Widening the ‘We’: Meeting the Crisis of Common Sense

Conor here: Perhaps something can grow out of the rubble of empire.

By Colin Greer, the president of the New World Foundation, and Eric Laursen, an independent journalist, historian, and activist. He is the author of The People’s Pension, The Duty to Stand Aside, The Operating System, and Polymath. This article was produced by Human Bridges. Cross posted from The Observatory. 

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 groups within society. Multiple factors precipitated this shift, some of them—changing economic conditions, demographic changes, and war—difficult for the inclusionary movement or its allies in government to address easily. Almost always, however, an active agent was the Third Force.

Even in the decades when an inclusionary sense of belonging based on goodwill was most widely felt, the Third Force continued to regard it as a threat to privilege and was alert for ways to undermine it. When the Third Force saw an opportunity, it struck on each of the four levels we laid out earlier:

• Performative: Substituting a narrow, exclusionary definition of belonging for a more inclusive one.
• Structural: Attacking the promise or vision by sowing doubt about whether inclusivity made sense.
• Topical: Starving the vision by pleading poverty and imposing budgetary austerity on the programs and benefits that had activated it.
• Methodological: Framing any deficiencies of those programs or missteps in their management as sufficient reason to abandon them rather than reassess and reform them.

Together, these four lines of attack instilled a new common sense of the Third Force:

• That poverty cannot be eliminated. Rather, it is always with us because, as former New York Times columnist David Brooks (among others) has long argued, it is a question of character, not of economic and social policy.
• That the common sense that improving life for the poorest and most disadvantaged will improve life for all of us is wrong. Rather, we are encouraged to think about any area of public policy as consumers, asking what is in it, specifically, for us.

The result has been a steady narrowing of the we, weakening the faith of a large swath of the public in the institutional infrastructure that underpins the sense of belonging based on goodwill: democratic processes and the expertise that bolsters inclusive social policy, including in health care, education, and economic well-being. This in turn has weakened or eliminated the features of society and government that for decades challenged—often effectively—the Third Force’s grip on power and privilege.

Undermining the Four Critical Areas of Social Reform

The narrative history of the 50-year period when the sense of belonging based on goodwill exerted its most powerful influence in the U.S.—beginning in the Progressive Era and flourishing in the New Deal and Great Society decades—demonstrates what can be achieved when inclusionary social movements determine common sense and shape our aspirational consensus.

Social welfare common sense achieved some of its greatest successes in four critical sets of policy initiatives: health care and public health, child welfare, old-age provision, and immigration reform. As products of the Rooseveltian New Deal, these initiatives and related policy areas developed as natural experiments—often, improvisations—that were expected to respond continually to the evolving needs of their constituencies. As such, they were always incomplete and constantly evolving.

The New Deal veterans who staffed the government for decades understood this. For example, the Social Security Administration included a policy office that worked with sympathetic lawmakers to plan the program’s future development. This office charted the vast expansion of the program in the ’60s and ’70s, including the creation of Medicare and Medicaid.

Belonging requires participation, and participation requires progress toward a wider we that is meaningful and inclusive. In each area of policy, leaders tried to create organizational structures that facilitated input from their constituencies, which could then inform the further development of the policy. When policymaking didn’t incorporate the expressed needs and aspirations of these constituencies, and progress stalled, leaders with roots in the New Deal worried that the public would lose its sense of ownership of—and faith in—the programs themselves.

As this pattern took hold, however, leadership—in government and in the movement—froze into a narrowly functional understanding of their commitment and forgot how to incorporate public participation into the programs they were custodians of. Hoping to hold onto the loyalty of key constituencies, leadership adopted a more fragmentary approach to policy prioritization that favored certain groups over others rather than taking a universalist approach that emphasized the benefits to all of policies that uplifted underserved groups.

The way was open for an argument to assert itself, on the methodological level, that problems and missteps within those programs were not part of an evolutionary process—in which policymakers learned from their mistakes through public input and participation—but fatal flaws and reasons why the programs should be either drastically cut back or eliminated. This argument was catalyzed by the 1971 Powell Memorandum, which framed the social programs of the New Deal era and beyond as an attack on American free enterprise and urged businesses to mount an ideological counteroffensive.

