What's our greatest danger?
The thing that gets me about great thinkers is how well they pull insights from the mess of our current moment.
Take the diagnosis political analyst Yuval Levin made in the new episode of A Braver Way, which we recorded live (a first!) at the Braver Angels convention in Philadelphia:
"The danger is not disagreement, it's not polarization,” he said. “These can be dangerous, but the greatest danger is passivity, is to understand yourself as a spectator."
It’s hard to overstate how valuable I think Yuval’s work is to how we see ourselves as a society. His book American Covenant is the one I recommend most to people wondering what comes next for what feels like a broken country. His take on where to find hope in dark times still fuels me up.
Yuval is such a skilled observer of where we are, I think, because he so rigorously studies where we’ve been.
And where we are, he goes 200 years back to point out, is asleep:
I think the best source on this is Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville, at the end of the second volume of Democracy in America, comes to the view that the greatest danger that the United States faces in its future is what he calls somnolence — sleepiness. A sense that all this stuff is somebody else's fault.
When something goes wrong, he says, the French have a tendency to fold their arms and wait for an official to turn up. And he's impressed that the Americans don't do this, but he worries that they could — that there's something about a free society, because it comes with so many rights, and because the obligations are optional, that we'll lose sight of those obligations.
Everyone laughed when he mentioned the French. What an empowering thing to believe about us as Americans: We don’t fold our arms. We roll up our sleeves!
But that's only true if we make it true.
We…
Sitting with him on stage, something clicked. Yuval had laid out the danger of passivity — of citizens acting like spectators. And I remembered something he'd said earlier, about the judge at his U.S. naturalization ceremony who told him to always refer to Americans — any Americans — in the first person plural.
We. Not them.
I said it out loud then: the passivity and that "them" were the same problem. If we think of our dysfunction as their fault, then suddenly, it’s their problem. Their responsibility. And we… fold our arms.
So here’s one prescription to stave off a case of anti-American sleepiness: Stop saying "them."
The next time you catch yourself talking about Americans you don’t like, or who see things differently, as some separate “they,” fix it. Honor your obligation. Say “we” instead.
Sleeves up, all.
And stay curious,
