President-Elect Donald Trump will take office on Friday, following one of the most divisive election campaigns in recent political memory.
In this session, leading US and international academics and business leaders discussed how the social fabric can be mended in the light of the deep fractures. Among the topics explored are the role of social media, economic inequality, regional divisions, generational and racial differences and the alienation some parts of the population feel.
Is social media driving division?
Exploring the reasons for the divisions, Dov Seidman, founder and CEO of LRN, asks if America is being divided by the ubiquity of tools that seed division, such as Twitter and other social media networks. This ties in with recent arguments that social media acts as an echo chamber for people with the same views, sheltering them from alternative perspectives. Seidman adds that the immediacy of these channels is also a contributor: “We’re skipping conversation and going straight to solution.”
A further dimension is that there is not only inequality of income but an inequality in terms of people’s ability to lead fulfilling lives, a right enshrined in the US Constitution.
Lonnie Bunch, Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, counters: “Division is more American than unity.”
The alienated middle reacts
Professor Laura D. Tyson from the University of California, Berkeley, raises the point that 60% of voters were concerned about the elite letting them down.
She underlines that in the 1990s, when all income groups were growing and unemployment was at a low, the divisions in the country declined. Over the last decade, she has seen these divisions become greater and she expects that they will get greater still with the advent of the new administration.
Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf Hanson, President of Zaytuna College, believes that Donald Trump is tapping into a powerful trend, the ‘nickle and dimed people’ who feel that the country is no longer their own.
Gemma Mortensen, Chief Global Officer at Change.org, sees the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in her native Britain as both economic and ideological issues.
“In many countries in which this trend is happening there is a spectrum: at one pole you have nationalists and at the other you have those who strongly identify as cosmopolitans. Then there’s the middle.What we need to do is step up how to communicate with this middle.”
Finding common ground
She cites the protest around the Dakota access pipeline as an example of how grassroots initiative can achieve results and invigorate people by enabling them to find common causes to fight for.
When asked for a solution to the divisions, both Lonnie Bunch and Dov Seidman have great hope in the millennial generation with their search for meaning and focus on ethics.