After Dwight Eisenhower had been sworn in as United States president on Capitol Hill in January 1953, he recited a prayer to the watching crowd that he had written himself that very same morning. The phrases embodied how Eisenhower hoped to manipulate. “Particularly we pray,” he advised them, “that our concern shall be for all of the individuals no matter station, race or calling. Could cooperation be permitted and be the mutual goal of those that … maintain to differing political opinions.”

To a 2020s viewers these phrases could now appear anodyne and pious, the standard politician’s guff that we barely take heed to. Race, particularly, would stay an unhealed wound by way of Eisenhower’s eight years within the White Home. However, the prayer honestly embodies an strategy to politics that truly labored for a lot of 1950s America.

These years are extensively seen – the unignorable exception of race aside – as marking, amid a sure mom-and-pop dullness, a excessive tide of shared nationwide values, prosperity and political depolarisation. As Robert D Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett have put it of their recent book The Upswing, the 1950s are on the swelling summit in the midst of the “I-we-I” bell curve of American life between the financial free-for-all of the 1890s, the period of larger cooperation within the mid-20th century, and the turbocharged renewal of individualism, inequality and hyperpartisanship of the 2020s.

Donald Trump and Eisenhower are each Republican presidents. But as leaders, and within the lives they’ve led, they might hardly be extra completely different in each manner. It’s utterly unattainable to think about Trump uttering the sort of phrases Eisenhower utilized in 1953. It’s, although, doable to think about Joe Biden talking them. Certainly, it might be a shock if Biden doesn’t make a dedication to cooperation of this sort when he himself swears the oath, in lower than two months’ time.

But is there the slightest chance that such an strategy would have any impact at this time, or that it might endure? The query of whether or not governments in superior capitalist democracies can convey entrenched and bitterly divided polities collectively is now the one most necessary problem dealing with our politics. America is by far essentially the most pressing and necessary instance of this. However it’s true of nations past the US too – Britain undoubtedly included.

The chances on Biden – or different consensual leaders in different international locations – reaching this are lengthy. As we speak we’re not on the summit of The Upswing’s 130-year-long “I-we-I” curve of financial equality, political cooperation, social cohesion and public altruism, as Eisenhower was within the 1950s. We’re as an alternative heading quickly down the curve to new depths of inequality, partisan intransigence, individualism and selfishness. We could even have handed a degree of no return.

Many due to this fact assert that these extra unified and civil days are merely over. Some on all sides really welcome this, considering that the downward descent of the previous, unified, liberal capitalist state within the early 21st century presents a cathartic alternative to clear the particles and failures of the previous and create a floor zero for a unique sort of courageous new future.

My reply to these zealots is to be very cautious certainly about what they want for. Putnam’s e book speaks for the various thousands and thousands who don’t assume the best way the zealots do. It speaks for individuals who need the tide of the final decade to be slowed, stopped and turned – and who need to imagine the restoration of a “we” society, primarily based on liberal democratic managed capitalism, can occur, though in a much less unequal and fewer rancorous manner.

One good motive for saying that is that one thing prefer it has occurred earlier than. The upward trajectory of the “I-we-I” curve within the early years of the 20th century didn’t descend from out of a transparent blue sky, within the US or wherever else. As a substitute, it was constructed on, amongst different issues, financial innovation and larger equality (together with for ladies), legal guidelines that broke up monopolies, political management that was not afraid of taxing the super-rich, the creation of efficient nation state and private-sector establishments, high-quality training, a increase in charity and philanthropy and a media that folks broadly trusted to inform them the reality.

One more reason for confidence is that the destroyers haven’t but triumphed. A lot of what sustained the sooner, extra cooperative period endures. What the EU would possibly name the acquis of liberal democracy and internationalism – the physique of ideas, establishments and civic habits that the current day has inherited from the not-so-distant previous – is definitely extra resilient than the shocks inflicted on it could counsel.

The transition from Trump to Biden illustrates this. Trump’s assault on the electoral course of and its credibility has been epochal and horrible, however ultimately the transition seems to be happening. The electoral course of was examined to the boundaries, nevertheless it proved strong and decisive. Its establishments and ideas have survived. One thing a bit of comparable could now be occurring in Britain over Brexit’s disregard of legal guidelines and treaties too.

And but the divides stay. How can these embittered certainties be eased and finally bridged? Altering individuals’s minds could appear to be the reply, however altering a thoughts is a really long-term course of. Opening one’s personal thoughts is extra necessary. And this wants to use on all sides. Denunciation, lecturing, labelling, and obsessing over language all make issues worse, not higher.

The secret is to prioritise listening after which speaking to others. Michael Sandel’s current e book The Tyranny of Merit argues that humility have to be central to the reconstruction of the notion of the widespread good, with out which no “we” society can prosper. Individuals don’t have to be humiliated or denied a voice by being advised they’re unhealthy, silly, bigoted or unsuccessful. The goal must be to search out issues we are able to all agree about, maybe together with things like equity, patriotism, serving to each other and making an attempt to agree about details.

Respect for the reality is indispensable. Social media are the chief accelerator on this space of catastrophic decline. A lot stronger management over on-line untruth will probably be a precondition for rebuilding the widespread good. That is as true of politics usually as of guaranteeing a full take-up of any Covid vaccine. However there may be materials to work with. Public belief has survived in lots of locations. Ipsos Mori reported this week that greater than 80% of us belief what nurses, docs, engineers, lecturers, judges, professors and scientists inform us. In contrast, round 80% misbelief journalists, authorities ministers, politicians typically and promoting executives. The issue lies with politics and media.

Maybe the Bidens of the world have it in them to vary this. Allow us to hope so. However they want the assistance of hundreds of native residents in that case, assembly at native stage to rebuild confidence within the widespread good. Authorities issues very a lot certainly. However the best way we deal with one another issues simply as a lot. We don’t simply have to construct up herd immunity to viruses. We have to construct up herd immunity to untruth, and to glib simple solutions too, and to all those that purvey them, in no matter kind.