If a culture becomes obsessed  with differences and competition, not surprisingly they will end up finding differences and competing in those differences.  Now if that same culture builds a transactional economy focused and based purely on those competing differences, look out, for you will end up with what we have today in the United States; a nation divided with such professionalism it seems impossible that we should ever be united again.  But we must reverse this cultural trend of  competing differences and move back at least to a majority living in mutual cooperation in the same house again. The goal of a shared commitment to restoring our democracy might just be the basis for accomplishing this worthy goal but we will have to be intentional about it. 

The second virtue of the next democracy as proposed by this project is “Building Toward the ‘Shared Public Reality’.  The shared reality that has been lost to the present set of divisions is not a natural occurrence.  Half the American public is not hopelessly deluded anymore than half are flawlessly brilliant.  But at core of democracy is a working commitment to find what is held in common despite the differences.  That work of reuniting is just beginning to be done, but that beginning is occurring in the face of an administration that has thrived by  perpetuating division. Worse yet they now have a cadre of media magnates at their disposal to institutionalize the faux differences.  In biology developmental divisions are life in action but aggressive divisions are cancer. 

The culture wars partially come from moving the public sector from the communal reality to a nuclear family level of organization or, in short, privatization.  The cancerous thinking error that threatens the very foundations of democracy is that a communal public reality sounds suspiciously like “communism” or “socialism”.  In fact, the construction of a shared public reality is an entirely different conversation and at the heart of a working democracy.  I blame both sides for this.  People on the liberal side have sometimes used the term socialism as a watered down safe version for the better values of Karl Marx and the 19’th century socialism.  This is the 21st century and it is time to live in this time using the new secular language that can reflect our contemporary reality  as a democracy.

Good is understanding that the private reality of the individual can live with adherence to a community based set of acceptable even compelling values and virtues. Good is recognizing that we cannot have a democracy without a level of a shared public reality. Good is recognizing that second to telling the truth is the very hard work of going down into ourselves to build the stabilizing bedrock of a shared public reality.  A purely private sector democracy is an impossible contradiction.