Abraham Lincoln was oft misunderstood. When Lincoln said that this nation cannot endure “half slave and half free,” critics would interpret Lincoln as calling for war. Surely — so his detractors believed — Lincoln meant to abolish slavery by force of law, which he knew the South could not abide. Yet Lincoln’s practical position was to restrict the further spread of slavery into newly-acquired territory.
In halting the spread of slavery, Lincoln believed not only that war could be averted, but that slavery itself would be put on a natural course toward extinction. Slavery was the greatest of evils, so Lincoln believed. And yet, good people supported, or at least tolerated, this peculiar institution. Lincoln was certain that on the issue of slavery, if only the nation could hold the incentives for war in check, the American people would ultimately solve the problem on their own, over time.
But the nation failed to halt the spread of slavery. Lincoln’s theory could never be tested. But it may be that we face an analogous test in our own time. What would it look like for us to pull back from the precipice of civic unraveling to find America reconciled across the bitter gulfs of her present divisions?
America today is gripped by multiple, supposedly irreconcilable divides — over race, over class, over urban and rural divides, over our political visions.
I represent an organization called Braver Angels — a community of Americans left, right, and center who are dedicated to reviving empathy and goodwill in our culture of politics. We seek to rehabilitate our failing institutions by first reviving trust in each other. We grapple together on issues that are usually presented to us as false binaries — impasses of abortion or immigration. How to handle racial ideology (to be woke or anti-woke?). What side we must come down on in the conflict in the Middle East.
I recently asked an activist in Los Angeles to join us in an initiative to find common ground on immigration. Her response was, “How can I seek common ground with people who don’t believe in having a border?”
Most Democrats — most Americans — do believe in a border. But the belief that Democratic leadership is not interested in securing the country is enough to drive many Republicans to write off the party entirely. Worse than this missed opportunity for productive political dialogue is the fraying of personal relationships among the American people. Braver Angels co-founder and noted family therapist Bill Doherty established Braver Angels because, after decades of practice, he began to receive clients who were on the verge of divorce because of political disputes. Professors, meanwhile, are thought to turn their progressive students against their conservative parents just as pastors are at times blamed for turning their conservative congregants against their progressive-left friends.
Immigration and abortion, in the best of times, divide us. But these divisions are then weaponized by media companies, political parties, and even corporations — and arguably by institutions of higher learning — in ways that feed business models more concerned with their own enrichment, political power, and ideological signaling. Is it not time for these institutions to return to their core functions, ones that serve rather than divide Americans?
Seeking a higher purpose
The media — at its best — is meant to inform the American people, not polarize them. The press is based on nobler values than sowing division for profit.
The truth may be controversial, but we should be careful that controversy does not remain the business model of the American press. We should be asking our spiritual institutions to provide us with their guidance on spiritual, not political, matters. We should ask that our educational institutions teach our children how — not what — to think. We should ask our corporations to build up our economy, not tear each other down. We should have places where politics play second fiddle to higher purpose.
There was — in view of some — a golden age of American politics, overlapping a golden age of American media where party differences did not trump common patriotism and journalists prized objectivity. A John Kennedy and a Richard Nixon could debate one another while celebrating each other’s patriotism, all while Walter Cronkite enjoyed the trust of the entire nation.
This is the nostalgia for post-World War II America that many of us still harken back to as we decide what our future should hold. That golden era then gave way to simmering discontent that boiled over into the Civil Rights Movement and then the Vietnam protests.
What would it look like for us to pull back from the precipice of civic unraveling to find America reconciled across the bitter gulfs of her present divisions?
But with respect to the Civil Rights Movement, another romantic lens takes shape as we recall the inspired moral leadership of a generation of activists who sought justice and racial reconciliation through the power of love and nonviolence. There were those who, in the time of Martin Luther King Jr., believed that the path to liberation for African Americans lay through violence (just as there were those in the 1960s who believed that domestic terrorism was an effective and legitimate means of protest). Of course, violence was an accepted tool of oppression wielded by the forces of Jim Crow.
But the nonviolent movement challenged each side of this coin (from very different postures). And the result was ultimately that Jim Crow was defeated, and the general principles of the Civil Rights Movement were accepted as foundational for both the nation and the Black community.
The 1960s was, clearly, not without violence. But there is nevertheless some vindication of Lincoln even in this. Injustices that in many ways were almost 350 years old in American life ultimately gave way to the power of a movement that was explicitly nonviolent in its tactics even while met with violence. And it sparked a culture of conversation across America that accommodated both political and moral changes that were patriotic and revolutionary.
