Tag: A. Lawrence Chickering

Transpartisan Note #78

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Our daily political ups and downs present both threats and opportunities.  We think the Four Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, as a new tool of analysis, will help us find opportunities and manage threats.

The 2016 election displayed the gap between our politics and our people.  The gap both expresses and feeds instability and alienation.  The 2016 Presidential winner received the support of 26% of the eligible electorate.  Forty-four percent stayed away.  These numbers differ little from the previous election, won by the other side.

The Matrix, with its left/right horizontal axis and order/freedom vertical axis, helps explain this divide between politics and the electorate.  Here is how it looks:

See our Transpartisan Note #52, in which we describe the 2016 election in terms of the Matrix.

Between 1932, at the depth of The Depression, and 1994 there was little conflict in our politics.  Democrats dominated House elections winning every election since 1932 except 1946 (with President Truman serving out Franklin D Roosevelt’s 4^th term) and 1952 (when President Eisenhower won his first term).

In 1994 Newt Gingrich and his ‘Contract with America’ picked up 54 house and 9 senate seats, ending Democratic dominance.  Since 1994 the Republicans won six congressional elections, and the Democrats two.  The GOP has maintained control since 2010.  It seems all that might be up for grabs in 2018.

The Matrix process suggests a possible transpartisan path.  It shows that people seek, individually and collectively, more than the lowest common denominator values embraced by the major parties.  We believe people, both left and right, seek both free expression (freedom) and a sense of the higher good (order).

Saying this another way, the four quadrants highlight larger personal and community experiences (beyond family and tribe) gained through free expression and choice.  In times of threat people choose order.  In times of opportunity people choose freedom.  Today the major parties fight over threats.  The people seek choice.

The Trump/Sanders/outsiders expressed a freedom impulse against party elites who fight over threats to order—climate change, guns, national debt, moral decay etc.  Vast numbers, seeing elites ignore real apparent opportunities, failed to vote. We offer the Transpartisan Matrix process to lure the stay-aways back.

We think the key to overcoming their alienation is to provide more openings for citizen participation in national, state and local elections as an expansion of the more active citizens’ roles beginning to take place in community organizations such as schools, housing projects, and community health centers.

“Work together”, the electorate seems to be saying, to get the best of American politics.  To achieve shared outcomes, citizens from all four Matrix quadrants— order, freedom, right, left—need access to active roles in public spaces.  The Transpartisan Matrix process offers one important way to understand and promote citizen action.

Transpartisan Note #77

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We have often written about how personal engagement provides the path to transpartisan collaboration in all major political venues.  It is true in state and national policy-making as well as in local, self-governing organizations such as schools and housing projects.

In reviewing celebrated, successful social service organizations serving the most ‘difficult’ populations, all operate around the same principle.  All promote shared ‘ownership’ of public spaces, which engages even diverse populations to engage each other in common purpose.

Although personal engagement is widely understood to be essential to a positive, productive political environment, it is all but invisible in the current political debate.  The current debate sees every issue as a mechanistic challenge. Governments work in ‘the magic business’ of producing different visions of ‘machines’.  Our politics argues about giant anti-personal, mechanistic system governments of markets that will solve everything.  All, public government agencies and private corporate business, lack any subjective personal engagement.

It was not always this way.  Ronald Reagan, both as Governor of California (1967-1975) and as President facing legislatures controlled by Democrats, understood that progress would depend on promoting joint action, with credit shared by both parties.  As Governor, Reagan and House Speaker Bob Moretti planned the major reforms of both the state’s public medical program and its welfare system.  When they passed with strong bi-partisan support, Reagan and Moretti stood together on the steps of the state capitol and held their joined hands in the air in celebration.

An anecdote from that period reveals the spirit of trust that made this collaboration possible.  In negotiations on the MediCal reform, Moretti and Health Secretary Earl Bryan were struggling on a single, final issue that seemed beyond agreement two dollar co-pay for every doctor visit.  After endless hours of talking, Moretti came up with a solution.  He proposed that he and Bryan engage in an arm-wrestling context, and the winner could decide the unresolved issue.  (Moretti was confident he would win because he was a fitness buff, and Bryan seemed out of shape.  What he didn’t know was that Bryan was an accomplished tennis player.  Bryan won, and the Republicans got their way on that issue.  But everyone shared in the glory of overall major reform.

