Category: Transpartisan Notes

To ONLY be used with the Standard Weekly Transpartisan Notes. This category sorts Transpartisan Notes into their own section.

Find-the-Matrix: Different Standards

Why This Liberal Mayor Doesn’t Want a Lecture From Progressives

Transpartisan Note #150

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Matrix sits behind most, if not all, of todays’ partisan political smash-ups. Here New York Times Silicon Valley columnist Kara Swisher interviews San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed about law enforcement.

Two paragraphs from the summary of the Swisher/Breed interview point to the Matrix in the “defund the police” scrum. The left/right “defund vs. give more money to” the police (the cartoonish characterization of the nation’s wrenching law enforcement debate) gets a lot of ink in all kinds of “journalism”. In the process it dumbs down the discourse on national law enforcement.

Left/Right debates like this one sketch out the horizontal axis of the Matrix in cartoonish often clownish entertainment terms. Cartoons have consequences. In this case, they provoke harm to protesters and police, incivility within families and between neighbors, and a malaise of doubt as both “freedom” and “order” fall victim to media events that range from dignified to histrionic.

“Freedom” and “Order” form the vertical axis of the Matrix. On both the political left and right, debates rage between and within those championing order and those searching for freedom. Resolution of issues through the solving of problems, we suggest, most often occurs when all four quadrants of the Matrix – order left and right and freedom left and right – share in developing the resolution.

Here are the two paragraphs in the summary of the Swisher/Breed interview that give a taste of the Matrix from the left. Note that London makes the point of her experience growing up and her internal efforts to provide both security and trusted police. We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a tool, for those interested, to dig further into contemporary political issues than the partisan arm wrestle for power offers most people.

San Francisco’s politicians are struggling to find a Goldilocks balance when it comes to public safety, and Democrats across the nation should pay attention. After declaring a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood to deal with what she called a public health crisis of opioid use, Mayor London Breed has been criticized for taking too strong a hand in forcing people to seek treatment for drugs or mental health problems.

…

“In this conversation with Kara Swisher, Breed talks about the crackdown she’s leading and whether she was ever the ‘defund the police’ mayor some in the media painted her to be (and critiqued her for stepping away from). Breed says her experience growing up in a public housing development in the Western Addition neighborhood gives her a perspective many of her critics may not have. ‘They have a theory as to what they believe based on their ideology, but they’re also white,’ she says. ‘They are not Black people who had these unfortunately traumatizing experiences in communities where there’s not trust with the police, but also there’s a desire to be safe.’

You can listen to the entire interview on a recent NYTimes Sway podcast. A transcript of the interview is also provided. For a bit of additional spice consider this quote form the summary of the interview:

Swisher and Breed discuss “…how Black mayors like Breed, Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago are ‘held to a completely different standard.’”

FIND THE MATRIX…PENETRATE THE NEWS!

(Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Find-the-Matrix: Biden-Cheney 2024

Friedman Goes Transpartisan?

Transpartisan Note #149

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times opinion writer with deep roots reporting from the Middle East, asks, in his January 11, 2022 column, why look to Israel’s current government for insight into contemporary American politics?

“Answer,” he writes, “it’s the most diverse national unity government in Israel’s history, one that stretches from Jewish settlers on the right all the way to an Israeli-Arab Islamist party and super-liberals on the left. Most important, it’s holding together, getting stuff done and muting the hyperpolarization that was making Israel ungovernable …  [and] I,” Friedman writes,” pay close attention to the Israeli-Palestinian arena … a lot of trends get perfected there first and then go global … It’s Off Broadway to Broadway …”

Then he asks a second question:

“Is that what America needs in 2024 – a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination. Before you leap into the comments section, hear me out.”

We suggest hear him out.

He says, “… [R]ightist Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and left-of-center Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid (they are to switch places after two years) … swallowed their pride” and came together to defeat then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, “a smarter Donald Trump.”  For the first time, an Israeli Arab party, the Islamist organization Raam, played a vital role in cementing an Israeli coalition.” Could it happen here?

