Need to work toward restoring balance

As an observer of human nature and the body politick, I’ve reached the conclusion that the meanspirited attacks on both sides are largely due to the extremes. But there’s a more moderate middle that sees a third way, one that’s closer to our collective nature and articulated well by the pundit David Brooks.

Longtime journalist Brooks is what I’d describe as a moderate conservative. He writes a column for the New York Times and gives analysis on PBS News Hour, but he’s more of a free thinker than a partisan political commentator. Search for him on YouTube and you’ll find him speaking at colleges and symposiums about culture more than politics, tying them together in ways that shed light on why we’re as divided and “tribal” as we are now.

Here’s a sample of what I’ve gleaned from one of his speeches:

American society has gone from a community-based culture, where conformity gave us a collective identity, to a culture that values individualism over all else. To illustrate, Brooks points to Super Bowl III, when the clean-cut quarterback Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts against the New York Jets and their flashy, hippie-like QB, Joe Namath. It was 1969, and Namath’s cocky win over Unitas marks the cultural change going on in America at that time.

And it stuck.

In a few short years, America came to value individualism over conformity, which led to tremendous entrepreneurial advances in places like Silicon Valley. But as Brooks points out, it also stripped us of us of our collective identity and our nation devolved into a “us-against-them” tribalism that divides us to this day.

At a speech before students at Davidson College, a small liberal-arts school in North Carolina, Brooks proposed a way out of such tribalism, by recommitting ourselves to each other, to take care of each other by valuing service over selfishness. We need to recognize there are truths on both sides of our political divisions and by incorporating those truths into one overreaching approach is the best way to find justice.

This may be utopian thinking, but I can see the value in it, for this reason: I know people whose political views are altogether different than my own, and yet they are still good neighbors. Same with members of my family who have different political viewpoints. If I needed them, they’d be there for me, and I would do the same for them.

Sure, there are extremists on both sides who demonize their counterparts on the other side, but most of the people I know will help a neighbor regardless of the political sign in their yard. In other words, most Americans are still good people, and that goes for the right as well as the left.

If you ask me, we need more thinkers like Brooks.

Then maybe we can restore civility and balance in our way of life.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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