What Could We Imagine? The U.S. As a Country That Comes Together After Divisive Elections
While we are many months into 2021 now, it was not that long ago that we were reflecting on the wild ride of ups and downs democracy experienced through the 2020 Presidential Election when we were met with another upending event: the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
I think the New York Times put it well when they said the “insurrection was one of the rare live-TV atrocities that grew only more sickening, more terrifying, more infuriating as more days passed.” As part of our journey to process January 6th and the preceding years of increasing polarization, we found ourselves wondering if we could even imagine unity in the United States anymore. Our reality felt like it had grown so far from that, and yet, doesn’t the very premise of the American experiment require that we come together in shared purpose? These questions swirled in our heads as Inauguration Day approached and we were hearing a chorus of leaders calling for national unity as another chorus of leaders questioned the feasibility and appropriateness of that, especially without satisfactory atonement or accountability. All of this illuminated a hard truth we are unable to escape: Americans are operating with different understanding or versions of American identity, history, and truth. The idea of true unity — or, unity that is more than performative — felt difficult to imagine.
But we had to try.
In spring 2020, PACE took a bold step to put a sizable portion of its organizational energy and muscle into experimenting with civic imagination, and we developed Imagination Sprints as a way to fully immerse ourselves in the creative and collaborative process of re-imagining a new reality for our future around particular topics. After all, when the status quo is in total upheaval — like it was in 2020 — isn’t that the exact moment to consider that the previously impossible may now be possible?
In early 2021, PACE hosted an Imagination Sprint focused on imagining the U.S. as a country that comes together after divisive elections. The sprint engaged eleven participants, predominantly from the philanthropic sector, who engaged in a series of exercises designed identify assumptions we carry about unity, which helps us break down the current frames that may not be serving us in our new reality; spark new insights about unity, which helps us build new scaffolding upon which we can envision a new reality; and create the conditions for kernels of new ideas about unity to sprout.
Uncovered Assumptions and Insights
By way of sharing what imagination transpired during our time together, I want to provide a glimpse into the assumptions and insights about unity and coming together that were revealed to us through our process. While these points are not exhaustive of all the conversations or angles we touched on, I consider them the “greatest hits” as I reflect back on the sprint.
Perhaps the first place to start is in our exploration of the difference between the terms “unity” and “coming together.” We quickly surfaced that these words are often used interchangeably, and we even found ourselves using them as synonyms in our early conversations. While these words share attributes, there is an underlying distinction that is subtle but important to uncover. If the goal is to move forward together, “unity” seems to assume everyone is in alignment while “coming together” seems to acknowledge difference. As one participant said: “Coming together doesn’t really mean coming together. It might just mean effectively working together across complex and strongly held differences.” We detected that when leaders call for unity and ask that Americans come together, baked in there might be an expectation around adapting to a (their?) belief system, which left us with two questions: (a) Is that what is going on? Do leaders have that expectation? Do we have that expectation? and (b) Is that necessary? Is a common belief system a prerequisite for coming together? Or, if not a prerequisite, is it an essential ingredient to building the trust necessary to come together?
This question of “Do we share the same beliefs? Do we have to?” led our group down a path towards interrogating if Americans have shared aspirations anymore, and considering that calls to come together usually occur after tragedy, crisis, or a painful flashpoint, one participant questioned “Can Americans come together after things that aren’t negative?” There was a lot of conversation about our societal addiction to outrage and one participant even referred to it as “transgenerational soullessness.” Elections — where there are winners and losers and reasons for outrage at every corner — seem to be a perfect fan for the fire. But where did the joy in everyday life go? What gives us hope as individuals? And can we translate that into community hope? National hope? How do we stop putting energy into outrage and start putting energy into joy? Might that get us to a place where we want to move forward together again?
Relatedly, the group kept coming back to the role of nostalgia in coming together, and we wondered if our memories were getting in the way of our ability to move forward. We explored this in two ways. First, memories are hyper-personal. Even if two people live the same experience, they may have very different views, impressions, or takeaways from it. When calls for unity harken back to remembering the “good days,” we need to acknowledge they were not always the “good days” for everyone. For some people, calls for unity are heard as calls for restoring the past. There is understandable resistance in certain groups, and that might be a healthy sign of progress. Second, our group talked about how the calls for unity today seem to sit on top of an implicit narrative that unity was something we had and lost. But did we? Was America always united? Or is that narrative necessary — true or not — to give today’s calls for unity substance? It seems to us that it is more complicated than that, and we should be careful about the narratives we accept from nostalgia.
As a group, we acknowledged how quickly the country seems to move from one election to the next and how coming together is made more difficult by skipping an important cultural practice of taking a moment to make meaning between elections. One participant used the metaphor of a kids soccer game: The game is played, a team is named the winner, and everyone high-fives and eats orange slices as they clear the field. The sting for the kids who lost the game can linger as they get in their cars and head home. What happens in the car? “If the kid has good adults around, they will talk to them about what lessons to take from that experience, how to find joy through loss, how to see a bigger picture.” In other words, there is a space for making meaning. Where does that function exist in our society? Where does it exist in our politics? Where do we turn for collective reflection, dialogue, understanding after major events? If we do take the time to process or make meaning, is it only with people who already think like us or information sources that affirm our perspectives, therein further exacerbating our sense of right-ness? Without the space to pause or leadership to reflect, we end up internalizing lessons we may not intend.
