What We Owe One Another: Citizenship in a Divided America
America is marking 250 years as a country and heading toward another midterm election. Those two moments invite the same question: What do we owe one another now?
Not what do we owe people who think like us, vote like us, or live like us. What do we owe the people with whom we share a country, even when we disagree about what that country should become?
Citizenship is more than a legal status and more than a vote every few years. It is the daily work of staying connected to a shared future: paying attention, testing what we believe against reality, using our voices responsibly, and contributing to institutions and communities that are larger than any one person.
And democracy rests on an extraordinarily ambitious idea: people who disagree, sometimes profoundly, can still build a society together.
So what does that require of us? How do we live with disagreement? How do we establish enough shared reality to act? How should we use our voices? And what does it mean to serve something larger than ourselves?
What Do We Owe People We Do Not Know?
A country cannot hold together if citizenship is treated only as a set of individual rights. It also involves obligations to people whose lives we may never see.
Political philosopher MICHAEL SANDEL has spent decades examining justice, democracy, and the common good. His work raises a fundamental question: Is citizenship a transaction, defined by what we can claim from society, or a moral relationship with people we may never know? If our choices shape the opportunities, institutions, and communities other people inherit, then citizenship asks us to consider consequences beyond our own lives.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON approaches that obligation through a lifetime of advocacy and public service. Her career makes another point clear: democratic participation is not spectatorship. Citizenship means organizing, advocating, serving, and continuing to participate even when institutions frustrate us or outcomes don't go our way.
The first obligation of citizenship is not agreement. It is refusing to pretend that people outside our immediate circle are someone else's problem.
Can We Move Forward Without a Shared Reality?
The midterms will not only test political preferences. They will test whether citizens can make decisions together when they no longer agree on basic facts.
CNN correspondent DONIE O'SULLIVAN has reported extensively on misinformation, conspiracy theories, political extremism, and the online communities shaping how Americans understand the world. His reporting reveals why misinformation is more than a media problem. When people inhabit fundamentally different versions of reality, it changes how they understand their neighbors and institutions, and threatens the possibility of a common public life.
AMNA NAWAZ offers a different lens on journalism's role in that public life. Bringing different experiences into the same conversation doesn't eliminate disagreement. It can make disagreement intelligible, allowing people to understand what someone else sees even when they reach a different conclusion.
For Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist RONAN FARROW, citizenship also involves what we choose to notice. His work uncovering abuses of power raises a question that extends beyond the journalist doing the investigating: Will the rest of us keep looking when the truth is inconvenient? Attention is not passive when public accountability depends on it.
Former Speaker of the House JOHN BOEHNER has spent his career inside an institution built around disagreement. His experience offers a reminder that democracy does not require consensus, but it does require people who disagree to keep participating in the same system. At a moment when political opponents are increasingly treated as enemies, Boehner's perspective raises a more fundamental question: Can our institutions work if we stop seeing the people across the aisle as people we can work with?
VAN JONES brings the question directly to disagreement itself. His work engaging people across political and cultural divides explores what it takes to remain in relationship with people whose beliefs may be profoundly different from our own. Common ground does not have to mean surrendering conviction. It can mean preserving enough connection to continue sharing a country.
Shared reality does not mean shared opinion. It means having enough commitment to facts, curiosity, and one another to keep deciding what comes next.
What Does It Mean to Use Your Voice?
Citizenship is not reserved for elected officials, policy experts, or people with large platforms. It begins when someone decides that a problem should no longer remain invisible.
Medical mythbuster and health equity advocate JOEL BERVELL shows how expertise can become public service. By making complex health information accessible and exposing disparities in medicine, he uses knowledge not simply to inform but to advocate for people who may not have the same ability to make institutions listen.
ERIN BROCKOVICH demonstrates something different: influence does not have to begin with formal authority. Her advocacy shows what can happen when an individual keeps asking questions that powerful institutions would rather not answer. Sometimes civic power begins with persistence.
Neither model requires holding office. Both suggest that citizenship can begin with seeing something wrong and deciding that other people should have to see it too.
A voice matters not because it is powerful at the start, but because it can make something difficult to ignore.
What Does Public Service Require When the Stakes Are Real?
Institutions survive when people are willing to serve something larger than their own prominence, party, or moment.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff GEN. MARK MILLEY spent more than four decades in the U.S. military and ultimately served at the highest levels of national security. His experience offers a powerful way to think about institutional leadership: the institution is larger than the individual temporarily entrusted with it. Service requires accepting enormous responsibility without confusing personal power with institutional purpose.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico KEN SALAZAR has served in elected office, the Cabinet, and diplomacy. Across those roles, public service becomes a form of stewardship. No office belongs permanently to the person occupying it. The responsibility is to leave the institution capable of continuing its work after that person is gone.
That distinction matters far beyond government.
Public service is not about being seen as the person who saved the institution. It is about protecting the institution so it can continue serving people after you leave.
Where Does Citizenship Actually Happen?
National arguments become real in cities and neighborhoods, where people with different priorities have to share space, resources, institutions, and a future.
Former Los Angeles Mayor and U.S. Ambassador ERIC GARCETTI has experienced public life at both the local and international level. But governing a city makes citizenship particularly concrete. Questions about public space, safety, trust, resources, and belonging cannot remain philosophical when leaders have to turn competing needs into actual decisions.
Former Chicago Mayor and U.S. Ambassador RAHM EMANUEL offers another perspective on the unavoidable trade-offs of governing a large, diverse city. Moving forward rarely means finding an answer that satisfies everyone. It means making choices openly, navigating competing interests, and maintaining a workable civic relationship after the decision has been made.
That may be where the democratic experiment becomes most visible. The person next door may vote differently, want something different from government, and imagine a different future. They are still your neighbor.
Citizenship is practiced closest to home, where compromise is not an abstract virtue but the price of living with other people.
What Do We Owe One Another Now?
America at 250 is not a finished argument. It is an ongoing test of whether people with different histories, beliefs, and hopes can remain responsible for a future they share.
The midterms will measure votes, but citizenship is measured in the choices around those votes: whether we pay attention, whether we remain in conversation, whether we use our voices to make problems visible, and whether we contribute to institutions and communities that belong to more than one side.
The challenge of citizenship in a divided America is not figuring out how to eliminate disagreement. Democracy was never built on the assumption that we would all eventually see things the same way. It was built on the much harder proposition that people who disagree can remain responsible for one another anyway.
We do not owe one another sameness. We owe one another enough honesty, attention, participation, and care to keep moving forward together.
Continue the Conversation
HWA represents voices who help audiences examine these questions from different angles, from public service and journalism to advocacy, leadership, health equity, and civic life. Together, they offer different ways of thinking about what citizenship asks of us, especially when agreement is difficult.
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