Polarization in the Time of Trump and the Path Forward

America is a melting pot of ideas as much it is of people, and political differences are just one of the defining characteristics of our country. We have willingly embraced the messiness of a government by the people, secure in the knowledge that if we didn’t like the way things were going, we would always have a chance to change it, or at least contribute to that change.

But something else has changed, and it has torn us apart in a way we never could have imagined.

There was a time when the nation as a whole agreed on a basic set of outcomes: we all wanted our communities to be safe, we all wanted to ensure a quality education for our children, we all wanted access to high quality, affordable healthcare, and we all want a strong economy that delivers the opportunity to live what we once called the American Dream. We shared a belief in the principles and values of America — of our constitutional rights, of the goal of equality, of freedom of speech — and implicit in these beliefs was a shared understanding of what we didn’t want to become: a monarchy, a dictatorship, or just another country that surrenders our individual freedoms to a government.

One of the exceptional attributes of the United States was always that we were a continuous work in progress, pursuing all of the above goals for all of our…