Category Archives: life

Touchstone Terms: Adverse Selection

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If there were a single concept from economics I’d like to see more widely understood, it would be adverse selection: the tendency for markets to sort participants into worse and worse pools when one side of a transaction knows more than the other.

The idea originates in a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, “The Market for Lemons.” Akerlof modeled used car sales in a way that revealed how, under very common conditions, no one with a good used car would be willing to sell it. Sellers know more about their cars than buyers do, and so those with “lemons” will always be more desperate to sell than those with reliable vehicles. Since buyers can’t tell the difference, they will only purchase a used car on the assumption that something is wrong with it, and pay accordingly. As Akerlof puts it, “good cars may not be traded at all. The ‘bad’ cars tend to drive out the good” (489).

This is the core pattern: asymmetric information (one side knows more than the other) leads to adverse selection (the worse risks or lower-quality goods dominate the market) which can produce market unraveling (the market ceases to function well for anyone). That three-step sequence recurs across domains far removed from used cars. In each case, the same basic dynamic creates sorting problems that individual good faith cannot solve.

It is worth noting at the outset that markets sometimes generate their own responses to adverse selection. The used car market did not actually collapse: it produced warranties, certified pre-owned programs, CarFax, and lemon laws. A free-market economist would say that Akerlof identified a problem and then markets solved it through entrepreneurial innovation. This is a fair point, and it should be conceded. But the private-solution story works best in domains where the stakes are modest and the information gap is narrow enough for reputation mechanisms to bridge. Nobody invented a CarFax for health risk that prevented the insurance death spiral. Nobody developed a private warranty against neighborhood racial transition. The domains where adverse selection is most destructive tend to be precisely the ones where private solutions are weakest: the information gaps are widest, the stakes are highest, and the affected populations have the least market power to demand better terms.

Poverty and Insurance Markets

Akerlof applies the same model to car, life, and medical insurance: the more accident-prone, close to death, or sickly you are, the more desperate you will be to have insurance. But the more these “high-risk” individuals buy insurance, the higher the payouts, which drives up the average price above what healthier, younger, better drivers would choose to pay. Adverse selection takes over, and only the high-risk individuals end up insured.

The textbook version of this story is clean, but reality is messier in an interesting way. In practice, the people most likely to buy insurance are not just the sick; they’re also the risk-averse. Healthy people who worry about everything overinsure. They buy supplemental plans, max out their coverage, and renew faithfully. This actually helps stabilize insurance pools, because the worried-well subsidize the genuinely ill. The people who go without insurance tend not to be the healthy-and-rational actors of the economic model; they’re the young and cavalier, the overwhelmed, or the too-poor-to-bother. Adverse selection is real, but it operates alongside a countervailing force: anxiety. The question for policy design is which force dominates.

The underlying problem remains asymmetric information. Insurance purchasers know more about their own risks than the insurance company does. This is why life insurers try to get as much medical and genetic information about their enrollees as possible, and why car insurance companies use accident history, residential zip code, and miles traveled to price coverage.

It is also why the Affordable Care Act was designed to require “community rating”: forcing insurers to ignore most individualized risk information and instead treat communities as a single risk pool. Several distinct mechanisms work together here. Community rating prevents price discrimination against the sick. Subsidies stabilize the pool by making coverage affordable. The individual mandate discourages people from waiting until they’re desperately ill to enroll (the same waiting game that “pre-existing conditions” exclusions were designed to prevent, and that the ACA banned in favor of the mandate and financial penalty).

This is all well-known to anyone who has paid attention to health care policy over the last decade. But naming and framing the problem this way reveals why some solutions are superior to others, why even well-intentioned proposals can recreate the very dynamics they’re designed to prevent, and why dismantling these protections is so dangerous.

We are watching this play out in real time. The 2017 Republican tax bill zeroed out the individual mandate penalty, removing the main tool that kept healthy people in the insurance pool. During his first term, Trump slashed ACA outreach and advertising by 90% and cut the enrollment period roughly in half. This is a textbook recipe for adverse selection: the sick always know where to sign up, while healthy people, the ones whose premiums subsidize the pool, are the most likely to miss a shortened window or never hear about their options. By one estimate, these changes alone kept 500,000 people from enrolling.

The second term has been worse. Congressional Republicans allowed the enhanced premium subsidies to expire at the end of 2025, and the so-called “big, beautiful bill” cut over a trillion dollars in federal health care spending. New CMS rules on enrollment verification significantly disrupted automatic reenrollment, which had kept nearly 11 million people covered, though the full regulatory picture remains in flux amid litigation and rule revisions. The results are already visible: insurers’ list-price premiums rose an average of 26% for 2026, with increases exceeding 30% in states like Delaware, New Mexico, and Mississippi. For subsidized enrollees, the picture is even worse: with the enhanced tax credits gone, what households actually pay has in many cases more than doubled. The CBO projects marketplace enrollment will drop from 22.8 million to 18.9 million, with 4.2 million Americans losing coverage entirely because it has become unaffordable. Aetna has already exited the individual market, and three insurers have pulled out of Illinois, where rates jumped nearly 29%.

Each of these moves accelerates the adverse selection spiral the ACA was designed to prevent. Fewer healthy enrollees means higher average costs, which means higher premiums, which drives out more healthy enrollees. The pool gets sicker and more expensive. Insurers exit markets where the math no longer works. The people left holding coverage are the ones who cannot afford to go without it, paying more for less, in a market with fewer options. This is what adverse selection looks like when policy actively feeds it rather than fighting it.

Consider Bernie Sanders’ original Medicare for All Act. It went a long way toward eliminating selection effects by creating a universal federal entitlement with comprehensive benefits. But even this ambitious proposal preserved a significant state-administered role for long-term care, routing it through existing Medicaid channels with maintenance-of-effort requirements tied to state spending floors. This raises a familiar adverse selection worry. Long-term care is among the most expensive forms of health provision, and the populations who need it most, the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, are precisely those whose costs any system has the strongest incentive to contain. By leaving the administration of those costs in fiscally pressured state channels rather than absorbing them fully into the federal pool, even a nominally universal plan can create a two-track system: comprehensive federal coverage for the majority, and more constrained, state-variable care for those with the greatest needs. The risk-averse healthy people, the ones whose overinsurance stabilizes any pool they join, stay in the well-resourced federal track. The people who need the most help end up in the track most vulnerable to cost-cutting. Partial universalism can be worse than honest market segmentation, because it borrows the moral authority of universalism while quietly reproducing the sorting it claims to abolish.

