The Big Idea

Life Liberty

Pursuit of Happiness

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“The constant clashing of opinions”

• Anti-federalists: Only homogeneous groups can self-govern

• Hamilton: Diversity of opinion “promotes deliberation and circumspection, and serves to check excesses in the majority”

• Cass Sunstein: The most profound insight of the framers was “to see diversity as a creative force which would enable people not to hate each other but to think more productively about what might be done to solve problems. It turned this vice into a virtue.”

• Madison: Factionalism as the ultimate check on power

E Pluribus UnumOut of Many, One

The Village Square is Born

American Marketplace of Ideas

The garden club, the bridge club

The PTA

The Elks Lodge, The Masonic Temple

The bowling league

The evening news

The hometown newspaper

The neighborhood church

The Divided States of America

Prosperity brings mobility

Maslow’s hierarchy: No longer about survival, but belonging

We seek out people “like us”

Groups, even communities become more likeminded

Choose your news & the alleluia chorus

Lifestyle and ideologically individualized churches

“The Big Sort:” 1965 - present

THE BIG SORT:Why the Clustering of

Like-Minded America isTearing us Apart

By Bill Bishop

The United States of “those people”The Psychology of the Tribe

100 years of social psychology experiments consistently document how humans behave in groups

Likeminded groups grow more extreme in the direction of the majority view

Risky-shift phenomena: Homogeneous groups consistently make riskier decisions than individuals in the group made by themselves

Ignore evidence their position is wrong

Mixed company moderates; likeminded company polarizes

Bishop: “As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”

Early legislators lived in regional boarding houses

Jefferson: they came to work “in a spirit of avowed misunderstanding, without the smallest wish to agree.”

The Year of LivingThe Year of LivingDangerouslyDangerously

The Year of LivingThe Year of LivingDangerouslyDangerously

Take-out Tuesday

LunchAcross

TheAisle

68% Solutions

34.1% 34.1%

• We make better decisions by crossing the aisle • Solutions are more durable with a larger consensus• Outlast the last election• Better than the constant sparring to get just over 50%

www.tothevillagesquare.org

In YOUR Hometown…

The only place we can really begin to fix this

Neighbors reconnecting with neighbors

Reviving American common purpose and common sense

Remembering the Founders’ vision: We NEED each other, we balance each other

The resurgence of

The Village Square

The Village Square

I have always believed that a lot of the troubles in the world

would disappearif we were talking to each other

instead of about each other.

--Ronald Reagan

Our lives begin to end when we stop talking about things that

matter.

-The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Culturally, right now, we don’t have a broad conversation among people. . . We don’t agree with each other – and one of the biggest challenges, I think,

we face as a nation is how do we create those spaces?

--Barack Obama

Thank you to Luke Inhen Political Science Grad Student

Village Square Intern

For planting the seedsof this presentation

and for makingFounding Father

gums flap.

Literally.