Tag: A. Lawrence Chickering

Transpartisan Note #103

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Free market champion and our friend Milton Friedman often said that he thought the apparently socialist, communal, and utopian Israeli Kibbutzim are a triumph of capitalism. Why? Because they are freely chosen. That many socialists also regard them as a triumph of socialism highlights an important principle of our Four Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix and of transpartisan politics.

Besides being freely chosen, the kibbutzim also feature—internally—systems of shared ownership of public spaces.  Sharing ownership means everyone having a stake: everyone serving the private interests people have by working for the larger good.

In 2010, there were 270 kibbutzim in Israel.  Their factories and farms account for 9% of Israel’s industrial output worth US $8 billion and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over $1.7 billion.

The debate between capitalism and socialism has always been conducted between diametrically opposed visions—the freedom-right versus the order-left.  This diametric opposition positions one vision (freedom-right) with limited appeals to the common good against the other (order-left) with limited appeals to freedom.

Neither side can imagine situations in which people will choose the good, despite evidence everywhere of people doing just that.  In private life that is the overriding value in families, communities, and love.  In the contentious free-right, order-left conflict, both speak as if it represents the entire right and the entire left.

Property rights in private property are a cornerstone institution in market economies, as studied by economists.   Economists seem to have little or no interest in shared rights in public spaces such as schools.  While insisting their only interest is to observe the real world, economists seem to believe only in self-interest, narrowly understood (in private space) as a motivator of behavior.

Economist’s seem to overlook shared interests, which can be among peoples’ most cherished values (the only values, we would say, that people live and die for).  Shared interests are part of ‘self-interest’—all studies of happiness, for example, focus on associations and relationships, which involve shared interests.  It takes much more than money to live a happy life.  

Many examples exist of shared property rights promoting powerful examples of social triumphs, with benefits widely shared, including the economically very poor.  Working in two states of India, Educate Girls Globally (EGG), the education group Lawry founded on the four-quadrant model, has been conducting a fifteen-year experiment.

EGG shows how shared rights, using the same incentives as private rights, can empower traditional communities, including girls, into powerful, active leaders and entrepreneurs.  Working only in government schools, EGG’s model is changing the cultures of both traditional communities and even government bureaucracies.

The first question in the first EGG community meeting is who owns the school? At first people answer The Government, and the next hour is taken up with complaints about what the government is not doing.  The first meeting aims for people to understand that the school will never be any better than they themselves make it, and that they, the people, not the government, are the real owners of the school (not legally, but informally, in spirit). 

EGG has worked in more than 7,000 schools in two states, and in every one people get it.  This leads them to mobilize in a variety of different ways for action.  An important example iscommunity projects without any subsidy from EGG—Lawry likes to say that EGG’s only currency is empowerment.

In EGG’s Girls’ Parliaments, empowerment mobilizes girls as leaders and role models.  The crucial empowerment moment comes when they say they want boys to join them.  When asked ‘How many?’, the answer is: ’50-50.’ They don’t want any advantage in numbers.

The magic in EGG’s use of the four-quadrant model comes from integrating the empowering feature of OWNERSHIP (having a STAKE, which is the key to CARING) with the powerful PROCESS of active participation. This crucial integration drives all democratic systems.

When all four quadrants—freedom and order on both left and right—actively empower people, striving is internalized.  Everyone’s contribution to the larger good is valued.  SHARED OWNERSHIP—for schools students, parents, families, and communities—drives a PROCESS of working together to promote the common good.

When a community chooses to work together for the good, it does more than merely follow rules.  Our current political debate focuses almost entirely on rules —what are they, who makes them (how can I be the one?). What punishment follows violating them? We are now even discussing why should the rules apply to me.

In this age of claimed populism, the principal champions of populist rage—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—always seem to frown in anger, threatening to punish evil-doing elites.  Shared ownership empowers people to look inward and feel their power positively.  Co-owners are not ‘victims’.  Nobody is oppressing them.

Friedman often said he thought that the greatest threat to freedom in the world was the decline of both personal and social responsibility. Many experiences show that introducing shared rights in public space—a ‘capitalist’ (market-based) instrument—would largely solve that problem. The Israeli Kibbutzim show how a capitalist/socialist vision can produce 40% of the agricultural output of one major country when policy and culture allows shared ownership to create and allocate resources that are part of the common good.

