Opinion: Washington will follow if we’re willing to act

By JOHN BRODERICK

Published: 02-01-2025 6:00 AM

John T. Broderick Jr. is the former dean of UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law and the founder of the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Policy.

These are very uncomfortable and uncertain times in America, that’s hard to deny. You are either exuberant about the political and cultural change that is taking hold or despondent about it. There seems no middle ground. Apparently, everyone is expected to suit up and pick a side. There’s nothing ordinary or predictable about where we find ourselves today. There’s nothing reassuring. This is unlike any “change of party” election I ever remember.

I think that’s because the most recent election cycle was not really about party or even politics. It was about something deeper than that, something more personal, more intrinsic, more revealing and more important. It was about how we see ourselves, our values, our national fingerprint, our choices and our fears in a deeply divided and entrenched America and, more importantly, how we see and treat each other, especially those who disagree with us.

It’s not about President Trump, it really isn’t. He got 77 million votes and he won the election. No, it’s not about him, it’s about us. We’re the problem — and the solution. All of us. We need to bridge our growing divide and take ownership when it cripples us.

The everyday norms and expectations that ordered our nation’s life for decades have changed, or at least it feels that way. I believe that we all see it and feel it, whatever our views. Things do feel different. Less assured, less reliable — it’s palpable, at least to me. What used to seem reliable and foundational no longer does. The gyroscope of civic life and civil discourse seems haywire. Change can be healthy, but disabling dysfunction isn’t.

Distrust and suspicions are now commonplace and accepted conspiracies abound. America, always complex and diverse with its share of divisions and failings, has always worked — sometimes proudly and sometimes not — but we nonetheless bridged our differences, or at least accommodated them, in an imperfect but acceptable way so we could keep moving forward. But I have this disquieting feeling that something is inexorably changing, that the adhesive that has miraculously kept us together as the largest and most successful multi-cultural, multi-racial democracy in the world is slowly failing. Compromise is dying, truth is a convenient shade of gray, our information streams are shallow and self-righteousness is on the rise from both the far right and the far left.

Normal social conversation is fraught with a risk I don’t remember. Flags, once commonly displayed and accepted as a show of patriotic pride regardless of party or politics, have now taken on a tribal meaning, especially when waving in a flaunting way from a passing vehicle. “My country,” they declare, “not yours.” Indeed, new flags have been fashioned for an even more emphatic tribal message. We are sadly and dangerously confusing policy differences and candidate choices with patriotism. That isn’t America. Our country has become an increasingly angry place and too many of us are reactive, frustrated, afraid and distrustful. Left unattended, our experiment won’t end well.

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Washington won’t repair what ails us, but we can if we are willing to act locally and be honest about our perils. It’s in our self-interest to ground ourselves in shared values and lived-experience. To have any chance of success, we will need to open lines of communication in our own communities. We’re neighbors, after all. And we will need to find ways to agree on common facts so that our debates and choices won’t have a false premise or an unrealistic solution.

We need to stop blaming. We need to stop questioning each other’s motives; that only fans suspicion and mistrust. We need to lower our voices, begin to really listen to those who disagree with us and have enough humility not to believe everything we think or the last thing we read. Our fundamental problems can’t be solved by the next election, and that should scare us all.

The good news is Washington will follow our lead if we are willing to act.