Daniel Yudkin, director of the Beacon Project, analyzes how "perception gaps" drive American polarization, citing a Pew poll where 53% view fellow citizens as unethical. While acknowledging deepened distrust since 2017, he argues shared civic duties like jury service act as social glue despite partisan value splits. Addressing viewer concerns on Israel-Hamas and third-party viability, Yudkin attributes gridlock to gerrymandering and the Electoral College, urging focus on core communal values over new parties. Ultimately, his Kansas family reunion experience illustrates that recognizing shared humanity can bridge divides better than structural reform alone. [Automatically generated summary]
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In our final 30 minutes this morning, we're talking about political polarization, civic responsibility.
Our guest is Daniel Yudkin of More in Common, a 501c3 nonprofit whose mission is what, Mr. Yudkin?
Well, our mission is to better understand what's driving people apart so we can have them find some common ground and bring people back together.
How do you go about achieving that mission?
Well, the first thing we do is we use tools from social psychology and social science to better understand where people are coming from.
What are their beliefs?
What are their values?
How do they see the world?
We think that if you can understand people's core beliefs, you can better understand what's driving them apart, what's causing them to disagree in the first place, and then maybe even find a way to tell a story that can bring them back together again.
Joining us on a day that a new Pew Research poll comes out, there's a headline in today's Washington Post on it.
The United States is the lone nation in the world to say most of its fellow citizens are bad.
53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens as bad.
The story notes, in the 24 other countries polled by Pew Research, most people said other residents of their countries were good or somewhat good.
Is that result surprising to you?
It's not surprising.
It's consistent with years of work that's been done on American politics.
Looking at this term called effective polarization, it's this idea of a deep animosity that each side holds towards the other.
But what our research finds that's heartening here is that a lot of that animosity is driven by something that we call perception gaps.
Perception gap is a belief that one side holds about the other that is not actually reflected in reality.
And so part of the work that we're doing is animated by this idea that Americans actually oftentimes have more in common than they think.
And if they actually had an opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with someone from the other side of the aisle, they would figure that out.
Define civic responsibility.
Civic responsibility is a way that we show up for each other.
It's the kinds of responses, the duties and obligations that we hold as Americans, as Americans, that allow us to be active and participatory members of civic life.
What are the duties and obligations that we have to each other?
What do we think of when we try to define those duties?
Yeah, well, it's a great question.
This is something that what we were, something that we were exploring as part of the work that I'm doing in the Beacon Project.
The Beacon Project is a new initiative at More in Common that's trying to better understand what are the ways that we show up for each other, how do people think about being an American and a citizen today.
So in this study, we ran a study of 5,000 Americans.
And what we asked them is just a simple question.
What does it mean to be an American and what are the civic responsibilities that we hold?
And what we found is that Americans have really a shared core of responsibilities that many agree upon.
So this includes things like you might expect, things like obeying the law, paying your taxes, showing up for jury duty.
But there's other things like defending freedom or helping out your community that we found are widely shared across Americans regardless of their position on the political spectrum.
Do our civic responsibilities, what we owe each other as Americans, does it change at a time when our country is in an active shooting war?
We haven't looked at that.
It's not something that we have explored particularly.
What we're looking at specifically is kind of like these domestic responsibilities.
I do think that at times of war, it changes the way that we think about Americanness and it raises deep questions about not just our responsibilities to each other, but our responsibilities to people overseas.
What do we owe the people who are in a country that we've never seen or we've never met before?
And how does that humanity carry over into the way that we show up as people in the world?
So it's a really important question, but what we were really focused on is how do Americans think about what our obligations are to each other as part of the country that we all share together?
How long has More in Common been around?
We've been around for about nine years now.
We were started in 2017.
Again, our effort has always been to try to better understand where people are coming from and try to find and highlight and identify areas of common ground.
In those nine years, are we finding more common ground or less as a society?
It has been an unfortunate fact that we are seeing, if anything, a deepening of American polarization in our politics right now.
We find that people are increasingly distrustful of each other.
They're increasingly prone to these perception gaps that we identified.
And what we think that we were trying to kind of bring people back to is a better understanding of the social glue that's holding us together.
And this is why we're focused on responsibilities.
