Society

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Amanda Gorman at Biden's inauguration reminded me: politics needs poetry

      by

      Obama-endorsed and wearing gold-clipped braids and Oprah-gifted earrings, 22-year old poet Amanada Gorman and her poem The Hill We Climb have been the talking point of Biden’s inauguration. Her five-minute poem, which started with the question “When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”, explored grief, redemption and recovery, and wowed the world. Imperfect but fervent, it reminded us of something important: politics needs poetry.Gorman, born in 1998 in Los Angeles and raised by a mother who works as a teacher, graduated from Harvard university in 2020. She was the first US national youth poet laureate and its youngest ever inaugural poet. Owing to a speech impediment, she couldn’t pronounce the letter R until two years ago. She has described spoken word as “my own type of pathology”. Praise has overflowed for the young poet and many have celebrated her passion, beauty and poise in this historic moment that closes the door on Trump. “I honor you, @TheAmandaGorman. Thank you,” wrote the daughter of Dr Martin Luther King Junior, Bernice King on Twitter.The clips circulating on the internet of Gorman, glowing and optimistic, stand in utter contrast to scenes of Trump supporters storming the Capitol, grotesque and desperate. She wrote the remainder of the piece after the events of 6 January , staying up late to watch the storming the Capitol. The line: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” speaks directly to the attempted derailment of democracy.On Instagram, Gorman describes herself as a dreamer, and the line: “Our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful” shows her faith – a young woman dreaming aloud before millions of people in the form of spoken word. The moment has gone viral. Spoken word is a craft and a powerful art form, from the cadence to the delivery, to the subtle choreography. The moment, as internationally syndicated as it was, belongs to America. I don’t necessarily desire to see a version of it reproduced should Keir Starmer ever be elected prime minister (nor for the poet to find inspiration in Winston Churchill speeches).American politics’ relationship to poetry has a deep legacy in its fight for justice. In 1861, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and lecturer, wrote To the Union Savers of Cleveland, a poem about Sara Lucy Bagby, a woman who had escaped enslavement and was arrested and returned to her “owner” under the Fugitive Slave Act. Harper published the poem in abolitionist newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle, and addressed it fervently to the white people of Ohio, writing “And your guilty, sin-cursed Union/ Shall be shaken to its base/ Till ye learn that simple justice/ Is the right of every race.” Poetry has long been the platform for opposing the current condition. As Matt Sandler writes in The Black Romantic Revolution: “Harper and her contemporaries borrowed and transformed the techniques and theories of Romanticism in an effort to bring about the end of slavery.”Poets are vendors of aspiration and are always fashioning together depictions of a better tomorrow, but it’s fair to ask if they are ever truly listened to in political spaces.Maya Angelou read her poem On the Pulse of Morning in 1993, at the inauguration of Bill Clinton. She says: “Lift up your hearts/ Each new hour holds new chances/ For a new beginning./ Do not be wedded forever/ To fear, yoked eternally/ To brutishness./ The horizon leans forward,/ Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Clinton would later go on to instigate the war on drugs and enact the 1994 Crime Bill that would destroy many lives and accelerate the incarceration of African Americans.I have wished many times to see more poets in positions of power, though writing poetry hasn’t made presidents any less barbaric or kinder – as one might think a writer of similes would be. Obama published poems at 19 in a literary review, published in 1982 by Occidental College. Jimmy Carter was the first US president to write a book of poetry, Always a Reckoning, and Other Poems, in 1995. Neither of these men has clean hands.For now, it’s paramount that young poets be given the space, funding and opportunities to be the voices of their communities. They are often spokespeople for those who look and live like them. Don’t wait until a black poet is on the world stage to be inspired by them – often they are not invited, and often they don’t want to endorse state activities by engaging in such ceremonies.Those poems, performed on neighbourhood stages, sitting in anthologies and self-published books, showcased at slams and open mics, have the answers too. There are many young poets like Gorman, who have glistening ideas for tomorrow and deserve to be recognised and propelled into superstardom, or at least just read. Buy their books too.Gorman was an alumnus of empowering youth projects such as Youth Speaks and Urban Word. If you fell in love with Gorman’s inaugural poem, support your local equivalent too. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican lawmaker apologizes after mocking Biden's trans health nominee

