United we stand, divided we fall. Decade long friendships have come to an end just because of political preference. If we are to survive as a nation which hinges on us being United, we need to start searching for solutions. Any suggestions?

24 comments

  2. We are well less divided compared to history.

    Voting has become more divided but actual political division among people is basically the same or better than historically.

  3. Unfortunately, the things that unify us tend to be tragedy and external threats. Nothing brings America together like when it’s under attack. Not recommended.

  4. War.

    No seriously, a horrific attack… or even more specifically, a single enemy we can target and agree to “come together” and blow up (something the War of Terror and Covid lacked).

    Other than that…. uhhh….. mind control…. magic?

  5. As others have pointed out, typically the things that overcome political divisions are horrific, large-scale tragedies — but only as long as they can’t be immediately politicized (as COVID was).

    Other than that, maybe an emergent third party that actually represents the centrist positions that the majority of the country align with. But our two-party system is not set up to allow this to happen without many election cycles of name recognition being built (and a massive influx of targeted cash).

  6. Don’t really know. History doesn’t have brakes and there’s no instruction manual, only a FAQ page. Any remedy past “let’s just get along” will have winners and losers, which means it’s politics.

  9. I’m not sure I buy the notion that America was ever particularly United.

  12. Turn off cable news and social media. Force people to interact face to face

  13. A massively staged bread and circus of a legislative civil war by proxy, where the politicians are forced to hash out every point of dissension in brinkmanship, labor union style negotiating. Amid the backdrop of increasing climate change and the rise of a cold war with China, with whom we have a morality/ideaology popularity contest for geo political world advantage.

    It’ll have to get worse before it gets better.

  19. It’d be great if the right could stop trying to install American Fascism into the nation as its main ideology.

    They promised communism under Biden and I haven’t seen any communism. Where’s my goddamn communism McConnell!? All I’m seeing are attempted right wing coups.

  20. I think it would help if the Democrats stop posing and start doing their jobs.

    People are scared and tired of the party being all talk. Some real, measurable action could pull a lot of people into more secure positions.

    Save that, I think it would help if we started building some Shared Platforms. Right now, the Big Media determines what people are thinking about and how, and they’ve decided on some… Polarizing Lenses. But there are plenty of platforms that would make progress that all the non-politicians could agree upon. For example, walk-able cities are great for the economy and have a real and measurable benefit to small businesses and the individuals in them. That’s a one-two hit on economic and social issues.

    But we also need a different type of shared platform – currently we have an issue where both sides are fed characatures of the other. We need news and entertainment media built to give everyone the same base reality, call out insecurities and concerns, and help people feel safe to lower their defenses. We also have to fix the outright lies that have been told to our people. As long as people have two very different mental images of how this last election has gone, we cannot build the bridges we need to build.

    The biggest thing, though, I think is that we need to stop trying to “Find common ground” and instead “Build common infrastructure”. Sure, we can all agree that cats are cute, but that doesn’t help us any. If we’re honest about our own goals and they’re honest with theirs, then maybe, hopefully, please, we could start working on moving forward on projects that further both sets of goals. Sure, you and I may disagree on what counts as important, but there are places where we can build things that will impact both our goals without hindering the other, without us first having an agreement on what our goals should be. Doing these projects first will help us start to work together and respect eachother, and maybe understand eachother in a way we had not before.

    But in order to do that, I guess it takes understanding yourself and what you want better. I will admit that this is a lot to ask.

  21. Vote out both Democrats and Republicans. They no longer, if ever, share the views of the people. We need smaller political parties and more representatives.

  22. Populist alliance.

    There’s already a huge potential for it, which is why the economic/political elites keep desperately trying to divide us on social issues (trans rights, abortion, LGBT issues, vaccinations…) anything to distract the public from the economic issues that we actually share quite a bit of common ground on.

    There’s a reason why Trump and Bernie Sanders shared a good chunk of voters. It wouldn’t seem to make sense on the surface, but the common thread is populism.

    If you listen to one of Steve Bannon’s speeches (Breitbart founder and Trump advisor who ran Trump’s campaign) and one of Bernie Sanders’ speeches, you’ll notice a significant amount of overlap in talking points and ideology. Way more than either side is willing to acknowledge. I’m dead serious. Listen to Steve Bannon’s Oxford Union address on YouTube. Tell me Bernie Sanders couldn’t have said at least 70% of it.

    We deny that common ground at our own peril.

    **Edit:** for anyone who thinks I’m crazy or just doesn’t have the time, here’s an excerpt from Bannon’s speech transcript (about the 2008 recession)

    >There’s the elites, and people like you and me. People that bought into the system . And who’s been held accountable? Name one banker, one CEO, one law firm, one accounting firm. No equity has been taken, no bonuses were actually really deferred. How do we get out of this? …We’ve basically socialized the risk for the wealthy.
    >
    >If you’ve owned intellectual property, real assets, or stocks in the last 10 15 or 20 years since the collapse in 2008, you’ve had the greatest run in human history, and yet in the United States 50% of our population can’t put together 400 dollars of cash in an emergency.
    >
    >62% of the jobs that were created before President Trump got there were jobs at living wage or below the living wage, and “living wage” means no extras- no holidays, nothing for the kids, it means essentially a sense of basically subsistence.
    >
    >The elite in this world are the cause of the problem not the populace. …You have right-wing populism, you have left wing populism, and the difference and I wish our dear friends out here understood is that fascism is that combination of state crony capitalism and big government. It’s exactly what we’re trying to fight.
    >
    >It’s where the United States is going as an economic system: more and more concentration by media companies by pharmaceutical companies by industrial companies by tech companies along with their partners in big government…

    You see it, right?

  23. I would say alien invasion, except I’m pretty sure opinions would wildly vary and we would rip each other to shreds before the aliens even had to use their laser guns.

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