The transformation of hearts and minds will require a profound cultural transformation, and promoting important stories that can define and inform a national self-consciousness and identity and narrate a new direction is one key element of this project of cultural transformation.

Our nation collectively, but especially white America, needs to confront and work through psychotherapeutically the deep cultural and collective mental illness of white male supremacy to understand why it’s damaging to the interests and well-being of white Americans and all Americans. We need stories that help us work this poison out of our cultural bloodstream.

One story that comes to mind is the 1998 movie American History X, directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. 

I am not suggesting we not act with conscience per se, but I am suggesting that the call on conscience tends to root us in an individualist stance that removes us from our relationship with the many others in our world and prevents us from seriously imagining the impact of our voting behavior on their lives.  We might just need a different term, maybe something like “social justice” or the “public good” which takes us out of our individual sense of rightness to think in broader terms.  Indeed, the very problem with neo-liberalism is its evacuation of the concept of a public good, its denial of its very validity, as it insists we are motivated only by private interests.

Puerto Ricans discovered in Trump and Vance the Hangman coming for them, but we all need to see that the hate informing the Trump-Vance campaign is not reserved for any one group. You don’t even have to look that closely to see through this illusion that only certain groups–certain “others” and not “us”-- are the targets of their hate.

Indeed, most of us have little say in how our work is organized, what gets produced in our factories, how resources are used and distributed. In short, we are not involved in making most of the key decisions about how our world is run. We tend as a culture and people not to think about democracy in the arena of the workplace and of production more generally.

We need a comprehensive national education policy as well as federal legislation to guarantee and enforce this human right by, in part, mandating adequate budgeting and insisting education funding be a priority.
Thus far, all signs point to the fact that a Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C. will be necessary to achieve these goals. Republicans have long called for eliminating the Department of Education.