Has civility and empathy been eroded from American politicstoday? With so many people taking divided and fractured stands when it comes tothe state of the government. Well, if you take a deeper dive into the numbers,they will tell a compelling and interesting story. According to Gallup News, Arecord-high 80% of U.S. adults believe Americans are greatly divided on themost important values, while 18% believe the country is united. The percentageseeing the nation as divided has ticked up from 77% the last time Gallup askedthe question in 2016. It is more than 10 percentage points higher than in the prior2004 and 2012 measures.
Public skepticism about national unity isn’t new. Surveys byGallup and others dating back to the 1990s show that Americans typically haveseen the country as divided on key values. Only in 2001 and 2002, in theaftermath of 9/11, did Gallup find most Americans perceiving the opposite, withover two-thirds of U.S. adults believing the nation was united. For someinsightful answers regarding the current state of play in American politics today,I enlisted the expertise of Brent Giannotta.
Brent was a CIA counterterrorism analyst from 2010 to 2015,tracking ISIS foreign fighters, external operations, and extremist psychology.After resigning, he became an award-winning journalist and ghostwrote op-edsfor political figures published in the Washington Post and Foreign PolicyMagazine. He then transitioned to mental health, joining a psychiatric crisisresponse team and counseling callers to the 988-suicide crisis hotline. He leftthose jobs in 2024 when he was invited to join the 2024 Harris-Walz campaign inPittsburgh.
Born and raised in Los Angeles and educated in internationalrelations, Spanish, and Arabic at the University of Southern California, Brentwon a Rotary scholarship to study Middle East studies at the AmericanUniversity in Cairo, Egypt. He's worked in Congress, edited reports for HumanRights Watch, worked on AOC's first campaign, has published op-eds in the LATimes, and guest lectured at USC, UCLA, and Harvard Extension School. Brent nowlives in Las Vegas, where he authors the Substack newsletter, Sleeping Giant.
Subscribe: https://brentgiannotta.substack.com/
Follow: @BrentGiannotta
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