Race and Real Estate

Adverse selection is part of a broader family of sorting dynamics that appear wherever people make choices under uncertainty using imperfect information. Akerlof recognized this himself: his original paper treats racial discrimination in labor markets as a case of the same phenomenon, where employers use race as a proxy for unobservable worker quality, and the resulting discrimination makes it harder for members of the discriminated group to invest in quality, confirming the original prejudice. The mechanism is simple. The outcomes are vicious.

Racialized housing markets in the US offer a vivid example of how these dynamics interact with, and amplify, deep structural racism. No economic model captures the full weight of what redlining and blockbusting did to Black communities, and there is a risk that naming these dynamics as “selection effects” makes them sound more orderly and less violent than they were. But the analytical lens is worth using precisely because it shows how racist outcomes reproduce themselves even when individual malice is not the proximate cause.

Consider how redlining and blockbusting worked hand-in-hand to prevent market-driven racial integration. (No story about race in America ever truly “begins” where we say it does; the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy is ongoing and always in the background.)

Source: National Archives (Mapping Segregation in Washington DC)

It began when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board tried to determine whether some neighborhoods were too risky to finance. In the midst of the Great Depression, the most vulnerable neighborhoods were those primarily inhabited by African Americans: those who suffered most during the Depression were those who suffered most generally, so foreclosures were always worst in those neighborhoods. The maps drawn by the FHLBB were used by the Federal Housing Administration to dictate underwriting to private mortgage lenders. African Americans were barred from receiving federally underwritten loans. Private mortgage companies could still lend to them, but at much higher risk without federal insurance, and so they demanded a much higher premium.

A free-market critic would note, correctly, that the worst distortion here was government-created: the FHA drew the maps, and federal policy enforced the discrimination. This is true, and it matters. But the objection proves too much. Government created the information asymmetry; the market then amplified it through blockbusting, white flight, and self-reinforcing price spirals. Removing the FHA maps did not undo decades of wealth destruction. The damage compounds, and the compounding is a market process. The lesson is not that government intervention is always the answer, but that markets do not self-correct when the underlying information environment has been broken, even long after the original distortion is repealed.

Add to this the existence of “blockbusting” real estate agents, who used the threat of incoming African Americans to pressure white homeowners into selling. The fears were partly racial anxiety, but partly financial calculation: a “busted” block would lose considerable home value as wealthier whites fled and were replaced by African American buyers who had been shut out of better-financed markets. Even setting aside the racial animus, the financial incentives alone were sufficient to drive the sorting: any homeowner, regardless of personal attitudes, faced a real threat to her single largest asset. Real estate companies made a solid business of this practice, flipping houses from fleeing whites to middle-class African Americans for decades in places like Chicago.

While blockbusting sometimes looks like the just deserts of a racist society, where white people are so afraid of Black people that they willingly sell their homes at a loss, it exacerbated the underlying dynamics of segregation. The sorting was self-reinforcing: each departure confirmed the fears that motivated the next one, driving prices further down and concentrating poverty in the newly “turned” neighborhoods. The result was decades of wealth destruction in Black communities, even as the real estate agents who facilitated the churn profited handsomely.

Today we see related sorting dynamics working in the opposite direction: white homeowners return to the cities their parents fled, and expectations of neighborhood “improvement” drive transactions that accelerate displacement. The mechanism rhymes with blockbusting (speculation on racial neighborhood change) but the power dynamics are inverted. Capital flows in rather than out, and the displaced population, largely Black and largely renters, loses not just housing but neighborhoods, churches, schools, and the social networks that make a community function. They lack the market power that white homeowners had when they chose to flee. Some people may catch a windfall if they own property at the right moment of transition, but the overall pattern is the same: sorting by race and wealth, driven by information asymmetries and self-fulfilling expectations, producing outcomes that are worse for the most vulnerable.

There is a bitter irony here. Racial integration was the goal of decades of civil rights struggle. Now a version of it is arriving through market forces, and it is experienced, correctly, as displacement rather than progress. Integration through capital is still sorting. It replaces one racially stratified equilibrium with another, and the communities that fought hardest for integration bear the costs of its market-driven arrival. This is perhaps the clearest illustration of why adverse selection problems cannot be solved by markets alone: even when the market moves in the “right” direction, it moves on terms that reproduce the underlying injustice.

Test Scores and Schools

The connection between test scores and school segregation may be the clearest example of adverse selection logic outside insurance markets. Risk-averse parents cannot distinguish between two causes of low test scores: poverty and pedagogy. They tend to prefer schools whose students test well, treating scores as a proxy for teaching quality. Schools with lower test scores lose these risk-averse parents, who transfer their children elsewhere or simply move.

This has come to define real estate markets, with housing prices in desirable school districts dwarfing those in neighborhoods whose schools have historically underperformed on standardized tests. High-performing schools gradually accrue higher-income parents, while low-performing schools gradually accrue impoverished ones. Even childless homeowners prefer to live in high-performing districts, because of the relationship between school test scores and property values.

The sorting here is self-reinforcing in exactly the way Akerlof’s model predicts. The “good cars” leave the market, which makes the market look worse, which drives out more good cars. Parents who can afford to leave do; their departure further depresses scores; the next tranche of parents leaves. The schools that remain become, in effect, pools of adverse selection.

There are “community rating” equivalents: mixed catchment areas that require students of different races and incomes to attend the same schools. But the responses must be calibrated to account for consumer behavior. Parents can read catchment maps as well as any bureaucrat, and they will relocate for their children, to the suburbs or, in the most extreme cases, to private schools. After which they tend to oppose funding for the schools they have abandoned, creating a new cycle of sorting and disinvestment.

School choice advocates would argue that vouchers and charters are the solution: let motivated families escape failing schools. They are right that geographic assignment is an imperfect tool, and that trapping students in schools that do not serve them is its own injustice. But choice programs do not eliminate the sorting; they accelerate it with public funding. The families who exercise choice are disproportionately those with the information, resources, and engagement to navigate the system, leaving behind a more concentrated pool of the most disadvantaged students in schools with declining enrollment and declining revenue. This is adverse selection with a permission slip. The question is not whether parents should have options, but whether the mechanism for providing them creates a spiral that makes the remaining schools worse for the children who have the fewest options of all.

