Tag: A. Lawrence Chickering

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.