Tag: A. Lawrence Chickering

Transpartisan Note #94

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We published the first in our series of weekly Transpartisan Notes on July 4th, 2016.  In the 22 months since, the world has turned upside down.  As we approach our 100th Note, we see the forces of individuation challenging the institutions of order across the globe in every walk of life.

In the past two years, we’ve also published two issues of The Transpartisan Review (featuring sixteen articles), shared three special notes, a transpartisan bibliography, and focused on the importance of tools such as our Transpartisan Matrix and Joan Blades’ Living Room Conversations to help people understand the forces reshaping our world.

Each Transpartisan Note, each article, each lead presents an example of political opponents problem-solving together or ordinary people in transpartisan collaboration, or a combination of both.  Our accumulating inventory of transpartisan examples shares a vision of political interactions quite different from the click-bait news of daily political conflict.

Taking stock of our two year effort, we see this transpartisan vision gaining ground in the lives of actual people, even as it remains virtually invisible in the hyper-polarized, entertainment-driven, 24/7 circus of partisan debate that continues to alienate people from parochial political, bickering gridlock.

Imagine alternative paths leading to political successes that are all but impossible for the petty partisans to conceive.  Around the world individual force challenges institutional power in ways unprecedented, unexpected, and unwelcomed by those occupying positions of institutional power.

Let’s begin with individual constituencies’ seemingly contrary demands: more transparency and more privacy; more government services and lower taxes; more freedom and more security; more income and less useless work; more sexual freedom and more sexual responsibility; and fewer abortions along with more reproductive choice.

This list of assumed dichotomies goes on and on.  Today’s political class (15% right, 15% left) leverages these contrary perspectives and fights, fights, fights.  It seems to enjoy fighting, egged on by a media that maximize revenues by reporting “stories” of conflict.  We urge this conflict include transpartisan approaches to integrate these dichotomies into policy approaches that might actually solve problems.

By transpartisan we refer to the over 70% of American citizens who are non-registered eligible voters — along with the registered non-voting citizens, the registered voting Independents, registered voters who choose none-of-the-above, and the “hold-your-nose” Democrats and Republicans — all who want more to politics than partisan infighting.

Our Transpartisan Notes have included examples from the policy dichotomy areas listed above, and we are aware of many others.  In a future Transpartisan Note — How The Transpartisan Vision Gains Traction II — we will reprise some previous notes and suggest new initiatives.

As people learn about Transpartisan, it gains traction.

Transpartisan Note #93

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

In A Renaissance on the Right (NYT 4-12-18) David Brooks writes about an issue he argues underlies the crisis in the Republican Party and in conservative thought that is getting the attention of young conservative writers…

Suddenly fundamental issues, like the values of the liberal democratic order itself, are up for debate.  Some conservatives are laying down comprehensive critiques of the way our society is organized.  Modern liberal capitalism is too soulless, they say, too atomizing, too destructive of basic institutions like family, faith and village that give life meaning.  Liberal individualism doesn’t produce the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain it.

We think our Four-Quadrant Matrix helps understand Brooks’ issue.  We believe he puts his finger on the challenge of order at a time of increasing individualism and individuation.  It is an issue that challenges liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and society at large.  We believe candidates who best address this issue will greatly enhance their chances of winning elections.

Brooks argues that excessive individualism (freedom) is undermining all forms of institutions (order), which are essential for society to exist.  It ‘has left us distrustful and alone—naked Lockeans,’ which explains the recent increase in tribalism, which is undermining basic principles of a liberal democracy.  ‘Tribalism, he writes, ‘is the end product of excessive individualism.’

We think Brooks struggles with this problem because he sees freedom and individualism inherently undermining order—by which he means traditional order.  He presents no concept of order that emerges out of freedom.  He sees freedom and individualism as substantive, conceptually mechanistic, and contradictory to order—inherent enemies of order because separated from it. 

An alternative concept of freedom and individualism is instrumental, procedural, related to consciousness not related to any particular outcome—as in freedom of choice.  Parents know that rebelling adolescents, rather than rejecting parental values, seek ‘separation’ from parents to find values they can call their own. Such separation may or may not lead them to reject, embrace or selectively choose their parents’ values. Their real purpose is self-discovery for self-determined values.  We believe that organizations and societies follow a similar course.

Individuation is a process borne from advancing consciousness of the subjective self.  This process weakens traditional influences and habitual behavior and sets people on a path to live consciously and make choices.  (Because this process is an individual one, we prefer the word ‘individuation’ to ‘individualism’.)

Brooks focuses on the social effects of this process, tending to see the freedom quadrants as a collective problem that must have a mechanistic, collective answer.  Believing in a collective-problem and a solution-answer tends to ignore freedom and consciousness, which are essential for individual and collective significance. This significance is redeemed when someone or group freely chooses the good—an expression of the highest form of idealism.  In this moment freedom and order become integrated.