We think that civic responsibility is the kind of force that we can use to remind ourselves how we show up for each other as Americans and what are the values that we all share.
Of course, people are going to be different, and that's totally fine.
We should disagree about different things.
And in fact, part of our research shows that Democrats and Republicans hold some importantly different views about what it means to be an American and what our responsibilities are to each other.
So for example, liberals or Democrats think it's more important to defend equality and Republicans think it's more important to love America and be patriotic.
But at the same time, the number of responsibilities that Democrats and Republicans support is about the same, suggesting that people care equally about being a citizen, about what it means to be a citizen.
They just express it in different ways.
Your group's been around nine years, and your group is not the only group working on this issue of trying to bring people back together to heal division, to try to understand the divides in this country.
But if in nine years things are getting worse, when do these efforts start paying off?
When do we know that things are getting better?
Yeah.
Well, we'll know that things are getting better when Americans, you know, we'll feel it.
There's something that is, I think, widely shared in the American psychology right now.
We all feel this deep sense of despair and distrust and animosity towards the other side.
This is sort of a kind of a ubiquitous feeling and it comes up in conversations all the time.
How do we find our way back to a sense of shared understanding and respect for our common fate, the fact that we are here together and we need to work things out?
And so how do we know?
Well, we'll feel it.
It will also show up in polls, of course.
But I think that the most important thing is the feeling that we'll have where we feel less concerned about the decay and the erosion of these basic norms in our politics.
And we feel a greater sense of respect and acknowledgement that everyone is here together and we need to work things out in order to be able to make progress as a country together.
Daniel Joitten is our guest joining us from New Orleans, Louisiana this morning.
He's with More in Common, the project that he works on there, the Beacon Project.
BeaconProject.us is where you go if you want to check it out.
Taking your phone calls on phone line split by party, Democrats, Republicans, Independents.
We'll put the numbers on the screen for you.
He's with us until the end of our program today at 10 a.m. Eastern.
So go ahead and get your calls in.
And we will begin on the Independent Line, Bridgewater, New Jersey.
Joan, you're on with Daniel Yudkin.
Hi, good morning.
I think your topic would have been good maybe years ago, but I think there's so many other bigger issues that I feel is just going to like water it down.
Such as what?
I'm going to say this.
I think that we look at things too conventional now, and we need to start looking at things in different ways.
For instance, the war that we just had with Israel and in Gaza, my personal opinion, when I really look at big picture and I say, who won that war?
You would say Israel won that war, but I don't think Israel won that war.
I think Hamas won that war because I don't think Hamas went into this war to really win a war, conventional war against Israel.
And if you look, Hamas won the war in public sentiment because when before October 8th, everybody was with Israel.
And then at the end of the war, when you look at how they plummeted Gaza, all the children that died, all the people that are displaced, that Israel actually thought it was okay to bomb hospitals.
Well, Joan, got your point.
Daniel Yudkin, to bring it back to this conversation, are there lessons from the Middle East in a place where there's so much division, historic division, are there lessons that your group can look to to try to heal the divide in America or create more of this ability to have civic responsibility towards one another?
What lessons can you learn from such an ingrained conflict over there?
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, if anyone who's looking around the world is seeing with increasing concern just all of the different ways in which there's war, there's deep levels of violence, and just troubling,
you know, chaos around the world in a way that is, you know, many people had thought, okay, we're entering a period of peace, we're entering a period of prosperity, and it's just for many people, there's a sense of despair that this stuff is going to be continuing to take place and is going to just is ongoing.
Values And Disagreement00:15:33
And so the question I think that needs to be asked is, what are we doing wrong?
And how can we return to a better sense of, to kind of first principles?
What do we actually need?
How do we, what are our roles as Americans?
How do we show up for each other?
And how can we recommit to the fundamental principles of what it means to be American in a way that can kind of present a new understanding of how we navigate these seemingly intractable problems around the world?
So again, for me, what it comes down to is this recommitment to the fundamental principles of how we operate as Americans.
We're with Daniel Yudkin this morning.
We're talking about civic responsibility in this country.
It's our final 20 minutes of the Washington Journal this morning.
By the way, if you're looking for President Trump's remarks at the Shield of the Americas conference that's happening, the president has stepped up to the microphone, and we're taking that over on C-SPAN 2.