Freedom and Order, left and right—people working together for the common good—builds strong democracies.  Strong democracies build strong communities and strong countries.

(Photo from the excellent article Kibbutz: Prospects of a Utopian Community Project, taken by the author Michal Palgi and presented as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 on the Futures We Want website.)

Transpartisan Note #102

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

On Saturday, August 25th, we lost quintessential American John McCain. Agree or disagree with his politics, it’s generally accepted that the 5-term Senator, 2-term Congressman, presidential candidate, Navy pilot, and war hero was one of the most devoted civil servants in Washington. His final message to the citizens of the nation he dedicated his life to offers a truly transpartisan message condemning tribalism and celebrating our shared love for our country.

In tribute to the service of Senator McCain, we share his final, transpartisan, message with our readers…

John McCain’s “Letter to America”:

My fellow Americans whom I have gratefully served for 60 years and especially my fellow Arizonians. Thank you for the privilege of serving you, and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead.

I’ve tried to serve our country honorably. I’ve made mistakes but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them. I’ve often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now, as I prepare for the end of my life. I’ve loved my life, all of it. I’ve had experiences, adventures, friendships, enough for 10 satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life in good or bad times for the best day of anybody else’s.

I owe this satisfaction to the love of my family. One man has never had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America to be connected to America’s causes: Liberty, equal justice, and respect for the dignity of all people brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth were not circumscribed, but are enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

Fellow Americans, that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history, and we have acquired great wealth and power in the progress.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment, and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down; when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before, we always do.

Ten years ago I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening. I feel it powerfully still.

Do not despair of our present difficulties. We believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history. We make history. Farewell fellow Americans, God bless you, and God bless America.

— Senator John McCain

(Image taken October 30, 2008 by Rona Proudfoot – CC BY-SA 2.0.)

Transpartisan Note #101

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We spent August 17-19 in Denver, CO at the Unite America Summit.  During the meeting, the rough outline of a path to power for Politically Independent People seemed visible. Here is some of what we saw:

1. Votes: Over 40% of voters register Independent. This is more than register for either major political party.  Roughly half of Americans constitutionally eligible to vote fail to register.  These two unaligned groups—60 to 70% of the American public—add up to more people than both major (and “third”) political parties combined. Also, more and more major party members say they dislike their current parties.
2. Process: Independent people seek a more effective electoral process. Open primaries, rank choice voting, the end of gerrymandered districts, full disclosure of campaign financing (supported 8 to 1 by the Supreme Court in Citizens United), inclusive voting (mail in ballots, same day and driver license registration), and other adjustments expanding voter access all get wide independent support.
3. Program: Promoting active citizen participation in, or ownership of, public spaces—schools, health centers and other community services—gets broad local citizen support (we call this transpartisan).  Nothing expands greater recognition of Independent values more than citizen participation when informed by successful experiences.  Independent candidates thrive when endorsing such programs.
4. Citizen Empowerment: Informal, incremental action more than formal government mandates create successful experiences in citizen empowerment. Efforts to reform public schools often draw strong opposition while citizen initiatives to ‘increase community support’ for schools, emerging organically and consensually, rarely provoke opposition. Community support fuels independent campaigns.
5. Shared Ownership: More shared ownership in public services—schools, hospitals, police, roads/biking planning, and others—creates active roles for all major civic groups. Teachers engage with parents and students, patients and families work with hospitals, citizens join with police and road planners. Everyone has a stake in working together to promote productive communities. Independents thrive.
6. Models: One example—shared school ownership—creates informal charter schools with no threat to teachers or families.  Empowerment works to ‘leave no one—teachers or students—behind’.  Empowering programs—infrastructure, health, education, security, etc.—enliven communities. Local political forces uniquely position independents to champion such movements outside formal partisan political channels.
7. Embrace and Transcend: Increasingly the shenanigans of the Democratic and Republican leadership sicken party members and neutered office holders. Sound independent strategy leaves no disgusted party member behind. Dems and Reps, like everyone, live in communities. Transpartisan strategy embraces all party players and transcends leadership shenanigans. It takes everyone to make a village work. 