Employment and Credentials

The adverse selection dynamic also shapes the labor market. The General Education Development (GED) test was designed to help those who failed to complete a US high school diploma demonstrate mastery of equivalent material. High school diploma holders earn more than those without one, so if the value of high school is primarily learning, then exam-certified learning ought to perform just as well. Yet as Stephen Cameron and James Heckman have shown, it does not.

Part of the explanation is adverse selection. The GED has become correlated with incarceration, and criminal backgrounds are a cause for hiring discrimination and low wages. Once a credential is associated with a negatively selected population, its market value degrades, which further discourages anyone with better options from pursuing it. The pool gets worse; the credential’s value drops further; the cycle continues.

But most GED holders did not leave high school because of incarceration. They tend to be primary caregivers, to have lost a loved one, or to have been abused. These experiences also make sustained full-time employment difficult. The credential ends up carrying the weight of every reason someone might not finish high school, and employers treat it accordingly.

In 2014, Pearson VUE tried to fix this by making the GED significantly harder: computer-based, aligned to Common Core standards, with constructed-response questions replacing multiple choice. The logic was straightforward. If the credential’s value had degraded because the pool of holders was negatively selected, a harder test should produce a more valuable credential. The results were dramatic. Test-takers dropped by more than half nationally; completion rates fell 23 to 39 percentage points across every racial and ethnic group. By 2016, Pearson had to lower the passing score from 150 to 145, retroactively awarding credentials to people who had scored in between. The stated reason was revealing: students hitting 150 were actually outperforming high school graduates in college, suggesting the bar had overshot. Pass rates eventually recovered to around 80%, and Pearson’s own research claims 45% of passers enrolled in postsecondary programs within three years. But “fewer people take the test, and the ones who do are better prepared” is a description of adverse selection doing its work, with the credential’s gatekeepers actively assisting. The people deterred by a harder test are precisely the most marginal candidates, the population the GED exists to serve.

A related sorting dynamic appears in “ban the box” policies, which prohibit employers from asking about criminal history on initial applications. There is evidence that employers who cannot directly inquire into criminal backgrounds compensate by discriminating against all African American men. The structural logic is clear enough: employers substitute a racial proxy for the information they’ve been denied. But the structural logic does not exhaust the moral reality. This is racism, leveraging the machinery of adverse selection to do its work. The policy designed to help the formerly incarcerated ends up punishing an entire demographic, and the employers making these decisions are not innocent bystanders caught in a sorting trap. They are choosing the proxy. The sorting logic is relentless, yes, but the people operating it bear responsibility for the choices they make within it.

Solutions, or: Why Universalism Matters

So far as I can tell, adverse selection and its related sorting dynamics are natural byproducts of free choice under asymmetric information. This means the solutions must address one or both of those conditions. But the menu of responses is richer than it first appears.

Correct the information asymmetry. Force disclosures that help the less-informed party make better decisions. This is what insurance companies do when they demand medical histories, and what consumer protection laws do when they require used-car inspections or home disclosures. But disclosure is a double-edged tool: the same information that helps markets function can also enable discrimination.

Limit the sorting. Mandates, community rating, anti-discrimination rules, and mixed catchment areas all work by preventing people from separating into stratified pools. The individual mandate in the ACA is a pure example: you must participate whether you’re healthy or sick, which stabilizes the pool.

Provide the good directly. Where selection effects are severe enough, the most effective response may be to remove the market mechanism altogether. Public schools, single-payer health systems, and universal social insurance don’t just limit choice; they eliminate the market in which adverse selection operates. This is the strongest argument for universalism: it doesn’t try to outsmart the sorting. It refuses to sort. A fair objection: universal systems do not eliminate sorting entirely. They push it into different channels. Single-payer systems produce wait times, regional quality variation, and private supplementary markets. The NHS has private alternatives; Canadians cross the border for some procedures. But the sorting that persists under universalism is a different kind than the sorting markets produce. Under market sorting, the excluded population is the sickest and poorest. Under universal systems, the people who opt into private alternatives are the wealthiest. A system where the rich buy faster care is a far less harmful equilibrium than one where the poor are priced out of care altogether.

These three are the standard responses. But the examples above suggest that they are not always sufficient, and that more creative interventions are possible.

Change the incentives, not the information. Rather than hiding risk information from insurers or forcing everyone into a single pool, you can let everyone see the information but make it unprofitable to act on it. Risk adjustment transfers do this: insurers who attract healthier pools pay into a fund that subsidizes insurers with sicker ones. The ACA has a version of this mechanism, though it remains underdeveloped. The principle generalizes. School funding formulas that pay more per high-need student, enough to make “difficult” students a revenue source rather than a cost center, would transform the incentive structure that drives school sorting. Instead of fighting adverse selection, you make it financially irrelevant.

Change what information is legible. The essay has framed the choice as: reveal information or hide it. But there is a third option: change which information is visible. Raw test scores conflate poverty and pedagogy; value-added models that control for demographics would give parents a signal for teaching quality that doesn’t simply proxy for income. The GED carries a stigma because it is a single binary credential that cannot distinguish a formerly incarcerated person from a teenage caregiver. Richer signals, such as portfolio-based assessment, stackable micro-credentials, or apprenticeship records that carry narrative rather than just pass/fail, could break the pooling that makes the credential toxic. Adverse selection thrives on coarse information. Finer-grained information can disrupt the sorting without requiring either blanket disclosure or blanket concealment.

Design for precommitment. Adverse selection requires people to sort themselves after they know their type: sick or healthy, in a good school district or a bad one. If you can get people to commit before they know, the selection pressure disappears. Employer-provided health insurance partially works this way: you choose a job before you get sick, so the pool is not self-selected by health status. School assignment by lottery before test scores are published does the same thing. This is the Rawlsian insight as design principle: the veil of ignorance is not just a thought experiment but a template for institutions. Where you can build precommitment into the architecture, you defuse adverse selection at its root.