The impulse toward freedom, we believe, originates in an accurate understanding of why Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden—they left for ‘knowledge’, for consciousness. 

Individuation is manifest in many intellectual, artistic, and political ways.  Two paintings in Room Two of Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, of ‘Madonna and Child’, one by Cimabue (created 1280-90) and one by Giotto (1310), represent how, in three decades, expression of consciousness changed from Cimabue’s dreamlike Madonna to Giotto’s figure, who has become self-determined (and alienated?).  This shift displayed individuation and marked the launch of the Renaissance.

Lionel Trilling wrote Sincerity and Authenticity(1972) about individuation in literature. Christian mystic Rudolf Steiner (1905), Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli (1965), and the practice of Mindfulness (used by Congressional mindfulness caucus members such as Tim Ryan/D OH and Mark Sanford/R NC) promote individual will-strengthening.  With increasing individuation, engaging the self can only happen by strengthening the will as consciousness—to live consciously.

The core challenge here for societies and political systems is imagining a concept of order that earns voluntary allegiance—order that springs from and is fed by freedom—an order that, in Brook’s terms, ‘produce(s) the sort of virtuous, self-restrained people that are required to sustain’ American democratic life.

Our suggested answer is counterintuitive and ironic as it looks to economists and free market capitalismfor support for the democratic enterprise.  We suggest a key part of the answer is OWNERSHIP—property rights not only inprivate space, which is exclusive and represents traditional economic interests; but also in PUBLIC SPACE, such as schools, housing projects, health programs, and security (policing) systems, for example, which are inclusive. 

Real experiences show that shared ownership (property rights in public spaces) can be a powerful instrument for bringing people—everyone, including the most exalted and the most disadvantaged—together in common purpose.  The work of our friend and colleague Hernando de Soto, expanding his previous efforts by using blockchain to legally formalize the existing de facto ownership of land by disadvantaged individuals around the world moves in this direction.

We have presented real, powerful, examples of such integrated efforts, like de Soto’s, in previous Notes and articles.  We will present more in future writings.  They are in fact springing up all around us like seedlings in a newly planted lawn.  The political task consists of creating space to effectively nurture and harness the advancing consciousness of millions of individuals across the world.  In public spaces ownership belongs to everyone.

(Detail from Giotti’s Ognissanti Madonna found at the Galleria degli Uffizi. Image via Wikimedia Commons.)

Transpartisan Note #92

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Our colleague Ralph Benko writes ‘Seven Reasons To Read Gorbachev: His Life And Times‘ for Forbes Online (Mar. 31, 2018).  The Fall 2017 Gorbachev biography, by Pulitzer Prize winning Amherst history professor William Taubman, underscores the crippling way in which the left/right spectrum hobbles effective political action.  Gorbachev’s reform ran into a nationalist reaction.

From one perspective Gorbachev careened from crisis to crisis, domestic and foreign, in the grip of forces changing Europe and the world in ways neither he nor anyone else expected.  Attempting to corral the forces of change and expansion into communist ideology, Gorbachev failed to prevent an attempted coup, the fall of the Soviet Union or his own ouster from power.  Taubman tells this story.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr, American Ambassador to the USSR from 1987-1991, who wrote of Russia in Issue #2 of The Transpartisan Review, calls Taubman’s biography ‘Comprehensive, judicious, utterly absorbing . . . [giving] rare insight into the man who changed his country and world politics.  A model of careful research and compelling narrative skill, this biography is destined to become a modern classic.’

Benko draws attention to important ways Gorbachev’s struggle illuminates today’s politicsincluding the way Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan created a tight and lasting friendship during their terms in office.  Benko says, for example, setting out one of his seven reasons for reading Taubman’s Gorbachev biography:

Fifth, Gorbachev reveals the story of a political leader in mortal combat with a massive bureaucracy.  For those of us following the struggle between our current president and what is romantically, if wrongheadedly, called the ‘Deep State,’ there are profound lessons to be learned.  By the way, speaking as one who has served therein, the ‘Deep State’ gives the bureaucracy way too much mystique.  Its main weapon is inertia, not laser death rays.

Ideology — left, right and other — presents a part of the political picture.  The integration of freedom and order presents every ideology a task, a puzzle to be solved. As our politics transitions beyond the limits of left/right ideology, a transpartisan awareness may help us see new alliances creating greater freedom within new forms of order.

Taubman’s Gorbachev biography spotlights the workings of that dynamic process.  Read Benko on Taubman and Taubman on Gorbachev for useful explorations of how history changes as ideology accommodates social forces—or fails to.  The transpartisan vision suggests that recognizing the best ideas in each ideology expands the possibility of finding the best ideas overall.