We see normal politics as featuring adversaries promoting single-quadrant solutions, which, by resisting the other three quadrants, inevitably fail. We see and are committed to including in the political debate integrated, four-quadrant solutions to individual issues. We see this as emerging transpartisan politics illustrated by Our Towns Deborah and James Fallows’ book on local America reporting that “a local-level wave of renewal and re-engagement is already underway.”

Friedman’s article cites Israel’s United Government, bringing together all-quadrants on all issues as a democratic republic’s response to threats to democracy. He offers it as a government form and possible model for Americans to follow in resisting threats to democracy by Netanyahu/Trump-style administrative state paralysis. He hints that a unity (transpartisan?) government holds countries together, gets stuff done, and mutes the hyperpolarization that makes a country ungovernable. Does he have a point?

Read Friedman on the Biden-Cheney ticket impulse and Find the Matrix.

FIND THE MATRIX…PENETRATE THE NEWS!

(Images from Wikimedia Commons.)

Find-the-Matrix: Global Radicalism vs. the Power of Citizens

What academics lament,
the power of community can overcome.

Transpartisan Note #148

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

In a recent NYTimes essay, Trumpism Without Borders, Thomas B. Edsall suggests that the “peculiarly American characteristics” of Donald Trump’s presidency has blinded us to the spread of radical disorder worldwide, writing:

“America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism, and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump.”

Mr. Edsall goes on to explore this idea by examining the work of Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky who see a “common thread to these seemingly disparate developments” as a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline”.

“The authors elaborate in their paper, ‘A post-liberal theory of stratification.’ Loss like this, they write, can be experienced by children as a dramatic decline in their chances of achieving a standard of living as high as that of their parents. It is experienced by men as a decline in the gender pay gap, occupational segregation, and other types of loss relative to women. It is experienced by manufacturing workers as a sharp loss in the number of high-paying union jobs. It is experienced by “rust belt” families as a loss of employment and earnings to China and other countries.”

…

“The politics of loss have, in turn, empowered the populist right by encouraging the view ‘that disadvantaged groups have unfairly benefited from legal protections, egalitarian social movements and government and charitable assistance. These initiatives, far from facilitating fair and open competition, are instead seen as overshooting the mark and providing unfair advantage,’ ushering in “a new era of high grievance, high conflict, and high ideology.”

 

Edsall’s article is an interesting read, expanding beyond Jackson & Grusky’s assessment of this “ubiquity of loss” to include the Danish political scientist Pieter Vanhuysse’s elaboration on the issue:

“… a major strain on democracy is the rise of unequal life chances along multiple dimensions. Take education/human capital: as automation and digitization will also be major forces perturbing the world economy, it is likely that new divides will sharpen between human capital haves and have-nots at the level of both nations and persons. These inequalities, Vanhuysse argued, may be exacerbated by seemingly unfair practices. For instance, richer nations are likely to engage still more in poorer-to-richer nation brain drain practices, coming from the lower- or middle-income countries that invested massive public resources in producing these skills.”

Mr. Edsall presents plenty of examples corroborating Vanhuysse’s views with comments from Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University; Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, economists at M.I.T; and three recent public policy publications on global trends including “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020” from the World Bank.

But it’s Daniel Esty, a professor of environmental law at Yale, description of “how tribalism, hostility toward outsiders, notably immigrants, and the emergence of what some call ‘exclusionary nationalism’ all serve to undermine prospects for global cooperation” which strikes a nerve:

“Global collaboration on concerns such as climate change has become more difficult even as the urgency of the issue and the inescapability of global-scale action with no nation free-riding off the efforts of others become ever more clear. The broad-based rise of tribalism/nationalism sharpens “us” versus “them” thinking and makes cooperative responses to any realm of international policymaking — pandemic response, climate change, and trade — more challenging.”

These arguments come from those who would see The Transpartisan Review in their camp, so to speak – their natural ally, supporter, and advocate. However, despite being important perspectives and based largely on shared factual analysis, we see these views as 180 degrees distinct from the realities and possibilities of the solutions available to embrace.

