Category: Transpartisan Notes

Transpartisan Note #6

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Seventy percent of voters say they think the country is going in the wrong direction. The numbers of voters registering as independents, declining to associate with either party, continues to increase and is now 42%, more than either Democrats or Republicans. Reflecting on the campaigns that began with the conventions will provide huge opportunities to explore new (more than partisan) reasons for voter unhappiness.

Voters are unhappy with partisan conflict – they want political leaders to work together at least on things we agree about.

The media tends to be more in the entertainment than the news business. In this business conflict (entertaining ‘stories’) sell. Covering political events like conventions, the media imitate the partisans. ‘Balanced’ panels, editorials, commentary mean Republican/conservative and Democratic/progressive spokespeople squaring off. Following this formula, CNN covering the Democrats, made little effort to represent Trump or Sanders supporters – only poor Jeffrey Lord, by himself, for Trump and no one for Sanders, facing seven others, some active partisans, others ‘neutral’.

Why not include transpartisan voices, highlighting the tension between freedom and order on both left and right, which would help explain conflicts within the two sides and reveal positions partisans ignore because they agree. (One conservative activist in Washington scoffed at a project promoting education for girls in developing countries with scarcely-concealed disgust: ‘Well, no one could be against that!’)

What can you say about a society that cannot do what people agree about? As transpartisans, we think that is fundamentally wrong.

Wouldn’t it be news to show transpartisans bringing partisans together to solve problems? Organizations like Living Room Conversations are starting to promote dialogues between left and right. Conversations about issues that create transpartisan solutions can entertain. They can also give people hope, which is in tragically short supply right now.

(Photo from the 2016 Republican Debate by user “Gage Skidmore” found here and licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Transpartisan Note #5

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Reports agree: the Republican and Democratic conventions differed profoundly. Yet Transpartisan possibilities in both went unreported.

Both conventions represented common, unitary visions and realities—‘dark’ and angry (GOP: party-out-things-are-terrible) versus aspirational and joyous (Democrats: party-in-things-are-hopeful).

This year’s conventions revealed serious conflicts. Many unhappy, angry people in both parties have new ways to express themselves. “Grievances” dominated Republicans while Democrats, celebrating eight years in power, air-brushed differences.

Still, new themes, like flashing lightning, give glimpses of an emerging political horizon. They suggest a less visible — we say Transpartisan — environment surrounding this election.

“Like many of my fellow millennials,” Ivanka Trump said, “I do not consider myself categorically Republican or Democrat…” Bernie Sanders passionately endorsed Hilary Clinton, then reinforced his Independent Senate affiliation.

Reports say about 70% of voters believe the country is going in the wrong direction (slightly above the forty-year norm), without reporting that conservatives say the country is too liberal and liberals say it is too conservative.

39% of voters now register as Independents, more than either Democrats or Republicans, refusing major party affiliation. Another 33% opt out of registering at all. The two major parties, combined, form a distinct minority.

The story is deep hostility toward major party elites. A majority of the public wants something different. The Trump and Sanders populist appeals feed on this hostility, and share the negative slogan, “not the other”.

Deep divisions remain. Key GOP leaders avoided the convention. Conservative intellectuals oppose the (wildly divergent–compare Trump and Pence speeches) ticket. Sanders supporters are working out their anger, while liberal intellectuals espouse “win first, then worry.”

The conventions presented “more of the same” versus “break up the furniture”—a recipe for continuing dysfunction. The future belongs to the flashes of Transpartisan impulses voiced at both conventions. We will explore these impulses in future Transpartisan Notes and The Transpartisan Review.

(Photo of 2008 Democratic Convention by user “Qqqqqq” found here and licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.)

Transpartisan Note #4

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

America has a representative government. Voters elect leaders who appoint civil servants, and they implement ‘public policy’. This works for much public business, but in areas involving social services—school reform, drug rehabilitation, criminal justice, race relations, poverty and even security policy, results fall far short of aspirations. These programs (War on Poverty, Cancer, or Drugs are examples) tend to follow a similar trajectory: fanfare at the launching followed by years and even decades of slogging disappointment.

Failure in social areas starts with the focus on objective conditions alone (poverty reduction measured in dollars), ignoring the, which can often be measured in civic engagement or community-building. Failure happens when governments follow (mechanistic) ‘rule of law’ approaches, only operating objectively, without empowering citizens as active participants for change (subjective) Empowering people subjectively requires recruiting them as informal public policy partners.

Recruiting citizens requires seeing everyone as independent and capable of self-governance. This means embracing core assumptions claimed by both left and right: the left’s assumption that there are ways that government can help people and the right’s that people are more than ‘victims’ dominated by ‘oppressors’; properly integrated open new policy roads.

Social problems are often rooted in personal isolation. Connection can help address problems from poverty to alcoholism to drug addiction. Personal engagement creates connection, with people spiritually bonded. Engagement cannot be accomplished mechanically (objectively). Engagement happens when people come together either spontaneously or in common purpose.