In this, we see the hand of the Third Force, exploiting the impulse toward malignant belonging on which exclusionary social movements are built and encouraging them to reject the common sense that had been the basis for social and economic progress through those programs. In its place, the Third Force promoted the idea that the market and the private sector set the standard for good and efficient administration, and if left to their devices, could solve the very problems that government had set out to address.

This is not the first time the privileged and propertied have risen in revolt; an understanding of the pattern is even contained in the Book of Psalms: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed,” (Psalm 2:2), i.e., against the good we can offer each other. Today, the Third Force is moving aggressively to complete a decades-long rollback of social welfare common sense across the four key policy areas.

Health care/public health

Beginning with new laws and regulations on sanitation in the early 20th century, American cities and then states and the federal government vastly improved public health, leading to increased life expectancy and a better quality of health for millions of people. For example, when vaccines became mandatory in succeeding decades, and especially following World War II, many diseases that formerly had been crippling or life-ending, such as polio, malaria, and chickenpox, were almost entirely defeated.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, a movement arising within the Third Force advocated for an end to programs like Medicare and Medicaid on the grounds that the private sector could build and operate health services more efficiently than the government. Since then, privatization has been encouraged and health insurance fees have gone up, resulting in profits for investors and a widening gap in the quality of services for the rich and poor.

Child welfare

The same era that saw the beginning of improvements in conditions for industrial workers witnessed a drive to improve children’s health and universalize public education. Together, these changes aimed to improve the prospects for children, ensuring that they all would have healthy and productive adult lives.

Concerns over the prevalence of child labor in factories in the U.S. led to a series of state-level laws banning the practice and finally the national outlawing of child labor in factories, mines, and other occupations under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. At roughly the same time, children were included under Social Security’s survivor benefits, and other programs were adopted to boost childhood nutrition and health. Expanded availability of higher education following World War II enabled millions of working-class children to prepare themselves to enter white-collar jobs and professions.

As momentum declined for the Civil Rights and social justice movements in the ’70s and subsequent decades, however, neoconservative arguments grew louder that public education, child labor laws, and public health, including vaccine mandates, were undermining parents’ rights and authority. As pressure built to allow families to operate within silos rather than as part of a social network, the ability of the government to level up standards of living and development for children decreased.

Today, some states are relaxing laws against child labor, rationalized as respecting parents’ rights to raise their children as they prefer and serving the Third Force’s appetite for cheap labor. Meanwhile, the homeschooling movement, combined with voucher campaigns and pressure on public school systems from conservative parents, has degraded the standard of education many children receive, leaving them unprepared for a competitive labor market that emphasizes high levels of skills and adaptability.

Old-age provision

Beginning with the Social Security Act of 1935, the U.S. put in place a modern latticework of social insurance and social welfare programs that gradually lifted millions of elderly people and their family members out of poverty and established—albeit piecemeal—the rudiments of a health care safety net for the aged, low-income, and disabled people of working age.

The Third Force’s opposition to these programs and provisions never entirely ended, however, and beginning in the ’70s, it revived, with both ideological arguments that they discouraged work and personal savings and claims that they were unaffordable. An additional argument gained traction in the ’80s and ’90s that Social Security’s Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs and Medicare did not provide good value for the money and that households would be better off if they could invest their Social Security contributions in the stock market and purchase private health and disability insurance.

Strong public loyalty to these programs has kept OASDI from being privatized and has only partially succeeded in moving Medicare recipients to private plans. But the ideological arguments over their cost have prevented progressive advocates and lawmakers from updating them to better serve today’s working population.

Immigration reform

After close to a century of increasingly restrictive and racist rules on foreign entry into the U.S., the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the discriminatory National Origins Formula and liberalized immigration of non-Western Europeans. While critics argued that the more open policy would pull down wages for native-born Americans, in reality it held back the growth of a permanent low-wage underclass in the U.S. by preventing immigrant labor from being driven underground.

The Third Force was equivocal about immigration reform initially; on one hand, it expanded the labor supply, and on the other, it threatened to cut off a supply of labor that was less able to organize and demand benefits, protections, and proper working conditions. That concern turned out to be unfounded; efforts to restrict undocumented immigration through border control and internal policing proved ineffective, and the undocumented population increased as conditions in many of their home countries deteriorated.

