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Responding to increasing attacks on capitalism and growing support for socialism, the Business Roundtable, representing the CEOs of the largest corporations in America, on August 19, released its Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, promoting a radically new direction for business’ purpose.
The Statement sought to separate business, philosophically, from the long-standing, defining purpose of maximizing profits and to embrace a larger economic and social agenda (in addition to profits). The late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman stated the older, ‘discredited’ view as follows: ‘There is one and only one social responsibility of business: to engage in activities designed to increase its profits.’
Friedman wrote this statement in 1970, fifty years ago, at a time very like the present. In 1970, when we were still at war in Vietnam, the country was torn by political polarization and conflict, and criticism of business and capitalism were at fever pitch. At that time, calls were being heard for business to change along the same lines as the Business Roundtable statement. Friedman was responding to these calls.
As transpartisans, we believe that many conflicts are rooted in different uses of LANGUAGE that are never explored. A hint of that problem here appears in the fact that Friedman embraced ‘profit-making’ as the central purpose of business, but he also, often, said that he thought the greatest threat to freedom in our society was the decline of both personal and social responsibility. His concept of ‘capitalism’ was focused on freedom and freedom alone: freedom to choose, whatever one valued material or non-material — pure Freedom Right. Thus, he embraced the Israeli kibbutzim as a triumph of capitalism—because they are freely-chosen.
Since many socialists embrace the kibbutzim as a triumph of socialism (because of their communal values), the language problem rears its ugly head and is almost invariably ignored. This problem goes to the heart of the Transpartisan challenge to the mainstream political debate and its defining Left-Right spectrum. Perhaps without knowing it, Friedman—in this example, at least—was a transpartisan.
The Transpartisan Matrix can be applied in understanding policy proposals—working toward our objective of four-quadrant models—and also in understanding entire cultures. Recalling the end of the sixties again, when conflict and polarization were high and social trust was low, demands were intense for forcing business to import Order Left values into their basic Freedom Right model.
Our thought here is at times of intense conflict and low trust, entire countries tend to shift toward multi-quadrant cultures; anyone who understands this point might therefore see corporations would maximize profits by importing those other quadrant values into their business model. Friedman’s vision might still be alive as long as no effort is made to compel business in this direction.
When societies are torn by conflict and social trust is low, people long for order—conservatives looking for it in traditional institutions and values, the province of the Order Right quadrant; and progressives looking for it in demands for justice as equality, the province of the Order Left quadrant. As culture changes, it should come as no surprise that all social institutions will change, including profit-making companies.
Those who don’t like business wandering away from its core Freedom Right quadrants can reduce this temptation by promoting change in the political idiom toward four-quadrant, transpartisan values and institutions. As long as the debate focuses exclusively on framing issues in mechanistic terms (with governments making decisions for citizens in areas where active citizens could make them) conflict will remain high and trust low, while demands will continue for business to find solutions for the essential problem of ‘Connection’ that only engaged citizens can solve.
Ralph, a former deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, is the principal of the public affairs firm of RalphBenko.com. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, was short-listed as Nonprofit Blogger of the Year for his work for the Lehrman Institute, and is a political columnist and professional blogger for a variety of outlets including American Spectator and Townhall.com.
Below you will find a press release for the book and several excerpts. If you have enjoyed Ralph’s past contributions, we encourage you to check it out at TheCapitalistLeague.com (now on sale at this link).
A Call to Truly Liberal Radicalism
Transpartisan Review adviser (and self-described cispartisan) Ralph Benko, together with Tea Party progenitor William Collier, Jr., recently published The Capitalist Manifesto: The End of Class Warfare, Toward Universal Affluence (The Websters’ Press, 2019).
It is now available in eBook and, soon, a trade paperback edition at TheCapitalistLeague.com where you can also subscribe, free, to the League’s newsletter Universal Opulence. Rather than merely criticizing Socialism (which it does) Benko and Collier celebrate Capitalism in no uncertain terms as beneficial to workers as well as the affluent.
They cite President John F. Kennedy’s axiom from his last public speech, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The Manifesto’s epigram and leitmotif is Adam Smith’s statement from Wealth of Nations:
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.
A core point of The Capitalist Manifesto is that – from The Communist Manifesto to the present day – core socialist doctrine holds that capitalism is excellent at creating wealth and terrible at its equitably distributing wealth to workers. Factually untrue, according to the authors.
– Excerpts –
Marx and Engels, in inventing Communism, pitted the workers – the proletariat – against the middle class – the bourgeoisie. They claimed that the middle class was exploiting the workers.
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Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, pay homage to Capitalism’s ability to conjure abundance:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam- navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
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As we write this yet another Communist Manifesto is in press, garnering favorable attention from prestige publications such as The New York Times. It is entitled Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. An excerpt:
Automation, robotics and machine learning will, as many august bodies, from the Bank of England to the White House, have predicted, substantially shrink the work force, creating widespread technological unemployment. But that’s only a problem driver or construction worker — is something to be cherished. For many, work is drudgery. And automation could set us free from it.
