1/29/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with a piece by Pete Peterson and Jack Miller at RealClearEducation: “How Civics Can Counter Antisemitism on Campus.” Peterson, Dean of the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, and Jack Miller, founder and chairman of the Jack Miller Center, argue that the “anti-Israel, antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses and in the streets of our cities should be a wake-up call for all Americans.” They contend that what lies behind today’s surging antisemitism is the rise of identity ideology. This phenomenon, which they argue is saturating American culture, features a wrong-headed “oppressor vs. oppressed” dichotomy that “brokers no disagreement.” “Because Israel is seen as strong it is viewed as the oppressor, and Hamas, because it is weaker, is seen as the oppressed,” they posit. Instead, Peterson and Miller argue that only a civics education that’s grounded in the principles and practices of the American founding can serve as an antidote to this harmful ideology. “Only through a civics education that encourages debate, even as it celebrates the country grounded in the freedom to do so, can we win this battle.”

At Deseret News, John Wood, Jr. of Braver Angels remembers when he first started thinking seriously of how to bridge the growing partisan political divide in America. These reflections pointed him back to his parents, who are politically far apart. His mother is a "liberal Black Democrat from inner-city Los Angeles” while his father is “a conservative white Republican from Tennessee.” Wood says that despite these very real differences, they could still all live together under the same roof. America, like his family, is also politically divided. In Wood’s mind, this problem must be solved akin to how he approached navigating his own family. Wood concludes that the “answer to this deep societal cancer of polarization must begin with a certain remembrance — that we as Americans are like a family. We didn’t choose each other. But we can choose to love each other.”