Paul Solman is a national treasure. He’s our nation’s senior economics correspondent, providing decades-long, outstanding economics news coverage for PBS NewsHour. Not everyone watches the NewsHour. But if you want to learn what’s really going on in the economy, Paul’s on-location, in-person interviews — with the people who comprise the economy (consumers and businesses), the people who study the economy (academic and business economists), and the people who regulate and manipulate the economy (bureaucrats and politicians) — are the ticket. Just go to youtube.com and search for Paul. You’ll find one outstanding economic exposé, interview, discussion, discovery, and investigation after another.
Paul has appeared on my podcast to discuss his career and some of what he’s learned about the real world. Here’s the link. But today I wanted to have him talk with you about ending American tribalism — the growing divide between Reds and Blues, haves and have nots, city mice and country mice, techies and service workers, ecstatic Celtics fans and diehard Sixers fans, and, well, you name it.
Below, Paul describes, in his words The American Exchange Project — Paul’s brilliant concrete initiative to bring young Americans, from all walks of life, together. It’s, in short, a domestic foreign exchange program, which takes, say, a high-school kid from Macon, Georgia and has them spend the week with a Brooklyn kid and their family or vice versa.
Having been an exchange student for a year in Germany at age 16, I know how everything you thought you knew suddenly changes when you immerse yourself in someone else’s home, family, friends, politics, economic circumstances, and mental perspective.
The American Exchange Project’s mission is to “Connect Our Divided Country.” Read all about it just below. But also make our country love each other again by digging deep into your wallet and contributing to the American Exchange Project by clicking here.
Paul Solman on The American Exchange Project
A member of the tribe that its enemies call “libtards,” 18-year-old Madelyn Castro grew up in Palo Alto, California; 19-year-old “wingnut” Peter Zeferino (according to his opponents), a MAGA tribal member, is from Muskogee, Oklahoma.
But just a week after meeting, “Paul and I got really close,” Castro told Silicon Valley's Mercury News.
So how did they bond? Read on. Before the answer, though, a little context.
At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, tribalism is nothing new. Safe guess: as long as there have been humans, there were tribes. And as long as there have been tribes, there has been solidarity within them and conflict among them. No history exists to report the first of them, but Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct and we self proclaimed homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., smart squared!) are still around. Draw your own conclusion.
Moreover, no recorded era is without its Jews versus Philistines, Spartans v. Athenians, Crusaders and Muslims (after warming up on Jews), Christians v. Christians (for 2000 years), Montagues and Capulets, Hutu v, Tutsi, Serb v. Croat, Hatfields and McCoys, Jets and Sharks, and these days, most personally threateningly to me writing this and you reading it, MAGA Republicans v. woke Democrats.
But why this latest tribal death match, where 19% of both the right and left said in a poll that it would be best if the members of the opposing party “just died”? Why, in a land where no one freezes or starves and even Trader Joe’s two-buck Chuck is probably better than the wines of the past’s greatest kings, is America as polarized as it was on the brink of the Civil War?
Well, our species first organized itself, like other primates, in troupes, clans…tribes. It’s in our wiring: my group – family, town, party, country – right or wrong. To the winner goes the spoils; the more spoils, the more kids you can have and nurture into adulthood; the more your winner-take-all genes proliferate, and play out in competitions large and symbolic.
I am, I confess, a New England Patriots football fan (as in FANatic). This despite “my” team’s sketchy past and pathetic present; despite the ravages of CTE; despite the fact that I don't know any of the players, never will. But I root for the laundry, because it has my symbolic tribe literally written all over it. And though I was reared in Manhattan, college brought me and my irrational athletic allegiances to New England, where I’ve lived ever since.
Of course, rooting for the Patriots is (relatively) harmless – hardly a matter of deep identity and therefore not a life-or-death-like tribal attachment as to religion or, for the last 400 years or so, country. Or these days, as during the Civil War, political party.
But here's a reassuring fact: tribal allegiances can come and go. As a kid, I cried when the Brooklyn Dodgers lost. For the past 60+ years, I couldn't care less.
So then why, if we can easily switch sides, are today’s political allegiances again so hardened, so Union/Confederate toxic?
Well, maybe it's the echo chamber of modern media, segregating us further and further from one another. Maybe it's increasing income, wealth and status inequality, ever more amplified by an ever more radically morphing economy that rewards new skills over old ones, and thus increasingly defining two classes: the respected and the dissed. Maybe it's all that, and more.
But then back to the opening question: how have Silicon Valley’s Madelyn Castro and Peter Zeferino, the Okie from Muskogee, overcome their differences?
The aswere: A nonpartisan nonprofit called the American Exchange Project that ferries newly minted high school graduates from all over America to communities utterly unlike their own, where they spend an initial day freaking out with total strangers their own age, similarly disoriented, but by the end of the week have bonded so completely, there's a fair chance they'll be friends for the rest of their lives. And then, back in their own communities, those same kids host other kids from a radically different elsewhere for another week.
Thinking globally, acting locally – on what's been called “the best kept secret in the country, aka “AEP,”, which I co-founded in 2019, after a teaching stint at Yale, with a former student, David McCullough III, grandson of the noted historian. Our objective: to buld AEP into the annual rite of passage for America’s newly diploma-ed high school graduates and, year by year, young American by young American, reduce our various tribal animosities by proving that we all have more in common than divides us.
The American Exchange Project was in dry dock during COVID, so we connected kids in hundreds of online hangouts. Then, in 2021, 20 kids from four communities (Palo Alto, Kilgore TX, Wellesley and Lake Charles LA). 2022: 100 kids, 20+ communities. 2023, almost 60 communities; 300 new grads, going to and from one another's hometowns for a week, in what’s basically a domestic foreign exchange program. Summer 2024: more than 500 kids have officially committed.
Mutual respect. Connection. At the risk of getting too hokey, isn't that the truth of human relations, even to its innermost part?
And that's what bonded the libtard from Palo Alto and the Okie from Muskogee, a pair of teenagers, bucking the most troubling trend in American culture: toxic polarization. And transcending it within days. Because, as Trumpster Peter Zeferino Castro put it: “we were able to put our politics aside to get to know each other.”
For details, just Google “American Exchange Project,” visit our website, watch a few videos there, read this story from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post on April 6 (https://nypost.com/2024/04/06/lifestyle/student-exchange-program-swaps-kids-in-red-and-blue-states/) and, to the extent you’re moved, join us. It costs $2000 a senior (mostly transportation) and we need all the help we can get to send as many young Americans as possible. Given where the country is at, it's obvious we all had better do something.
And now some words from your sponsor — me!
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Thanks, Jerry!
See you next week.
Cheers, Larry
Thanks for the info about this terrific program. As a PBS/NPR regular, I truly admire Paul Solman. Kudos to him and David McCullough for starting this project. I am pleased to contribute.