Recruit against the spiral. If adverse selection is driven by the exit of good actors, one response is to make staying, or entering, actively attractive to them. This reframes the ACA outreach cuts as even more destructive than the premium numbers alone suggest: outreach was not just informational but counter-selective, specifically targeting the healthy young people whose participation stabilizes the pool. Magnet programs in struggling schools follow the same logic. So do signing bonuses for teachers in high-need districts. And so does second-chance hiring: employers who actively recruit people with criminal backgrounds, GED credentials, or nontraditional career paths are not just doing social good. They are breaking the adverse selection cycle that degrades those credentials and populations in the first place. Every employer who hires a GED holder and has a good experience makes the next employer’s decision slightly easier. Counter-selection is contagious in the same way that adverse selection is; it just requires someone to go first.

Route around the degraded pool. When a credential or institution has been too badly damaged by adverse selection to rehabilitate, sometimes the answer is to build a new pathway rather than trying to rescue the old one. This is arguably what community colleges do for GED holders, what expungement does for criminal records, and what “housing first” does for homelessness services. You are not correcting the information asymmetry or forcing people to stay in a broken market. You are routing around it entirely. The risk is that the new pathway eventually suffers the same selection effects (community colleges themselves are not immune to this). But pathway replacement buys time and creates options that pure reform cannot.

Each of these approaches has costs, and none eliminates the underlying pressures entirely. Parents still move to better school districts; wealthy patients still seek private care; employers still find proxies. But the history traced above suggests that leaving markets to sort themselves, especially in domains as fundamental as health care, housing, education, and employment, reliably produces equilibria that are worse for almost everyone, and catastrophic for the most vulnerable. And the range of available interventions is wider than the usual debate between “let the market work” and “replace the market” would suggest. The most promising designs often work with the sorting dynamics rather than against them, redirecting incentives, enriching information, and recruiting the actors whose participation stabilizes the whole system.

The point of naming the pattern is to make it harder to ignore. Once you see adverse selection, you start to notice it everywhere: in the way dating apps stratify their users, in the way adjunct hiring degrades faculty quality, in the way nonprofit funding cycles punish organizations that serve the hardest cases. The concept doesn’t explain everything. But it explains a remarkable amount about why free markets, left to their own devices, so often deliver the opposite of what their advocates promise.

Hannah Arendt on Academic Freedom

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We often say that colleges and universities deserve some sort of freedom from political interference. But for Arendt, freedom just is politics. The idea of freedom from politics is largely oxymoronic for her, and involves fundamental misunderstandings of the component terms “freedom” and “politics.” But of course, we seem to know what we mean when we use “freedom from politics” so these misunderstandings are obviously institutionalized in ways that are at odds with Arendt, such that it takes some excavation to determine how this divergence is possible, and whether we can adjudicate the disagreement:

“As long as one understands politics to be solely concerned with what is absolutely necessary for men to live in a community so that they then can be granted, either as individuals or social groups, a freedom that lies beyond both politics and life’s necessities, we are indeed justified in measuring the degree of freedom within any political body by the religious and academic freedom that it tolerates, which is to say, by the size of the nonpolitical space of freedom that it contains and maintains.” Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics.” The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), pg. 136.

The disdain with which Arendt articulates the justifications for religious and academic freedom in this passage is remarkable.  What seems obvious to us seems equally absurd to Arendt, such that she has to spell out our mistake: “as long as one understands politics to be solely concerned with what is absolutely necessary for men to live in a community….”

(She might as well write, “if you insist on starting from absurd premises, then yes, it’s true, absurd conclusions will follow….”)

She is not just exasperated that we are so devoted to universities and churches that we’ve set them outside of and above politics, but seems to believe that when we see the assumptions required we will reject them. (Loyal readers will recall this post on Christianity and the flight from politics.) For Arendt, politics is not merely about providing the bare necessities of communal life: if anything, communal life serves to provide the conditions of possibility for politics. But our communities are decidedly non-Arendtian: why should we accept that reversal?

Here, a brief Arendtian recap may be in order: she argues that the Platonic (née Parmenidean) ideal of freedom from politics is predicated on the belief that speech carried out before the many becomes corrupted or deceptive, while speech among the few can achieve truths “higher” than political freedom. We now regularly encounter these “higher” or “realer” truths: science, religion, justice, beauty, family, wealth, health, culture, morality, and happiness are all often celebrated as the true purpose of politics, those ends that politics must achieve but for which politics should be forsaken. So obviously Arendt is on to something in her diagnosis. But it’s thus striking that Arendt is nearly alone among political theorists and philosophers in claiming that the true purpose of politics is politics–the coordination of collective action–itself!

For this she is often accused of romanticizing the Greek polis. She goes so far as to say that many people and places have taken the “higher” purposes of politics so seriously that they’ve lost track of politics in the first place:

“Politics as such has existed so rarely and in so few places that, historically speaking, only a few great epochs have known it and turned it into a reality.” (Arendt, Promise of Politics, 119)

But I don’t think this is properly-speaking a romantic view of the Greeks, since the Greeks are to blame for losing track of the meaning and significance of politics (for themselves and for Europe too) when they built the Academy:

“In order for their institution to succeed, the few had to demand that their activity, their speech with one another, be relieved of the activities of the polis in the same way the citizens of Athens were relieved of all the activities that dealt with earning their daily bread.” (Arendt, Promise, 131)

Arendt has often received criticism for her view that politics is only possible for those who are free from necessity because others (slaves, peasants, capitalist workers) labor. She always acknowledge the horror of this dependency and exploitation, but it’s hard to ignore how elitist she sounds in those moments. Here she accuses those seeking academic and religious freedom of a similar kind of elitism: to turn politics into a means-to-an-end of something that cannot equal it.1

Universities are not, then, havens from politics, but in their purest forms they become hierarchical substitutes for politics. This helps to explain the kinds of inconsequential wrangling that often trouble departmental life: having determined that only academic merit can satisfy our fundamental political needs, we then get lost in minutiae in a fight for recognition.

And then there is the not-so-pure form: acknowledging that the university is partially shielded from politics, we retreat to it with a fantasy that Arendt diagnosed as an Archimedean (“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the earth”) whereby we desire to engage in politics without being engaged by it, to act on the world without being acted upon. The university becomes a place to engage in politics, to affect policy and act as a political agent, but one that is sheltered from the consequences of ordinary political spaces. It becomes a microphone or a platform with which to shout one’s projects without having to listen.

