Widening the We : Meeting the Crisis of Common Sense

ieyenews.com · Feb 20, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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By Colin Greer and Eric Laursen Author Bios: Colin Greer is the president of the New World Foundation. He was formerly a CUNY professor, a founding editor of Social Policy magazine, a contributing editor at Parade magazine for almost 20 years, and the author and coauthor of several books on public policy. He is the author of three books of poetry, including Defeat/No Surrender (2023). Eric Laursen is an independent journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of, among other books, The People’s Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including In These Times, the Nation, and the Arkansas Review. Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges. What do we mean, in a social and political sense, by “we”? Generally, we’re referring to our shared identity as a community: the collective understanding that enables us to discuss, deliberate, and arrive at decisions on matters that affect all of us. But “we” does not automatically include everyone. It refers to those of us who feel confident that we have a voice, however limited, in how society is run, and that we can expect our interests, needs, and desires to be recognized and addressed by the people who govern us. How widespread this feeling of being part of the “we” or of being left out is, becomes one of the most important determinants of cohesion in any society or polity. This feeling of belonging—or not—is deeply affected by two other, often more widespread factors: Common sense is the general understanding of how the social, political, and economic order works and the directions it needs to avoid: who it benefits and who it leaves out and how its processes and institutions do or do not work. Whether one approves or disapproves of the existing order, common sense represents our practical knowledge of how it operates and what’s essential for the social order to be deemed to be working. Aspirational consensus is the understanding of what we can expect and hope for from one another and from the government acting responsibly and effectively. Whether or not it is universally accepted as valid, our culture aims to instill a shared understanding of our aspirations as a society. Common sense and aspirational consensus are achieved in one or more of three ways: Rhetoric and value positioning: The language that the dominant social movement uses to instill a sense of what values ought to define society, Participation and representation: The assumptions this rhetoric inculcates that outline who rightfully belongs to society and has a voice in how it is governed, and Coercion: The assumptions flowing from this sense of belonging as to what measures society can rightfully take to exercise its power, and upon whom. Neither common sense nor aspirational consensus is shaped by the extremes of public opinion. But the contest between those extremes can affect the assumptions that determine mainstream opinion—the generally held view of how social order and its professed ideals ought to serve us—and therefore determine mainstream values. Together, common sense and aspirational consensus determine how wide the we is: whether it tends to be inclusionary or exclusionary. This changes over time, in response to pressures from competing social movements and the Third Force: propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it, and those who defend and promote their interests. The institutions that form the basis of the present-day American political and social order—its aspirational consensus—were mainstreamed during the Progressive and New Deal eras. While these institutions were always under attack to some degree, it wasn’t until the Reagan presidency that a powerful assault on inclusionary social policy emerged. What followed has been a growing polarization that makes it nearly impossible at times for political parties, religious sects, cultural identities, and other groups to cooperate even on basic, essential matters. In the past decade, polarization has reached a new level of policy paralysis. This is occurring at a time when the need to communicate and deliberate productively is especially urgent. Climate change has become an existential danger. Economic globalization and resulting mass migrations have created enormous new social pressures. Vast, entrenched disparities of wealth and the interests connected with the rich have shrunk the window for new or updated social policy commitments to prevail. All these pressures make it imperative that we better comprehend the dynamics that produce a widening or narrowing of the we. Tearing Down the Common Sense of Inclusionary Change Polarization is the term we use to describe a situation in which politics becomes engulfed in competition between inclusionary and exclusionary social movements. It manifests itself in anger over issues like health and insurance, hunger and lack of material support, and socioeconomic injustice on one side, and fear and resentment of social change, status anxiety, and loss of faith in government on the other. Since the 2000s, polarization has repeatedly fueled crises and paralysis in American politics: the ICE and Border Patrol raids in our cities, a record government shutdown in 2025, the contested 2020 presidential election, the divisive public response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the inability of successive administrations to end the U.S. engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq satisfactorily. In each case, the origin of polarization lay in the conflict between social movements and the impact of that conflict on mainstream opinion. That conflict expresses itself on four levels: Performative: The elements of morality we all share or profess to share. Structural: The universal promise or vision that a social movement creates. Topical: The movement’s promise of delivery on that vision, issue by issue, generally through government. Methodological: How that vision applies in practice. The performative leverages our sense of belonging to motivate change; the performative morality and ideological priorities that accompany either inclusiveness or exclusiveness establish the groundwork for our sense of the we, and in turn for the social movements we create and the social, economic, and political changes we implement. Each social movement can spawn others that perpetuate that pattern of change, providing an umbrella under which they can develop. In the post-New Deal decades, our sense of belonging sustained an inclusionary, social welfare common sense that supported applying resources across society to benefit the maximum number of people. At the structural level, the aspiration was to reduce the impact of poverty, counteracting the assumption that poverty is inevitable and affirming that this goal served the common good, not just that of the poor. On the topical level, the product of social welfare common sense was a push to fight poverty wherever it manifested itself: to bring Americans out of poverty as widely as possible. But when social welfare common sense was successfully undermined, the inclusionary movement’s cumulative achievement became vulnerable. The opportunity arose for exclusionary forces to make a plausible argument against the movement and its goals and to build their own social movement around an exclusionary sense of the “we.” This began with the argument that a less “deserving” segment of society was benefiting at the expense of other segments that (implicitly) worked harder and accomplished more. Related to this complaint was the assertion that the autonomy of the more deserving segments was under threat: that government was interfering with their members’ right to manage their lives, families, households, and communities as they saw fit. This was then amplified into a fear that the entire way of life of the more deserving segments was under threat and that the institutions of an inclusionary society and government no longer heard their voices. All practicalities of actual class gain were marginalized in the public understanding—guided by the threat and fear of the hypothetical proposition—that those not yet included would override and extinguish the gains of previous generations. This weakened confidence that common sense and aspirational consensus could widen and become more liberal. The consciousness of collective responsibility faded and faith in the ability to widen the we dissolved. The end result was malignant bonding: a new, exclusionary sense of belonging, often informed by racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Its adherents were locked in a fortress of isolation and denial, knowing themselves only through belonging built on a bygone—largely mythic—culture that they stretched back to claim. Malignant bonding formed the basis of a new social movement adhering to a narrow, exclusionary ideology that denied any collective, cooperative social vision. It asserted that economic deprivation was a moral flaw and ought to be treated not as a collective responsibility but as a private matter. This shift caught the previous inclusionary movement off-balance. Its representatives in government became defensive, concentrating on salvaging what they could of its former achievements—or cutting them back to accommodate the new political climate. This resulted in an atrophying of the inclusionary movement, a rolling back of the benefits it had achieved—even some that still inspired great popular loyalty—and a disintegration of the movement itself. It was replaced by a siloed common sense and aspirational consensus that encouraged households to think of themselves as discrete economic units rather than part of a larger social fabric. Beginning with the Reagan presidency, if not before, even purportedly progressive administrations conceded that they could no longer put across an inclusionary argument for any given policy initiative but had to sell it according to the specific benefits it offered to specific