations of gratitude for nature and her blessings, and sadly, celebrations of hatred too. There are a million more examples of our hopes and fears and visions, and they’re not all happy.

I bet that’s one of the lessons that mom was explaining to her children. I imagine her saying, “America is a place where everyone matters equally. No one’s dignity matters more than anyone else’s. Sometimes we get it wrong. But in our country, we always keep trying and we never give up.”

For the next 12 months as we lead up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we’re going to be hearing a lot about what we want America to be. But maybe the more important question is what we the people are willing to do to fulfill our vision of what we can be. The answer to that question is hiding in plain sight and is as old as the country itself: join with others and do your part, and no part is too small to matter.

At our best, our country is a country of people who serve one another. Some may say that’s out of fashion, but not me. Someone is waiting for each of us—to talk, to share, to join, to care, to lead, to love. And in our time, the superpower we need is the capacity to treat each other with dignity, even when we disagree. Differences of opinion aren’t the problem; in fact, they’re the solution. As we love to say, “There’s no America without democracy and there’s no democracy without healthy debate and there’s no healthy debate without dignity.”

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The American Experiment tested whether groups with diverse interests could unite under a declaration of common principles. In this moment, we face a critical juncture that tests whether distrust and political fervor could drive Americans to abandon or deny everything that unites us.

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Social entrepreneur John Marks developed a set of eleven working principles that have become his modus operandi and provide the basic framework for his new book, “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship," from which a series of three articles is adapted. While Marks applied these principles in nonprofit work, he says they are also applicable to social enterprisesand to life, in general.

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It is a common refrain to say that Americans need to find common ground across the political spectrum.

Over the past year, AllSides and More Like US found >700 instances of common ground on political topics, revealed in Similarity Hub. It highlights public opinion data from Gallup, Pew Research, YouGov, and many other reputable polling firms.

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