Jackie Cushman - Our Broken America: Why Both Sides Need to Stop Ranting and Start Listening

This is a book with a powerful message of hope for American renewal and an amazing number of specific examples and insights. It is a serious contribution to the conversation we must have if we are to bring our country back together again.

I am proud of the citizen that my daughter Jackie Cushman has become, and I am most proud of the time and energy she and her husband, Jimmy Cushman, have put into their two children: Maggie, now a sophomore at Davidson College; and Robert, now the senior class president at his high school. It has been fascinating to watch Jackie study and learn as her children went through the various stages of childhood and adolescence and are now emerging as solid, thoughtful, and admirable young adults.

It was by talking with Jackie over the years about the different ways Maggie and Robert deal with life that I began to realize just how constantly she learns and how many different places she goes to for information. She was constantly bringing up the newest thinking about childhood or education, or grappling with the challenges of life.

About fifteen years ago, Jackie began writing columns. Her thoughtful approach to writing columns carried her from personal topics (such as remembering her mother) to insights into the raising of children, to education, to religious liberty, to the lessons of history and current events. During that period, she also wrote two books. The one we wrote together, 5 Principles for a Successful Life: From Our Family to Yours, is as relevant today as when we collaborated on it more than a decade ago.

It was while Jackie was thinking through the current tensions, hostility, and bitterness that are splitting the country that she began to develop an important notion. She determined that persuading Americans to take personal responsibility for emphasizing the positive was the key to getting America out of its current decline into vicious, unrelenting political partisanship.

Jackies insights into the importance of being positiveand her ability to cite psychological studies on the upward spiral of energy, confidence, and cooperation versus the downward spiral of hostility, alienation, and gridlockcreate a significant framework for getting America back on a positive track.

Both Democrats and Republicans would profit from reading Jackies analysis. The current infighting has real negative consequences for the future of America, and even small positive steps could build a reinforcing cycle of accomplishment.

In some ways, Jackie represents a revival of a deeply American positivism, which grew from Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Ronald Reagan. Historically, Americans have held a deep belief that the future will be better, that we can help make that future better, and that the key was, in Dr. Norman Vincent Peales bestselling phrase, the power of positive thinking. (It is no accident that the Trump family routinely attended services at Dr. Peales church and learned the importance of having faith in a better future while working to make it come true.) This combination of optimism about the future and a willingness to workboth as individuals and in voluntarily formed collaborationswas a key part of Alexis de Tocquevilles analysis in his 1835 classic, Democracy in America.

Jackie has had the great advantage of living what she is recommending. She and Jimmy have a deep commitment to the Atlanta community. Jimmy has served on the boards of the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the Atlanta History Center, and the Arts Alliance. They have supported Our House (which provides shelter for homeless children and their families so they can live, learn, and thrive). Jackie and Jimmy have also supported activities at Pace Academy, the school their children attended. Every time I chat with them, Jackie and Jimmy have a civic engagement underway. They are also deeply engaged in their church, where Jimmy serves on the vestry.

Jackie also serves on the CFA Society Atlanta Foundation (which focuses on financial literacy), the Trust for Public Land Advisory Council, and the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students (GEEARS), which focuses on learning for children from birth to the age of five. Jackie is also an avid tennis player (Atlanta has the largest tennis association in the United States).

I mention all those activities so you will understand that when she advocates local involvement and local citizenship, she is living what she is preaching.

Jackies belief that local volunteerism is better than national bureaucracy is a restatement of the classic American position. She understands Friedrich Hayeks principleexpressed in his classic work The Road to Serfdomthat a centrally planned and implemented system inevitably involves the massive loss of freedom. She has absorbed George Orwells warning that a totalitarian system must inevitably eliminate individuality and coercively force obedience to the whims of the central system.

This warning that socialism and left-wing totalitarianism are both roads to loss of freedom is timely. We have a younger generation that has not learned the lessons of history. We have a news media that does not want to describe the lessons of Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and other economic failures pulled down by failed socialist ideas. Jackie is combining the lessons of American history, the warnings of great economists and writers, and just plain common sense.

What makes me especially interested in this book is Jackies clarity that the long-range future is not conservative centralism versus left-wing centralism. Any centralism is inherently dangerous. In this approach, Jackie is exactly in the tradition of the Founding Fathers. She cites example after example of the great leaders who believed in freedom and understood that defending liberty required courage and a deep sense of personal responsibility.

Finally, this book is so inherently American. As the author of The Essential American: 25 Documents and Speeches Every American Should Own, Jackie is especially well prepared to emphasize the core values and history that have made America an exceptional nation.

She understands that the Founding Fathers created a system of exceptional freedom designed to protect liberty from the human propensity to slide into dictatorship of one form or another. She correctly emphasizes that the belief that our rights come from God and not from the state is what makes America exceptional. For virtually all of human history, rights have come from those with powerwhether a chieftain, a dictator, a king, or whatever form upon which power was centered.