What can grow from common ground?

A lot, as it turns out

Image: Megan, Creative Commons Public License

I started engaging in political conversations across lines of difference in 2017, under the auspices of Braver Angels’ red-blue workshops. Braver Angels was—and is—ever hopeful that civil discourse between ordinary people could and would reveal the elusive common ground where we all agree on what the problem is and how to fix it.

I was skeptical. It sounded wistful, and I put my odds on agreeing with a Trump voter on par with the chance that I would eat five potato chips and then put the bag away.

I was wrong. By the end of my second workshop, the self-described “most right-wing person in the room” said that the person he found common cause with was “the most far left person in the room” (that would be me). It was too long ago for me to remember where we synced but, since then, I’ve made a habit of taking note of where common ground exists in the electorate.

Here’s a list off the top of my head of widely popular ideas, but there’s more, many more. Most of these are easily verifiable from public opinion polls showing strong majorities, sometimes super-majorities, in agreement. Others are so obvious I don’t need a poll to tell me. I’m too rushed at the moment to hyperlink to a million polls but, if there’s one you’re particularly interested in, let me know in the comments:

• Ban junk fees

• Crack down on monopolies and predatory lenders

• Prescription drug price caps

• No subsidies for companies that do mass layoffs

• Penalties for companies that move factories abroad

• Federal jobs guarantee

• Capping CEO pay

• Making it easier/fairer for workers to unionize

• Support family farmers over corporate farms

• Farm-to-school healthy food programs

• Raise the minimum wage to $15 (super-majority in PA, bare majority nationwide)

• Medicaid expansion

• Continue Affordable Care Act subsidies

• Improve Veterans’ Affairs health care system

• Government role in making sure all communities have hospitals and assisted living facilities

• Government spending on drug addiction treatment programs

• Government involvement in building more affordable housing

• Streamline affordable housing development red tape

• Publicly-owned utilities and public banks

• Government subsidies for small businesses, not large corporations

• Cracking down on Pentagon waste, bloat and graft

• Wealth taxes

• Ban housing and employment discrimination against LGBTQ people

• Gay marriage

• Legal abortion up to 15 weeks (possibly longer depending on survey)

• Make polluters pay to clean up local waterways

• Stop private companies from bottling local water

• Stop AI data centers from coming to town and sucking up local water and electricity and, while we’re at it, stop the AI apocalypse!

• Private or public programs that give isolated people face-to-face social opportunities

• Legalizing marijuana (but not the super-potent varieties, OMG!)

• Teaching media literacy, medical literacy, civic literacy, financial literacy, and scam protection in K-12

• Ban cell phones in K-12 schools

• Blocking children’s access to online porn

• Screen-free after-school programs

• Federal funding for Head Start

• Free breakfast in public schools

• Gun safety locks and background checks

• Youth violence prevention programs

• Drunk driving prevention programs

If we’ve got such widespread agreement on so many important issues, why don’t politicians and activists talk more about them? Why do we let ourselves get dragged into culture war fights (that we’re often on the losing side of)?

Talk is cheap. Railing against Trump/Hitler or squaring off on the controversy du jour is an easy way to fill time on the 24/7 cable news channels and the 24/7 social media cesspool. It’s the tried-and-true way of burnishing your personal brand and gaining likeminded followers.

In other words, it’s good for tech overlords, media owners and conflict entrepreneurs but bad for the rest of us. Bad for politics. Bad for society. Bad because it makes us hate each other. Bad because it distracts us from doing the things that need to be done and that we all agree should be done but can’t be done because the water has been so polluted with toxic vitriol. It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about things like ICE brutality and conquering Greenland and the Epstein files, but those things shouldn’t drown out everything else.

The good news, as chroniclers like Gwen Frisbie-Fulton and Luke Allen will tell you, is this: In small towns across the country, ordinary people are coming together to solve ordinary problems. They’re dialing down national flashpoints and doing what they can, across lines of party, race and ethnicity, to make their lives better, easier, fairer, healthier, and more fulfilling.

If only the people who have all the resources—and keep investing them in conflict—would follow their lead.