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8 ways to find common ground

Gridlock plagues Washington. Polarizing soundbytes get constant play in the 24/7 news cycle. The culture wars rage on. But these Monitor op-ed writers suggest there’s more common ground than meets the eye. Here are eight powerful perspectives on the possibilities for meeting in the middle.

4. Why most Americans are both liberal and conservative

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Morley Winograd and Michael Hais write:

American politics is consumed by a bitter, at times violent, debate about the overall role of government and specific governmental programs.

They warn that this analysis “misses an important paradox about Americans: Most of us have both deep conservative instincts and liberal instincts.”

Winograd and Hais go on to explain that “most Americans have conservative attitudes concerning the size of government, and liberal beliefs in support of programs to protect themselves economically.”

The research supports their point:

In every Pew survey, there were always more conservatives than liberals regarding the overall role of government and a greater number of liberals than conservatives in support of programs designed to promote equality and economic well-being. In effect, the United States is neither a center-right nor a center-left nation; it is, and always has been, both at the same time.

Finally, they urge:

Despite these divisions, the leaders of each party must find a way to work together to synthesizeboth strands of America’s political DNA – a belief in the importance of a strong national community and equality of opportunity as well as a strong desire to limit government’s encroachment on individual liberty – into a new civic ethos that is broadly acceptable to most Americans.

Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute and coauthors of “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics” and the upcoming “Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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