In the closing of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he told a tense nation on the brink of war, “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”
Hearkening back to those words, a panel of scholars gathered Thursday in Washington, D.C., at an event sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University to consider whether those bonds of affection still hold and if unity is possible in today’s fraught political climate, with an election looming that stands to divide us even more.
Among their conclusions: Yes, an improved political climate is achievable and doesn’t even require that the whole nation sign on to the project. But it will take substantive changes in the language we use to talk about each other and the way we think about unity and moderation.
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