Stone: How Civic Obligations and Education Can Save America

Three observers of American politics fear deepening division and polarization, and offer different proscriptions for the best way forward.

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For Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, a fundamental challenge as we look to the future of democracy is political and ideological polarization. Perhaps more than ever before, he fretted, Americans tend to live in political and ideological bubbles, in part because social media has permitted citizens to construct their own feeds rather than relying on common, more or less responsible news sources, “like Walter Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune.” Although these sources sometimes had biases in one direction or the other, he acknowledged, “they were almost always within the mainstream of responsible journalism.” There were deep disagreements on hugely consequential issues back then. But citizens could “at least speak with one another with a more or less common foundation.”

What we need going forward, Professor Stone argued, is “a new focus in our educational system on civics and on the responsibility of citizenship, leaders whoencourage citizens to see both sides of the issues that divide us, and technological mechanisms that automatically provide us with the opposite perspectives from those we tend to favor.”

In the long-run, he said, “these and other innovations are central to the future success of our democracy.”