Thursday, November 10, 2016

Thursday Thinking - Public Character Formation

Let’s Not Do This Again
David Brooks, New York Times | NOV. 8, 2016

If I had to sum up the election of 2016 in one clause, I would say it has been a sociological revolution, a moral warning and a political summons.

Sociologically, this campaign has been an education in how societies come apart. The Trump campaign has been like a flash flood that sweeps away the topsoil and both reveals and widens the chasms, crevices and cracks below.

We are a far more divided society than we realized. The educated and less educated increasingly see the world and vote in different ways. So do men and women, blacks and whites, natives and immigrants, young and old, urban and rural.

We like to think of democracy as a battle of ideas and a process of individual deliberation, but this year demography has been destiny. The campaigns have pushed us back into our tribal bunkers. Americans now seem more clannish, and more incomprehensible to one another.

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