We can mend our national divide

By Walter Olson, Michael Sozan and Cissy Jackson*

Aug 30, 2024, 09:00 AM EDT

We live in a time when American democracy and the rule of law are facing profound challenges. Mob violence, vicious rhetoric, and even assassination attempts have raised fears that as a nation, we can no longer resolve our differences peacefully at the ballot box.

In 2023 alone, there were 8,008 threats against members of Congress from both parties. Violent threats also target public officials involved in the judicial process, including judges, prosecutors, court staff, jurors, and their families. Partly due to a record number of threats, 39% of state and local election officials resigned in 2022, taking with them valuable institutional knowledge about election administration. More than two-thirds of Americans across all parties now believe the republic is threatened, and nearly 50% believe future presidential election losses will result in violence.

What can we do about it as individuals?

The three authors disagree on many issues. But we do agree on these ideas for lowering the temperature and getting American policy back on a more constructive path:

It will take many such measures to pull us back from the brink, but it is worth starting today. The future we save could be our own.

1) Do not rationalize violence. Political violence is an escalating spiral: Many people see an attack on their side and think that striking back with equal or greater force is fair play. Leaders and authority figures play a special role. When they flout the rules, many followers do, too. So hold your leaders to a high level of restraint and respect for the Constitution and the rule of law, and accept that destructive criminal acts demand punishment, no matter which side commits them.

2) Confront extremism and dehumanization on your own side. Calling out offensive speech from the other side is the easy part. It’s harder, but more important, to speak up when it comes from people you mostly agree with.

3) Don’t blame entire groups for things that individuals do. Don’t say that “they” carried out the latest act of political violence when in fact it was one individual or a few hotheads. “They” – meaning everyone who votes differently than you – did not collectively throw the stone or make the hateful comments on social media. Most ordinary members of that other party or faction lead a daily life very similar to yours and found out about the incident in the same way you did.

4) Do not contribute to undermining confidence in our electoral system. America is lucky: Even now, our democracy is the envy of much of the world. Any system can be improved, but ours is typically well-run and its results trustworthy. Instead of forwarding the latest spicy rumor online, listen to the voices of veteran state and local election administrators who have lately banded together across partisan and regional lines to dispel myths about our elections.

5) Protect the electoral process. We need to protect election officials and workers from violence and intimidation and also safeguard secondary election processes, such as certification, from risks, including the danger that insiders might refuse to comply with their legal obligations. Congress’s 2022 update to the Electoral Count Act is a good example of how to pursue bipartisan reforms of the election process. Relatedly, while public budgetary resources are inevitably limited, conducting elections is a core function of government, and it is wrong to deprive local administrators of the resources they need to do their jobs properly.

6) Promote civic education. The late Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor devoted much of her retirement to rebuilding America’s long-eroded capacity for civic education. She wisely understood that a population that doesn’t understand the basics of how government or elections work is more vulnerable to false rumors or the lies of a demagogue. And it can make all the difference from day one if students (and, indeed, people of all ages) know which parts of government are responsible for what, how to get involved in their communities, and how to distinguish rumors or misinformation from reliable sources.

7) Study structural voting reforms that can help us overcome our polarization. A good start would be to curb partisan gerrymandering. Lately, quite a few localities have introduced voting methods that offer hope of bridging the gaps between different groups, such as ranked-choice voting, open primaries or the innovative combination of the two now being used in Alaska, where participants say they see more consensus and civil debate across the political spectrum.

It will take many such measures to pull us back from the brink, but it is worth starting today. The future we save could be our own.

This article was originally published on elcato.org.