If you'd like to watch it, he came to the mic a little bit earlier today.
We're expecting him around 10 a.m.
But if you want to watch it, it's happening over there.
You can pop back over here afterwards, and you can also call in on this program like Paul did in Kingston, New York, Line for Democrats.
Paul, good morning.
Hello, this is Paul in Kingston, New York.
I started out a political life as a right-winger, and today I'm farther to the left than probably anybody you've ever met in your entire life.
It was a long journey.
I started out as a right-winger because my family was.
But then I started writing letters to the editor, newspapers, and I started meeting and talking to all different kinds of people.
And I just never stopped moving to the left.
And that's where I is today, far, far, far to the left.
I was during Vietnam for several years, the head of the anti-war movement in my area.
And then through that, I became friends with Everett Hodge, who was the founder of the Ulster County Branch NAACP.
And after he passed, I remained active.
And so I'm white, and I became president of the Ulster County Branch NAACP.
So I've never stopped moving, and I'm still moving.
And I can't go back to the right because what I've learned about the right is, and I think it's true in all places at all times, the right wing can be summed up in one sentence.
And that one sentence is, I've got mine in the hell with everybody else.
And I care about everybody else.
And that's why I never stopped moving.
Paul, can I ask you before you go, you said you started by writing letters to the editor.
I asked because somebody asked me recently, I want to write a letter to the editor.
Do you think it's worth it?
What would you say to that person as somebody who started this path that you're talking about, just writing letters to the editor for newspapers?
Absolutely, it's worth it.
I can honestly say I've never lost a debate.
I started writing letters to the editor, then people started responding to my letters, and we'd go back and forth and back and forth.
I always won every darn time.
How do you know you won, Paul?
Because other people sided with me, because of my own judgment, and because I never wrote a letter to the editor that wasn't published.
Every single one of them was.
Paul, thanks for the call from New York.
Daniel Yudkin, let you jump in on what Paul was talking about.
I think it's really interesting, this idea that people can change their trajectory over time.
You can start off on the far right and then end up on the far left.
And what are the life experiences that people have?
What are the insights that people gain that allows them to change their political point of view?
I mean, this is something that we see in our research, that people do change their views over time in both directions.
And so it suggests maybe that these boundaries that we consider to be so set in stone are maybe a little bit more malleable than we give them credit for.
Jason in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, Independent, you're on with Daniel Yudkin.
Hi, my name is Jason, and I'm a teacher in Pennsylvania.
And I'm so glad you have your guest on this week because this week is Civic Learning Week in schools across America where teachers are encouraged to use different resources to teach civics.
See Stan Classroom is a great resource, by the way.
And in Philadelphia, we're having a civic learning convention down there.
And my question for your guest is, for every $50 spent on STEM education in America, five cents is spent on civic education.
How do we convince people that civic education is vitally important and you need to start at a very young age?
Because I think education, obviously, as a teacher, is extremely important.
Jason, before you go, how are the kids doing today?
Are you optimistic?
I am optimistic.
Kids, you know, they ask very genuine questions.
They're curious.
We just watched the State of the Union the past week asking different questions about that.
And I am.
I am optimistic, but I worry about the fact that it's not getting enough focus, not getting enough funding, not getting enough attention.
Daniel Yudkin.
Yeah, I think this is great.
And congratulations to you, Jason, for your work.
I mean, citizenship and understanding how we live together in a democracy starts, as you say, at an extremely young age.
We need to learn the basic rules of how do we show up for each other?
How do we navigate difference?
How do we make sense and form our own opinions?
How do we get information and use it to inform our views of the world?
And so these basic skills, not to mention, of course, some of the basics of American history.
What were some of the contradictions at the heart of the American founding?
How have we navigated and tried to resolve those contradictions over the past 250 years?
These basic skills are absolutely critical for the fabric of a pluralistic democracy where we're going to disagree.
And in fact, disagreement is what we want.
We just need to just disagree in the right way.
And so the skills that are being taught to children and to kids from that young age are going to carry them through and help them to become active and productive members of civic life later on.
So I can't agree more that civic education and some of these basic skills need to be taught at a young age and need to be increasingly prioritized.
As somebody who's been in this work for a long time, how do you feel about social media?
Well, as you might imagine, I think I have mixed views about social media.