It’s this conception of academic freedom that both inspires and worries me. It inspires me because I’d like to think we can find some shelter from the political currents of the day to think through the problems that confront us and investigate matters that require it, and that when that thinking and investigation is done our fellow citizens should listen to what we’ve figured out. It also inspires me because the company of disagreeing friends is one of the major sources of joy in my professional life. (Recall: 1, 2, 3)

But it worries me, too, because governments fund these havens, and they are growing increasingly disenchanted with our work. And it’s only natural that when political actors recognize a source of influence in their communities–an unmoved mover that is both powerful and claiming shelter from power–they will move to capture the “commanding heights” of that influential position. An Iowa state legislator even proposed partisan balancing tests for new faculty. (And the backlash surrounding his Sizzler certification is ample evidence of the exclusivity and signaling role of college education.)

Now, a standard reply is that the university has earned its role as a place outside of normal politics by welcoming a diversity of viewpoints. We inoculate ourselves from the claims of partisanship by encouraging educated disagreement, and take a voluntary vow of nonpartisanship in exchange for that freedom. But this is no longer sustainable. It’s both at odds with the evidence of partisan affiliations, and at odds with the consensus-building towards expertise we expect from the sciences.

We really don’t and shouldn’t welcome a diversity of viewpoints on race and IQ, for instance, which is both reasonable (internal to the disciplines involved) given the methodological shenanigans required to justify white superiority stories, and reasonable (writ large) given the fact that pseudoscientific racism actively hurts our students and our society.

I am tempted to end on the idea that academic freedom debates are a part of local, nested norms of safety and collegiality and freedom-from-interference, such that there is no generic answer about academic freedom, but rather a set of internal institutional norms that get articulated and adjudicated in practice. But sometimes in all that sophisticated distinction-making and precise line-drawing, I think we miss the fact that universities are parts of society as a whole, inhabited by faculty and staff with multiple conflicting allegiances and communities of interest. We don’t need principles of academic freedom because we are discovering the eternal and unchanging truths of these systems, but rather we need these principles as simple coordination mechanisms. Sometimes we need to be able to say: “This is not what we do, this is not who we are.”

1. It’s worth noting here that most legal defenses of academic freedom either make a professor’s rights subordinate to the public welfare via the claim that unimpaired investigations into the natural sciences produce public goods (i.e. Sweezy v. New Hampshire) or treat academic freedom as a tacit custom that governs university contracts with faculty. (i.e. Greene v. Howard University)↩

Your Enemy is Your Best Teacher

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My good friend Sarah Shugars is subtweeting me:

Resistance is a way of life, it’s a form a citizenship. It’s a commitment to speaking out and, importantly, creating space for others to speak out. It’s a bold declaration that all people are created equal and its an unequivocal call that we will not, cannot, rest until that equality is manifest is our society. Resistance comes in every word you say, every action you take.

I find this approach to civic life unhelpful, just as Shugars intended (her subtitle: “an unhelpful guide.”) I think we–we scholars who tackle the civic arena–ought to be able to give advice, and not simply advocate a life of unspecified restless action. Too often we study the politics of governments but we need to practice a different politics: of relationships and of institutions. But I don’t yet know what advice to give. I am still a little bit heeding the instructions: don’t just do something, sit there.

The activists have only changed the world. The point is to understand it.

The Dalai Lama has said that “in the practice of tolerance, your enemy is your best teacher.” I suspect he meant something about love and difficulty, about how we must learn to tolerate those we truly disagree with and not those to whom we have grown accustomed. But here’s what I want to know: why can’t we actually learn from our opponents?

Republicans responded to the elections of both President Clinton and President Obama with radically obstructionist tactics. Remember? Special prosecutors, filibusters, impeachments, Benghazi, endless attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, budget showdowns, government shutdowns, fiscal cliffs, refusing to hold hearings or approve nominees at every level.

They played constitutional hardball, and won. Maybe Democrats should try that. 

I imagine someone will say that it works better for the party that claims to oppose government than the party that supports it. But in public, they’d simply say they were opposed to the policy X, not ALL government. We’re about to see that they believed that, too: the federal government is not about to suddenly shrink so small it can be drowned in a bath tub. They’ll cut taxes and spend profligately like they’ve done since Ronald Reagan “proved” that deficits don’t matter. Republicans haven’t been afraid to contradict themselves, which meant lots of bad soundbites for Jon Stewart to satirize, but kept spelling electoral success. A lot of what made the GOP so effective over the past eight years was running out the clock with nonsense and using pre-commitment strategies to win various games of policy chicken.

I imagine someone will say that the Democrats don’t have a single house of Congress in which to stage these obstructions. That’s how the GOP felt in 2009. Yet 2010 is widely recognized as their crowning achievement. They founded the Tea Party to oppose themselves, and gerrymandered themselves a longterm majority.

So why not try that? What do we have to lose, control of government?

There is, unfortunately, an objection I can imagine someone could raise: the problem with chicken is that someone has to be willing to swerve. If both sides play constitutional hardball then we will fall into Juan Linz’s nightmare of constitutional crisis. The likely result of conflicts between a popular president and an unpopular congress will be a weaker legislature and a stronger executive branch. So there is something to lose, and that is the lesson: winning policy victories does not tame the prince, when the prince has a clear mandate from the people. Knowing that this is a possible fate makes thinking through such scenarios important, and it makes informed guides to strategy and action valuable as well.

So as I said on November 9th, it is a good time to ask me to make future commitments of help and support. Tell me what you plan and what you need and how I can help.

For Education, Against Credentialism

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Today I’ll be addressing a group of imprisoned students, university administrators, and prison officials to inaugurate the University of Baltimore’s partnership with the US Department of Education and Jessup Correctional Institution to offer Bachelor’s Degrees. We have a few tasks today, including inspiring the students and encouraging the officials that their support for the program is not a betrayal of their other constituents. Here’s what I plan to say:

It’s well-known that receiving a college degree improves life outcomes. The standard claim is that getting a Bachelor’s Degree is worth an extra million dollars in income over a person’s lifetime, but even this is hard to predict as the returns to education are increasing. In 1965, a person with a college degree only made $7,500 more per year than a person without one. This is called the college wage premium: in 2013, that college wage premium had increased to $17,500. Since it’s increasing, it’s likely that a college degree today will be worth even more than a million dollars over a lifetime.