The time “between elections” was a major area of discussion within our group, and we discussed the degree to which elections have become the “main event” in our system of government. They take up a lot of oxygen and it seems like, culturally, we have adopted them as the prime indicator of our civic health. In actuality, elections are one part of the overall civic engagement spectrum. How do we elongate civic engagement beyond this “before elections/after elections” construct? There are many other civic engagement practices and expressions of civic health that we should be promoting, but that also assumes Americans know that those things matter to a healthy democracy, feel incentivized to engage, and have access to the opportunities to get involved.
Relatedly, we interrogated the assumption of elections as divisive — do they have to be? Do we choose them to be divisive? When we assume elections are divisive, do we overlook the true workings of the system? One participant shared his experience finding collaborative elements in competition: He and his friend play chess, and to throw his friend off his game, he playfully beat-boxes during his friend’s turn. Over time, his friend not only started to strengthen his mental game, but he also joined in on beat-boxing during the game. In a funny way, both friends have pushed each other to be better chess players and beat-boxers. As this participant reflected, “Who says competition can’t also be collaboration?” When elections use the language of “races,” “winners” and “losers,” perhaps we set up a construct that doesn’t give collaboration a chance.
One of the insights that stuck with me the most was our discussion about who is on the other side of calls for unity. As one participant shared: “We need to think a lot more about what we hope to get out of ‘coming together’ because that framing feels exclusive to a lot of people.” When leaders call for America to move together united, what are they really asking of people? Is everyone — truly everyone — included in that call? And are leaders calling for unity but really meaning that certain groups do more work to align? Who do we burden with the responsibility of unity? These are the questions we sat with during our time of uncovering assumptions and sparking insights in our imagination process.
Kernels of New Ideas
From those assumptions and insights, these kernels of ideas emerged:
- Recognizing the need to turn down the temperature on elections and elongate civic engagement beyond the construct of elections, the group had ideas about ways we might tackle this at the community level with “simple” tasks. Could we “start local and get good?” At a high-level, there was discussion about the civic rituals that we might incorporate into our regular lives. As one participant asked, “What cumulative impact is possible?”
- Appreciating the insight that the language and terminology we use makes a big difference in our ability to build trust and come together as Americans, participants shared an idea for a program that would help translate between groups, with the goal of helping people use language that isn’t inherently marginalizing or breaks people free from “speaking institutional democracy.”
- The idea of some sort of “meaning-making” space was raised — a space for dialogue and understanding after elections or other major moments in our democratic lives.
- The idea of reframing came up a lot; is there a way for us to collectively write the narrative of our history together, inclusively, so we know how we are moving forward together? Or, can we write a shared history or shared future so we know what we’re uniting back to? One participant offered this idea after sharing that she had seen Black History Month reframed as a month to share the story of democratic progress through Black leadership, and she wondered what that sort of thoughtful reframing in other parts of our collective democractic story might mean for our ability to unite.
Areas for Further Exploration
In revisiting our conversations and my notes from this Imagination Sprint, I am reminded of the important insights and ideas that were raised. Participants shared feedback that they, too, found incredible value in having space to think through this thorny topic with colleagues and step into a space intended for imagination. Participants also identified areas where further exploration and imagination could be helpful, such as:
- An understanding of how unity ebbed and flowed throughout American history. Did we ever actually have unity, and if so, what did that look like?
- The lessons and narratives we need to “unlearn” as individuals, as communities, and as a country in order to move forward united. As one participant asked: what are the lies we are still holding onto?
- Understanding the difference between social cohesion and solidarity and how those might be fostered in a pluralistic democracy.
- How we might rebrand democratic participation, both within and beyond the construct of election participation?
- How might we help people (across race, class, and political views) feel better about this country and its future?
- Case studies or examples of what funders have already done in this space.
So what do we do from here? Throughout 2020, PACE led groups of philanthropists and practitioners to imagine new futures related to civic learning (Could we imagine civic education without disparities in access?), trusted relationships (Could we imagine trusted relationships in a diverse and pluralistic society?), crisis response (Could we imagine relationship infrastructure as central to crisis response?), voter turnout (Could we imagine a U.S. election with 100% voter turnout?), and election information (Could we imagine a U.S. election season without deliberate misinformation or disinformation?).
This Imagination Sprint was intended to “get the juices flowing” related to unity and elections, and it certainly achieved that — both for us at PACE and the participants of the sprints. We now have a keener sense of the topic, the opportunities, and the gaps that might be worth interrogating further. In particular, the process of breaking down assumptions and sparking new insights about trust allowed us to start to build new scaffolding upon which we can imagine a new reality for us as individuals, for our communities, and for our country. And, we have a strong community of participants who are thinking deeply on the topic of how it might shape their work moving forward.
This Imagination Sprint adds to our catalogue of topics for which we have flexed our civic imagination muscle. PACE intends to deepen its learning and experimentation as a philanthropic laboratory this year, and we will focus on bridging and polarization as a learning topic. This sprint serves as an important input into that journey.
To learn more about PACE’s Imagination Sprints, please visit: www.PACEFunders.org/imagine.
