Now that we’ve voted for politicians, it’s time for us to get back to work building our democracy from the ground up. So advised “civic entrepreneur” Eric Liu. “Our job, 365 days of the year, whether or not it’s Election Day, is to show up and humanize each other and learn how to live together,” Liu, who is 58 and lives in Seattle, said during an Election Day conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” “The most essential question in a diverse democracy is: How shall we live together? How shall we solve problems together? How shall we deal with competing visions” for society? “How shall we deal with just our different worldviews without killing each other? … The actual premise here of American life that it’s possible to take so many people from so many vantage points and throw us together, and somehow we can actually make a union of unlike parts.” Liu has spent decades addressing those questions by gathering people of all backgrounds to do that grassroots civic building through an international nonprofit called Citizen University. He has a new book out — Live Like A Citizen: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country (Simon Shuster) — calling on citizens to get involved in their communities and gather in person with people of different backgrounds and viewpoints. The campaigns for Tuesday’s national elections reflected a continuing deterioration in our ability to disagree and work together as a nation, Liu observed. He argued that extreme polarization has fed a democracy/civic/citizenship crisis in which “every election feels like a grim duty to stave off an existential threat.” Step one to reverse those polarized habits: Get off our phones. Face our neighbors. “Everything on online life rewards righteous certitude and purity thinking, and just banishes anybody who has any complexity or any doubt or isn’t 100 percent on our side,” he said. Liu doesn’t downplay the seriousness of issues like free speech, immigration, the economy, trade, or war. He’s calling for us to engage in debate as a unifed nation who hear each other out with an open mind rather than as warring tribes. And not count on politicians to do it for us. “National leaders can poison our civic culture from the top down, but they cannot heal it. Only we can do that — from the bottom up. From the inside out,” Liu writes in his new book. “It can be satisfying to hate a bad man. It can be tactically useful to personify an abstract issue with a villain and to scream at that villain,” writes Liu, who served a stint as a domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House. “I get it. I’ve worked in politics. But outhating the other side isn’t a recipe for keeping a republic. It’s a way to feed fascism. No democracy can long survive saturation in a culture of hate.” His prescriptions center on joining — clubs, committees, social events. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who in the early 1830s saw those “habits of hearts and mind” at the root of our burgeoning democracy. Live Like A Citizen dedicates chapters to eight steps toward reclaiming our civic culture: learning to “see,” “listen,” “feel,” “join,” “fight,” “change,” “imagine” and “commit.” Click here to learn more about Civic University. Click on the below video to watch the full conversation with Citizen University CEO Eric Liu. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to download the WNHH FM app. The post Post-Election Rx: Link Up With Neighbors appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less