For two days in August 2018, 250 inspired, empowered, enlivened former Dems, Reps, Third Party, nonaligned, unorganized, committed political players calling themselves Independent met in Denver to take the next step in organizing—what?

Some said a Third Party. Others said a Second Party. Some said a National (Global) Movement. Others said Local Communities. All wanted better elections.  All wanted more—beyond the stale—possible solutions to every problem on the table.  All wanted to be friendly, civil with people holding different ideas.  All loved America. All wanted a more perfect union.

The Transpartisan Challenge: Find, without creating further obstacles, national, state, local, and community ways to give articulate voice to, and facilitate effective action by, the over 70% of the people who seek better happier lives for themselves, their communities, their country, and the world and feel that the major political parties fail them.

The Challenge: Move Independent to center stage.

Read about Unite America Summit in the Washington Post here, the Denver Post here, IVN here, and watch John King talk about it on CNN TV here.

(Photo of authors by Denise Lewis Premschak.)

Transpartisan Note #100

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed the New Orleans school system.

Education is among the most important, if not the most important issue, in every community. The greatest education challenge in most communities lies in reforming and sustaining government (that is public) schools. With few exceptions, government schools across the country and around the world face deep crisis.

On July 1, 2018, the state of Louisiana, which took over the New Orleans schools after Katrina, returned control of all New Orleans schools to the city. In a little over a decade, writes Progressive Pulitzer Prize New York Times journalist David Leonhardt on July 15, ”the academic progress has been remarkable.” In all major dimensions the New Orleans school rebuilding program scored impressively.

On July 15, researchers Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen reported increases in: New Orleans student achievement by 11–16 percentiles; high school graduation 3–9 percentage points; college entry 8–15 points; college persistence 4–7 points; graduation 3–5 points; college outcomes 10–67%. Outcomes for disadvantaged students and educational inequities for high school and college also improved.

The re-creation of New Orleans schools, say researchers Harris and Larsen, “… represent the first time in the last century that the traditional U.S. government-driven system of K-12 schooling has been completely replaced by a market-driven one.”

What lessons can be learned from New Orleans’ experience? What features have the limited political opposition which often destroys so many plans for school reform?

Both public government school and private charter schools face powerful political opposition dividing communities for and against each. New Orleans by-passed this common battle very simply: every school became a charter school. No need to fight. We believe that three features of the New Orleans reform are very important, and it happens that they imitate other reform experiences that we are aware of.

The three features are:

• Everyone is included in the reform; everyone gets to participate. In current charter school advocacy, schools become charter schools for groups that organize charters. Everyone else is left behind ‘in the nightmare’.
• Changes occur organically rather than mechanically. Principals and teachers are given authority and held to accountability. Most public policy reforms today are implemented mechanically on order from ‘central’.
• Every community controls its school. Though legally part of the public system Charter schools here act independently. This essential principle empowers school communities with shared common ownership of schools.

There are many examples of individual schools operating on these principles in many places, both in the U.S. and globally. Educate Girls Globally, created by Lawry Chickering, has been working in two states of India for fifteen years in about 7,000 schools serving more than 500,000 children. It uses these principles and has not experienced significant opposition or conflict in a single school.

New Orleans’ school renaissance provides another way that city overcomes Katrina.

(Image of Bienville (Pk-8) – Housing Arthur Ashe Charter from NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune.)

Transpartisan Note #99

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The May 25th, 2018 New York Times op-ed article Why Life as a Foster Child Made Me a Conservative by Rob (Robert Kim) Henderson — a 2018 Yale graduate, 8-year Air Force veteran, and loved son of his foster mother and her female partner — features significant transpartisan themes.

First, the headline misdirects.  After recounting his story Robert Kim closes by saying: “If today that makes me a conservative, great. I take responsibility for that.” In the article, rather than saying he is a conservative, he says if progressives, society, or others see him as conservative he accepts and takes responsibility for that.

Yale has few conservatives and even fewer foster children.  Rob’s drug-addicted birth mother sent him to foster care for five years when he was very young.  He was adopted when he was seven and was brought up in broken homes.  His three names, Robert Kim Henderson, came from three different adults, all of whom, it turned out, abandoned him.

