Tag: A. Lawrence Chickering

Transpartisan Bridge Alliance Enters Washington

Transpartisan Note #12

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Bridge Alliance, self-described “rising American tide of conservatives and liberals, centrists and moderates, … (that) can become a powerful and positive voice in the American political landscape advocating ‘Country Before Party,’” made its first appearance in the nation’s capital Thursday, September 15.

Cosponsoring an energetic Transpartisan gathering at American University’s Katzen Arts Center with Updraft America, the Alliance showcased its “43 and growing” member groups, brought its message of cooperative politics to a set of media players, and presented its vision in collaboration with a major American University.

The University describes the Updraft America Exhibition as “Washington, DC, sculptor (and former aide to Senate Democratic Majority leader Thomas Daschle) Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg (manifestation) of Americans’ frustration with our gridlocked partisan politics by taking an entire year of the official proceedings of the United States Congress, as documented in the Congressional Record, and folding each page into a paper airplane.

“From this mass of over 10,000 airplanes, striped red or blue to connote the political divide, the uppermost planes will rise into the air, as if taking flight, and as they do, their hues will combine to become purple – the color of hope that we may bridge the political divide.”

Hope animated the crowd as Ms. Firstenberg and media star & Washington-player Cokie Roberts cohosted the program’s two panels with Executive in Residence Rebecca Cooper of American University’s Kogod School of Business who works to create “thought leadership forums … to highlight smart conversations with smart people finding solutions.”

The Christian Science Monitor presented its new program Under-reported Good News stories.

The Congressional Management Foundation shared  “While the process may be slow, when people provide Congress with helpful input, Congress makes thoughtful, informed and deliberative decisions that represent an investment in the nation’s future.”

The Bridge Alliance’s entry to Washington reminds us that much goes on each day than our daily press skips. A lot of this unreported news is hopeful.

The Many Faces Of Transpartisan II

One Matrix, Multiple Dialogues

Transpartisan Note #11

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Left and right agree that both freedom and order are essential for solutions to social issues. Transpartisan dialogues are designed to reveal this agreement. Dialogues need to ensure both values are represented on each side and then highlight the conflict between them.

Conflicts within left and right tend to be between the traditional, often religious (order) and libertarian (freedom) right and between the social democratic (order) and libertarian (freedom/ACLU) left. To highlight the challenge of integrating them, consider:

  •   One side, representing order, promoting government ‘solutions’ that encroach on individual freedom, and
  •   The other side, representing freedom, investing all their energy encouraging people to distrust the government.

These positions form the Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix (see Note #10), and they create multiple potential dialogues — within and between left and right, searching for a path to integrate freedom and order.

The Matrix increases understanding of the complexity of positions, revealing new, potential paths to agreement. Positions integrating all four will both bring people together and solve problems—often creating things that no one ever imagined. This is especially true showing paths to order (virtue, justice) through freedom.

This approach highlights values often ignored, including:

  • A strong concept of citizenship, with citizens playing active ownership roles from public school reform to foreign and security policy;
  • Idealism of empowerment added to left’s commitment to equality (empowerment as the key to effective equality since real, objective equality is elusive.);
  • Strong participation of civil society in empowering each individual including disadvantaged and marginal populations;
  • Emphasis on the subjective (community and connection) as essential to empowerment;
  • Emphasis on ownership especially in public spaces, expanding the ‘self-interest’ in capitalism to all individuals including disadvantaged and marginal populations and to voluntary service for the public good*;  and
  • In emphasizing the subjective, emphasize spiritual connection in all transformational change.

Including Four-Q activists increase Transpartisan ranks: besides our programs (Educate Girls Globally and Citizens for Health/Voice for HOPE): Mimi Silbert (Delancey Street Foundation, San Francisco); Lenora Fulani (All-Stars Project, New York City); James Dierke (Visitacion Valley Middle School, San Francisco), and many others.

* Milton Friedman promoted this (expanded) concept of capitalism, e.g., in his assertion that the Israeli kibbutzim are a triumph of capitalism because they are freely-chosen. That many socialists also consider them as a triumph of socialism suggests a Transpartisan understanding of the relationship between capitalism and socialism.