The structural problem of their analysis is a debasement of the process in a way that the vast majority of people (who have the good sense to see the problems and have ways to resolve them) are purposely and/or inadvertently excluded from the structures designed for decision making, both for themselves and their communities. Their analysis is necessary and comprehensive, but ignores the potential of the very individuals and communities struggling with these societal challenges their examinations set out to expose.

Likewise, their analysis ignores the positive impact that community-based solutions can provide to many of the issues they examine. In fact, we see, from a transpartisan perspective, a potential benefit from all issues when addressed by an engaged community. For example, seeking solutions to the loss of manufacturing jobs can lead to the creation of higher-paying jobs, modernized work conditions, and better education if addressed properly. These solutions are more likely to come from engaged citizens immersed in the issues affecting their lives than from decision-makers and lobbyists with political or financial agendas who make up an integral part of the system needing comprehensive change. Breaking down the barriers to citizen participation in daily living is at the heart of the transpartisan process as we see it.

Read this article and look for the Transpartisan Matrix we see. Whether you see a Matrix or not let’s discuss this article and its value/relevance to our Transpartisan undertaking in the comments below.

(Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Mapping the Transpartisan Terrain

Transpartisan Note #147

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Movement has emerged out of increasing political conflict, which has made it difficult for governments to govern effectively and sustainably. Over the past ten or fifteen years, growing numbers of organizations have emerged to search for and promote a new ‘transpartisan’ politics, integrating the useful aspects of both Left and Right into a vision that reduces conflict and promotes policies to solve problems that have proven difficult for both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Why the Issue Matters

This discussion explores the efforts of ‘transpartisan’ organizations to reduce conflict and promote collaboration in our politics. Despite efforts going back more than a decade, progress has been hard to see—at least in terms of the crude measurements below. This ‘Mapping’ exercise was designed to identify leading examples of these efforts and evaluate them. We hope the effort helps improve current approaches as well as develop new, more effective ones.

The Challenge(s) We Face

Political challenges. The book Our Towns, by James and Deborah Fallows, provides a narrative of a political challenge(s) that we believe is quite fundamental. They traveled 100,000 miles around the country and observed two very different political cultures operating simultaneously, with nontrivial numbers of the same people (it appears) operating in both. One is the centralized political systems organized around the federal and state governments, with information about them almost entirely dependent on the mass media, especially broadcast and cable television. This system is torn apart by partisan conflict, which systematically undermines almost all efforts at effective government. The other is the powerfully collaborative governance of people working together to solve every imaginable kind of local problem. Information about this system is gained either by local or social media, or by personal experience.

These two political ‘systems’ can also be seen statistically, featuring 30% of age-eligible citizens, 15% on the Right (Republicans) and 15% on the Left (Democrats), who are partisans. On both sides they have deeply moral views of issues, which addict them to conflict and moral condemnation of opponents. The other 70% of age-eligible citizens are transpartisans (also called ‘problem-solvers’), who work together and accomplish enormous good at the local level, solving local problems.

The 30% of partisans control nearly 100% of elected officials at both national and state levels.

Besides controlling all major governments, the partisan political class, working in implicit alliance with the mass media (especially television), dominates the public debates on both federal and state issues. We believe this 30% of partisans controlling nearly one 100% of all elected positions is one, if not the principal, cause of the conflict and polarization that paralyze our centralized political institutions and make effective central governments all but impossible.

Social and psychological challenges. Through the end of World War II tradition provided the principal source of social order and trust for most people. In the 1950s, demands for self-expression started to challenge tradition in all social and political sectors, and in the sixties the challenges exploded throughout the society.

The decline of tradition and increasing demands for self-expression set in motion complex, manifold effects in all social, artistic, and political arenas—all of them destabilizing established orders. Edmund Burke stated the essential challenge in 1781 as follows: ‘Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.’ Without order, therefore, from either within or without, neither society nor freedom is possible. The question facing us was how we would find ‘within’ the order we had gotten over centuries from tradition ‘without’.