(Image of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev relaxing at Reagan’s California ranch by Bob Galbraith and in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

Transpartisan Note #91

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

President Trump’s national security shake-up — Mike Pompeo at State, John Bolton as National Security Advisor — is drawing huge criticism from both sides of the aisle, but it also creates an important opportunity to address an important security issue that recent policymakers have largely avoided.

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, it was commonly said that the major security challenges had shifted from ‘strong states’ — USSR, Nazi Germany, China, etc. — to ‘weak states’ influenced by strong non-state parties and forces.  At the time, analysts agreed, this seismic shift in the security environment required very different responses than in the past, before 9/11.

The new responses would focus on the non-state sector — local civil society organizations (CSOs), promoting economic, social, and political change from within the effected societies.  Despite the talk, little has changed in the foreign policy narrative, which continues to focus on relations between governments.

The failure to think in different ways — to add policy toward non-state actors and parties to traditional concerns about inter-government relations — is rooted in what foreign policy experts know: they know about relations between governments, and they know next to nothing about civil society organizations and non-state issues, including culture. We think this explains much of the policy ‘drift’ of this and the last two administrations especially in relation to the countries of greatest strategic concern, which are the Arab and Muslim countries in the greater Middle East.

The appointment of more ‘hawkish’ foreign policy officials does not address this new concern — it addresses more traditional challenges (from North Korea and Iran), which are solvable only by governmental action.  With all political and media attention on these high profile traditional issues, an unusual opportunity may arise to address these new issues and forces.

For a visceral sense of the power waiting to be harnessed, notice the ‘March For Our Lives’ rally in Washington, DC, on March 24.  Also notice, almost simultaneously, the Moscow march urging Putin to resign; rallies across Spanish Catalonia protesting the German arrest of the region’s separatist leader; the massive French protest against labor law reforms; and England’s Brexit struggle becoming known as ‘anti-politics’.  States everywhere are struggling to harness non-state energy.

The Transpartisan Matrix, proposing integration of freedom and order on both left and right, provides important clues about how to think about these non-state issues.  The central challenge in the traditional and tribal societies is to empower traditional people to advance beyond traditional order, which freezes people in passive concepts of self, to more entrepreneurial selves that can plan active roles in promoting change.  There are many examples of real experiences on how to do this so it works both politically and socially.  The task is to learn from them.

We propose that a Working Group be assembled, including both government and civil society members, bringing together a new breed of experts to examine non-state challenges such as ethnic conflict, strategies for promoting change in traditional cultures, and promotion of property rights for economic, social, and political development — and possible responses to them.

Since civil society organizations have developed the most successful examples of change on these issues, CSOs need to play a significant role in the Working Group, working with traditional foreign policy experts to explore integration of new and traditional policies.  Such an effort would represent the best application of transpartisan principles to issues that are both crucial for our security and resist solution by traditional principles alone.

Transpartisan Note #90

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Bassam Aramin became active in the Palestinian struggle as a boy growing up in Hebron in the West Bank.  At 17, he was arrested for planning an attack on Israeli troops, and he spent seven years in prison.  He co-founded Combatants for Peace in 2005 (with former Israeli and Palestinian combatants) supporting a non-violent struggle against the occupation.  He has remained a peace activist since then even when his ten-year-old daughter Abir was killed by an Israeli soldier two years later.  (Story shared here: The Forgiveness Project.)

Combatants for Peace says about itself:

We are a group of Palestinians and Israelis who have taken an active part in the cycle of violence in our region: Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF and Palestinians as combatants fighting to free their country, Palestine, from the Israeli occupation.  We—serving our peoples, raised weapons, which we aimed at each other and saw each other only through gun sights—have established Combatants for Peace on the basis of non-violence principles.’

Founded a year earlier, in 2004, The Forgiveness Project ‘collects and shares stories from individuals and communities who have rebuilt their lives following hurt and trauma.’  In its own words ‘It provides resources and experiences to help people examine and overcome their own unresolved grievances.  The testimonies we collect bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit and act as a powerful antidote to narratives of hate and dehumanization, presenting alternatives to cycles of conflict, violence, crime and injustice.’

The Project is based on a belief that ‘restorative narratives have the power to transform lives; not only supporting people to move on from harm or trauma, but also building a climate of tolerance, resilience, hope and empathy.’  It does this on multiple platforms — ‘in publications…, in public conversations, and our award-winning RESTORE prison programme.’

The Project is a secular organization ‘sharing stories from all faiths and none’, believing that ‘stories of forgiveness … demonstrate that forgiveness is first and foremost a personal journey, with no set rules or time limits.’