As President, Reagan worked out the great tax reform bills (in 1981 and 1986) in active cooperation with Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House.  Reagan could never have accomplished these major tax reforms without active Democratic support.

What happened then?  A symbol of the parties’ movement apart was that Republicans started taking all the credit for the ‘Reagan tax revolution’ and reforms that were NOT a success of Reagan and Republicans alone.  They were TRANSPARTISAN actions supported by both parties.  By the end of Reagan’s second term, the two parties were at war over Iran-Contra and other issues.  When Bill Clinton won the Presidential election in 1992, Newt Gingrich swept the mid-term Congressional elections with his Contract with America, and a war was raging.

Personal contact played an important role in Reagan’s successes working with Democrats, who controlled legislatures most of Reagan’s years in office.  Major political, technological, and social changes fueled the loss of contact.  We will review in future Notes the story of these influences, including active support from both political leaders and the mass media, which live off of conflict while pretending to abhor it.  Understanding how the spirit of cooperation and trust was lost is important to find a path toward a more cooperative politics.

Transpartisan Note #76

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Katie Fahey, dreading 2017 Thanksgiving with her Trump supporting Michigan family, prepared for the day by starting a Facebook political movement to challenge gerrymandering in Michigan.  She told her story on public radio (at 08:30:47 of the recording) which featured a civil discourse discussion with examples of how folks from different political persuasions find ways to work together.

Katie’s biggest surprise happened when her family joined her to take on Michigan gerrymandering.  She found that when partisans focused on a nonpartisan solution they could talk again. Feeling that divisiveness in politics had reached a critical point following the 2016 election she started her group Count MI Vote. She wants you to join her.

Count MI Vote has launched a group, Voters, Not Politicians, and a ballot initiative to create an Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (ICRC) to be in charge of the Michigan redistricting process. The proposed Commission follows guidelines established in California and six other states.  Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii and New Jersey, have forms of independent districting commissions.

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg collaborated politically and financially to pass the California initiative.  Read our note about their effort here.  They also vowed to support gerrymandering reform efforts as they moved across the country.

In 2012, 71% of California voters supported that states Commission-created California Senate district maps when opponents sought to reject them by referendum.  In June 2015, the United States Supreme Court upheld an Arizona initiative and ruled that independent redistricting commissions were permitted under the U.S. Constitution.  Story here.

The Michigan commission championed by Katie Fahey will be made up of 4 Democrats, 4 Republicans and 5 Independents with representation from across the state and no political insiders. Read more about the Commission selection process here. Follow the referendum campaign here.

Katie say, “The people of Michigan have been locked out of effective change-making opportunities, but we have the power, energy, and drive to create a solution that ends gerrymandering and reinvigorates the very spirit of our democracy.”

Win, lose or draw now, Count MI Vote exemplifies local actions across the country that bridge partisan divides and reshape future politics. We call these actions Transpartisan.

(Photo found on the votersnotpoliticians Instagram account.)

Transpartisan Note #75

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

 Centrist Project executive director Nick Troiano, reports that “Election Day 2017 reminded us of the old adage, ‘all politics is local.’ Independents were elected against major-party candidates in municipal races across the country, foreshadowing what may come in 2018.”

In Colorado, he says, the Centrist Project successfully supported Thornton City Councilman Sam Nizam’s reelection in a three-way race against a Democrat and a Republican. Nizam told Colorado Politics, “Thanks in large part to the infrastructure and resources the Centrist Project provided, I can continue to serve my constituents free from the constraints of partisan politics.”

The group also celebrated Ben Walsh as the new, independent Mayor of Syracuse, NY. His win is receiving national coverage as a blueprint for independent candidates to win against the major parties.    Troiano told the Wall Street Journal, “Ben’s win will encourage more independents to run because they will see that it’s possible.”

Troiano says “We are heading into 2018 with real confidence that independents can and will win major races across the country.”

