Our Common Ground

Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters

By: Diane Hessan

Narrated by: Diane Hessan

Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversation with voters across the United States. What she has learned will surprise you, enlighten you, give you hope, and change the way you think about your fellow Americans.

Our inability to hear each other, our suspicion, and our impatience is stressing us out and tearing us apart. It’s a sickness that permeates the American culture, erodes our collective mental health, and makes us hate each other. To gain insight into how we can move forward, Hessan undertook a massive listening project, conducting an ongoing series of weekly interviews with 500 voters from every state, of every age and ethnicity, and along different points of the political spectrum. The topics ranged from race to guns, from character to party politics, from masks to rallies, from the Supreme Court to the pandemic to immigration and climate change.

After more than a million individual communications, two things became clear:

• We have more common ground than we realize.
• And we are, sadly, failing at understanding each other.

On issue after issue, our “divided” nation isn’t nearly as polarized as we imagine. An overwhelming majority of voters believe in commonsense gun licensing and regulation. They are pro-immigration. They believe climate change is real, and the coronavirus is deadly. They care deeply about their families and are willing to work hard to make ends meet. And, they believe that Washington is slow, bureaucratic, and not working in their best interests.

In dozens of columns on these topics published in The Boston Globe, Hessan has upended common political wisdom. Presented together for the first time as part of this book, they reveal a unique perspective on how Americans actually think, what they value, and how we can move forward.

©2021 Diane Hessan (P)2021 Diane Hessan

Hessan's Common Ground

This book tries to bring together, and thereby better understand, the divisions within the American political scene resulting from Trump’s nomination and subsequent election. It is an amazing compendium of opinions from 500 people of different backgrounds, different locations and different political leanings brought together by the author in several well-defined sections aimed at providing the reader with a better understanding our differences. The author subsequently offers commentary on interpretation, what we can do about it and the way forward. In these objectives, the author absolutely succeeds.

I loved this most unusual book. Putting it together had to be a massive challenge. I found it extremely interesting and easy to follow and offer my unqualified recommendation to anybody interested in today’s political scene.

Great book, but unfortunately not unbiased.

This is an excellent book with a well intended purpose of bringing people together. However, it’s left leaning vs centrist. Example “gun control” is leftist terminology vs “responsible gun ownership” which aligns to the 2nd amendment. Racism regardless of race is used, but no discussion of accountability to change perception. Being poor and white for example (been there) is no excuse for being unlawful, and blaming society for my woes. A major miss in this book is accountability to one’s actions and ownership to improve. We the people are accountable. This great country was forged through replacing governments who’ve forgotten their role.