Sally Kohn’s introduction of Bassam Aramin in her TEDWomen 2017 presentation What We Can Do About the Culture of Hate has received 565,862 views as of today.  Combatants for Peace and The Forgiveness Project present useful ways to build trust, the essential element in the transpartisan spirit.  Visit their websites to share their experience.

Transpartisan Note #89

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

By fewer than 700 votes Conor Lamb looks like the surprising Democratic party winner of the March 13, 2018 Pennsylvania district #18 special Congressional election.  This race, southwest of Pittsburgh — where President Trump won by 20 points — raises three key Transpartisan questions.

First, what about the non-voters?  As in many current elections voters split evenly.  Of 532,000 district residents over 18 (PA’s voting age) 223,378 voted and 309,000 did not.  In the 2016 general election 293,684 voted (100% for the Republican incumbent), and 237,000 did not vote.

Non-voters, intentionally or not, make a political statement — pox on both your houses.  Knowing more about them helps candidates, voters, and political parties.  In 2014, the Supreme Court upheld a forty-year old Nevada law placing a none-of-the-above line on Nevada ballots.

In 2012, Republican Dean Heller beat Democrat Shelley Berkley for a Nevada U.S. Senate seat by 12,000 votes.  45,000 voted ‘none of these candidates’.  In race after race across the country, non-voters exceed the margin of victory.  Their non-vote counts.  Non-voters include many Transpartisans.

Second question: What about Gerrymandering?  How will the Pennsylvania Supreme Court order abolishing District #18 affect this November’s midterm congressional election?  The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against one of the nation’s most gerrymandered state systems.

In the 2016, Pennsylvania races with a 53% Republican vote won 13 of 18 Congressional seats.  With 45%, Democrats won five seats.  A 13 of 18 win requires 72% of a non-gerrymandered state.  Dems get unbalanced wins in gerrymandered Maryland.  Fed up Transpartisans say pox on both.

Third question, what, if anything, does Pennsylvania’s 18^th mean for the 2018 midterms? Harry Enten of CNN says in seven special elections before this one, Democrats outperformed their partisan baseline by 16 percentage points.  Lamb outperformed the partisan baseline by 22.

Analysts of every stripe weigh in. Some suggest a blue wave shifts the house. Others say a strong Trump base and stay-at-home voters hold the house.  We suggest that while pursuing their various analyses they also consider that a Transpartisan message, by any candidate, might draw votes from the non-voters.

Transpartisan non-voters offer an untapped or modestly tapped resource for every candidate seeking elective office.  Effectively addressed, Transpartisans tip the scales toward winning. Unite America organizes to elect independents as one strategy for harnessing the none-of-the-above constituency.

(Image from conorlamb.com.)

Transpartisan Note #88

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

On February 27, 2018, TheChisel.com told reporters at the Washington Press Club that it’s Bipartisan Survey Shows Right, Left, and Center Agree on #1 Goal for 53% of 34 Issues (press release).  The Survey reported ‘the surprising good news about Americans’ shared values from a coalition of partners across the political spectrum’.

‘The results demonstrate that despite different vocabularies, favorite news channels, local customs, or professions, Americans maintain many shared values,’ said Deborah Devedjian, Founder of The Chisel, which spearheaded the survey.  You can find the details of the survey at TheChisel.com.

The survey addressed 7 themes: Economy; Social Justice; Liberty & Regulation; Health, Education & Care; Infrastructure & Services; Foreign Affairs; and Governance.  The Chisel coalition—30 universities, media outlets, and policy organizations across the political spectrum and the nation—reaches 58 million Americans.

TheChisel.com hosted the survey on its unique bipartisan public discussion platform.  Erik Fogg, Editor of ReConsider Media said of the survey, ‘Given partisan stereotypes and soundbites, many commonalities will surprise readers, especially in Employment, Mental Health, Foreign Aid, Campaign Finance, and Elections’

‘As a nation, we are frustrated and face uncertainties.  We expect this effort will help guide our nation’s leaders to understand Americans’ goals and devise tactics to achieve those goals.  It’s time for a new playbook,’ said Devedjian.  You can order the 100-page book of survey results from www.YesWeAgree.com.

The survey was based on 1,318 voting-age Americans, reflecting 2016 Census by gender, age, race, geography, income.  Respondents self-identified for political affiliation and provided numerical rankings and 5,000+ personal comments.

TheChisel.com identifies itself as the first and only online civic platform based on 100% bipartisan facts and proposals.  No bias,  no jargon, and fun, easy-to-understand graphics.  Content is developed with recognized experts from both sides of the aisle working together.

TheChisel.com provides a significant piece of what we call the ‘Transpartisan Impulse’.