What Transpartisans are Doing at Present to Meet These Challenges

Addressing the political challenge. Transpartisans believe good ideas win. Although they claim to be promoting new ideas, reframed from current debates, the great majority of transpartisan organizations and advocates come from the conflict resolution or conflict management fields, and they focus all their efforts on bringing together people on issues defined by the current, larger political debate.

By concentrating their efforts on the terms of the current debate, these organizations, without intending this result, restrict and limit themselves to issues as defined by the partisan 30%–assuming there are no other ways of seeing the issues. Some critics will engage and struggle with this mechanism as a way of defining the issues they consider important. They wonder if this framing of issues does not serve the partisan political class by focusing entirely on their narratives. Transpartisans operating to engage the partisan system on the issues they focus on fail for several reasons:

    1. Almost none of them makes any effort to represent or appeal to the 70% of age-eligible transpartisans, who focus on solving problems.
    2. By starting from issues framed by the current debate, they implicitly embrace the hidden assumptions about what is important from approaches that have shown no capacity either to reduce conflict or to solve problems (see #6 below for more on this).
    3. By avoiding consideration of new ways of approaching problems, they do not learn from successful programs. They cannot learn, for example, from methodologies that are working even with the most ‘difficult’ populations. (‘Working’ here not only means achieving unusual results working with them. It also means framing issues in ways that bring people together and transcend political opposition.)

In The Transpartisan Review we have often referred to this point, highlighting a number of specific programs, including the Delancey Street Foundation (drug and alcohol rehabilitation, founded in San Francisco, now with satellite programs in other cities); the Girls’ Community Schools, sponsored by UNICEF in ‘the epicenter of radical Islam’, around the city of Asyut in Egypt; other girls’ empowerment programs in similar regions in Pakistan dominated by radical Islam; Educate Girls Globally (empowers girls to drive change in schools and low-income communities); and the All-Stars Program (offering renowned programming in fitness and performing arts in New York City).

    1. By embracing issues defined by the partisan and polarized national debate, they only reinforce the negative roles of the mass media and the political class, who are locked into polarized positions that appeal to their theatrical psycho-drama, scripted largely by conflict.
    2. In terms of our (Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner) analytical tool for understanding politics, the Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, transpartisans who define issues based on the current partisan debate show little or no consideration of the complex interaction of values and approaches that might both bring people together and solve problems. There is only perpetuation of the simplistic Left-Right political spectrum, which rigidly and absolutely separates political and ideological positions, asserting that all wisdom is either on one side or the other, that neither side has anything to learn from the other—ever.
    3. Finally, these organizations and advocates are failing because they make ‘public policy’ and government efforts to solve economic and social problems all about governments solving problems mechanically. They rarely, if ever, consider the crucial role that citizens can play—organically and subjectively—on issues including, but not limited to, school reform; health and health care; law enforcement and criminal justice issues; drug rehabilitation; and even foreign and security policy. Without the active participation of the 70% transpartisan citizens in each of these areas, there will never be anything approaching solutions to any of them.

Addressing the social and psychological challenges. There is little understanding of these issues in transpartisan organizations. That does not mean they are doing nothing to meet these challenges, however. Communication (dialogues) can provide an important source of order and trust, which will help address at least part of the social and psychological challenges. There is much more to these challenges than this, which are beyond the scope of this Note because none of the current, major organizations we have examined is addressing them.

Note on The Transpartisan Review, Searching for New Approaches

The Transpartisan Review’s Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix adds complexity to the simple Left-Right spectrum, which dominates both the mainstream debate and efforts to influence it. The most important intellectual element The Transpartisan Review adds is consideration of the increasing importance of subjective issues that intensify the challenges presented by equality and justice, which are the favored arena of the Order Left. When tradition dominates social life, people tend to accept inequalities defined by tradition. Increasing individuation (consciousness of self) intensifies peoples’ perceptions of inequality and injustice. Individuation will also tend to stimulate the desire and even demands for an active, citizen role in solving problems.

