What's next?
What's next?
The short answer
The history on this site is the record of how Americans divided and how they kept one country through it. What's next is the part we write now. Left. Right. Forward. is this project's line for it, the dolphin is its mark, and the starting point is the ground both parties already share.
Left. Right. Forward.
Every chapter on this site is history: the parties, their fights, their exclusions and the issues that split them. This page is the part that comes after the history. It is new, and it is ours.
Left. Right. Forward. Leave left and right at the door, and move forward together.
The record gives a reason to try. In 1801, after one of the most vicious elections in American history, the losing party handed over the government. Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address named the ground under both sides: "But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle" avalon.law.yale.edu. Read the story in the election of 1800.
Start from what we share
Majorities of Republicans and Democrats already give the same answer on term limits for Congress, a ban on stock trading by members, paper backups for voting machines and more. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 70% of Americans said "the people in their districts" have too little influence on the decisions members of Congress make, including 72% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats pewresearch.org.
- The starting ten: ten places both parties agree, each with its survey, dates and wording.
- We agree more than we disagree: the numbers, and why it does not feel that way.
- How to talk politics again: what the research says about conversations across the line.
The dolphin
The dolphin is this project's mark: red above, blue below, one animal moving in one direction.
Dolphins coordinate. In a 2018 study, pairs of bottlenose dolphins learned to press underwater buttons within about one second of a partner, even when one was released up to 20 seconds after the other pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. In Shark Bay, Western Australia, male bottlenose dolphins form what researchers call "the largest nonhuman alliance network known" doi.org. Those same alliances herd females with threats, which researchers classify as sexual coercion pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.
- Why the dolphin?: the cooperation evidence.
Sources
- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. avalon.law.yale.edu (locator: paragraph 2). Accessed 2026-10-28.
- Pew Research Center, "Americans' Dismal Views of the Nation's Politics," September 19, 2023 (ATP Wave 130, July 10 to 16, 2023, N=8,480). pewresearch.org (locator: report pp. 47 to 49; topline item REPR_INFL). Accessed 2026-10-28.
- Jaakkola K, Guarino E, Donegan K, King SL, "Bottlenose dolphins can understand their partner's role in a cooperative task," Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285(1887): 20180948, 2018. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (locator: Methods a to e; Results; Table 3). Accessed 2026-10-28.
- Connor RC, Krützen M, Allen SJ, Sherwin WB, King SL, "Strategic intergroup alliances increase access to a contested resource in male bottlenose dolphins," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(36): e2121723119, 2022. doi.org (locator: Abstract). Accessed 2026-10-28.
- King SL, Allen SJ, Krützen M, Connor RC, "Vocal behaviour of allied male dolphins during cooperative mate guarding," Animal Cognition 22: 991 to 1000, 2019. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (locator: Abstract; Introduction). Accessed 2026-10-28.
Last checked against its sources on October 30, 2026. Report a correction.