Second, victims, progressive, conservative, other. A Yale classmate recently told Rob he was a victim.  He had never heard himself called a victim, only at Yale.  He answered: ‘…if someone had told me I was a victim as a kid, I would never have made it to the Air Force, where I served for eight years, or to Yale.  I would have given up.’

When he was ten, a teacher told Rob that if he really committed himself, he could change his life—which he did.  His fellow student suggested that Rob ‘was not as progressive’ as he was. Strange syntax.  Did this fellow student mean Rob was not as progressive as the progressive student? Did he mean Rob was less progressive than Rob thought he was?  Did he mean not thinking of himself as a “victim” meant he was not progressive at all?

Third, what is a conservative?  Rob then reflected on what it means to be a conservative.  His first principle was honoring inherited wisdom, which for him meant ‘the value of the two-parent family’.  He listed among benefits emotional and financial support.  A psychology professor helped make his case when he asked students anonymously to describe their parental background.  All 25 in the class except himself and one other came from traditional two-parent families.

Foster children fare even worse.  Ten percent go to college, and only three percent graduate.  He noted that out of some 5,000 undergraduates at Yale, fewer than ten were foster children.

In discussing other values conservatives claim, he focused on the rights and responsibilities of individuals.  Among responsibilities, he notes ‘a sense of unease among my peers’ when he says parents ‘should prioritize their children over their careers.’  ‘They think I want to blame individuals rather than a nebulous foe like poverty … [or] ideologies, institutions, abstractions’.

Finally, success. When people ask Rob how he was able to succeed given his troubled childhood, or when people use his success to argue for lax attitudes about parenting his ‘skin crawls.’  He explains his success simply: ‘During adolescence, I had the benefit of two parents…, and I had control of my future.’  His parents created a stable home for him in rural California.  ‘We had dinner together every weeknight.  We talked about minutiae … we loved each other.’

‘My adoptive mother and her (female) partner [created a stable family]… Though they experienced homophobia and struggled financially, they never let it get in the way of doing the right thing for their son.’

Rob did not comment on the drum beat of opinion in political media, academic studies, legislative initiatives, and in conservative circles that repeats the stereotype that “Conservatives want to keep gay couples from adopting fostering kids”.

What do you call a foster kid from a financially stressed California family with two female parents who promotes duty, love and responsibility?  Transpartisan.

(Image and story found at Yale News and NY Times Op-Ed.)

Transpartisan Note #98

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We think Trump found and exploits a powerful contradiction in the current terms of American and even global political discourse. This contradiction spotlights a deep wound or tear in the American social fabric—one that profoundly distorts our political debate.

American political parties offer individuals key ways to express and address their wants and needs.  Americans today find political parties increasingly unable or unwilling to effectively deliver on their offer.  Wants and needs go unmet.  Thus the vast majority of Americans resist identifying with either major party.

The central problem arises out of post WWII forces of individuation—pushing self-expression—with both economic and social consequences tearing at the social and political fabric.

Economically, individuation in America and other countries is creating both material improvement for the ‘middle class’ (neither rich nor poor) and significant inequality between them and both the top and the bottom (1% at the top and 15% at the bottom).

Socially, individuation, pushing self-expression, is weakening tradition and undermining traditional communities of family and church that were the basis of traditional social order.

These trends, both economic and social, are pulling countries apart, creating the tricky task of bringing together people in conflict with each other to find new institutions and expressions of values to connect them.  Trump is salting a wound related to identity politics (which exists on both the left and the right).  The new information technologies, reflecting and encouraging self-expression, bring this real divide into view while also encouraging it.

On both left and right, identity politics represents ‘victims’—people oppressed by ‘oppressors’—who will be liberated only when oppressors stop their oppression either by their choice or political force.  The seething, righteous anger—if not rage—of the Sanders and Trump campaign crowds captures the pain and the fury.

Inflaming crowds leads to righteous anger and the intense desire to PUNISH oppressors. Sander’s left goes after the 1%.  Trump’s right shifts the conservatives’ flag from freedom and virtue (freedom and order). Instead, it pitches to a ‘base’ of new (non-left) ‘victims’—people feeling oppressed by progressive public policies aimed at helping progressives’ ‘victims’.