      by

      A Pennsylvania legislator has apologised for sharing an image mocking the appearance of the recently departed state health secretary, Dr Rachel Levine, a transgender woman nominated to serve in the Biden administration.State representative Jeff Pyle, a Republican from Armstrong and Indiana counties in western Pennsylvania, said on Facebook he “had no idea” the post mocking Levine “would be … received as poorly as it was”, and said “tens of thousands of heated emails assured me it was”.“I owe an apology and I offer it humbly,” Pyle said, not specifically apologizing to Levine or other transgender people. He later apologized “to all affected”.Levine has not commented. The state health department did not immediately respond to an email seeking a reaction to Pyle’s post or his apology. Comments on his Facebook page had called for him to resign.Joe Biden tapped Levine a day before his inauguration be assistant secretary of health, leaving her poised to become the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the US Senate.Pyle, who was first elected in 2004, cited a conversation with the Democratic leader in the state House “who explained the error of my post”. He said he did not come up with the meme but merely shared it, though he said he should not have done so.“From this situation I have learned to not poke fun at people different than me and to hold my tongue,” he wrote. “Be a bigger man.”Pyle wrote that he would leave Facebook “soon” but was not resigning and would focus on a Butler Community College project and the economic revitalization of Pennsylvania amid the Covid-19 pandemic. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      We're on the verge of breakdown: a data scientist's take on Trump and Biden