What’s more, college graduates are healthier, have lower unemployment rates and shorter periods of unemployment. They are more likely to have happy marriages and less likely to be divorced; they are less likely to be incarcerated, and even live longer.

Thus it seems like a pretty good investment. But there is very little clear connection between studying Civil War history or the anthropology of upland Southeast Asia and doing the sorts of jobs that college graduates end up doing. What’s more, there’s a phenomenon called the “sheepskin effect” which shows that most of the college wage premium comes from completing school, rather than along the way. Half or even 90% of a college degree does very little to increase your income, while finishing that last course can make a big difference.

College, then, seems to serve more as a signal of ability and conscientiousness than as training in necessary skills. Employers are paying for smart and hardworking staff, and a college degree is a reliable signal of those qualities. And indeed in college campuses throughout the country we see evidence that this is true: no one thinks that a cheater or a plagiarist is “only cheating himself,” they worry that he has an unfair advantage. The grade matters more than the work, it seems, which is also why students seek out “easy As” and rejoice when class is canceled. And many students readily engage in “cramming” for exams knowing that they will not retain the material in the long-term. (I owe these examples to Bryan Caplan, though they now seem almost too obvious to attribute.)

Calling it “signaling” is mostly an economic exercise, but educational researchers can see it at work in different ways, all of which indicate that there is not enough emphasis on learning. Educational sociologists call it the “disengagement compact,” a bargain struck between faculty and students in which both agree: “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” Teachers agree to be entertaining and undemanding, and in exchange students agree to pay their tuition without complaint and give the faculty good teaching evaluations. Both thus have more time for other endeavors.

I believe that imprisoned students do not have the luxury of the disengagement compact. If we accept the signaling theory then a period of incarceration is a severe signal to potential employers: it is a signal that you are more likely than not to go back to prison. At best, a degree serves to distinguish some formerly incarcerated returning citizens from the rest, to deepen the prejudice against some returning citizens in favor of others.

Thankfully, it turns out that people do sometimes learn useful skills in college. Education can be transformative. A rigorous liberal arts education that focuses on reading difficult texts, solving complicated problems, and writing and speaking clearly about matters of little direct concern can help teach the skills that employers want more than any other:

  • critical thinking
  • analytic reasoning
  • problem solving
  • clear written and oral communication

And research on college learning outcomes suggests that a liberal arts education can teach these skills so long as the classes require a lot of reading (forty pages a week), a lot of writing (twenty pages a semester), and the professor has high expectations of the students. Which is encouraging, because it means that we can break out of the merely competitive cycle.

I have a theory as to why this works, that comes from the educational advocate Earl Shorris. His Clemente course in the humanities inspired Bard College’s Prison Initiative, which inspired the US Department of Education, who took a chance on us here. In his book Riches for the Poor, Shorris argues that one major factor in poverty is the stultifying character of one’s problems and environment. Shorris offers the analogy of Native American hunting practices, where hunters would encircle their prey and then move in, creating anxiety and fear that aids the hunter in capturing stunned prey. Poverty and prison both offer similar “surrounds of force” whereby individuals are beset by so many forces (“hunger, isolation, illness, landlords, police, abuse, neighbors, drugs, criminals, and racism”) that they do not know where to turn.

An education in the liberal arts gives us the crucial pause we need to avoid confusion and find an escape route. The “pause” is a performative skill, like learning to fix a car or perform a surgery. Anyone could do it at any time, but learning to pause when we’re stressed is actually extremely difficult. We need to learn to reflect. And it isn’t just enough for a professor to tell you: “reflect!” Just as you can’t just tell an illiterate person, “read!” or a clumsy person who has never learned, “ride that bike! A highly rigorous and engaged liberal arts degree offers its students an opportunity to train in important meta-cognitive habits. Education is not something the teacher does to the student, it’s something the student does to himself, with the professor’s guidance.

To sum up:

Education may just be about signaling. If so, let’s signal loud and clear how amazing you guys are! But there’s a good deal of evidence that education can be transformative, even if your professors can’t transform you, exactly. You have to transform yourself with their help.

We will set out the guidelines. You will meet our (VERY HIGH) expectations. If the educational sociologists are right, this will give you an opportunity to develop the habits and skills that employers want and need. And if Shorris is right, maybe you’ll develop inner peace along the way. If you see a professor giving you too much slack, ask: does she believe in the transformative value of education? Or is he just here to collect a paycheck and hand out sheepskins?

Demand transformation.

Nationalistic Dissent: Trump, the Tea Party, and the “Bowling for Fascism” Study

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Civic engagement folks need to talk about nationalist populism.

In the past I have praised movements with which I have no ties for at least giving voice to groups of my fellow citizens who are frequently excluded from policy and electoral politics because they hold noxious views. Both the Tea Party and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seem to have tapped a part of the US that usually have no representatives who will speak louder than a dog whistle on their behalf. As a proponent of participatory politics, I’ve often thought that the exclusion of nationalistic white people is undemocratic, just as I have thought that the exclusion of leftist non-whites would be undemocratic.

My guide in these things has usually been Hannah Arendt, who praised political participation and criticized the exclusivity of bureaucratic proceduralism. All democratic theorists confront this question in some way: why is it better for a people to govern themselves rather than submit to the dictates of some (richer, wiser, more virtuous) subset of their number? We sometimes speak of politics as a decision-theory, so that a form of government that depends on bureaucracy is no more or less just than any other: everything depends on the characters, or perhaps simply the decisions, of those who rule, no matter whether we call them administrators or aristocrats.

In contrast, Arendt often pointed to the spontaneous development of councils in revolutionary settings when explicating the ideal institutions of political life. On Arendt’s account, the councils of the Hungarian revolution closely resembled the Constitutional Congress and ward system proposed by Thomas Jefferson as an alternative to political parties, the ad hoc groupings of citizens during the French Revolution, and the soviets that succumbed to party unification after the Russian Revolution. Everywhere, the building blocks of politics seem to form the same basic shapes, only to be assembled into different forms due to ideologies, foreign pressures, or historical ideals. According to Arendt, the councils predate the formation of interest groups, they federate easily and advance their most excellent members as representatives to more central councils. The councilors are principally concerned with the establishment of the polis, and so strategy often succumbs to republican altruism. In the US and Europe, lacking as we do anything approaching a revolutionary context, the institutions that most closely resemble councils are deliberative polls.