Shared ownership of public spaces in a school, housing project or police station gives people incentives to connect. When public property is ‘owned’ not by government alone but also by parents, teachers, kids, residents—even bureaucrats—working to common purpose, transformational effects can follow. This is true for pre modern-conscious, tribal people becoming citizen-entrepreneurs in tribal societies, and in twelve-step programs addressing addiction. These activities build on generating objective outcomes from subjective engagement.

Shared ownership of public spaces and working for the common good incorporate both objective and subjective aspirations and values. We intend The Transpartisan Review to address these concepts–drawing on real experiences involving the most disadvantaged and most marginalized, along with the most objectively successful—as constantly recurring themes.

Transpartisan Note #3

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Adding the subjective to political discourse expands how we view reality. It focuses us on how perceptions as well as facts determine ultimate impacts on people.

Travelers often return from Africa, Asia and developing areas of the world surprised to have found poor people there who appear happy. Understanding that objectively poor individuals might be subjectively happy helps us understand why social programs focused solely or primarily on objective outcomes alone (relieving ‘poverty’) often fail subjectively—leave people emotionally dissatisfied, even bereft.

Adding the subjective to our understanding explains much about the ‘paradox’ of ‘the happy poor’. Psychiatrists may touch the essential point when they say people seeking their help are mostly looking to relieve isolation and loneliness. Consider this isolation in understanding ‘social problems’—alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, suicide and even poverty. Aloneness seems to us to play a key role in each of these conditions. We propose that a crucial, and often overlooked, aspect of each objective social problem is isolation. We think it likely that both social and personal rehabilitation begins in connection.

‘Transpartisan’ integrates freedom and order as people subjectively move (in freedom) to choose connection (order). If ‘caring’ schools are essential to reach adolescent African-American males, as current research suggests, we propose a larger point—that successful schools are all positive communities—they connect people. Subjective educational communities provide an essential foundation for objective learning. Subjective components of all communities provide an essential part of the foundation of every objective program—welfare, justice, health, employment, for example. Objective programs often minimize or overlook these subjective components.

Embracing the subjective forces radically changes our understanding of politics. Religion as Spirit is subjective, conforming or not to traditional religious practices. Recognizing the ways objective politics—polls, votes, demographics etc.—overlook or fail fully to consider subjective (difficult to count) realities, forces, impulses can help explain realities of our current electoral season that seem objectively preposterous. Seth Godin identifies the role of such subjective forces in his new book Tribes.

Albert Einstein, probably quoting William Bruce Cameron, is reported to have said: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ We have reduced so much of our politics, our programs and our daily lives to what can be counted (the objective), what cannot be counted (the subjective) constantly surprises us. The Transpartisan imperative embraces, illuminates, and employs life’s subjective reality within the objective political context.

Transpartisan Note #1

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Review will concentrate on promoting new political ideas, ideas that bring people together who are now in conflict.  Since the current debate focuses entirely on conflict, the approaches we explore will be hard to find in the current debate.  Yet they are often essential to solve problems that otherwise seem insoluble.

Our political conflict is not only between the parties, between progressives (left) and conservatives (right); it is also within them.  Conflict within is between freedom and order.  There are thus four positions rather than two in our political field—freedom and order themes in both left and right.  We refer to these four positions as the Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix — featuring social democratic and civil libertarian themes on the left and the traditional (especially religious) and libertarian themes on the right.

The conflict between freedom and order is at present more obvious in the Republican Party than the Democratic.  Part of the reason (there may be others) is that the party in power (which holds The White House) can contain conflict more easily than the party out of power.

There is ‘truth’ in all four positions—partial truths.  Ultimate truth, we believe, comes from integrating all four.  Integrating all four will both bring people together and solve problems.  The Matrix will be a recurring theme in these pages.

We will focus on key policy arenas such as education, criminal justice, and foreign policy, issues on which we are aware of transpartisan initiatives making headway.

Between now and the launch of the new online journal, we will post short Notes showing how the transpartisan impulse is in forms all around us.  It will highlight report on real experiences where transpartisan approaches are solving real problems.

These examples often occur outside the formal political system.  Since we hope the formal system will want to learn from them and incorporate them into formal government policy, we will also feature comments on how that might happen.

As contentions a matter as Citizen United Supreme Court decision gives a taste of the opportunity.  McCain Feingold, the campaign finance law found unconstitutional by the court represent order-and order right.  The immediate attacks on the law came from the National Rifle Association an ACLU — free right and free left respectively.

Drawing on all four impulses the country is staggering toward a full blown disclosure of the source of all campaign contributions.  The transpartisan lens of the journal provides a way to look at virtually all contentious matters (issues) and suggest a different angle to evaluate it.  We ask others to join the discourse.