Troiano also reported:

• That former Democratic Congressman Brian Baird and former state GOP chair and state legislator Chris Vance launched Washington Independents the Centrist Project Washington state partner.
• Former Republican Congressman and MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough saying about the 2018 election “The only way to escape [this] cycle is to break apart the hyperpartisan two-party duopoly that has kept Washington too divided, too dysfunctional and too directionless for too long.”
• Leon Panetta, former Democratic congressman and Defense Secretary: “The budget process has not only collapsed, Congress is totally ignoring any semblance of fiscal discipline.” Troiano says his Project’s idea of 2-3 fiscally responsible independents who could slam the brakes in the U.S. Senate, where both parties seem unable to control deficits, sounds pretty good right about now.
• Vox breaks down some interesting new political science that shows: “Most voters aren’t ideologues, and even accounting for that, most ideologues aren’t particularly ideological.” Those of us who, Triano deadpans, put ideology before party? Well, apparently, we’re the weird ones.

The Centrist Project is one of many nodes in the emerging Transpartisan impulse network cropping up across the nation.  It also includes other groups such as No Labels,  All Sides, The Mediators Foundation and others of the more than 80 member Bridge Alliance working individually and together to transform the political terrain.

Individuals across the country, at every point on the political spectrum and around the political matrix create these and many other efforts—both inside and outside the organized political parties—to give voice to the roughly 70% of age eligible American voters dissatisfied with the direction of our country (Gallup) and the 57% that believe we need an alternative voice to both major political parties (Gallup).

The transpartisan voice for more effective politics grows.

Transpartisan Note #74

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Strom Thurmond, US Senator (R-South Carolina), 1954/2003:

Arguably the most successful public racial segregationist American politician of the 20th century, Strom Thurmond made his signature move to prominence in 1948.  That year he joined the walkout of delegates from the Democratic Party convention in Philadelphia protesting the party’s civil rights platform. He then accepted the nomination for President of the Southern segregationist States’ Rights (“Dixiecrat”) Party.

That year Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thurmond’s biracial daughter, turned 23 and Carrie Butler, her mother, and former maid in Thurmond’s home, died at age 40.  Mrs. Washington-Williams married lawyer and NAACP member Julius T. Williams in 1949, raised four children, got a University of Southern California Master’s degree, spent 30+ years as a schoolteacher and administrator in Los Angeles, and got an honorary PhD from South Carolina State University in 2005. That same year she published a memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, written with William Stadiem, that was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

In February 2015, two years after her mother died at 87, Mrs. Washington-Williams’s daughter, Monica Williams-Hudgens, spoke of her mixed race heritage to a Winthrop University audience in Rock Hall South Carolina—the state Strom Thurmond represented in the US Senate for 48 years.

The Rock Hall South Carolina Herald reported Williams-Hudgens’s speech and an accompanying interview saying in part:

’Anger is unproductive,’ Williams-Hudgens said. ‘I may not like what happened to me. I don’t even have to accept certain things that happened to me. But I don’t want anger to cause me to be a person I don’t want to be. I believe in going out into the world and doing good’…

When Williams-Hudgens later visited Thurmond’s archives, she was surprised to see he’d kept every letter her mother sent him, and kept a copy of every reply he sent her. ’He never threw anything away,’ she said. ‘If he wanted to keep us a secret, he would have burned all that stuff.’…

Asked if the school’s Thurmond Building should be renamed, Williams-Hudgens said ’Yes, I’d like it to be called the Strom Thurmond-Essie Mae Washington-Williams Institute. …I didn’t really feel one way or another about him,’ she said, ‘but I knew my mother knew things about him that we didn’t know, and she respected him as a person.’

At a time when current headlines spotlight battles over Confederate State symbols and the sexual consequences of the power imbalance between men and women, Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ family story highlights the intertwining of important strands of America’s complicated journey.

Monica Williams-Hudgens embracing of her family’s story offers one positive way to approach powerful divides.   In 2004, the South Carolina State Legislature altered the official Strom Thurmond state monument, which listed the Senator’s children, to include his daughter Essie Mae Washington-Williams.

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Read the entire February 2015 article, “Granddaughter: Strom Thurmond Saved Correspondence with His Bi-racial Daughter,” by Bristow Marchant on the Rock Hall South Carolina Herald website. It is worth reading. You can get “Dear Senator” here.

Transpartisan Note #73

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Here is part of what our Transpartisan colleague Raquel Lazar-Paley reports on Jewish and Arab youth drumming for peace together.  Find the full article on the Transpartisan Voice.

