Calling all Americans

WELCOME TO the new era of sweetness and light! W graciously admits that the Republicans took “a thumping” in the elections, Madam Speaker-elect got a lunch date at the White House and “bipartisanship” is the flavor of the day.

The postelection rhetoric of bipartisanship is nice to see, but it can’t erase the deep divisions in the American electorate. By almost any measure, Americans are more partisan and divided than we’ve been in decades. A little more than a third of Americans are hard-core Democrats who would almost prefer to vote for Satan himself than for a Republican candidate. Another third of Americans are hard-core Republicans who assume that a vote for a Democrat pretty much is a vote for Satan. And the lonely independents waver in the middle, wondering why everyone else is always so mad at each other.

Being passionate about politics isn’t a character flaw. Policies matter: They affect who gets rich and who stays poor, who can marry and who can’t, who lives and who dies.

But where did all this nastiness and mutual mistrust come from?

It’s fueled as much by mutual ignorance and misunderstanding as by abiding philosophical and political disagreements. I know Southerners who have never met an atheist, a Catholic or a Jew, and Northeasterners who have never met an evangelical Christian. I know military officers who genuinely believe that the media want to undermine the United States, and sophisticated urbanites who assume that anyone in the military is either oppressed or a brutal macho bully.

In this era of cable news, talk radio and the Internet, we can hear only what we want to hear, see only what we want to see and read only what we want to read. As a result, when we’re confronted with difference, we react with mistrust.

Our coins still say “e pluribus unum,” but does anyone remember what it means?

It’s not too late to change this. Last week, I wrote about the widening demographic gap between the military and civilian society. The draft, for all its flaws, at least had the virtue of bringing together Americans from many different backgrounds, forcing them to learn to live and work with one another. Why not try something similar today?

No, not a military draft; I’m talking about universal national service. Why not call on every young American to spend a year or two serving our country? Some could serve in the military or in the Peace Corps; others could choose to help with post-conflict reconstruction, teach in our schools, staff our public health clinics or screen passengers at our airports.

Universal national service would help us fill hard-to-fill jobs and create a culture in which service is the norm, not the exception. Just as important, a well-designed national service program also would help break down some of the barriers that keep us from a healthy and mutually respectful political discourse.

Participants should be given some choice of how they serve, but not much -- and everyone should be required to go through several months of basic civil defense training. As in the military, participants shouldn’t be able to choose where or with whom they would train -- they should have to mix it up with people from other walks of life -- and the training should be genuinely useful, focusing on the core practical skills every citizen ought to have: first aid training, emergency response and survival skills, for instance.

So here’s my proposal for the new Congress: If you’re serious about pushing forward on nonpartisan initiatives, develop and pass legislation creating universal national service. There are several good proposals out there. Create a program that can break down the barriers between Americans from different backgrounds and help instill a shared ethic of service.

Yes, it will be expensive. Depending on the details, a universal national service program could cost up to $70 billion a year. But in the longer run, such a program would pay for itself: Participants would be doing work our society desperately needs, and they would gain economically valuable skills at the same time.

Anyway, let’s keep it in perspective: If the Bush tax cuts are made permanent, by 2013 our government will be forgoing an estimated $400 billion to $500 billion in lost revenues each year, according to a Brookings Institution report. Meanwhile, we’re spending roughly $100 billion a year on Iraq.

Compared to those expenses, the cost of a universal national service program doesn’t seem all that outrageous. And unlike the war in Iraq, which has produced, so far, only chaos and coffins, a national service program would be a real investment in America’s future, enhancing both our prosperity and our national security.

Just as important, a universal national service program might just give us back what our divided country needs most: the conviction that despite our differences, we’re all in this together.

rbrooks@latimescolumnists.com