The Many Faces Of Transpartisan I

Transpartisan Note #10

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The contemporary Transpartisan movement appears to have two quite different faces. Many transpartisans, perhaps most, associate with the most recognizable theme, which might be called the Dialogue Approach. This approach regards conflict as inevitable and binary (the left-right spectrum) and encourages partisans to find common ground. Examples are the Mediators’ Foundation, Search for Common Ground, The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, and Living Room Conversations.

The second approach expands on the first. It starts with the belief that most conflicts are more than two-sided and that binary framing of conflicts often conceals important conflicts and differences within each side. This creates four positions and parties for every binary conflict: right critics of both the left and the right, and left critics of both the right and the left.

We believe (as Lawry Chickering first wrote in his 1993 book Beyond Left and Right and we expanded in our 2008 book Voice of the People) that ideological conflict among the four quadrants (order-right, freedom-right, order-left, freedom-left) is an Hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis search to integrate four positions that are partly true, but incomplete, representing the two great values in all modern societies: ‘freedom’ and ‘order’. (The quotations are important to highlight the mythic nature of these concepts, with left and right using different words to express their concepts of order — ‘virtue’ and ‘responsibility’ for the right; ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ for the left.)

Our Transpartisan Matrix integrates the two approaches by overlaying a horizontal left/right spectrum and vertical freedom/order spectrum as follows:

F(reedom)

*

R(ight)_________________L(eft)

*

O(rder)

(For further discussion click here).

Each quadrant is partly truth, but incomplete. The separate quadrants alone feature continuing conflicts both within and between left and right, and experience great difficulty solving problems. Integrating freedom and order occurs when people come together freely in communities and solve problems.

Next week we will provide examples of how one Matrix produces six dialogues; organizing conflict toward the inherent agreement implicit in every disagreement.

Antidote to a Poisoning Epidemic

Transpartisan Note #9

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Here is part of what our Transpartisan colleague Jacob Z. Hess, Livingroom Conversations partner, wrote in The Huffington Post. For the full article click here.

from What If Our Political Opposite Isn’t (Actually) The Devil… What Then?

by Jacob Hess, August 3, 2016

Friends and acquaintances used to be mystified at my interest in liberal-conservative dialogue. Not anymore. America is having a rude awakening about the value of dialogue and deliberation in a world torn by bitter conflict.

At the center of the harshest rhetoric (from both sides) is one essential claim: Those Other People (on the other side) are dangerous. They cannot be trusted and do not have America’s best interest at heart (and if they say they do, they’re basically lying).

They are Demons Incarnate…and must be treated as such.

What if closer examination revealed that people holding different views are equally good-hearted and care the same about ensuring America’s well-being but have different ideas about what that requires?

Thousands of years ago, one of the world’s earliest scientists invited people to sit in silence and turn towards (rather than away from) inner contradictions in body, mind and heart. As people tried this radical act, they were surprised to find the gnawing tension inside them change. And insight arose—with suffering decreasing too.

In recent years, the dialogue and deliberation community has been inviting people towards a similar experiment: instead of avoiding painful questions, to begin sitting with our political opposites and turning towards the contradictions between us — listening and getting curious…

Last year, we tried an experiment. We offered free consultation to anyone willing to try a Living Room Conversation (with anyone they wanted, on any topic). Then, I went knocking on doors inviting people in my own neighborhood, but I was turned down right and left.

Liz Joyner, national director of the Village Square, explained: ‘Jacob, there is something we like about polarization; something almost reassuring about knowing that Our Side is superior to Those Demons.’

Chronic resentment hurts. That same scientist (the Buddha) warned that anger functions like a poison in the body and mind.

If he was right, America is now suffering from a poisoning epidemic on a vast scale. Turning toward our contradictions, in a safe and comfortable livingroom environment, might begin to drain the poison.

Excerpt from What If Our Political Opposite Isn’t (Actually) The Devil… What Then? by Jacob Hess from The Huffington Post posted August 3, 2016.  Used with permission of the author.

Bridge Alliance: Transpartisan Gathering

Transpartisan Note #8

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We spoke this past week with David Nevins, the new President & Co-Director of Bridge Alliance (www.bridgealliance.us), a growing home for Transpartisans. He talked of leadership, spelled out the Bridge Alliance mission, and told us of the group’s first big Washington, DC public coming-out event.