What the councils, wards, and townships all have in common is that they enact a vision of democratic politics in which democracy is understood as isonomy, meaning equality both before the law and in the legislation. And isonomy is only possible if all citizens participate as equals and develop equal civic capacities, no matter what their ideology. In fact, this participation itself produces certain kinds of inclusive and non-dominating norms, such that to exclude our fellow citizens is to destroy the very power and capacity by which we act.

She sums up the problem in her brief essay On Violence: “Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.” Where power designates the human ability to act in concert, violence emanates from a singular act whose explosive consequences are utterly out of the actor’s control. For Arendt, power is a characteristic of human collectivities: where a plurality forms, the potential for action becomes realizable. Violence, for Arendt, is a perversion of that appearance, insofar as what appears to the members of the group is the possibility of impossibility: terror in the face of the potential for one’s own death. On Arendt’s view of violence, the violent one exposes her fellows to their own mortality by reminding the assembly of the risks of gathering together with others who, like themselves, are fundamentally unpredictable. She may seek to control their activities through this violence, to force them to obey her commands, or she may seek to disperse them and their collected potential for even more unpredictable actions, including mob rule and widespread violence.

Though they usually appear together, violence and power are nonetheless opposites: “…where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” (Arendt 1970, 155) The inseparable contraries of power and violence are best seen at work in the efforts of a democratically-controlled police force, where they work in tandem. When they come into conflict, however, the conclusion is foregone: violence wins. The “textbook case” of such a confrontation is the Prague Spring, when “the head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely nonviolent resistance of the people in Czechoslovakia” demonstrated the vulnerability of power in the face of violence. (Arendt 1970, 151-2) Of course, the encounter is usually not so unalloyed, and the violence necessary to subdue power is not always palatable to the state. Thus nonviolent resistance like that adopted by the Indian decolonization movement under Gandhi is quite capable of giving pause to an overwhelming force if that force is itself aware of the capacities and risks associated with violence: “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but its price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is paid by the victor in his own power.” (Arendt 1970, 152) Violence can settle the present debate, but it renders every subsequent discussion uncertain because of the fear that it will be settled as the murderer settles the argument over the life of his victim: with a bullet.

This has long been my way of thinking about politics and hate: that hatred breeds violence, and violence is of limited effectiveness for building lasting political institutions. And simultaneously: inclusive institutions will tend to tamp down both hatred and violence, make us realize the inefficacy of hate and self-destructive character of violence.

Thus civic engagement would be civilizing.

And yet: this was always a kind of cherry-picked idealized political theory for Arendt and for me. It may well fail the test of empirical verification. A few years ago, Shanker Satyanath, Nico Voigtländer, and Hans-Joachim Voth published a study on the relationship between social capital and Nazi party affiliation in Germany called “Bowling for Fascism,” where they showed that “social capital aided the rise of the Nazi movement that ultimately destroyed Germany’s first democracy.”

This was a disheartening result. We often talk about Germany between the World Wars as if it was an unrelenting economic and social depression. But in fact, many Germans still had strong social ties and institutional memberships: not just militaristic, but chess clubs, choirs, and animal breeding clubs that seemed to contribute to the rise of the Nazi Party: “a dense fabric of civic associations went hand-in-hand with a more rapid rise of Nazi party membership.”

Social associations are thus no more good or bad than any other capacity: they are as prone to justice as injustice, as prone to democratic norms as undemocratic ones! As Satyanath and his co-authors describe the state of this research, this connection between authority and social capital goes well beyond Nazi Germany: we see similar mechanisms impeding development in Sierra Leone in the research of Daron Acemoglu, Tristan Reed, and James A. Robinson:

[C]hiefs that face fewer constraints build social capital as a way to control and monitor society. This mechanism may also induce people to invest in patron-client relations with powerful chiefs, thus giving them a vested interest in the institution. Hence, if in surveys people say that they respect the authority of elders and those in power, this is not a reflection of the fact that chiefs are effective at delivering public goods and services or represent the interests of their villagers. Rather, rural people appear to be locked into relationships of dependence with traditional elites.

Social capital and civic power, thus, can be tools of both isonomy and oppression. Like many other forms of human organization, the strategies and institutions that we develop to collaborate with each other are not universally good or bad. We can democratically deliberate about violence, racism, and misogyny and come to any conclusion at all.

The burgeoning self-awareness of white national populists within the Tea Party and now in support of Donald Trump for president are unlikely to win an election any time soon. But insofar as they are now busy building lasting relationships, institutions, and sources of support and political power, this need not have a moderating or cosmopolitan effect. In fact, empowering our fellow citizens could easily lead to much worse outcomes. We might well hope that they would continue to lack a voice in our political system.

Consider Get Out the Vote (GOTV) campaigns: we normally see more participation as a non-partisan activity. Indeed the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service both define it as such, so that wealthy donors may fund GOTV as a charitable contribution without campaign spending limits. Yet it’s now become de rigueur to use targeted GOTV camaigns as a part of partisan electoral strategies. Democrats focus their GOTV spending on likely Democratic voters, Republicans focus their GOTV spending on their own likely voters. A non-partisan tool for participation has become partisan.

Civics engagement, too, could become a partisan resource. It’s increasingly clear that differential social capital accounts for some of the major privileges in our society: well-organized groups get better government, and thus over time the patterns of organization and disorganization have come to resemble the patterns of wealth and income distribution, the maps of public health disasters, unemployment, crime, and incarceration. As a good liberal, I tend to focus on the way that these differentials affect Blacks and Latinos, and to compare the plight of disaffected whites to the statistics that still report that they are, as a group, better off than non-whites.

But: my framing of the problem comes from a position of comfort. I am not a low skill white male in a de-industrialized city. And so my judgments and values support my class and social position: they are ideological.

Poorly educated white workers are the only group that is demonstrably hurt by free trade and immigration. Yet cosmopolitan liberals have pretended that they ought to stomach their losses to make up for our privilege. Who can blame Tea Partiers and Trump supporters for noting that no one among contemporary elites is willing to stand up for their interests? Who can blame them for attaching themselves to the first charismatic figure who promises to do so?

