Avoiding Drift Toward 2nd Civil War
Spotlighted by PBS News Hour, Alamance County, NC is bridging the partisan divide. How about your community?
It’s one of the most polarized and divided communities in the U.S. And yet it’s rediscovering what residents hold in common.
In 2020, shortly before I moved from Burlington, NC, I wrote a profile of the town and Alamance County as representative of the hyper-partisan divide in the U.S., a cultural blend of the Old South, minority aspirations, immigration and resentment, working-class mill-town tension with a private university symbolizing the infiltration of Yankee privilege.
Four years later, in April 2024, PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff did an 11-minute profile of Alamance as an example of the hyper-partisan divide in America and how citizens are tackling it.
PBS News Hour: “Issues such as inequality, gender identity, and education have become the subjects of national debate, with the focus often on what elected leaders in Washington say and do about them. Yet many of these issues play out on the local level in communities with their own histories and challenges. Judy Woodruff traveled to one such community in North Carolina for her series, America at a Crossroads.” Transcript.
With the help of Rich Harwood of the non-profit Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, residents of Alamance gather regularly in small groups to discuss hard, divisive issues, what one participant called “gargantuan problems, especially with our school system.”
Not just schools. With rapid population growth, Alamance faces an identity crisis and a crisis in resources, an influx of migrants from other parts of the country and from Latin America, factionalization, high poverty, conflicts over history, and the kind of future to be created.
Harwood calls Alamance “one of the most divided places in America that I have worked.” His goal is to “push out the culture wars,” the divisive national politics, and get people to focus on the kinds of communities they want to build locally. In the words of one of his supporters, Harwood helps participants create a “shared vision for our community and a shared responsibility for that vision.”
Discussion Questions
Do you see signs of the national hyper-partisan divide locally, in your community? Or do you live in a bubble, an echo chamber, where most people think and vote alike?
Describe any cultural and political conflicts you observe in your town, city, county, region or state.
What are the prospects of overcoming them?
Could you start by writing an essay on your sense of place, the affection you have for your town or community, and your concerns? Might this elicit common ground from those you disagree with about national politics?
James and Deborah Fallows, in their 2018 book "Our Towns: A 100,000-mile Journey into the Heart of America,” offered a “vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention taking place in America, town by town and generally out of view of the national media. A realistically positive and provocative view of the country between its coasts.” Perhaps if we can return to the concept that “all politics is local,” where people have a shared interest in strengthening their sense of community, the national hyper-partisan divide will subside. Do you agree?
“The America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.”