Weary from living in an ideological war zone that’s often compared to a radioactive marriage, a surge in Americans say it’s long past time for a national divorce.
“Common Ground” weighs in on a variation of a classic Dear Abby Question: Will life be better – or worse – if the red states and blue states split and the great American experiment ends? Or, is it possible to usher in a new era of collective good by addressing flaws in the U.S Constitution that are inciting our seemingly irreconcilable differences?
walter S. isaacson
Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. What do these revolutionaries, visionaries, and geniuses have in common?
Walter S. Isaacson, their biographer and one of the defining intellectual voices of our times.
The legendary writer came to national attention as a journalist for The Sunday Times in London before joining Time magazine, where he was the magazine’s political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media. He ultimately was appointed its 14th editor before joining CNN, where he served as chairman and chief executive, steering the news organization through historic events such as the September 11 attacks. Later, he led the Aspen Institute as its president.
But Isaacson became a household name and a nationally known intellectual as a biographer, equally adept at chronicling the 18th century lives of the Founding Fathers as reporting on the men who revolutionized America at home and abroad in the 20th and 21st centuries. His books are considered classics, celebrated in university classrooms and as perennial fixtures on the New York Times bestseller list.
Born and raised in New Orleans during the 1950s and 60s, Isaacson’s father was an electrical and mechanical engineer and his mother was a real estate broker. “My father and uncles were electrical engineers,” he wrote in his 2014 book The Innovators. “I grew up with a basement workshop that had circuit boards to be soldered, radios to be opened, tubes to be tested, and boxes of transistors and resistors to be sorted and deployed.”
This meticulous curiosity defines Isaacson’s biographical approach. Most recently, while writing his 2023 biography of Elon Musk, he became a fixture for two years in the life of the billionaire entrepreneur. He spent weeks with the newly appointed political juggernaut, interviewing 128 people in his orbit, attending his meetings and reading his emails and texts.
Isaacson attended Harvard University, where he studied history and literature, before earning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he delved into philosophy, politics, and economics. At 24, he returned to New Orleans to work for the States-Item, where his reporting skills quickly garnered attention. In one life-changing week, he received job offers from both Time magazine and the CIA—he chose the newsroom over Langley.
The result, to paraphrase the cliché, is in the history section.
Erwin chemerinsky
The perverse political paradox of this inflection point in the country’s history is that the Constitution, which created American democracy, is now endangering it.
So posits one of the country’s leading constitutional scholars, Erwin Chemerinsky, the distinguished dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law. After spending a lifetime studying and defending the constitution as the lifeblood of the American political system, he now argues it embeds systemic inequalities that undermine majority rule and makes democracy untenable.
“The U.S. Constitution, which created a government that succeeded so well for so long, now itself threatens American democracy,” he declares in his latest book, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. Unless the country reforms the Constitution’s structural flaws, Chemerinsky warns, we may soon confront “serious efforts at secession.”
Born in Chicago on May 14, 1953, into a working-class Jewish family on the city’s South Side, Chemerinsky graduated from Northwestern University before earning his law degree at Harvard in 1978. After stints in private practice and at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Division, he joined academia and has emerged as a prominent defender of free speech, a renowned constitutional expert and a relentless critic of the country’s legal institutions.
In his 2014 book, The Case Against the Supreme Court, Chemerinsky meticulously chronicled the Court’s historic failures, dismantling its reputation as an unassailable guardian of justice. He highlighted instances where the Court condoned the undermining of worker protections, allowed forced sterilizations, and upheld segregation and internment camps. “The Court has frequently failed, throughout American history, at its most important tasks, at its most important moments,” he observed.
While Chemerinsky at that time had little to say about the Constitution’s contribution to our political crisis and even praised the difficulty of amending it, he now criticizes its basic architecture for generating pressing political problems and for making it all but impossible to solve them. He says the Constitution’s durability has become a “sledgehammer wielded by a minority” to maintain a dysfunctional status quo. Rather than merely tinkering with amendments, he argues we need a complete overhaul—a new constitutional framework that could genuinely reflect the needs, values, and aspirations of today’s diverse and evolving American polity.
Melody C. Barnes
Melody C. Barnes, a senior leader of a democracy organization and a seasoned Washington strategist, was a key member of President Barack Obama’s inner circle and helped shape many of his administration’s landmark domestic triumphs.
