Dr. Matthew Moen visited the Elizabethtown College Feb. 12 for a lecture about incivility and about the use of past political climates as reference for civility today.

Moen is the President of the Gettysburg Foundation following a job as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Political Science and Lohre Distinguished Professor in his home state at the University of South Dakota from 2002-2017.

Prior to that, Moen worked at the University of Maine from 1986-2002 as a professor/chair of the Department of Political Science, the special assistant to the president, and as University of Maine System Trustee Professor.

The Gettysburg Foundation in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania operates the visitor center and museums along with the National Parks Service.

At the lecture, Director of the Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking and chair of the history department Dr. David Kenley welcomed the audience and President Carl Strikwerda, who then introduced Moen as his friend and colleague.

Moen opened his lecture by talking about the Battle of Gettysburg July 4, 1863, when the Confederate army tried to take Harrisburg and had to go through Gettysburg to get there.

He highlighted that now this place that is full of animosity and bad memories is seen as a place of forgiveness and reconciliation.

When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, he did not gloat about the Union’s victory or say anything bad about the Confederates, but instead he spoke of a united nation with a government that was “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Moen compared this time in our country’s political history to the modern day political climate by talking about the “implosion of trust” that citizens in the country have been feeling about the government.

But, as first-year Alissa Stoneking was elated to hear, Moen did not leave Gibble Auditorium feeling as though the political system was in turmoil and nothing could be done to fix it.

“I thought he did well talking about possible changes and offering potential solutions in a hopeful way that was different from most other events on campus,” Stoneking said, following the lecture.

“[These] suggestions sound naive and are hard to implement, we can experiment with changes of policy that drive a different conversation in a manner that is more consistent without democratic values,” Moen told his audience.

He also reassured everybody that America is not full of hopeless victims of dystopian novels.

Moen came to Gettysburg “in the hopes of making Gettysburg more of a focal point in this country for conversations about the sustenance and the maintenance of American democracy,” he said prior to the lecture.

He studies Lincoln because of the precedent that Lincoln set when it comes to outreach to the American people in a way that allowed democracy to survive.

He believes that when it comes to media, Americans pick and choose what they want to hear, which causes them to not listen to dissenting viewpoints, even if they are respectful and not necessarily incorrect.

People have become less and less respectful which is becoming a problem as well.

In a recent Survey of Trust in Business, Government, Non-Government Organizations and the Media, it was found that people today have had an “implosion of trust” of motives and institutions.

Moen believes that although this loss of trust is definitely a problem, it is a problem that can be fixed.

Moen feels that America needs to try to figure out where this lack of trust is coming from and figure out a way to fix it, but he believes that it can be done.

He believes that there are many factors including a technological change, gerrymandering, and the erosion of trust in institutions that led to the incivility in today’s political climate.

Moen believes that incivility is reaching new levels that are different in terms of rancor, making it difficult to find common-ground solutions to issues in today’s society.