"We can't talk about things."
Have you stopped talking to somebody or has somebody stopped talking to you because your politics were different? Is America a racist country? Is America broken? |
These are a few of the questions we asked the seven Trump voters and six Biden voters who participated in our most recent focus group. We devoted our two-hour discussion to exploring the division that has run through America over the past decade or so. |
We knew that the participants had at least one thing in common based on their answers to a questionnaire. Asked if they were "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore," all responded with a yes. But could they find even a bit of common ground beyond that? |
The participants generally agreed that Congress is failing to do its job and that neither President Biden nor Donald Trump should be the presidential nominees in 2024. |
But past that, what unfolded over the course of the evening made for our most contentious focus group yet. |
Voters from both sides saw those on the other as violent, pointing to Jan. 6 and Charlottesville, Va., as evidence of violence on the right, at the protests of and quasi-assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh as evidence of violence on the left. At one point in the conversation, a participant said that violence "is not the American way." This led one voter to respond, "Can you get outside of your white skin for a minute and understand that this country was built on violence?" |
What is the American way? This question floated above the conversation that evening. After reading the transcript, one might conclude that one person's American way is another person's un-American — a tension that is driving left and right farther and farther from the center. How to resolve that strain is a defining problem of our age. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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