By Steve Brawner, © 2019 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

It’s always dangerous to quote one of our four most recent presidents including the current one, because so many readers despise one or two of them – often exactly two, depending on the reader’s political persuasion. Most people seem OK with former President Jimmy Carter, age 95.

But sometimes one of those presidents says something so insightful that it’s worth the risk.

Former President Bill Clinton spoke at the 200th anniversary celebration of the Arkansas Gazette’s founding Nov. 21, and this is what he had to say about Russia’s interference in American elections, as quoted by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“Their real goal is to break the conviction that we can know and we can act on what we know, and we can predict the consequences of acting on what we know,” the 42nd president said.

Clinton painted a dark picture of where this is leading, saying, “Technology and the movement toward authoritarianism all over the world are driving us to the point where ordinary people may find it hard to tell fact from fiction or truth from a bald-faced lie. If that happens, it will be impossible to sustain meaningful democratic government.”

The remedy? “We need to know things, and we need to be able to have discussions, even arguments, with our neighbors based on the same set of facts,” he said.

It was not so long ago that Americans were working off the same set of facts reported by a relatively small number of media outlets – one of the three national TV networks led by CBS’ Walter Cronkite, radio stations, and newspapers.

Importantly, those facts were based on a set of assumptions shared by a majority of Americans. It was assumed that the United States was the good guy and that the Russians were the villain. The American Dream was assumed to be attainable. Consumption was assumed to be completely desirable. Americans more or less shared a common religion, an Americanized version of Christianity.

This was not a perfect arrangement, and I’m not trying to glorify it. Walter Cronkite made mistakes like the rest of us, and those assumptions allowed many injustices and wrongs to be swept under the rug. But the arrangement did make democracy easier in this diverse land.

Assumptions these days are no longer so widely shared. And people being people, we choose to consume information that confirms our assumptions. Americans who watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh are presented an entirely different worldview than those reading liberal blogs. And if they rely on Facebook for their news? Goodness.

Return to what Clinton said earlier: If ordinary citizens can’t tell truth from lies, “it will be impossible to sustain meaningful government.”

Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem unable to agree on anything and don’t seem to want to try. And why should they? They and their constituents are working off different facts and assumptions.

The result is that our country’s democratic processes are breaking down at the national level. The federal government is running a $1 trillion budget deficit this year not because the economy is failing, but because the political system is. Votes to impeach and then remove a president from office – arguably the most serious actions Congress can take other than declaring war – are falling entirely along partisan lines. If members of the House of Representatives were a jury pool, the lawyers would object to all of them.

Clinton said he read six newspapers a day when working as a senatorial staffer in the 1960s. Three leaned left and three leaned right, but the reporters offered the same set of facts.

“I think that’s what we need to look for again, and then we need to be able to trust people with that mission,” he said.

Yes, you have to look for objective fact-based journalism a little, but it’s not hard to find. It still occurs, particularly in newspapers.

That would be a first step. If we can start with facts, then maybe we’ll have better and more universally shared assumptions.

Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.