Each side actually sees the other’s identity politics base as oppressors.  Before Trump, his ‘victims’ of progressive government programs were invisible because conservatives (promoting freedom and virtue) ignored them and their pain (often arguing instead that they were to blame).  Traditional conservatives gave the Trump-base ‘victims’ no place around which to organize politically, so they went left.

Kathleen Parker highlights how Trump picked the scab that radically changed that conservative stance: ‘Listen to what people are worried about, then throw fire at it.’  Her word choice touches why people rage at Trump: because (fundamentally) they experience his behavior as focused on turning Americans against each other.  Meanwhile, Sander’s, disdaining traditional Democrats, throws his own fire.

Although his critics see Trump’s behavior as uniquely destructive and ugly, he is only imitating the progressive playbook.  Like progressives, Trump seizes the dark side of identity politics—the partisan politicizing of ‘victims’.  He is just doing it, for the first time, on behalf of a different set of ‘victims’.

Trump offends the declining number of people who are politically wedded to the left’s victims—‘offends’ is not nearly strong enough: ‘CRAZY ENRAGED’ is closer. On the right the ‘CRAZY ENRAGED’ of the declining traditional conservative right (poverty is the price of lost virtue) see the Trump/Bernie crowd as the mob going for civilization’s throat.

Both may be even more enraged to consider that Trump is a natural consequence of progressive identity politics indulged by conservative patronizing that accepts behavior it previously disdained.

Progressive government programs designed to help the poor, the weak, and the discarded focus on and spawn their own set of self-perceived victims—those that government helps by pushing them around—public housing tenants feeling bullied by arbitrary rules; Medicaid and Medicare consumers blocked from using ‘alternative’ medicine; recipients of student loans and disaster relief hammered by poor government performance and marketplace failure.

Progressives are Trump’s foster parents—conservatives his indulgent grandparents.

The search for, and revelation of, a transpartisan politics, we believe, depends on seeing that identity politics in either the progressive or conservative form inherently misses the point and tends to turn Americans against each other.

Identity politics disempowers both left and right politically-proclaimed victims from taking control of their own lives.  It also disempowers the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ as collective political forces, giving each a smaller and smaller share of formal political power. Rather than move to the center, the large mass of society moves out of the current game.  In the name of protecting, identity politics disempowers.

Both sides disempower their ‘victims’ conceptually by constantly telling them their lives are failed; other people (claims the traditional left) or their own character flaws (claims the traditional right) are to blame, and their only hope is that these other people (‘oppressors’) can be forced to change (the left) or they can change and overcome their character flaws (the right).  Then the two sides (‘they are to blame’, ‘you must change’) fight.

The hope for recognizing and organizing an emerging transpartisan politics depends on creating institutions that empower individual ‘victim’ groups—#metwo, blue and #blacklivesmatter, marching victims of mass school shootings, crime victim rights groups, and many, many more (indeed all individuals)—to take control of their own lives, while controlling forces that seek to control them.

We need concepts of equality and supporting institutions that personally engage people so they see each other as human rather than as abstractions (as in identity politics), leading people out of what, in the context of the sex work/trafficking debate, Laura Agustín calls the ‘rescue industry.’  Transpartisan suggests that empowerment trumps rescue in every arena.

Exploiting differences for political gain, a tendency of our current politics, retards our really great opportunity, which is to create institutions that promote the personal engagement that will empower people by encouraging those who are ‘different’ to see each other as human.

(Image from pexels.com.)

Transpartisan Note #97

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

How, then, can one understand the Singapore Summit?  It brought two circus performers, Kim and Trump, together, proclaiming a new era in the relationship.  A result.  Democrats attacked Trump’s Republican supporters for doing precisely what those Republican would have eviscerated any Democrat for doing.

Now, different from the past, Democrats preach the caution common from Republicans, when they criticized ‘weak’ Democratic foreign policy.  Critics cautioned how ‘vulnerable’ Singapore made Trump.  They argued he just made up the positive—even transformative—Summit results.  Nothing, they said, had really changed.

In Note #85 we argued that North Korea’s isolation prior to Trump’s interactions with Kim dangerously fueled Kim’s apparent psychosis.  The most important antidote was to start interacting with him, bring him out of the shadows.  We could equally say Kim’s warlike rhetoric dangerously fueled Trump’s belligerence.