“A group of 15 Jewish and Arab youth from Northern Israel recently had a unique opportunity to be the first musicians in the world to perform on steelpans at Vienna’s Musikverein, one of the most prestigious concert halls in the world. The concert was part of Austria’s 500th anniversary celebration of the Lutheran Reformation.

“The young pannists are participants in ‘The Peace Drums Project,’ a unique interfaith initiative that promotes peace between Arab and Jewish youth in Israel/Palestine by introducing reconciliation and harmony through the shared activity of a dynamic steel drum band.

“The Peace Drums Project was founded by clergy of the Delaware Churches for Middle East Peace and four Delaware rabbis from the Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jewish denominations, who met in 2011 to exchange views regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and explore how they might collaborate to promote peace in their shared Holy Land. Their vision was to develop a peace-making project involving Israeli and Palestinian youth, and they enthusiastically adopted a model created by University of Delaware Associate Professor of Percussion Harvey Price.

…

“The Peace Drums Project directly addresses a major problem facing all youth in Israel and Palestine – their futures stand to be drastically altered by the Arab-Israeli conflict but they are excluded from the political process and from most aspects of peacebuilding. This is a crucial time for them – they are at an age where they are beginning to see outside the confines of their families and their schools. For many, it is the first time they ask themselves: ‘What kind of person do I want to be?’ and ‘What kind of place do I want the world to be?’ The Peace Drums Project teaches them to make positive choices that integrate non-violent community-building into their daily lives, and has led to more than one close friendship between the Jewish and Arab participants and their families.

“In a country where divisions are highly publicized, Harvey Price has created a program that provides an excellent opportunity to show these kids a better path, and to display to the international community a successful example of Arab-Jewish collaboration.”

To learn more, read the entire article on the Transpartisan Voice and visit the Peace Drums website at www.peacedrumsproject.org.

(Photo provided by Raquel Lazar-Paley.)

Transpartisan Note #72

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Long ago—decades, in fact—the subject of the very poor played a prominent role in our intellectual and political debate.  It was in the late sixties and early seventies, when the government first started measuring economic poverty.  The objective was to reduce the numbers who were poor.

Now, fifty years later, despite massive money spent, it is hard to see very much accomplished.

The same is true of other forms of social dysfunction—alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence and so on.  Billions spent; little to show for it.  Worse than that, it is hard to find evidence that anyone effectively cares.  There is only the eerie sense that all anyone can think about is that we keep spending the money, maintaining the theater of caring.

The subject here is the most difficult population: people at the economic bottom in a society that values monetary achievement—the demoralized poor, people without hope.  Forty years ago books like Tally’s Corner and The Children of Sanchez recorded their struggles.

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is perhaps the best example today.  Very much worth the read. Among current political leaders only Bernie Sanders has raised the issue, but in a form that fails to effectively address it.  As hard as he tries his campaign about economic inequality and against the ‘one percent’ seems more like artifacts of the old left’s mainstream playbook than a serious attempt to bring new insights and new tools to bear on the issue.

Progressives want to increase taxes on the rich to slightly reduce inequality.  Conservatives want to cut corporate taxes and on the rich to slightly increase opportunity and growth.  So they fight. Neither has a program for—or any practical interest in— the really poor.  Or how addressing the really poor addresses all our social assumptions.

These traditional left/right positions all focus on objective issues, which touch people only as objective victims.  The reality here, and in most of our pressing issues, concerns people as subjects.  How might a serious debate arise about how, in addition to more money, to ease, if not eliminate, the pain of people who are at the economic bottom in a society that, above all, values financial achievement and success as ours does?  How can we reimage the drive to ‘get ahead’ and be ‘winners’ so that it does not force others to be ‘losers’ and live in shame?

Both left and right avoid serious answers on the subjective plight of the demoralized poor.  Are there Transpartisan approaches that deserve attention for people who really do care about the issue?

There is a better question.  There are many ‘extraordinary’ programs serving the most difficult populations that are producing powerful results.  We have often written about them.  What works is out there.  The better question is why people in power, both left and right, show little ability to learn from these existing programs?

In our lead article in TTR (Vol I, No. 2 p. 26) we mentioned five programs addressing the plight of the poor, working on different issues in all global regions.  One key to the success of these programs is personal engagement among people empowered by shared ownership of public spaces.