      by

      Peter Turchin is not the first entomologist to cross over to human behaviour: during a lecture in 1975, famed biologist E O Wilson had a pitcher of water tipped on him for extrapolating the study of ant social structures to our own.It’s a reaction that Turchin, an expert-on-pine-beetles-turned-data-scientist and modeller, has yet to experience. But his studies at the University of Connecticut into how human societies evolve have lately gained wider currency; in particular, an analysis that interprets worsening social unrest in the 2020s as an intra-elite battle for wealth and status.The politically motivated rampage at the US Capitol fits squarely into Turchin’s theory. In a 2010 paper, Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010,Turchin wrote that “labour oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.”Turchin’s Cliodynamics, which he describes as “a more mature version of social science”, rests upon 10,000 years of historical data, as such there is, to establish general explanations for social patterns. He predicts that unrest is likely to get worse through this decade, just as it has in roughly 50-year cycles since 1780.Historians don’t necessarily like the proposal, he acknowledges. “They bring general theories through the back door. Our job is to be explicit.”Explicitly, then, Turchin explains current political warfare as a battle between an overpopulation of elites to some degree exacerbated by a decline in general living standards or immiseration, and financially overextended governments. Initially, Turchin applied the theory to pre-industrial societies, but a decade ago he travelled forward in time, predicting unrest –Ages of Discord– that would intensify in 2020 and endure until reversed.“Societies are systems and they tend to change in a somewhat predictable way,” Turchin told the Observer. “We are on the verge of state breakdown where the centre loses hold of society.”In the US, he points out, there are two political chief executives, each commanding his own elite cadre, with nothing yet being done at a deep structural level to improve circumstances. “We’ve seen growing immiseration for 30 to 40 years: rising levels of state debt, declining median wages and declining life expectancies. But the most important aspect is elite overproduction” – by which he means that not just capital owners but high professionals – lawyers, media professionals and entertainment figures – have become insulated from wider society. It is not just the 1% who are in this privileged sector, but the 5% or 10% or even 20% – the so-called “dream hoarders” – they vie for a fixed number of positions and to translate wealth into political position.“The elites had a great run for a while but their numbers become too great. The situation becomes so extreme they start undermining social norms and [there is] a breakdown of institutions. Who gets ahead is no longer the most capable, but [the one] who is willing to play dirtier.”Turchin’s analysis, of course, is readily applied to Donald Trump who, spurned by mainstream elites, appealed to a radical faction of the elite and to the disaffected masses to forward his political ambition. A similar case could be made for leading Brexiteers.Similar circumstances, says Turchin, can be found with the Populares of first century Rome who played to the masses and used their energy to attain office – “Very similar to Trump, who created a radical elite faction to get ahead.”In the professor’s reading, the incoming administration, notwithstanding the diversity of its appointments, is representative of mainstream elite power. “Think of 2020 as the return of the established elite and separation of dissidents. What’s important is that the incoming administration recognises the root problem.”In recent weeks, Turchin has found himself profiled in the Atlantic (The Historian Who Sees the Future), portrayed as a mad prophet, and name-checked by the Financial Times (The Real Class War is Within the Rich).He has been uplifted by some, but pushed back against by others. “You have this veneer of complicated impressive science. But any analysis like this is only as good as the data upon which it rests,” says Shamus Khan, chair of Columbia University’s sociology department. “It’s easy to imagine that you’re a Cassandra, and forget about the million others who similarly claim that they are.”“I think he’s got a point, because a significant component of the reasonably far left are highly educated but with blocked opportunities,” says Mark Mizruchi, author of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. “Where you have disjunctures is where you get political extremism. If Turchin is right, you’re going to get a lot more highly educated people facing limited career prospects. Most of those will turn left rather than right.”Dorian Warren, one of the authors of The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy, says elite warfare is only one way to describe the circumstances. “Frustrated elite aspirants gets radicalised when their expectations meet the reality of a rigid hierarchy. They perceive the system as unjust, but the source of injustice is elite overproduction and too much competition.Warren points to Occupy Wall Street, which was not a working-class movement. “It was mostly disaffected, white college graduates. That was a preview of what we’re seeing now.” In the American context, Warren says, “it’s mostly white elite fighting among each other, while the elites of colour are trying to break into the hierarchy.” For the most part, Warren points out, black elites in the US refuse to participate in white elite warfare.”But the hard science of Turchin’s approach cannot explain all things. After the Great Depression in what some might call a negotiated settlement, elites negotiated a unionised settlement with the masses in a moment of enlightened self-interest.“There was an elite consensus to accept the legitimacy of unions. In the last 40 years, we’ve seen a re-fracturing of that consensus with no worry for peasants with pitchforks who might come.”Without Trump as a unifying villain, elite fracturing is likely to enter a period of multi-dimensional refracture. “The left was always fighting among itself, so in some ways, it’s reversion to normal. There’s a reckoning coming in the Republican party, too, as it turns in on itself again over how it lost power. I think we’ll see intra-elite warfare on both sides.”Warren believes we’re at a critical juncture over a new elite settlement. One reason for optimism can be found in the battle for a minimum wage or corporate support for the social justice movement – “seeds of a new settlement”.Turchin says he feels “vindicated as a scientist who proposed a theory, but I have some consternation that we have to live through this. It may not be very pretty. I’m worried about a state breakdown. Mass shootings and urban protests are the warning tremors of an earthquake. Society can survive, but problems are likely to escalate.” More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump will soon leave office. But the ingredients of homegrown fascism remain | Dale Maharidge