At the heart of The Transpartisan Review’s approach to meet this challenge is a commitment to empowerment of citizens through shared co-ownership of public institutions such as schools, health care, and law enforcement. In this perspective, ownership (shared ownership) turns people inward to improve what they own (co-own) and reduces the dominance of impulse to the Politics of Grievance, complaining about perceived injustices.

Until now, The Transpartisan Review has limited its consideration of these issues to intellectual and philosophical analyses. We have largely ignored theatrical challenges in presentation, which are essential to gain the attention of a theatrically-minded mass media to the substantive issues at hand. The Transpartisan Review is exploring theatrical strategies that would force/entice the media to provide it’s consumers with prominent coverage of new, reframed ways of looking at problems. Despite their prioritizing delivery of audiences to advertisers, mass media is still the most effective way to showcase solutions which bring together the constituencies often depicted as enemies (for theatrical purpose), who nonetheless have become allies when pursuing four-quadrant strategies on particular issues.

What We Need to Do to Face the Challenges

We could have listed our first entry here under failures above, but this first entry under what we should do differently is so far removed from the ‘transpartisan’ agendas of either organizations or advocates that it seemed ‘strained’ to inject it there. It requires some background to explain. We need to start here with an assertion: good ideas often do not win. Understanding how 30% of people who are partisans control 100% of elected officials in state and federal offices requires understanding how an implicit alliance between the 30% in the political class, and the mass media are sustaining a theater of conflict that is our political ‘debate’. The discussion below argues that the overwhelming majority of ‘transpartisan’ organizations, which think they are in the transpartisan business while reinforcing partisan conflicts, need to be added to the destabilizing forces.

The world runs not on ideas, but perceptions of ideas. In this world of media, both mass and social media, the principal terms of debate are determined by a political psychodrama defined by the 30% in the political class (15% on each side) working in implicit collusion with the mass media, which while claiming to be in the news business are really in the entertainment business, presenting adversaries as representatives of Darkness and Light in a psychodrama. Donald Trump, whose only successful professional experience has been as an entertainer, was perfectly cast—casting himself—as the Prince of Darkness, representing the racist masses.

While many people believe that post-Covid people will go back to doing what they did before, there are important signs they are breaking in important ways from the past, at least economically.

    1. Our priority is to develop a perspective that sees politics as theater—starting with what the major current parties are doing; and then imagining an alternative theatrical path to a Four-Quadrant future acted out theatrically so the media will be forced/seduced to cover it, even celebrate it.
    2. Establishing critical mass and challenging perceptions well established will require concentrating force so the media will be excited to cover activities staged to challenge governing narratives on issues.

(Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.)

The Fulcrum Announces New Transpartisan Column

Transpartisan Note #146

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Last week, The Fulcrum, a new democracy project from the Bridge Alliance, announced an upcoming expansion of their website and daily newsletter and, with it, a new transpartisan column, Beyond Right & Left, to be written by Fulcrum contributors Mark Gerzon and Chris Gates. We’re excited to witness The Fulcrum’s rapid growth and want to congratulate Mark and Chris for taking on the daunting task of writing about issues from a transpartisan perspective.

From everything we know about their plan, we think The Fulcrum, working with thought leaders like Mark and Chris, can only strengthen the transpartisan movement at a time when the mainstream political debate desperately needs new ideas, seeking new paths to bring people together and solve real problems.

The co-authors introduced their column in powerful terms:

Our column . . . will bring a passionately transpartisan perspective to the conversation. We use the word ‘transpartisan’ with full intentionality here. We hope to talk about issues in a way that explicitly transcends the old way our country thinks and talks about the issues of democracy and divides.

