Breaking Bread Together

It's worth taking a bit of a deeper look at the background to de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." In his native France, the revolution had become empire under Napoleon, and been defeated at Waterloo. It is fair to say the revolution was struggling. Cromwell's revolution in England a little more than a century earlier had also failed quickly. Why had the American revolution not created the chaos that led to resurgence of authoritarian control as other revolutions had?

Part of de Tocqueville's answer is that non-governmental institutions provided public services to without resorting to governmental solutions. They are part of the whole fabric of and aspiration for minimal government in the US. And, though clearly different people have different ideas of what government priorities should be, I don't know anyone in the US who wants to pay more taxes or wants to be told what to do by the government. We do almost universally share at least some of that world view.

So the question becomes, how do we unite to solve problems without depending on governmental interference?

First, this is like "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." 

Second, we need to identify problems we can work together to solve -- for instance, reduction in in use of force incidents between police and citizens is widely desired, and could be a unifying problem. Or we could dehumanize police and say it is all their fault. Or we could dehumanize citizens and say it is all their fault. Finger-pointing does not give us leverage for change.

Third, we need to be more careful about alienating our potential allies before we start. If I tell you that "you and your kind are destroying the country" -- you're not all that likely to sit down and break bread with me, are you?