The Mission: “We are the Bridge Alliance – a rising American tide of conservatives and liberals, centrists and moderates, business owners and workers, students and retired persons, diverse in age, color, faith and orientation. We have come together in civility, respect, and goodwill to solve problems together. Together, we can become a powerful and positive voice in the American political landscape advocating ‘Country Before Party.’”

The Event:

Moving America Forward
Co-Sponsored by Updraft America & Bridge Alliance
Panel Discussion Moderator: Cokie Roberts
September 15, 2016 7:00 PM
Katzen Center at American University
Washington, DC

updraft_logo_borderThe Event will feature the unveiling of Updraft America — an installation of 10,718 paper airplanes folded from a year’s subscription to The Congressional Record by Washington, DC sculptor Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg. The red and blue striped paper airplanes rise into the air, inspiring hope that we may rise above partisan politics.

A panel will discuss How To Bridge the Partisan Divide, presenting alternatives to the partisan narrative that permeates the political process and there will be presentations by organizations representing a cross-spectrum of civic engagement and collaborative problem-solving that is already present across America.

Leadership: David told us of The Nevins Democracy Leaders program he started at Penn State University. The program teaches a cohort of students how to apply Transpartisan deliberative skills to enhance their sense of civic responsibility, their approach to building community, and practical politics and participatory government. To further this goal, David is appealing to business leaders around the country to implement similar programs at their alma maters.

Bridge Alliance is well on its way to its first fifty organizational members. See the list here www.bridgealliance.us/bridge_alliance_members. It provides a home for individuals of every political stripe who want to get things done through collaborative initiatives that transcend narrow partisanship. We salute David Nevins and his co- director Debilyn Molineaux for their creative leadership of this inspiring initiative.

The Conventions III — Republicans

Transpartisan Note #7

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Here is part of what two of our Transpartisan colleagues, Rich Tafel and Ted Buerger wrote to their fellow Republicans about the current election.  Read the full article on the Bold website.

from Creative Destruction Will Allow Republicans and Democrats to Rebuild After 2016

By Rich Tafel and Ted Buerger, August 9, 2016

In short, each party lacks balance and has retreated to its political corner. Each embraces pandering and the politics of division. And each has nominated a candidate that voters rightly don’t trust, leaving us a choice of “lesser evils.”

As lifelong Republicans who have spent our political life seeking to build bridges, we know that Trump’s bullying, imprudence, and unpreparedness would be dangerous for our country. On Election Day, we must vote against Trump, to protect the country, and for most down-ballot Republicans, to restrain the Democrats in Congress.

But Americans deserve better. Gallup polls now confirm that most Americans are “socially liberal and fiscally conservative.” As hopeful believers in the American dream, most Americans want a sustainable society based on innovation and opportunity, security and trust, private charity and public safety-net, inclusion and religious liberty, personal freedom and human dignity. That aspiration should be at the core of each political party. It is not.

And we Republicans must create a Party that once again champions civil debate, science, inclusion and religious freedom for all faiths, including Muslims. We must build a movement that fights for prison and police reform because we do not have justice until we have justice for all. We must stand for the middle class and the poor, one nation of opportunity, undivided by class, race, or gender. We must remain committed to fiscal and environmental sustainability, for the benefit of future generations and support a strong defense–including a plan to defeat terrorists and minimize war.

For America’s sake, Trump must fail, but each party still needs real change. The irony is that, in the wake of Trump’s self-destruction, we Republicans may be more motivated to make that change, from which could rise a renewed, inclusive party of Lincoln. That is our opportunity.

Rich Tafel is CEO of Public Squared and Founder of Log Cabin Republicans and Ted Buerger is Co-founder and Chairman of AmericanTowns.com and previously Chairman of the non-partisan Center for the Study of the Presidency (1998-2000).

Direct link: http://bold.global/rich-tafel/2016/08/09/creative-destruction-will-allow-republicans-democrats-rebuild-2016

(Photo from original article by eli.pousson and licensed under the Creative Commons.) 

The Conventions II — Media

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.)

The Conventions I

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.)

Government and Civil Society

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.