      by

      Several months into the pandemic, a friend drove us away from the southern California coast into barren, dun-colored mountains, where roadside signs were riddled with bullet holes. We came across an abandoned service station with the windows blown out and an American flag, faded by the desert sun, painted on the front. We entered the ruins. On the back wall was a graffito: fucked at birth.“I knew you’d like that,” my friend said as I took photos of the words that encapsulated what I’d been trying to say for the past 40 years in my work as a journalist documenting the ever-expanding class chasm in America.In the early 1980s, I believed awareness would instigate political and social change. Now, after so many articles and books, I felt that they were like some tired country ballad playing in a honky-tonk where everyone is drunk and not listening to the music. I was done with the work.So when my friend suggested the scrawl as a title for my next book, I blew her off – I was tapped out.In the coming days, however, I was haunted by the juxtaposition of the flag and the spray-painted words. It was time to change the song. I decided to drive across America and visit homeless encampments, meatpacking towns, crippled onetime industrial cities, showing people a picture of the gas station’s exterior and what was inside, and let those I encountered tell me what it meant. The responses always came fast.In Sacramento, John Kraintz, who had been homeless: “In the Declaration of Independence, they said all men are created equal. That was the first big lie. If you’ve got money, they care about you.”In Denver, the Black Lives Matter activist Terrance Roberts: “You ask me about being fucked at birth? I mean, I’m an African American male.”In New York City, my former student Megan Cattel: “That’s the millennial rallying cry.”That journey convinced me of the need for the title. Sales representatives from middle America told my publisher it would be difficult to place the volume in stores; a professor friend wrote that her community college bookstore in California “warned me that they might not carry it because of the title”.The words – fucked at birth – are perhaps harsh. But what is far more harsh and unpleasant is the fact that they are simply reality for ever-increasing numbers of Americans.The stark title is the least part of changing the song. I also came away from my recent cross-nation reporting tour convinced that the 2020s are going to be this century’s 1930s. The stock market – fueled by low interest rates and a record three-fourths of a trillion dollars of borrowed money – is by one metric overvalued more than any time since 1929. Amid this, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University fears as many as 30 to 40 million people face being thrown out of their rental homes when the various moratoriums end, which seems destined to create an unprecedented wave of homelessness.Don’t be fooled by what’s going to happen later this year: when the vaccines are widely distributed, the top two quintiles of the American population will start spending money. A lot of it. But this won’t immediately translate into good times for the bottom three quintiles. Tens of millions of the precariat were already living in a de facto Great Depression before the pandemic, and many working-class jobs will not return in the short term – if ever. This widening disparity creates a level of rage among voters that inexplicably continues to evade Beltway journalists’ understanding.It’s not that difficult to grasp meaning. Just look to the past. I’ve long been a student of the 1930s – fascism was on the rise in the US throughout the Great Depression. It’s something that never went away; it’s part of the American DNA. Many of the 74 million who voted for Donald J Trump in 2020 would be quite happy with authoritarian leadership. They aren’t going to vanish with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.In early 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 peopleWe think of social media, Fox News and the One America News Network as being drivers of QAnon or the Proud Boys, amplifying feelings and actions that heretofore would have remained in the shadows. But long before there was an internet and television, fascist ideas thoroughly infiltrated American culture. An early activist who recognized this was the Reverend LM Birkhead, a Unitarian minister. In 1935 Birkhead traveled to investigate the authoritarian governments of Italy and Germany. In 1938, he released a list of 800 “antidemocratic” organizations in the United States that were aligned with the Nazis and fascism. He believed that one out of every three Americans was being reached by fascist materials.In early 1939, a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 people. The rising authoritarian movement was the subject of a 9,000-word 1940 Harper’s magazine article, The American Fascists, by Dale Kramer.In the modern era, the Youngstown State labor studies professor John Russo recognized early that anger over the loss of good jobs was leading to a resurgence of fascism. When I interviewed him in 1995, he foresaw the emergence of a Trump-like figure. When I went through Ohio recently on my cross-country journey, John doubled down on his 1995 prediction; he feels that the threat from the far right will not abate. Trump lost “and the thing I say is, ‘So what?’ Right now we are at a tipping point in terms of what the American economy is going to look like, what the American social structures are going to look like,” Russo told me. “2024, that’s going to be the seminal election.”Russo says there will be “contested terrain”, a fight between progressives and rightwing authoritarianism between now and 2024. If a smarter, more effective Trump comes along, he or she could eclipse the threat that Trump presented to American democracy.The fascist inclinations of the 1930s were simply stalled by the New Deal and postwar economy. The final paragraph of Kramer’s 1940 Harper’s article, though off in timing by seven or so decades, serves as a warning for 2024:“It will take time for a powerful movement to organize itself out of the confusion caused by the war. But the [technique] of prejudice politics has been so well learned that should economic insecurity continue there can be no doubt that the American people during the next decade will be forced to deal with powerful ‘hate’ movements. Great vigilance will be required to preserve our liberty without giving it up in the process.”Adapted from Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (Unnamed Press, 12 December)
      Dale Maharidge is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism More

