Retired four-star General Wesley Clark visited Grand Valley State University’s Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies where he spoke about overcoming the polarization in American politics.
“What you find is that politics is more about the heart than it is about the head.”
In 2004, retired four-star General Wesley Clark ran as a Democratic presidential candidate. Clark explains the emotional reaction to politics is widening and the media covers the conflict.
“We’re being driven by the mechanics of the system toward polarization. The question is, can we halt that polarization and move us back to common ground as Americans.”
What can be done to rediscover the common ground?
“Well, I think you can try through education of the electorate. I think can try through some modification of laws. I don’t know if you can get the fairness in media law back. Maybe you could? But I think the way that it’s happened in the past for America is that we’ve gone to war and that’s not an acceptable alternative right now…We have to somehow find a way to link the rational and the emotional, the head and the heart, and prove that democracy is a system that works in the 21st Century or democracy will parish form the face of the earth and we don’t want that.”
Patrick Center, WGVU News.