How can governments far from people help promote the personal, even intimate, contact and connections that are crucial to relieve the pain felt by people who live in the misery born from isolation?  How can a political system obsessed by how money is spent shed light on this tragedy?  When will our leaders start to learn from the experiences of others that have found newer means?

Across the country and around the world people working together outside partisan divides point the way.

(Photo: Homeless by Matthew Woitunski CC BY 3.0)

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Now featured on The Fulcrum.

Transpartisan Note #71

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Eric Levitz writes, in the New York Times November 1^st, that “America is not a ‘Center-Right Nation’.  In fact, on economic policy, America is a center-left nation.”  He points to certain facts:

• The vast majority of the American electorate has no ideology, whatsoever.
• When polled on discrete policy questions, Americans consistently express majoritarian support for a left-of-center economic agenda.
• Over the past eight years, Democrats lost control of more than 1,000 state legislative seats, the House, the Senate and the presidency.

Mr. Levitz cites two books published more than fifty years apart arguing that Americans have no ideology:

• Political scientist Philip Converse’s classic 1964 essay “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” demonstrated that only 17 percent of American voters could both correctly assign the terms “liberal” and “conservative” to the nation’s two major political parties and offer a sensible description of what those terms meant.
• Political scientists Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe’s 2017 book “Neither Liberal Nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public,” shows that the electorate is scarcely more ideological today, at the peak of partisan polarization, than it was at the height of the New Deal consensus (when Mr. Converse published his landmark study).

Mr. Levitz summarizes his point saying, “Or as Mr. Kinder and Mr. Kalmoe conclude an analysis of four decades of voter survey data, ‘ideological identification seems more a reflection of political decisions than a cause.’ In other words: The average conservative Republican isn’t a Republican because she’s a conservative — she self-identifies as a conservative because she’s a Republican.”

“One crucial implication of this finding,” Mr. Levitz says, “is that political elites have enormous power to dictate ideological terms to their rank-and-file supporters. For a healthy chunk of conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ position on most issues is whatever their party leaders say it is.”

The nearly seventy percent of the public that distances itself from the two major parties—we call them transpartisan— resist being dictated to and look to sources other than political elites for the value terms of their political choices.  Ordinary voters, Mr. Levitz says, select the party that appears “to best represent their people, a group they might define with reference to class, region, religion, race or partisanship itself.”

“This make intuitive sense,” he says, “The left-to-right political spectrum is a construct born of seating arrangements during the French Revolution. The impulse to define oneself in relation to an in-group — and opposition to an out-group — is a survival strategy that’s been with us since the dawn of our species.”

The vast majority of Americans avoid locking themselves into the left (dispatch the king)/right (save the king) seating chart of the 1789 French National Assembly.  They are transpartisan.

Changing the subtitle of the Kinder/Kalmoe book makes the point. “Neither Liberal Nor Conservative” calls current voting behavior the “Ideological Innocence in the American Public.”

In fact current voting behavior might demonstrate the ideological Sophistication of the American public. It is possible that transpartisan Americans know their politics. “Ideological” parties may miss the point.

We are all left.  We are all right.  We are all Transpartisan.

Photo: Filip Bunkens

Transpartisan Note #70

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Introducing The Transpartisan Voice!  And Maven!!

Even though we see more and more citizens from all walks of life embrace their transpartisan nature and work together to solve local problems, our national political debate remains torn by conflict and misunderstanding.

“This need not be.”

That is the vision of The Transpartisan Voice, a new venue for transpartisan news & information which we at The Transpartisan Review, along with our partner, education innovator Michael Strong, have the pleasure of announcing this week.

Launching November 1, 2017, on the Maven digital publishing platform,  The Transpartisan Voice will create opportunities for engagement with other transpartisan community members by benefiting from the functionality of the Maven publishing platform and collecting the most notable and important transpartisan news and information.

Maven is an expert-driven, group media network, whose innovative platform serves – by invitation-only – a coalition of professional, independent channel partners.

By providing broader distribution, greater community engagement and efficient advertising & membership programs, Maven enables partners to focus on the key drivers of their business: creating, informing, sharing, discovering, leading and interacting with the communities and constituencies they serve.

For a real impact, we urge your participation!  Check out The Transpartisan Voice at www.transpartisanvoice.com, log in (just takes a username), and join the conversation.