They are very clear about what they will NOT do:

We don’t intend to balance perspectives on the left with perspectives on the right, which is an often-used frame for a ‘bi-partisan’ conversation. Instead we hope to bring a fresh point of view that explicitly calls into question the old, and in our minds outdated, political spectrum of ‘Left-Center-Right’. While traditionalists can tie themselves into knots as they debate where they and their opponents stand on that divisive, one-dimensional map, our experience tells us that more and more people are rejecting that type of simplistic labeling. As former Senator Bill Bradley famously said, almost no one wakes up in the morning thinking about where their lives and points of view sit on that spectrum. Our experience bears that out.

Both Chris and Mark bring long and powerful experiences in initiatives to strengthen American democracy. Chris has led three national organizations, the National Civic League, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, and the Sunlight Foundation. He has advised many nonprofits and foundations on issues related to democracy reform, and he has widely spoken about democratic theory and philanthropic practices.

As president of the Mediators Foundation, Mark has helped launch many bridge-building activities; and he has also written several books on ways to understand and address the growing polarization in American politics, including A House Divided: Six Belief Systems Struggling for America’s Soul and The Reunited States: How We Can Bridge the Partisan Divide.

The timing of their launch is fortuitous in relation to several activities we at The Transpartisan Review have recently initiated with new partners. The most important among them, we think, involves sharpening understanding of the role the transpartisan movement can play in the larger political arena.

We think the mainstream political debate has been so degraded that we need to expand our mission beyond the current arguments. We must include issues and interested parties that current politics ignores or marginalizes. We think these issues and parties, though hidden, may nevertheless be crucial to bring people together and solve problems that have shown themselves resistant to conventional reform. We especially look forward to opportunities for exchanging and debating ideas in ways that we expect will be unique and will, over time, attract new, interested parties to the transpartisan political movements taking shape locally, nationally, and globally.

(Image from Markus Winkler/Pexels.com. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Find-the-Matrix: Messing with Elections

“Not content with limiting voting rights, Republicans are threatening the integrity of vote counting itself.”

Transpartisan Note #145

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a descriptive, analytical, and energetic snapshot of contemporary American politics. In NYTimes writer Richard L. Hasen’s latest op-ed, Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections, the author examines how he believes Republicans are putting politics before the people by manipulating the system which supports our fundamental right to have all our voices heard.

At the core of Mr. Hasen’s piece is an exploration of the “battle over voter suppression”. From Georgia to Nevada, Texas to Michigan, and many states in between, elected and appointed officials are being censured, stripped of authority, and forced from office by conservatives looking to suppress and control the votes and the voters in their states, he says:

“A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.”

Although it is unsettling the number of examples he shares, Mr. Hasen’s goal is not simply to jolt us with a wake-up call. He also offers concrete solutions that we believe suggest the  transpartisan impulse or imperative at the core of American political activity.

“So what can be done? To begin with, every jurisdiction in the United States should be voting with systems that produce a paper ballot that can be recounted in the event of a disputed election. Having physical, tangible evidence of voters’ choices, rather than just records on electronic voting machines, is essential to both guard against actual manipulation and protect voter confidence in a fair vote count.”

Let us also note, Democrats who argued about fraud in the 2004 election as well as Republicans unhappy with the outcome of the 2020 election both call for paper ballots.

That’s not all. He goes on to highlight the importance of business and civic leaders speaking out; the need for Congress to fix the rules for counting Electoral College votes; the necessity of a nonpartisan  (we would say transpartisan, agreed-upon solutions rather than split-the-difference compromises); administration of elections; and, most importantly, the imperative of meaningful support for the people counting the votes. Republicans are pushing bills through state legislature they say will build confidence in elections outcomes. Democrats says this legislation will suppress votes. Use our matrix to sort out the claims and see what you think.

“…we need a national effort to support those who will count votes fairly. Already we are seeing a flood of competent election administrators retiring from their often-thankless jobs, some after facing threats of violence during the 2020 vote count. Local election administrators need political cover and the equivalent of combat pay, along with adequate budget resources to run fair elections.”

He ends the article by making it clear that,

 “…the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now. It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution. But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.”