A progressive policy nerd, Barnes served as a senior advisor in Senator Barack Obama’s 2008 longshot presidential campaign and, as Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council for his first term, played a key role in passing health care reform and groundbreaking initiatives to spur the economic recovery and advance social justice.
Barnes began her career as an attorney with Shearman & Sterling in New York City but quickly transitioned into public service, becoming chief counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Following her tenure with Senator Kennedy, Barnes she was appointed Executive Vice President for Policy at the Center for American Progress, a leading progressive think tank.
After leaving the White House, Barnes founded a domestic policy strategy firm, MB2 Solutions, which advises major financial institutions and other clients and leverages her extensive experience to drive change. In 2016 she joined the University of Virginia as a professor of practice and a distinguished fellow at the university’s school of law and three years ago was the founding executive director of UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, which works to fortify our democracy’s foundations.
A native of Richmond, VA, she was the chair of the board of trustees for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit organization that oversees Monticello. In her leadership of a pro-democracy organization, Barnes brings a historian’s sensibilities to her political organizing. “A clear-eyed, evidence-based telling of American history—all of it—is absolutely essential,” she says. “It is critical to understanding how our past informs our present and ensuring that the choices we make about the future of democracy are based on facts, not fiction or fantasy.”
Paola ramos
Once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, Latino voters four years ago supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in astounding numbers even though he made anti-immigrant fervor a battlecry by disparaging migrants as “animals” and Mexicans as “rapists.”
This year, when he once again demonized immigrants, he did even better.
No one has worked harder to explain this astonishing enigma than Paola Ramos, an award-winning journalist and the author of Defectors: The Rise Of The Latino Far Right And What It Means For America.
An NPR book of the year, it examines how Latino voters who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society, have been radicalized. The avatar of the left, the MSNBC host Rachael Maddow, called it “a deeply reported, surprisingly personal exploration of a phenomenon that is little understood in our politics: the affiliation of Latino voters with causes and candidates that would seem, at first glance, unwelcoming to them.”
Ramos identifies three key forces radicalizing Latinos: tribalism, a form of internalized racism exacerbated by a desperate desire to belong, the community’s traditional conservative Christian beliefs and rigid gender norms and, thirdly, what amounts to political PTSD – the trauma created by Spanish colonialism and American imperialism aggravated by a continuing history of violent upheaval and autocratic regimes in their homelands.
A former correspondent for Vice News and an MSNBC contributor, Ramos embodies this political paradox. The daughter of a Cuban mother and a Mexican father who was born in Miami and raised in Madrid, Ramos describes herself as a light-skinned lesbian Latina. Reflecting on her upbringing, she says she “worshiped the whiteness of my Spanish roots” and “erased my community’s Indigenous past.” It was only when she attended Barnard College and was required to take an English as a Second Language class that she became aware of her racial and ethnic identity. “It’s where I developed a sense of Latino solidarity and allegiance,” she recalls.
Before focusing on journalism, Ramos was the Deputy Director of Hispanic Media for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, served in the Obama Administration and was a senior member of President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She is also a former Hauser Leader in the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, where she received her Master’s in Public Policy.
ROBERT DOAR
Robert Doar is a spearhead of conservative advocacy groups and a veteran administrator of state and city social service agencies.
An eminent scholar of federal and state antipoverty policies and safety net programs, he is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of the conservative movement’s oldest and most influential public policy think tanks.
Doar’s career has been marked by frontline positions in the battle against poverty, including key jobs in the New York state and city administrations. He served as New York State’s social services commissioner for Governor George E. Pataki and headed initiatives in disability services, child support enforcement, and anti-poverty programs. He also headed New York City’s Human Resources Administration under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, managing the city’s welfare agency and supervising thousands of employees who provided critical services to more than three million residents.
Doar joined AEI ten years ago to lead the think tanks’ effort to create a program to study anti-poverty programs. During his tenure, he has co-chaired the National Commission on Hunger and played a pivotal role in the non-partisan AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity. He has edited and contributed to several notable publications, including A Safety Net That Works: Improving Federal Programs for Low-Income Americans (2017) and Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream (2015).
He was appointed AEI’s 12th president five years ago.
Born in Washington, D.C., Doar is a graduate of Princeton University. His father, John Doar, was a prominent civil rights attorney who, as assistant attorney general, prosecuted landmark civil rights cases in the 1960s and played a leading role in federal desegregation efforts. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded John Doar the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to justice and equality.