Senator McCain claims that, “the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists.” This claim, that dealing with Islamic extremists is the most important challenge for the future, seems exaggerated and unsubstantiated. There are a lot of dangers impinging on the world’s future. E J. Dionne asks, “Does McCain mean that in the year 2100, Americans will look back and say that everything else that happened in the century paled in comparison with the war against terrorism?”

As a member in good standing of the industrial military complex, it makes sense that McCain would frame the focus of the future in terms of fear, in terms of endless war, and in terms of giving the military increased supremacy. But, regardless if one doesn’t agree with McCain’s point of view, McCain needs to be given credit for advancing a powerful framework for discussion — identifying the most important issues that will impact our future. A central criteria by which to measure the effectiveness of leadership is the degree to which a leader succeeds in anticipating and planning for the future. It makes sense that at the heart of a presidential contest should be a discussion about how the most important issues impacting the future are defined. By asserting that terrorism is the transcendent issue impacting our future, McCain is asking by implication, “If terrorism is not the transcendent issue, then what is?”

In my judgment, I think a bigger threat to our future than Islamic terrorism is the potential disintegration of our democracy. The evidence of the degradation of our democracy is obvious and growing. I wrote in my post, “Can’t Help Thinking We Should Be Frightened About Tomorrow” : “Our biggest threat to the future, it seems to me, is the threat that our democracy will be incapable of producing the wise and effective leadership it desperately needs. As it stands now, our democracy is corrupt and weak. We do not have a government that is of the people and we certainly do not have a government that is for the people. Our democracy is not working as it should.”

How to make our democracy strong is the key question. I outlined some thoughts in an article about the 501C(3), nonprofit, Grassroots Dayton, “Sowing the Seeds of Democracy.” The challenge for Grassroots Dayton is inspire individuals to become motivated to want to share its purpose.

How or why one is motivated is an interesting question. McCain is betting that we are most motivated by fear. And maybe he is right. An authentic leader seeks to motivate by affirming  the most enduring and best principles. It is interesting that Barack Obama started in politics as a “community organizer.” He was motivated to become positively involved. I’m betting many individuals in Montgomery County are ready to be motivated to become positively involved and, if given the opportunity, will rise to make our democracy work.

Vitalizing its democracy is the transcendent challenge for our nation as well as for our community. Dayton and Montgomery County must answer this challenge in order to be assured of a great future.

In her essay published yesterday in the Los Angles Times, Susan Jacoby writes that “Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.” Jacoby is the author of the book, The Age of American Unreason. Based on this essay, reprinted in Truthout, I would like to read her entire book. Excerpts from her article:

• As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public’s increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing — or any hearing at all — to opposing points of view…. Virtually everywhere I speak, 95% of the audience shares my political and cultural views — and serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit.
• Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation’s best cultural traditions.
• In the last quarter of the 19th century, Americans jammed lecture halls to hear Robert Green Ingersoll, known as “the Great Agnostic,” attack organized religion and question the existence of God. They did so not because they necessarily agreed with him but because they wanted to make up their own minds about what he had to say and see for themselves whether the devil really had horns. Similarly, when Thomas Henry Huxley, the British naturalist who popularized Darwin’s theory of evolution, came to the U.S. in 1876, he spoke to standing-room-only audiences, even though many of his listeners were genuinely shocked by his views.This spirit of inquiry, which demands firsthand evidence and does not trivialize opposing points of view, is essential to a society’s intellectual and political health….
• When I recently spoke about the militant parochialism of American intellectual life on a radio talk show, a caller responded by telling me that there was nothing new about Americans preferring to bask in the reflected glow of their own opinions. Talk radio and political blogs, in his view, are merely the modern equivalent of friends — and haven’t we always chosen friends who agree with us?
• Well, no. Tell it to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who certainly had many, often bitter disagreements about politics and whose correspondence nevertheless leaps off the page as an example of the illumination to be derived from exchanges of ideas between friends who respect each other even though they do not always share the same opinions. “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote Jefferson in 1815.
• It is doubtful that today’s politicians will spend much time trying to explain themselves to one another even after they leave office. They are, after all, creatures of a culture in which it is acceptable, on the Senate floor, for Vice President Dick Cheney to tell Vermont’s Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to “go [obscene verb] yourself.” …
• Ironically, the unprecedented array of choices, on hundreds of cable channels and the Web, have contributed to the decline of common knowledge and the denigration of fairness by both the right and the left. No one but a news junkie has the time or the inclination to spend the entire day consulting diverse news sources on the Web, and the temptation to seek out commentary that fits neatly into one’s worldview — whether that means the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report — is hard to resist.
• A vast public laziness feeds the media’s predilection today to distill news through polemicists of one stripe or another and to condense complex information into meaningless sound bites. On April 8, for example, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, testified before the Senate in hearings that lasted into the early evening. Although the hearings were on cable during the day, the networks offered no special programming in the evening, and newscasts were content with sound bites of McCain, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioning the general. Dueling presidential candidates were the whole story.
• Absent from most news reports was testimony concerning the administration’s ongoing efforts to forge agreements with various Iraqi factions without submitting the terms to Congress for ratification — a development with constitutional implications as potentially serious as the Watergate affair. No matter. Anyone who wanted to hear Petraeus bashed or applauded could turn to his or her preferred political cable show or click on a blog to find an unchallenging interpretation of the day’s events.
• The tepid interest in the substance of Petraeus’ testimony on the part of the public and much of the media contrasts sharply with the response to the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. All 319 hours of the first round of the hearings were televised, and 85% of Americans tuned in to at least some of the proceedings live.  I remember those weeks as a period when everyday preoccupations faded into the background and we found time, as a people, to perform our civic duty. An ongoing war may lack the drama of Watergate, but it is doubtful that anything short of another terrorist attack on our soil would convince today’s public that it ought to read the transcript of a lengthy congressional hearing or pay attention, for more than five minutes, to live news as it unfolds.
• It is past time for Americans to stop attributing the polarization of our public life to the media, the demon entity “Washington” or “the elites.” As long as we continue to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing public affairs without the filter of polemical shouting heads, we have no one to blame for the governing class and its policies but ourselves.
• I yearn to live in a society that values fair-mindedness. But it will take nothing less than a revolutionary public recommitment to the pursuit of fairness, knowledge and memory to halt, much less reverse, the trend toward an ignorant single-mindedness that threatens the future of democracy itself.

From The Los Angeles Times, “Talking to Ourselves,” written by Susan Jacoby