4 min readNov 11, 2026 05:54 PM IST First published on: Nov 11, 2026 at 05:54 PM ISTThe editorial ‘Retrieving common ground in America’ (IE, November 7) was well-intentioned but failed to come to grips with the core issue. Namely, the varieties of intolerance and fundamentalisms that have afflicted America for a while.Undoubtedly, there is much to celebrate in the outcome of the midterms. The editorial does well to highlight the key victories that have renewed hope that diversity and inclusion will once again have more space in American public life. But this hope may be a mirage unless we acknowledge that intolerance is not limited to any one “side” of the social and political sphere. Common ground cannot be reduced to a set of positions on specific issues. Surely, it is about how we engage with the “other”. In that sense, the biggest danger to it, in the US or elsewhere, is that more and more discussion is being forced into a binary straitjacket.AdvertisementThe decimation of nuance and grey areas has unfolded over decades. The blame can be attributed to developments including shifts in technology, mechanisms of mass media, the rise of spin doctors in electoral politics and more. The consequence is a cultural and moral crisis. Hillary Clinton’s statement in the 2016 election campaign about Donald Trump’s supporters being a “basket of deplorables” may or may not have been a consequence of this cultural crisis, but seems to have made it worse.The editorial says, “the centre in America appears to have moved”. In terms of electoral politics, that may be true. But does the result imply some shifts in the cultural crisis that brought America to this juncture?Also Read | A Trump weakened at home could be more disruptive for the worldLike much of liberal discourse, the editorial assumes there was some “good time” when America enjoyed a stable and universally agreed-upon common ground, now destroyed by the rise of Trump-led racism and bigotry. That is only partly true. Yes, America has seen better times. I went to college in that America in the late 1970s. As a brown woman at a university in Washington, DC, I never experienced direct racism. But I always knew it was there, somewhere at the edge of my field of vision. What I admired was the unspoken understanding that even if someone held racial prejudices, they were meant to be kept under wraps, not flaunted. In Hindi, we refer to this as “ankh ki sharam”. In extremist-liberal discourse, it tends to be denounced as hypocrisy or doublespeak. In extremist-right-wing discourse, it is called weakness, even impotence.AdvertisementWhat these extremes have in common is a contempt for the unruly, fluid, intermingling energies and impulses that constitute an organic samaj. This is why the common ground that holds societies together is a much more complex phenomenon than elections. It is always more of a churning, a manthan, than a line on which you can mark a centre.you may likeThe civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr made a difference by simultaneously respecting the reality of this unequal, unfair samaj and doggedly persuading and pushing it to change. At the heart of this effort was King’s conviction that the African American could not get a better place and status in that society unless the White American was also healed and transformed from within.Common ground is that space, that energy of patience, which enables ordinary people to at least consider the possibility of such a transformation as being real. This is as much a challenge for American society as it is for us in India.Bakshi is an author and the founder of the YouTube channel Ahimsa Conversations