Trying to heal democracy one conversation at a time

America is a broken political family. On the ground, this means that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, do not live in the same neighborhoods or belong to the same organizations. They do not pray or worship together. They do not date or marry each other. They are not friends. Technical terms like “negative partisanship” and “polarization” are just fancy ways of saying that the American people do not like each other very much right now.

In America’s political imagination, Democrats live in big cities, are racially and ethnically diverse, and college-educated. Republicans live in rural America and are working class. Red State America has been fully MAGA-fied; big cities and blue states are dominated by “out of touch liberals,” “the radical left” and “wokeness.”

But this is a flat, stereotypical picture of the country’s political and social life. Polls and other research consistently show that, from healthcare to the economy, rural and urban Americans actually agree on a wide range of public policy issues.

Conflict entrepreneurs and extremists like Donald Trump have little incentive to unify the American people in service to the common good, which makes the task of healing the nation’s dysfunctional politics and successfully navigating its democracy crisis especially challenging. It will require convincing urban and rural Americans alike that they have more in common than what divides them.

The Washington Post’s Casey Parks recently profiled a small group of activists in Oregon doing this work by hosting informal town halls and small gatherings where they model respectful conversation, civility, shared problem-solving and a healthy civic life. The effort is led by Steve Radcliffe who, after being moved to action by the 2016 presidential election, signed up to volunteer for Braver Angels, a nonprofit advocating political civility, and became co-chair of the organization’s Oregon Rural-Urban Project, establishing a kind of exchange program where rural and urban residents visit each other’s communities. Radcliffe hoped they would formulate a set of bipartisan recommendations to the state legislature.

At a recent meeting in rural Wasco, population 417, Radcliffe and the five volunteers joining him met with eight townspeople, including one woman who blamed the state’s “urban liberal supermajority in the legislature” for ignoring the will of rural voters. Democrats, she said, could “pass any bill [they] like without every garnering support from the other side.”

“That’s why we don’t feel listened to,” she concluded, “because they don’t have to listen to us.”

Radcliffe responded that “It shouldn’t be this hard.” More Americans need to “listen respectfully, speak politely. If we all did that, we might be able to get some place.”

What Radcliffe described to the small group is what political scientists and philosophers call “deliberative” and “communicative” democracy — the notion that legitimate political outcomes and consensus can come from conversation and structures that facilitate the participation of more people in decision-making.

Those sentiments are widely shared. Polls and other research show that the American people want the nation’s leaders to turn down the political temperature. Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide fight with each other too much, many believe, and have lost touch with “regular Americans” like them.

The road to the Age of Trump and American fascism goes straight through the divide between rural and urban America.

In 2024, Trump won 94% of rural counties. Republicans and the MAGA coalition have used gerrymandering, voter suppression and other tools to maintain de facto one-party rule over red states and rural America. This imperils American democracy because there is no check or moderating influence on right-wing extremism. The Constitution and other structural features of American politics amplify this dynamic by giving a disproportionate amount of power to rural states; with 39.6 million residents, California has the same representation in the Senate as Nebraska, which has just over two million people.

For decades, the Republican Party and the right-wing have weaponized “culture war” issues such as “guns, god and abortion” in combination with racism and white racial resentment — and hostility to non-white immigrants — and economic anxiety. The result has been an “us versus them” narrative of “takers”, “welfare queens,” “invaders” and “out of control criminals” in racially diverse urban centers and Democratic-led states, while rural parts of the country, which are majority white, are portrayed as being filled with patriots and “hard-working real Americans.”

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This is what Radcliffe and his group of volunteers are up against. On a practical level, organizing in rural red-state America is difficult and potentially dangerous. Democrats risk alienating their family and friends, or losing their jobs and other community support. There is also a fear of being harassed or targeted for violence.

The need to come together across the political divide to find common solutions to shared concerns depends primarily on a sincere desire for real dialogue. But what if that mutual desire and respect — and the infrastructure to facilitate it — do not exist? Moreover, what if the political divides and echo chambers are so strong that loyalty to Trump, MAGA, White Christian Nationalism and the Republican Party are now such a core part of a person’s identity that they reject reality, facts and norms of basic civility toward their fellow Americans who are outside of their political tribe?

There is hope that Trump’s MAGA followers and others who support today’s Republican Party will eventually survey the destruction and have an epiphany — a moment of revelation and moral reckoning that returns them to normal politics. But for a variety of psychological and emotional reasons, this is unlikely to happen on a large scale.

In terms of realpolitik, the Democratic Party will need to do the work of going to rural America and presenting an alternative vision for the country. They may not be able to convert MAGA diehards, but they can at least compete for fence sitters and other persuadable Republicans and independents — and sow a populist message that might one day yield an electoral harvest.

Rural America was not always owned by the right-wing. From Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to Jimmy Carter’s winning campaign in 1976, Democratic Party built a durable coalition by making rural voters feel seen and heard with policies that responded to their needs and demands. As Howard Dean did with his 50-state strategy — which paid political dividends in 2008 when Barack Obama won more rural votes than any Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton — the white rural vote needs to be contested and not just surrendered to Trump’s fake authoritarian populism.

But just talking to each other in town halls and other more personal gatherings across the rural and urban divide will not be a panacea for the country’s democracy crisis in the Age of Trump. As seen on Jan. 6 and beyond, a significant portion of the current Republican base and the MAGA movement rejects the basic premise that their political opponents are fellow citizens worth respecting and talking to at all as equals.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary of independence, the country feels more divided –– and more exhausted and broken — than at any point in recent memory. Worse, there are several generations of Americans who do not even know what a healthy civic and political life looks like in this country. Donald Trump’s two non-consecutive presidencies, and the years of dysfunction that preceded them, is the whole of their formative political experience. 

Steve Radcliffe and his associates have it right. America needs a national reunion to move forward, and it needs to begin locally and personally.