What was lacking in Lincoln’s time, one can at least argue, was an organized effort to engage the conscience of the South more powerful than Lincoln’s artful political language and more inviting than attacks of the abolitionists. Lincoln was a politician gifted in sharpness and sensitivity. But the political argument between abolitionists and slaveholders was one steeped in mutual condemnation. No movement of thousands crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to peacefully lay siege to the moral conscience of the South, as it did during the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s.
How that would have changed history, who knows. But it stands to reason that the descendants of liberated slaves had within them a spiritual fortitude capable of enduring such self-sacrifice. Sacrifice and suffering is at the heart of the Black Freedom tradition, if nothing else is. And as the Bible teaches and as Dr. King believed, “unearned suffering is redemptive.”
We may never be in absolute agreement. But …
There are some who believe in cycles in history. There are some who believe, as integralists do, as in fact King did and perhaps Hegel did, that ages proceed from the synthesis of opposing forces yielding a greater wisdom in the resolution of their conflicts. Seen from this vantage point, perhaps American society is progressing according to a pattern of history that, for all of the dire divisions that plague us and might plunge us into a historical moment of unrest, is winding upward toward a greater moral paradigm.
Soldiers spilled blood and had their blood spilled to free the slaves. Activists were beaten, and some were killed — but had mainly to brave the slings and arrows of contempt from an American public deeply corrupted with racial animus and fear.
One cannot tell the future of this generation with certainty. But many things are certain — millions of Americans may not trust the legitimacy of the next president of the United States, or perhaps the legitimacy of Congress and the Supreme Court.
The energies of discontent will be channeled somewhere, in some way. They could manifest in organized efforts to refuse compliance with perceived illegitimate authority — perhaps an effort to overturn the results of an election. It could manifest in mob violence in the streets. This in turn could result in an anxious government summoning force to suppress its own citizens and another presidential transition period marred by violence.
A movement that begins to achieve the cultural reconciliation of the American people across lines of party, race, geography, ideology, and culture is one that can reset the norms of our civil society and our politics as well.
But if, instead, American citizens across communities and institutions began to engage one another through tools that channeled their friction into mutual understanding that could be transformed into trust, trust in turn could be transformed into consensus building.
The Revolutionary War was an effort of arms waged upon a philosophical foundation that set the stage for a process that was more revolutionary in its conservatism. The United States Constitution was an instrument that bound factions with deep differences in the context of their time, through a process where the energy of conflict was transmuted through discourse and deliberation. Discourse and deliberation in turn legitimated the outcomes of this process born out of conflicts that, in the absence of such architecture, would be guaranteed to spiral into disarray and violence.
The United States Constitution does not need to be reinvented. But the spirit of nonviolence, in its goodwill, its moral courage, and its dignifying of opposition, could be funneled into a series of civic engagement processing spanning across American civil society that could heal the virus of polarization across our civic body like so many antibodies — from campus to community, to the private sector, to the political parties themselves. The tools for such impact are already present within the work and research of hundreds of organizations across the larger bridge-building field.
But each of these spaces must be challenged by a civic renewal movement prepared to argue for the need to morally revolutionize our institutional structures from within — in a way that conserves their capacity to play the vital but necessarily limited functions each must play.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — often noble in their intent — too often sow division and undermine the Beloved Community in corporations and on campuses. Police departments too often are seen as militarily occupying communities as opposed to serving them. We’re watching religious denominations splitting apart over politics as if the year were 1859 instead of 2024.
But as the scholar Yuval Levin well explains, we have reduced our conception of being a productive member of an institution to our willingness to use it as a political platform for our individual views. In so doing, we sacrifice the ability of a given institution to be trusted by all.
A movement that begins to achieve the cultural reconciliation of the American people across lines of party, race, geography, ideology, and culture is one that can reset the norms of our civil society and our politics as well. But again, we must all argue the need for this shift. Chaos and even dissolution await if we fail to do so. But we can come together if we choose to. Now is the time to begin.
We may never be in absolute agreement. But we can call on our better angels — on our goodwill and a commitment to the democratic process upon which the republic stands. This is America reconciled.
Root Quarterly Founder’s Weekend Unity Picnic & Concert, November 16, 2024, 3pm – 8pm, Old Swedes’ Episcopal Church, 916 S. Swanson Street. Concert by Deb Montgomery and speech by John Wood, Jr. on the theme of “A House Divided Cannot Stand.” Free. RSVP here. More information on Founder’s Weekend here.
John Wood, Jr., is national ambassador for Braver Angels and a columnist for USA Today. This piece originally ran in Root Quarterly’s Fall 2024 issue, “Founders”. Subscribe to Root Quarterly here.
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