They will very likely fail this election cycle in the US. Possibly the right historical analogy (which I owe to Steven Maloney) is the French Presidential Election of 2002, where Jean-Marie Le Pen faced Jacques Chirac in the second round. Le Pen surprised everyone by getting 16.7% in the first, crowded, round, to Chirac’s 19.9%. Sound familer? It looked close! Then he got 17.8% in the second round and Chirac got the rest: 81.3%.

The white nationalist populists interests will not dissipate with the Toupée Voldemort who currently leads them. Other politicians–entrepreneurs looking for a market–will step up to take his place, especially now that they are organized and self-aware. So what should we do, together, about our fellow citizens?

Rachel Maddow: “Activism is a very specific and technocratic thing.”

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Rachel Maddow’s interview with Ezra Klein on her life and HIV/AIDs activism for prisoners has this amazing extended riff starting around minute 53:

“What I tried to do as an activist was to approach each thing I wanted to get as a math problem.

So, here’s a thing that I think should be different in the world: I want people who are dying of AIDS in prisons to be allowed to die in secure hospices rather than dying in jail infirmaries. That’s what I want. Me just saying that and expressing the moral righteousness of that is not enough.

Who is the person who can decide to make that happen? The hospices need to be good with it, so, okay, let’s go to the hospices. Who is the person who makes the decision about who goes to the hospices? Well, there’s a category of decision-making here that is for people who do not have life sentences; they’re susceptible to these kinds of decision-makers. And then there’s a whole another category of decision-makers who say as a matter of policy … so let’s change the local decision-makers; now let’s change the law.

And just doing it piece by piece by piece, why won’t this law change? Because the committee chairman who is responsible for this as an issue doesn’t care about this. What does he care about? He cares about golf. Okay, let’s find whoever he golfs with’s wife, and find who his pastor is and talk to her about this.

…Activism is a very specific and technocratic thing….

On a lot of the activist issues I worked on it was very important that we get no press. And I think, from the outside, one of the things people assume about activism is that you’re trying to consciousness-raise around an issue, and get public discussion and raise public awareness and raise the profile of an issue–not if you’re talking about the comfort of death row prisoners. You don’t actually want that subjected to a popular referendum, because that’s going to be a kneejerk, regressive response.

And so sometimes what you need for people to be brave is to limit their risk, and some of the ways you limit risk is by keeping things quiet. And that has ended up being an interesting thing to know and thing to believe in, given that I’m now a person who’s in the business of making national news of that stuff.”

Partisanship Has Reduced Our Efficacy as Citizens

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the new evidence that partisan distrust and even hatred now trumps racial hatred. Consider the now-famous Iyengar/Westwood study, “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” Iyengar and Westwood showed that partisan identification has ceased to be a wholly ideological or instrumental self-description. It’s gone from identification to identity: it’s become an affective relationship that justifies exclusions, bias, and even outright prejudice.

Asked to award a scholarship to fictional high school seniors with equal qualifications, Democrats and Republicans awarded a seniors who had evidence of the opposing party affiliation among their qualifications only 21% of the time. Even when the scholarship candidate from the opposing party was more qualified, Democrats awarded the scholarship to Republican-affiliated high school seniors only 30% of the time, while Republicans awarded the scholarship to more qualified Democrats only 15% of the time! Alongside other evidence from economic games and implicit association tests, this enmity towards now appears like a very serious bias, one that most people almost certainly encounter as a part of their everyday lives.

I just can’t get my mind around the idea that people would feel comfortable privileging members of their party in scholarship competitions. It feels pretty dirty, and it suggests the kind of unwillingness to associate and collaborate that will be a real challenge to democratic public work in the years to come.

It used to be pretty common to remark that racial hatred was cultivated by elites who themselves didn’t feel bigotry deeply in order to prevent the alliance of working people whose interests were closely allied. By preventing workers from developing solidarity, racial mistrust allowed elites to create competition and legitimate violence. And yet everyone seems to have forgotten that lesson now that hatred based on partisan identity is at stake. Elites don’t care about partisan identity nearly as much as ordinary folks now do. Wonks and bureaucrats are partisan but usually get along with their opponents quite well. Technocrats agree on more than we disagree on. But citizens need to be able to work with their neighbors on matters of shared concern even when they don’t agree on federal immigration policy, firearms, or the culture war.

What’s more, partisan identification isn’t even a particularly good guide a person’s ideological positions on those matters. Precisely because most districts are safe districts for one party or another, voters’ experiences of the parties do not necessarily line up with their beliefs about specific policy issues. Ideological consistency of voters has never been particularly strong: it’s growing, but from a very low base.

Even in a world where partisans will deny each other jobs and scholarships, only 56% of Democrats hold mostly liberal views, and only 45% of Republicans hold mostly liberal views. If you expect true ideological consistency from partisans (the sort of thing that political philosophers try to achieve, maybe) then you’ll find partisan identification even less helpful: only 23% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans are consistently or rigorously liberal or conservative. So what justifies the enmity?

I don’t think it can be justified, and I think we need to aim a healthy skepticism at people like Jonathan Haidt who diagnose liberal and conservative brains. What’s left is culture, and our cultures are increasingly trying to justify and legitimate partisan differences in just the same way that they’d justify racial differences or gender differences or class differences. We can’t let that happen.

But what should we do, what should you and I do together, to prevent the growing partisan hatred? Here’s what President Obama–the Citizen-in-Chief–said during the State of the Union:

The future we want — all of us want — opportunity and security for our families, a rising standard of living, a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids — all that is within our reach. But it will only happen if we work together. It will only happen if we can have rational, constructive debates. It will only happen if we fix our politics.

A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country — different regions, different attitudes, different interests. That’s one of our strengths, too. Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, fiercely, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security.

But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice. It doesn’t work if we think that our political opponents are unpatriotic or trying to weaken America. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise, or when even basic facts are contested, or when we listen only to those who agree with us. Our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get all the attention. And most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some special interest.

Too many Americans feel that way right now. It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.

]…]

So, my fellow Americans, whatever you may believe, whether you prefer one party or no party, whether you supported my agenda or fought as hard as you could against it — our collective futures depends on your willingness to uphold your duties as a citizen. To vote. To speak out. To stand up for others, especially the weak, especially the vulnerable, knowing that each of us is only here because somebody, somewhere, stood up for us. We need every American to stay active in our public life — and not just during election time — so that our public life reflects the goodness and the decency that I see in the American people every single day.