Accordingly, when an exclusionary social movement renewed the attack on non-European immigration under the guise of demanding secure borders, protecting jobs for native-born Americans (many of them descendants of immigrants who suffered under the previous National Origins system), and fighting crime (even though the crime rate was lower among residents born abroad), the Third Force offered little objection.

The Consequences of Overreaching

Polarization and the dominance of an exclusionary common sense and aspirational consensus have arguably made the task of rebuilding an inclusionary social movement that can reverse the dynamic—once again widening the we—more difficult than at any time since the Great Depression. But that does not mean it’s impossible for new inclusionary movements to learn from the mistakes of the past and formulate a new set of aspirations that can appeal to mainstream opinion.

No aspirational consensus is ever perfectly fulfilled, in part because it seldom lasts more than briefly. In the case of the consensus that formed during the New Deal–Great Society decades, the duration of the Great Depression, followed by World War II and the Cold War, created an unusually long period of opportunity during which progressive policies—and a new set of commonsense expectations built around them—could form. When the governmental leadership that grew out of the social movements that created the momentum behind the New Deal, became professionalized and bureaucratized, however, it lost the support of those movements, which also began to lose cohesion.

Disappointment turned to blame as some elements of the inclusionary movement found a home in new movements built on malignant bonding and a formerly progressive leadership looked for ways to regain their allegiance and hold onto power by adopting elements of the Third Force’s agenda. This served only to alienate the inclusionary movement’s core supporters, who either drifted away from the political leadership and organized outside electoral politics or withdrew from political life altogether. The result, today, is a crisis of common sense, as the old aspirational common sense and goodwill that underpinned it dissolve.

A new period of opportunity can open, however, if and when the exclusionary movement and the Third Force overreach, mistaking disenchantment with the conduct of the inclusionary movement’s political leadership for disillusionment with the aspirational consensus its success was built upon. The opportunity arises when the new consensus is revealed to so narrowly favor the Third Force that the exclusionary movement’s support erodes, encouraging its rivals to once again forge a consensus based on goodwill bonding.

Inclusionary social movements have a vital resource to draw on in meeting this challenge. Society’s reserve capacity is its store of trust and assurance, or goodwill. This both generates and reinforces the holding environment: the network of delivery systems, volunteer initiatives, and affinity groups that reflect the impulse to engage in mutual aid. These are the backdrop to all social life, emerging most vividly during natural disasters, economic crises, and community and family tragedies, when institutions fail and people have only each other to fall back on. The holding environment is naturally more in sync with a political agenda generated by an inclusionary rather than an exclusionary social movement.

Together, society’s reserve capacity and the holding environment represent an ongoing opportunity, even in the worst periods of polarization, to reactivate an inclusive political agenda. The foundational connections they foster enable us to imagine a new or renewed inclusionary social movement, which in turn can form the bedrock of an inclusionary government.

The proof of this is the fact that it’s been done before. A century ago, the U.S. had a system of great social and economic inequality that was largely taken for granted—until it was rejected. New inclusionary social movements challenged the status quo during the New Deal and Great Society eras; the mass protests that dogged the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement—and, possibly, today in the grassroots organizing against ICE raids. Sustaining such movements and building the momentum to transform government and widen the we is difficult work and not always successful, but the seeds are always there.

Overcoming the Crisis of Common Sense

Building an inclusionary common sense will take an understanding of the relationship between our social history, our experience of inclusionary social policies, and the opposing psychosocial dynamic that promotes a readiness to scuttle the gains those policies produced through a belonging based on fear and threat.

Making that common sense durable, however, will depend on how an inclusionary social movement performs once it achieves political power. If it maintains universality in its planning and delivery of public policy, addressing each of the four crisis areas in a way that meets the concerns of as large a number and variety of the people as possible, it can forge a lasting social vision, produce tangible benefits across society, and continue to inspire further inclusionary movements.

But if it instead resorts to a fragmentary approach that prioritizes some interest groups over others, it will once again leave the way open for an exclusionary common sense to assert its dangerous mythologies, causing us to drift back into malignant bonding.