    • 213 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      After the Trump years, how will Biden help the 140 million Americans in poverty? | Mary O'Hara

      by

      After four punch-drunk years of Donald Trump, the weeks since the November presidential election have presented a chance, despite his machinations to overturn the result, to reflect on what might come next for the tens of millions of Americans struggling to get by. What lies around the corner after the departure of an administration that brought so much destruction matters to the lives of the least well-off and marginalised people?
      President-elect Joe Biden sought to reassure people that he was on the case when he announced his top economic team last week. “Our message to everybody struggling right now is this: help is on the way,” he said, offering a steady economic hand to a weary public rattled by the virus and an unprecedented economic crisis.
      Many people are simply so relieved that Biden and Harris won that they talk about “getting back to normal” after the chaos. That’s an understandable reaction given all that’s transpired. However, getting back to normal isn’t an option. Nor should it be the goal. When Trump took power, around 140 million Americans were either poor or on low incomes even without a pandemic – a staggering proportion.
      For decades the wages of those at the top soared while paychecks for those at the bottom flatlined. Gender and racial income and wealth disparities endure. Despite widespread support for boosting minimum earnings, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 hasn’t been increased since 2009. Roughly 60% of wealth in the US is estimated to be inherited. And, as if this wasn’t enough to contend with, in 2020 billionaire wealth surged past $1tn since the start of the pandemic. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) calculates that the wealth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos alone leapt by almost $70bn to a colossal $188.3bn as the year draws to a close.
      Over the past four years I asked myself frequently what another term of the Trump wrecking ball would mean for the people at the sharp end of regressive policies and a reckless disregard for the most vulnerable in society. Thankfully, that is no longer the question. The question now is: after all the carnage, what next?
      So far, indications are that Biden and his team recognise that as well as confronting the gargantuan challenges unleashed by Covid-19, longstanding inequities cannot be left unchecked. The presidential campaign was calibrated to highlight this, including around racial injustices. Overtures have been made, for example, on areas championed by progressives such as forgiving loan debt for many students and expanding access to Medicare. Biden has also pledged to strengthen unions and, well before the pandemic during his first campaign speech, endorsed increasing the federal minimum wage to $15.
      Even in the face of unparalleled challenges – and while a lot rides on a Democratic win in the two Georgia Senate run-offs in January – Biden could and should “use all the tools” at a president’s disposal to shift the dial quickly, says Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the IPS. Examples include placing conditions on workers’ pay for companies bidding for federal contracts and leveraging the presidential “bully pulpit” to try to push proposals such as a minimum wage hike through the Senate.
      There is also a genuine opportunity for the new administration to spearhead a concerted focus on policies affecting more than 61 million Americans who are disabled – a group all too often ignored in presidential campaigns and sidelined in policy. Biden’s disability plan makes for a comprehensive read. Off the bat, if the new administration takes steps to overturn the “abject neglect of disability rights enforcement” under Trump in areas ranging from education to housing it would be off to a good start, argues Rebecca Cokley, director of the disability justice initiative at the Center for American Progress.
      The pandemic is the most pressing challenge facing the incoming administration. However, structural inequalities, the people lining up at food banks, the children going hungry or homeless, historic injustices and the out-of-control concentration of wealth, must also be priorities. Right now, the US at least has a chance to finally put some of this right. However in the UK, with the end of the Brexit transition period looming and the chancellor under pressure to fend off accusations that another dose of austerity isn’t on the way, it’s a whole different story. The lessons in both countries from past mistakes – ones that harm those most in need – must be learned.
      • Mary O’Hara is a journalist and author. Her latest book, The Shame Game: Overturning the toxic poverty narrative, is published by Policy Press. She was named best foreign columnist 2020 by the Southern California Journalism Awards More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Has political consensus become a pipe dream? | Letters