Then the Olympics.  Pageantry, Korea North and South marching together.  Kim’s charismatic sister.  US VP Pence scowling.  These helped bring Kim and his country into the open.  Public dialogue followed about negotiations first with the South and then with Trump, leading to Singapore.

Only a Pence / Muammar al-Gaddafi misstep caused a bump, but only a bump, in the road to Singapore.  Pence’s gaff cast a light on Kim. He has fear. Gaddafi danced with the West for years; gave up his nuclear weapons; then died in a culvert beaten by former subjects.  It was as if Pence said surrender Kim or die like a dog.

Trump the Unpredictable avoids rigidly following established behavior patterns.  He stepped around the gaff.  Republicans, Democrats, supporters, and critics, now respond to him, while he responds to our times’ shaping forces, in various rigid ways.  This strategy takes them all out of creative participation in a fluid environment.

The deep forces shaping contemporary society move all parties.  For the moment only Trump seems able to exploit these forces.  Each side is trying to ‘keep up’ often changing positions to sustain conflict.  In doing so they miss transpartisan opportunities on both foreign and domestic issues.

David Ignatius, of The Washington Post, summed up a grudging side of a Trump alienated media saying, ‘Diplomacy isn’t always pretty.  Dubious people sometimes do very good things.  So let’s celebrate Trump’s success in Singapore and hope someone can translate President Ronald Reagan’s injunction to “trust but verify” into Korean.’

Today mainstream political conflict looks reflexive and empty of meaning.   Ignatius’ comment suggests that the media could play a more creative role than they often do.  They might open dialogue to new ideas while continuing to fan the flames of conflict.  Conflict feeds their business model.  Creative dialogue feeds democracy.

(Photo from White House archives.)

Transpartisan Note #96

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

‘Sometimes overlapping theatrical objectives can create strange transpartisan bedfellows.  What’s next?  Don’t be surprised if at some point Kim is watching basketball at Madison Square Garden.’  These words ended our February 12, 2018, Note #85, ‘Korea and the Olympics: Moral, Therapeutic & Transpartisan Values.’

Today, four months later, we find ourselves several steps closer to Kim at the Garden. Korea, Kim, and Trump exhibit one exasperating feature of today’s political debate.  Under this President untethered political positions seem to have replaced traditional ‘orderly’ positions on both ‘left’ and ‘right.’

The past debate structure seemed relatively stable. ‘Conservative strong defense’ interacting with ‘progressive engagement’ reassured public and participants.  Everyone knew how a Democratic or Republican President would act on issues from trade to war to foreign policy.  For 65 years the cold Korean War simmered.

Extra-political forces, technology, population, climate, etc., roil this comfortable structure.  Donald Trump masterfully exploits this radically upended stability and predictability.  He consciously—even theatrically—goes out of his way to be unpredictable.  He routinely violates traditional Republican Presidential positions.

Trump explicitly uses, perhaps consciously, uncertainty as a leadership principle.  He called Kim Jong Un ‘Rocket Man’ when he fired test missiles and boasted that his atomic and hydrogen bombs could hit the U.S. mainland.  Trump called him smart, committed, and loved after the Singapore agreement.

It is a scary, crazy, exciting (pick your adjective) time, when serious people commonly say an atomic conflict with North Korea poses the greatest threat to world peace and then attack the “agreement” to denuclearize the Korean peninsula as dangerous.  Ditto when The Washington Post reports Dennis Rodman as a commentator.

‘If Trump wants the credit, he can take all the credit.  He can have it all.  I just want them to talk,’ Rodman said on ‘Good Morning, America,’ . . . he appeared . . . wearing dark sunglasses, a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and a T-shirt promoting a cryptocurrency company that sponsored his trips to Singapore and North Korea.

Kim at the Garden seems a few steps closer as deep forces drive humanity down a transpartisan road toward a crazy, exciting future.

(Photo from White House archives.)

Transpartisan Note #95

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

That Royal Wedding!!!  A kaleidoscope of integrating political and cultural memes, like a flash of lightning showing the flow of transpartisan movement across the globe.

A (the?) most spectacular transpartisan event of this young century.  The divorced, biracial American Meghan Markle, and the handsome British prince, son of Diana, emerge from the day as a most important, symbolic embodiment of how far transpartisan values have come and how bright a future they point toward.