It is a tool that can be used for ill or for good.
It is a fantastic way of democratizing information, allowing people to have a voice in the conversation, for allowing people to get a huge amount of information at their fingertips, of course, as we all know.
And then at the same time, it can be used as a force, as a deep wedge that drives people apart for all the reasons that are well known at this point.
Algorithms that are dividing people and raising up the most outraged and incendiary voices in the conversation.
So I think that social media is an important element.
It's not going away, but we need to, number one, as individuals, treat it with the kind of caution and respect.
And by respect, I mean a cautious acknowledgement of the powers that it has.
So we need to do that.
And we also need to be exploring ways of regulating this industry, kind of in the same way that the tobacco industry was regulated in the 90s, to make sure that it is being used as a source for good rather than for evil.
In your mind, is all social media created equal, or is there some sites that you think do better at bringing people together or at least don't do as much damage to tear us apart?
I do think that there are some sites that do a better job, and I don't exactly know why.
I don't know exactly what's going on with their algorithms.
But you know, I spend time on, for example, LinkedIn.
I think that that's a wonderful platform.
People talk about their work's successes and challenges, and it generally avoids being a source of division and outrage.
Then, of course, you have other platforms where that is not the case.
And so, I would say Twitter, for example, has become kind of a cesspool of incredibly divisive rhetoric.
So, there are things that can be done.
I think that the fact that these are so different is proof positive that there are ways that these organizations have of helping to regulate and create norms and a culture on those platforms that's either healthy or unhealthy.
So, it is within their power.
The question is, is there a will to do so?
Troy, New York.
Owen is a Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I appreciate being on C-SPAN.
Appreciate you having you on, Owen.
Go ahead.
As a Republican, I am hard-pressed to trust anything the Republicans say.
During the January 6th episode leading up to it, enduring, every Republican knew what was going on.
I mean, congressmen and senators, they knew what was going on, what was about to take place.
And yet they just let it happen.
And currently they just close their eyes to the things that are going on right now.
They must know that this is not normal, that this is the road to fascism.
How can that be?
Owen, why are you still a Republican?
I'm conservative.
I really believe that the country does better when it takes care of its resources and people.
And I just believe in that.
Daniel Yudkin.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right?
I'm hearing a conflict in the caller's voice, right?
There's a sense of values that are being expressed.
I am conservative.
And yet the Republicans, I can't believe the ways that they're devolving into these fascism and these types of things.
And I think that that actually speaks to some of the work that we've done at More in Common at the Beacon Project.
We're finding more and more that the narratives and the ways in which politicians are behaving is increasingly at odds with the values of the American people.
And so that's part of the reason at the Beacon Project.
What is the Beacon Project?
The Beacon Project is an effort to identify a story or a narrative or a vision that speaks to the core values of Americans, what we call the exhausted majority of Americans that feel as though their views aren't reflected in current politics and they want something better.
And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to go back to these first principles.
We're trying to figure out, okay, what do people actually want?
What do they believe?
What is their shared vision for the country in a way that's not reflected by current politics and generate that and then offer and hopefully allow that to emerge as a better and more healthy and more unifying story for the country?
If the narratives of today's politicians are increasingly at odds with the American people, why hasn't a third party arisen that can challenge Republicans and Democrats?
Why does this dominant two-party system still exist if you're seeing this thing of people saying, that's not my politics, the people who are doing it, increase more and more?
The problem is that there are deeply entrenched systemic factors, institutional factors, that are making it extremely difficult to leverage a third party.
I know that in history there's been many attempts to do this.
Some have been more successful than others.
There have been new parties that have emerged in American politics.
But it's very, very difficult to do so, especially today for all of the reasons that political scientists have identified, ranging from gerrymandering to party primaries to the electoral college to just the two-party system itself.
It is sustained and perpetuated by this binary type of thinking where there's just two sides.
And the problem is that when a third party comes along, it is so often the case that it can be what they call a spoiler because it pulls more votes from one side than the other and then ultimately gives the other side a greater chance of winning an election.
So there are systemic factors that are preventing this from happening.
What we're trying to do is to go upstream of that.
We're not even trying to talk about a political party.
We're trying to talk about what some people call a narrative, a framework, a value system.
What are the values?