      by

      Perhaps the liberal democratic managed capitalism desired by Martin Kettle did exist in the 1950s, including the new welfare state in the UK (The toxic polarisation of our politics can be reversed, but it will take humility, 26 November). It didn’t prove robust – the Conservatives moved to the right and embraced free-market capitalism; regulation exists but is weak and largely captured by “experts” from the relevant market sectors.It is difficult to see how the idealised consensus can be created today, especially within one state. Multinational companies moving activities to poorly regulated locations and tax havens means that regulation must be multinational. The EU is attempting to regulate and tax tech and online firms, cooperation with which the UK has abandoned. The replacement of Donald Trump by Joe Biden doesn’t mean that economic nationalism will go out of fashion.Kettle is right that respect for the truth is indispensable. The problem is that honest conservatism has gone and, internationally, the right has adopted untruth as a weapon. This approach will continue as it has proved successful. Trump has lost the election, but the size of his vote and support for his untruths demonstrate just how successful.Talking – and listening – to each other in a truthful and respectful way is a good thing, but it needs that approach from all parts of the political spectrum. Kettle implies that such consensus-seeking would inhibit the left from offering radical solutions to our problems, because that may destroy any consensus. Is that how democracy works?Doug SimpsonTodmorden, West Yorkshire• Martin Kettle rightly highlights polarisation and the growth of the “I” society since the 1960s. Surely it is no coincidence that this coincided with a digital revolution that changed all our lives? Last year, I revisited California 50 years after doing an MBA at Stanford University. The wealthiest state in the world has failed to solve homelessness in the streets or congestion on the roads. Black people have been displaced by escalating house prices.All the talking and listening in the world will be of little value unless governments get control of the land and finance needed to build a fairer society. We should be using technology to map inequalities and invest in bridging the gaps rather than consoling ourselves with webinars and games.Dr Nicholas FalkExecutive director, The Urbed Trust• It is possible to share Martin Kettle’s hope for a less divided America without romanticising the 1950s. One need only recall those who left for Europe when “cooperation” was not shown to their differing political beliefs. The 50s also saw the enlargement of the attorney general’s list of subversive organisations. A loyalty oath was required by anyone wishing to enter a graduate programme or benefit from a scholarship, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities destroyed careers. Dwight Eisenhower was no Donald Trump, but neither was he a hero to those not in the political mainstream.Susan ZagorLondon• On reading how Labour’s general secretary has banned local parties from discussing the loss of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn (Report, 27 November), I was reminded of how Joseph Stalin tried to make Leon Trotsky a non-person in Russia. It is marvellous where the party leadership takes its inspiration from.Terry WardWickford, Essex More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      It's only fake-believe: how to deal with a conspiracy theorist

      by

      Unless you’ve been on a silent retreat for the past year, you will have almost certainly heard the rumours – that the pandemic is an elaborate hoax, or that the virus was created as a Chinese weapon, or that dangerous elites are trying to kill off the elderly and to establish a new world order, or that the symptoms are caused by 5G.It is troubling enough to see these ideas on social media. But when you are hearing them from your family, your friends, or a casual acquaintance, it is even harder to know how to respond. You are going to struggle to convince the most committed believers, of course, but what about people who are only flirting with the ideas?These difficult conversations are only set to increase now that a new vaccine is on the horizon. Certain niches of internet are already rife with the “plandemic” theory, which alleges that the spread of the virus has been designed to create big bucks for pharmaceutical companies and the philanthropist Bill Gates (whose charity is funding many of the efforts). The idea has been debunked numerous times, whereas there is good evidence that conspiracy theorists such as David Icke are themselves reaping huge profits from spreading misinformation. The danger, of course, is that their ideas will discourage people from taking the vaccine, leaving them vulnerable to the actual disease. More

    • 213 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The toxic polarisation of our politics can be reversed, but it will take humility | Martin Kettle

