https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/anti-trumpers-on-the-left-and-right-cant-afford-to-shun-one-another-now.htmlBut the group that has given me the most hope goes by the overly alliterative name of Patriots and Pragmatists.* Founded by Rachel Pritzker, the president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund, and Mike Berkowitz, principal of Third Plateau, the group originally recruited a motley crew of liberal and conservative intellectuals, activists, and philanthropists to spend three days discussing the populist threat to democracy, what those of us who remain committed to the values of our political system can do to rally to its defense, and how we might be able to calm the partisan passions that are rending the republic asunder.
I have to admit that I was, at first, a little skeptical of the effort. Since some of the participants were reluctant to be publicly identified with a group that included members on the other side of America’s deep ideological divide, the first meetings were private. (In fact, this article is the first to describe the group publicly.) And since I, too, am naturally given to certain partisan passions, I was excited to spend time with scholars such as Larry Diamond or former staffers in the Obama White House such as Ian Bassin but deeply skeptical about whether I could possibly see eye to eye with Republican operatives and movement conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Evan McMullin.
But that is exactly why the experience of spending real time talking to people with whom I continue to have deep disagreements about matters of great political importance—people who I may have written off as insincere hacks or uncultured idiots back when they criticized Barack Obama or cheered on George W. Bush—has been so meaningful. For the longer I spoke with them, the more I had to face incontrovertible evidence that some of the people whom I saw as my political enemies a few short years ago turn out to be both thoughtful and morally serious.
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