How do we get back to the core values that the exhausted majority of Americans share?
And then let the parties work it out as they will.
But what is a story or a value system that better reflects the core beliefs of the American people in a way that can hopefully transform our politics from that direction?
What are three or four core values that you would hang this on?
Let me say, I'll start with one.
A sense of purpose and communal effort.
So one thing that Moore in Common has found is that when you ask people what they really want and what they're most interested in when it comes to bridging divides, they talk about working together to solve a shared problem in their community.
People don't want to necessarily talk about their differences.
Oh, I think about this, about gun control, you think that about gun control.
What they want to do is they want to work together to solve a shared problem in their community.
And so this, and this, and what this speaks to, I think, is actually something even deeper, which is this sense of purpose that people want.
So there's questions, obviously, we've talked about artificial intelligence and the ways in which that is promising to reshape the American economy.
And at the core of that is, how can we maintain a sense of purpose and really think about what it means to be human in an age in which technology is capable of doing many of the things that human beings are capable of.
And so recommitting to this sense of purpose, and let me actually bring it all the way back to the original topic, responsibility.
When we talk about purpose, we're talking about taking responsibility for the ways in which we show up in the world.
And so, one of the reasons why we're so interested in responsibility and civic responsibility is because we're interested in how this sense of obligation that we have to each other, this social glue, can help to cement and strengthen the bonds that we have as a country together and also speak to some of these sense of alienation and disconnection that Americans have, both from each other and from the institutions that form the heart of this country.
Finding Common Ground00:03:37
After this program, in about four minutes, we're going to go to a program called Ceasefire, where we bring two often a Democrat-Republican on, but it's two people on the opposite side of an issue when we try to find common ground.
Have you watched it or have you watched programs like this?
Do you think they help?
I think they do help.
I think that people, it's about modeling, right?
People often want to find common ground.
They want to find ways of identifying the core issue or the core value that they share, but they often don't know how.
And there's important research that shows that, for example, talking about personal experiences rather than facts actually can help to identify ways of meeting that, of bridging or finding that common element here.
So if we talk about our own experiences or how we came to the beliefs that we did, as opposed to, oh, I read this statistic in the New York Times the other day, it is a way of humanizing the disagreement and allowing people to kind of cut beyond the surface level, okay, I think about this, about this policy, and you think that about that policy, and then go below to the question of what are the values or concerns or worldviews that are animating those disagreements?
And are there things that we can, even if we don't share those or prioritize them to the same amount, are there things that we can sympathize with and be like, okay, you're talking about a deep concern for people, or you're talking about wanting to ensure protection or security for people who are vulnerable, whatever it might be.
That's something that even if I don't agree with it, I can relate to it.
And that, I think, is the essence of finding common ground and resolving our differences today.
About two minutes left here.
How did you get into this work?
And what motivates you to keep up at this work?
Well, I got into this work a long time ago.
I have family.
I grew up in Massachusetts in a very liberal enclave.
And I have family who is in Kansas.
And I remember a very kind of formative experience for me when I went to a family reunion in Iuka, Kansas, outside of Wichita.
And this was some of the first time I had really encountered a group of many, many people who are politically different from me.
And I just remember being struck by the level of humanity and warmth.
And it was a different way of life.
There are different values that these people who are in my family I'd never met before, but they held.
And this was a formative moment because it really showed me that this group of people that I had kind of absorbed in the groundwater being like, oh, they're evil, they're terrible, they're racist, whatever it might be, there's actually a huge amount of humanity that I was able to see in people and just by having that conversation.
So that, along with a number of other different life experiences, that alerted me to the different ways that the worldviews that we bring to the table shape our perceptions of reality and our opinions about political issues and about deep moral topics, moral disagreement.
Those types of, that sort of acknowledgement of the humanity and the values that people bring to the table as they try to make sense of these difficult issues that we're grappling with as a country and as a society, that was the kind of like the guiding light for me that brought me to this question of how can we find more common ground.
Daniel Yudkin is the Beacon Project Director at Morein Common, moreincommonus.com or beaconproject.us, both places you can go to learn about his and his group's work.
Guiding Light for Common Ground00:01:08
We appreciate your time on a Saturday morning on the Washington Journal.
Thank you so much, John.
It's been a pleasure.
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