The media and politicians now no longer refer to just voters, but rather, separate us into racial, ethnic, religious and gender categories by raising the salience of these categories and by exaggerating the differences between groups. Without a common sense of belonging to a civil society and country, I believe this increasing emphasis on division rather than the collective invites further conflict and populist governments.
We should be electing politicians who share a grand vision of the collective ways forward, the solutions to regenerate our communities and our countries, to end conflict and divisiveness, to bring us together in shared solutions and a collective consciousness for the ways forward to a meet the climate and biodiversity crises.
In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt us: “Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist.” He added, “If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate” (Brooks, The New York Times, November 14, 2024).
