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Sep 10, 2021Liked by G. Elliott Morris

I think that Putnam's data is relevant here. How we get back to any kind of face to face engagement is not clear, but his notion that personal engagement works is, I think, spot on. I was once on the cutting edge of this when we worked out of Princeton to put 70,000 students into campaigns for anti-war candidates and Bill Murphy and I wrote the handbook for the movement for a new congress Vote Power (Prentice Hall 1970 and Doubleday 1974) and later with the Downtown Independent Democrats and statewide New Democratic Coalition in New York. There were a handful of campaigns in 2018 and 2020 that, as in my self-published "Putting People Back in Politics" really did that, and some of those organizations persist, but it's tricky. I'm just writing the last chapter of the third edition on New York Politics (for Cornell) and wresting with this issue, but I do firmly believe that the more we work from the bottom up than the top down the better we mitigate this polarization. Anyway, thanks for this dispressing but vivid depiction of the problem we face.

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It's crucial to fund and deploy a vigorous, rigorous public education system, and punish propagandists who use social media to gaslight critical thinking.

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