Transpartisan appears in multiple forms.  Mainstream political symbols tend toward mechanistic, binary concepts, preoccupied with exposing falsehood.  These concepts have useful meaning only in disengaged, abstract public life.  They have little or no meaning in private, engaged life.

Around the globe privately engaged individuals demand their public servants stop their nonsensical arguing and destructive interference in private lives.  The Royal Wedding underscored and flashed into view the vast private changes underway in our community lives and how far out of touch formal politics is with personal living.

Mainstream symbols rooted in crudely crafted identity politics parade across the ‘public’ stage as weapons.  Symbols like left, right, race, gender, life as conflict, ’winners’ and ‘losers’, ‘victims’ and ‘oppressors’ (including “oppressive” culture) clash in wasteful conflict.  They deny, diminish, denigrate the primacy of ‘private’ lives.

Transpartisan recognizes individuals striving for connection beyond the superficial public categories. Transpartisan recognizes qualities, in conscious, engaged life that transform the brittle disengaged forms of public political combat.  The Wedding showed the breakup of all the mythic furniture, starting with race.

Here was the British royal family, the heart of the British Establishment, with blacks everywhere celebrating the essence of order-right values, rooted in love which order and free, left and right all feel moved by and energetically embrace.  That embrace transcends all identity conflict.  It is transpartisan.  Examples:

• Alongside the Most Revd Justin Welby white Archbishop of Canterbury was a sermon, raved about by Rev Welby, delivered by The Very Rev. Michael Curry, the first African-American to preside over the Episcopal Church of America, delivered in the manner of a Southern Baptist preacher on the power of love;
• Rose Josephine Hudson-Wilkin, QHC a black woman who serves as the personal Chaplain to the Queen, followed with a shorter sermon also intoning about the power of love;
• The Kingdom Choir, made up of 20 singers ‘a unique group of dedicated men and women, who blend Choral discipline with the raw Gospel spiritual sound – drawn from an inner experience,’ says their website.This all-black choir marked the rise of slavery’s descendants into the heart of the colonial enterprise;
• Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the black royal wedding cellist, gave, according to multiple media reports and reactions from the vast audience that watched, a breathtaking performance.
• Then The Wedding disposed of gender orthodoxy. Meghan’s arrestingly simple gown came from Givenchy, a first-tier temple of haute couturein Paris.  It was designed by the British designer Claire Wade Keller, whowas the first female artistic director in Givenchy’s history.  Long articles appeared on how the dress, ‘inspired by all 12 signs of the Zodiac,’ was a perfect symbol for Meghan.
• Sir Elton John attending the wedding with his husband David Furnish and highlighting the reception underscored the decline of gender orthodoxies.

The royal couple chose the music, combining traditional High-Church music with African-American gospel.  The service began with a musical fanfare by the state trumpeters of the Household Cavalry, featuring Lance Corporal Kate Sandford, first woman from the Household Cavalry band to play the fanfare at a Royal wedding.

Celebrities abounded: Amal and George Clooney, Elton John, Serena Williams, David and Victoria Beckham, Oprah.  All in Windsor Castle’s medieval splendor in the Queen’s own St. George’s Chapel, completed by Henry VIII in 1528, reminding that the march of individual reach, personal conscience, and free expression begun at the beginning of time continues on a long and winding path into today and beyond.

Hundreds of thousands of ‘common’ private people waited all night and lined the streets to see the royal couple.  The constant drum-beat theme was how they LOVED Meghan, how it thrilled them that this beautiful American was marrying the most popular member of the British royal family.

Will the moment last?  Divorce until recently was the ‘line in the sand’ for the English church.  How things have changed.  Three of the Queen’s four children are divorced, to a large degree because of the suffocating rigidity of the roles imposed on people who need more than anything free expression.

And Meghan Markle?  Her intense eyes and brilliant smile suggest an embracing transpartisan soul who understands the extraordinary role she has been ‘called’ to play.  Embracing and transcending her commitment to her husband, she seemed to revel in her role, which is more significant and permanent than any she auditioned for as an actress—a role she will play for the whole of her life.

We suggest this role expresses love, drawn from an inner experience which blends discipline and order with the raw spiritual force of freedom.  What a Wedding!