The Transpartisan Review reports on ideas, actions, and events that underscore the opportunity to find societal solutions by avoiding the all too common hyper-partisan and deadlock-threatening efforts often passed off as “politics” by our daily media. We point out that the current Democratic/Republican – Left/Right political duopoly made up of 30% of the US constitutional political constituency controls 99% of all the country’s elected offices.

The people want their vote counted fairly. Read Mr. Hasen’s article and look for the Transpartisan Matrix.

(Image CC BY-SA 2.0 by Michael Fleshman. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Find-the-Matrix: The Exasperated Core

Does Anyone See the ‘Exhausted Majority’?

Transpartisan Note #144

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Review operates on the belief that a system which incorporates more than a left/right bias is needed to discover productive solutions to our societal and political issues. In a recent NYTimes op-ed, We See the Left. We See the Right. Can Anyone See the ‘Exhausted Majority’?, Thomas B. Edsall asks:

Does Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 represent the last gasp of an exhausted moderate tradition or does a potentially powerful center lie dormant in our embattled political system?

Mr. Edsall paints a compelling picture of the left/right polarization structured into US two party politics.  We believe the data shows that polarization involves about 30% of the electorate roughly divided evenly between left and right activists.  That leaves about 70% of the electorate with no place to go to either express their policy preferences or satisfy their sense of belonging.  Rather than thinking of this 70% as the ‘Exhausted Majority’ we tend to think of it as the ‘Exasperated Core’ which has the positive attribute of including some red and some blue.  In states as diverse on the red/blue-right/left continuum as Georgia, Texas, California, Utah, Michigan, New York, and Arizona intense political identity battles rage not only between the reds and blues but also within both the reds and blues.

How about where the 30% agree, especially with the 70%? Mr. Edsall shares one particular study:

“A Not So Divided America,” conducted by the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland for a centrist group, Voice of the People. It found that if you compare “the views of people who live in red Congressional districts or states to those of people who live in blue Congressional districts or states,” on “only 3.6 percent of the questions – 14 out of 388 – did a majority or plurality of those living in red congressional districts/states take a position opposed to that of a majority or plurality of those living in blue districts/states.”

We offer our Transpartisan Matrix – the horizontal right/left axis crossed by the vertical order/freedom axis – as one possible contribution to understanding and harnessing the energy of that Exasperated Core – like the core of a nuclear reactor – to focus on resolving our current problems and taking the next leap into a positive powerful future.  Here is our Matrix:

We illustrate the shift from a continuum to a Matrix for analyzing current US politics by offering the idea of expanding the concept of a political compass to the broader idea of a political gyroscope. Let us know if the Matrix and/or the gyroscope helps to understand the information presented by Mr. Edsall.

(Image from Wikimedia and available CC BY-SA 3.0 from VIPSuperDave. Additional text, editing, and the gyroscope image by Andy Fluke.)

Find-the-Matrix: Brooks on GOP Woes

Transpartisan Note #143

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

In his April 22nd N.Y. Times op-ed, forebodingly titled The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse, self-described “conservative columnist” David Brooks says “those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused”.

The far too common vicious verbal attacks and radicalized rhetoric from the Trumpian right, Brooks explains, disguises an apparent issue at the core of the matter:

“It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.”

In his article, Brooks shares numbers to back this idea up. His first example, provided to the NYTimes, comes from pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson:

“When asked in late January if politics is more about ‘enacting good public policy’ or ‘ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,’ 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.”

He also shares the even more telling results of an Economist-YouGov poll which “asked Americans which statement is closest to their view”:

“‘It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated’ or ‘Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.’ Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose ‘a big, beautiful world.’ Two-thirds of Trump voters chose ‘our lives are threatened.’”

Adding “this level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality”. This is no silent, aggression-fueled anxiety exposed by pollsters:

“‘The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,’ Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. ‘The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.’”

Unfortunately, this type of assessment from the radicalized right is far too common and predicates the ill-informed and emotional reactions they have to the societal and political change required for lasting solutions.

We at The Transpartisan Review believe that our Transpartisan Matrix can help sort out this overheated, media-emboldened, rhetorical combat displayed by the far right.

