Polarization has sundered American politics and the crucial exchange of ideas and opinions underpinning its democracy. Karthik Ramanna writes that on this inauguration day, Americans must remember that our democracy requires commitment first and foremost to the necessary civil procedures that produce fair outcomes. Only then can Americans productively debate the values and political end goals that constitute divergent ideas of freedom and justice.
As an American living abroad but who commutes back nearly every month, I am often struck by the difference between the fear I feel for the country when I read about it online and the reassurance I experience when I interact with individuals in person. If Americans are as angry and polarized as online commentary on traditional and social media seems to indicate, we do not generally let it color our everyday interactions with even strangers on the street. Perhaps that is a superficial niceness, but it can still give us hope—and a window of opportunity— that we can reconstitute the fractured exchange of ideas and opinions that constitutes our democracy and forge from our divisions a more perfect union.
For nearly a decade now, I have been researching and teaching how people and organizations can be more resilient and even thrive despite the outrage around us and all the crises that it manifests. I have studied individuals who have successfully and less successfully navigated some of the toughest contexts—like election violence in Nigeria, primary school reform in Brazil, underfunded public hospitals during Covid, policing during anti-racism protests, and even corruption-fighting inside the Vatican. What seemingly works for leaders and communities across these very diverse settings is building a soft commitment to “opportunity values” while maintaining a strategic silence on “outcome values.” Let me expand.
Opportunity values are ethical commitments to a set of processes (the “means”) that are themselves seen as fair and that if followed are expected to yield fair outcomes. By a “soft” commitment, I mean avoiding a dogmatic adherence to these processes, partly because, whatever they might be, the processes are never perfect and sometimes require pragmatic conditioning on the margins. A soft commitment also allows for a broader construction of opportunity values that can bring more people into the tent.
By contrast, outcome values establish our preferred distributions or the “ends.” We all have outcome values, but they tend to be more varied, and so they divide us. The strategic silence on outcome values doesn’t mean we avoid confronting those divisions—it means we don’t engage actively on that divisiveness until such time as we have enough trust in our institutions to do so meaningfully.
As an example, consider what Priscilla Ankut did in her role as inaugural chief executive of the peace commission in the north-central Nigerian state of Kaduna. The region suffers from episodic bursts of violence rooted in historic ethnic and religious divisions that are exacerbated by scarce resources. Ankut had no substantive budget or authority over policing, despite her peacekeeping mandate. So, she sought to build her influence through a community-wide body—which she called the House of Kaduna Family. She named to this body prominent local leaders who had known disagreements about outcome values but who were willing to give a broadly acceptable soft process a shot.
At first, that process was as simple as coming together from time to time to show unity against violence, something we lack in America even after school shootings. But over time, the House of Kaduna Family was able to expand their shared procedural commitments to address violence-inducing religiosity during elections. For instance, they attempted to reset norms around what constituted acceptable forms of public prayer during campaigns, recognizing that “God” was often invoked as a call to arms. Their work is by no means complete or perfect, but it shows how despite sharp divisions in outcome values, shared opportunity values can deescalate and potentially even depolarize.
But can what works in community and organizational contexts work for a country as large and diverse as these United States? And what might a broad set of opportunity values for America even look like?
Three simple principles capture America’s (historic) opportunity values, that is, the American way of life. First, we live and let live. We recognize that we are different on many grounds, and we seek to interfere on those differences as the exception rather than as the rule. Second, we don’t care where one is coming from, but what one can achieve. Titles, birthright, and bloodlines don’t matter like they do in the Old World; what matters is chutzpah, grit, and capability. And third, we are committed to let the best win. Crucially, this requires both a fair fight and a belief that the game will not be rigged.
Even writing the above, I can’t but admit that in America today all three of these opportunity values are on somewhat shaky ground. And sometimes for good measure. What does it mean to say, “may the best person win” when in fact, in several settings, it really means “may the best man win.” More young Americans today feel our economic system is not a fair fight—that despite hard work and skill, they cannot expect to score a triple unless they were born on third base. The publicized rise of nepo babies in business, politics, academia, and even Hollywood adds fuel to that feeling. And increasingly, political extremes on both sides have hollowed out our moderating live-and-let-live impulses. Both the religious right and woke left are hard to ignore for even sensible politicians—as base turnout rather than the marginal voter can now swing an election.
But abandoning our opportunity values because we have not lived up to them is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Even as we mark today a new presidential administration, we will still have to confront a nation deeply divided. And unless we intend to be in a permanent state of vitriolic online abuse against each other—devolving even into physical abuse—we need an offramp from our outrage.
What divides us is often good and noble—for example, championing greater equity for those less advantaged—and we should indeed confront those divisions. But not now, when we are seemingly at our most divided since the Civil War, sitting on a tinder box of emotions. Rather, if our goal is to avoid violence, then perhaps we need to first find once again those things that unite us—that make us American, at least in the broadest possible sense. Only after we experience some sense of shared commitment can we gradually take on the causes for our outrage.
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