Twenty-five years ago, a political scientist noticed something changing in American bowling alleys and predicted something close to our current fraught and polarized moment.
In his best-selling book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documented how Americans were no longer connecting with each other in common places or in pursuit of common aims. Instead of bowling on a team, we did so in isolation. Putnam warned that a likely consequence of this growing isolation and withdrawal from genuine ties with neighbors would be a rise in undemocratic, and even authoritarian, politics.
Our nation’s problems, of course, are far more serious than the decline of bowling teams, or coffee shops in which everyone wears headphones and stares into a phone. Yet when we stop talking to one another in routine social settings, it’s easy to lose trust in our fellow citizens and faith in our common institutions – especially when we live in news bubbles designed to generate outrage rather than informed citizens.
With our divisions escalating into tragedy in Minneapolis and elsewhere, it’s time to remind each other that our constitutional self‑government is tied to a shared duty to secure one another’s rights and to respect one another. This is especially important where disagreements run deepest. The social contract binding our country is not the domination of some people by others. It is a mutual pledge that each of us will help guarantee what all of us retain – that my freedom is bound up with yours. That my disrespect of your rights and dignity imperils my own.
We're living through a test of that proposition. Our constitutional system has weathered civil war and economic collapse, but it's straining under the erosion of civic culture and democratic responsibility that makes self-government possible. The Constitution distributes power, protects rights, establishes procedures. But it can't make us care whether our neighbor can freely exercise the right to vote, or compel us to recognize the dignity of someone who voted differently. Those obligations belong to us.
The framers designed a republic that would channel faction and ambition into productive tension. But the machinery only works if we accept the legitimacy of the process and the rights and dignity of everyone. When we view fellow citizens as enemies to be vanquished, the constitutional order begins to buckle. When our elected leaders stop serving the interests of the general public in favor of a partisan few, our democracy becomes unproductive and, at times, counterproductive to voters.
When this moment subsides, and Americans turn their attention to repairing what has been broken, we will need much more than bowling teams. We will need a renewal of civic responsibility and practices in which we reach out to others – including those different from ourselves, but equally worthy of respect. Some have turned toward this work: The Disagree Better Initiative, for example, seeks to channel controversial topics into real conversation. Other groups have sought to bring red and blue America together. A new documentary based on Putnam’s work, “Join Or Die,” puts our choice in stark relief.
We will also need an electoral system that encourages us to talk to one another again. Today’s politicians, safe in their gerrymandered districts, chosen largely in closed, plurality primaries with a small percentage of the vote, have no reason to talk – or listen – to anyone beyond their partisan base. They have every reason to ignore or antagonize everyone else. That’s no way to choose our leaders. And to no surprise, it hasn’t resulted in progress or leadership, let alone problem-solving.
We have options. Ranked choice voting, which requires a candidate to earn over 50% of the vote to win, empowers voters to express their full range of preferences. It rewards candidates who can appeal to voters beyond a narrow partisan base, and incentivizes leaders to deliver for a majority of their voters rather than be beholden to that base. A more proportional U.S. House would end gerrymandering and encourage coalition-building among elected leaders.
These reforms won’t solve everything that ails us. But systems shape behavior, and our current system disempowers voters and is shaped for combat. If we're serious about renewing our commitment to constitutional government in our 250th year, we need not all become bowlers. (Though we should take off the headphones more often.)
But we should commit to speaking to one another – and to a politics where mutual respect and responsibility are an advantage rather than a weakness.
Meredith Sumpter is the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections.