David Brooks is not so optimistic:

This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of macho display.

I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

We operate on the belief that a system which incorporates more than the hyper-partisan left/right continuum, embracing instead a left/right, order/freedom, four quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, might help focus our energy on positive outcomes. Viewing events through the lens of this Matrix, we believe, offers an opportunity for the simmering anger taking place in widely divergent sectors of  society to be harnessed to the possibility of   discovering workable  solutions to our societal and political issues. We see this Matrix as a more friendly, useable, and broader framework than relying solely on the left/right continuum to understand the natural, social-economic, and cultural forces shaping our daily political life and the unfolding national and global future.

Do you see our Matrix in Brooks’ conservative examination of the societal and political insecurity and apprehension demonstrated by conservative Trumpian Republicans?

(Image CC BY-SA 2.0 by Lorie Shaull. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Do We Need a Functional GOP?

“Could the functions of a two-party system be performed in some other manner?”

Transpartisan Note #142

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

From the very beginning, we have operated on the belief that a system which incorporates more than a left/right bias is needed to discover productive solutions to our societal and political issues.

We do this by suggesting the expansion of the hyper-partisan left/right continuum to a left/right, order/freedom Transpartisan Matrix and present it as a handier, more helpful, less constrained metric to help translate unfolding political events into a serviceable shorthand. We see it as a more useable and broader framework than the left/right continuum to understand the natural, social-economic and cultural forces shaping our daily political life and the unfolding national and global future.

We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a tool to help clarify the voice of the people:

For example, this February 2nd, 2021 New York Times opinion article, Pundits are Wrong. We Don’t Need a Functional GOP, by Jennifer Rubin analyzes the future of the US Republican Party in terms we feel fit our Transpartisan Matrix approach. What do you think?

In the op-ed, Ms. Rubin begins with a very direct question:

A two-party system serves two functions. First, it provides choice to voters and discipline to each party. Second, it aids in organizing legislative bodies. But could those functions be performed in some other manner?

And suggests an interesting perspective:

[P]ining for a sane Republican Party — a “center right” party — makes sense only if one thinks such a party has a constituency and sufficient distance from the Democratic Party. Can you find a base for a party that, say, wants to spend a trillion dollars instead of $1.9 trillion on a covid-19 relief bill? Perhaps in a few states, but nationwide, it is unclear that there is a felt need for a Democratic-lite party, beyond rich donors. It is even harder to find a substantial base for a Barry Goldwater-style “small government” party. Neither side ran on such a platform in 2020.

She then turns to William Kristol, editor-at-large for The Bulwark, for a little wisdom on the nature of things:

It is no secret that modern conservatism, in large part a response to the Cold War, is ideologically spent. The Bulwark’s William Kristol got to the nub of it in a September post:

So perhaps we need to acknowledge that it has come to this: Real, existing conservatism as it exists in America in 2020 is an accomplice to, an apologist for, and an enabler of Trump’s nativist, populist, unconservative, and illiberal authoritarianism. …

[P]erhaps every political movement has a natural lifespan: Modern American conservatism was born in 1955, peaked in full flower in the 1980s, and then aged, mostly gracefully, for three decades. Until it could easily, if suddenly, be pushed aside in its dotage—forced, or induced, to surrender to its younger and stronger, if disreputable, distant relative.

Mr. Kristol returns to this idea (and an exploration of British thriller television programs) in a recent podcast that you can listen to here.

The Transpartisan Review reports on ideas, actions, and events that underscore the opportunity for ‘politics’ beyond the current hyper-partisan, deadlock threatening, hapless efforts passed off as politics by our daily media. We point out that the current Democratic/Republican – Left/Right political duopoly made up of 30% of the US constitutional political constituency controls 99% of all the country’s elected offices. The people want a voice.

We invite you to read Ms. Rubin’s article and “Find the Matrix.”

(Feature illustration by Andy Fluke CC BY-SA 4.0. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)