      by

      After Dwight Eisenhower had been sworn in as United States president on Capitol Hill in January 1953, he recited a prayer to the watching crowd that he had written himself that same morning. The words embodied how Eisenhower hoped to govern. “Especially we pray,” he told them, “that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who … hold to differing political beliefs.”To a 2020s audience those words may now seem anodyne and pious, the usual politician’s guff that we barely listen to. Race, in particular, would remain an unhealed wound through Eisenhower’s eight years in the White House. Nevertheless, the prayer truthfully embodies an approach to politics that actually worked for much of 1950s America.Those years are widely seen – the unignorable exception of race apart – as marking, amid a certain mom-and-pop dullness, a high tide of shared national values, prosperity and political depolarisation. As Robert D Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have put it in their recent book The Upswing, the 1950s are at the swelling summit in the middle of the “I-we-I” bell curve of American life between the economic free-for-all of the 1890s, the era of greater cooperation in the mid-20th century, and the turbocharged renewal of individualism, inequality and hyperpartisanship of the 2020s.Donald Trump and Eisenhower are both Republican presidents. Yet as leaders, and in the lives they have led, they could hardly be more different in every way. It is completely impossible to imagine Trump uttering the kind of words Eisenhower used in 1953. It is, though, possible to imagine Joe Biden speaking them. Indeed, it would be a surprise if Biden does not make a commitment to cooperation of this kind when he himself swears the oath, in less than two months’ time.Yet is there the slightest possibility that such an approach would have any effect today, or that it would endure? The question of whether governments in advanced capitalist democracies can bring entrenched and bitterly divided polities together is now the single most important issue facing our politics. America is by far the most urgent and important example of this. But it is true of countries beyond the US too – Britain undoubtedly included.The odds on Biden – or other consensual leaders in other countries – achieving this are long. Today we are not at the summit of The Upswing’s 130-year-long “I-we-I” curve of economic equality, political cooperation, social cohesion and public altruism, as Eisenhower was in the 1950s. We are instead heading rapidly down the curve to new depths of inequality, partisan intransigence, individualism and selfishness. We may even have passed a point of no return.Many therefore assert that those more unified and civil days are simply over. Some on all sides actually welcome this, thinking that the downward descent of the old, unified, liberal capitalist state in the early 21st century presents a cathartic opportunity to clear the debris and failures of the past and create a ground zero for a different kind of brave new future.My answer to those zealots is to be very careful indeed about what they wish for. Putnam’s book speaks for the many millions who don’t think the way the zealots do. It speaks for those who want the tide of the last decade to be slowed, stopped and turned – and who want to believe the restoration of a “we” society, based on liberal democratic managed capitalism, can happen, although in a less unequal and less rancorous way.One good reason for saying this is that something like it has happened before. The upward trajectory of the “I-we-I” curve in the early years of the 20th century did not descend from out of a clear blue sky, in the US or anywhere else. Instead, it was built on, among other things, economic innovation and greater equality (including for women), laws that broke up monopolies, political leadership that was not afraid of taxing the super-rich, the creation of effective nation state and private-sector institutions, high-quality education, a boom in charity and philanthropy and a media that people broadly trusted to tell them the truth.Another reason for confidence is that the destroyers have not yet triumphed. Much of what sustained the earlier, more cooperative era endures. What the EU might call the acquis of liberal democracy and internationalism – the body of principles, institutions and civic habits that the present day has inherited from the not-so-distant past – is actually more resilient than the shocks inflicted on it may suggest.The transition from Trump to Biden illustrates this. Trump’s assault on the electoral process and its credibility has been epochal and terrible, but in the end the transition seems to be happening. The electoral process was tested to the limits, but it proved robust and decisive. Its institutions and principles have survived. Something a little similar may now be happening in Britain over Brexit’s disregard of laws and treaties too.And yet the divides remain. How can these embittered certainties be eased and eventually bridged? Changing people’s minds may seem to be the answer, but changing a mind is a very long-term process. Opening one’s own mind is more important. And this needs to apply on all sides. Denunciation, lecturing, labelling, and obsessing over language all make things worse, not better.The key is to prioritise listening and then talking to others. Michael Sandel’s recent book The Tyranny of Merit argues that humility must be central to the reconstruction of the notion of the common good, without which no “we” society can prosper. People don’t need to be humiliated or denied a voice by being told they are bad, stupid, bigoted or unsuccessful. The aim should be to find things we can all agree about, perhaps including such things as fairness, patriotism, helping one another and trying to agree about facts.Respect for the truth is indispensable. Social media are the chief accelerator in this area of catastrophic decline. Much stronger control over online untruth will be a precondition for rebuilding the common good. This is as true of politics in general as of ensuring a full take-up of any Covid vaccine. But there is material to work with. Public trust has survived in many places. Ipsos Mori reported this week that more than 80% of us trust what nurses, doctors, engineers, teachers, judges, professors and scientists tell us. By contrast, around 80% mistrust journalists, government ministers, politicians generally and advertising executives. The problem lies with politics and media.Perhaps the Bidens of the world have it in them to change this. Let us hope so. But they need the help of thousands of local citizens if so, meeting at local level to rebuild confidence in the common good. Government matters very much indeed. But the way we treat each other matters just as much. We don’t just need to build up herd immunity to viruses. We need to build up herd immunity to untruth, and to glib easy answers too, and to all those who purvey them, in whatever form. More