Gene editing and sequencing could revolutionize medical practice, moving it from reactive to predictive. Hereditary diseases could be eliminated, including Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, and cancer cured before it reaches Stage 1. Those technologies could allow us to keep pace with the health challenges presented by societal aging — by 2020 there will be more people over the age of 60 than under the age of 5 — and even to surpass them.
What’s more, renewable energy, which has been experiencing steep annual falls in cost for half a century, could meet global energy needs and make possible the vital shift away from fossil fuels. More speculatively, asteroid mining — whose technical barriers are presently being surmounted — could provide us with not only more energy than we can ever imagine but also more iron, gold, platinum and nickel. Resource scarcity would be a thing of the past.
The consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative. For the crises that confront our world today — technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity — we can already glimpse the remedy.
But there’s a catch. It’s called Capitalism. It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share round the fruits of technological development.
There they go again. The new Communists, just like Marx and Engels, acknowledge Capitalism’s power to create abundance. Then they slyly indict Capitalism for its inability to “share round the fruits.”
This overlooks the fact that all but the poorest of the poor in developed – Capitalist – countries tend to own cell phones, color TVs, and live in air-conditioned and centrally-heated homes with plentiful food.
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As The Spectator observed in an article titled Glad Tidings published in 2012:
It may not feel like it, but 2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world. That sounds like an extravagant claim, but it is borne out by evidence. Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded. The death toll inflicted by war and natural disasters is also mercifully low. We are living in a golden age.
In 1990, the UN announced Millennium Development Goals, the first of which was to halve the number of people in extreme poverty by 2015. It emerged this year that the target was met in 2008.Yet the achievement did not merit an official announcement, presumably because it was not achieved by any government scheme but by the pace of global Capitalism. (Emphasis added.)
As Tim Worstall writing in Forbes.com– that Capitalist Tool! – noted a few years back, “the average American today is 90 Times Richer than the Average Historical Human Being.”
I have regularly tried to get over the idea that there is just no such thing as real poverty in the United States today. Absent those entirely outside our society through addiction or mental health problems there is just no one at all who suffers from what has been the usual human description of poverty. Actually, there’s no one at all in the US who has anything even close to what the human experience has been of poverty. By any historical, and by standards of all too large a part of the world today, all Americans are simply hugely, gargantuanly, richer than any but the fewest, most privileged, of our forefathers.
Capitalism, and with it the “universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people,” strikes again!
“Unable to share round the fruits?” Simply untrue to the point of inanity. How inconvenient a truth for those who wish to restore the neo-Feudalism that is Communism or Socialism. So they ignore it.
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What is to be done? Let us again take inspiration from the wisdom of Hayek, that great prophet of liberalism. In his essay cited above Hayek commanded the advocacy of a liberal utopia, founded in truly liberal radicalism:
Does this mean that freedom is valued only when it is lost, that the world must everywhere go through a dark phase of socialist totalitarianism before the forces of freedom can gather strength anew? It may be so, but I hope it need not be. Yet, so long as the people who over longer periods determine public opinion continue to be attracted by the ideals of Socialism, the trend will continue. If we are to avoid such a development, we must be able to offer a new liberal program which appeals to the imagination. We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage.
What we lack is a liberal utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of Socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote.
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The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and therefore an influence on public opinion which is daily making possible what only recently seemed utterly remote. Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this had rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide — unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.
The battle is not lost, and in fact the odds are strongly in our favor if we but decide to join arm-in-arm to make common cause in defense of, and to advance, the greatest economic system ever known to humanity. Capitalism is the only economic system which we can point to and say, “it has made substantive progress toward its seemingly utopian aims.”
(Feature Image: Fortune by Tadeusz Kuntze-Konicz, Fortune, 1754 from the Collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.)
Our colleague, Rob Gibson, does not see his response to Anthony Picadio’s February 2019 article “The Right to Bear Arms: A Disfavored Right” as transpartisan. He couldn’t be further from the truth. Although his response represents only one voice amongst many contributors to the greater conversation, transpartisan examination of any issue requires both participation and a willingness on the participant’s part to add their point of view to the search for meaningful policies.
In “The Right to Bear Arms” context, we note that the 9th Amendment plays a role in the Supreme Court’s recognizing a right to keep a hand gun for self-defense in your home. We note that the Supreme Court also recognizes the 9th Amendment as playing a role in the right to privacy on which it has based the right to choice in the abortion issue. How these kinds of issues are integrated offers fertile ground for transpartisan exploration. Likewise, Rob Gibson’s comment on Anthony Picadio’s Disfavored Right article also seems to us to offer opportunity for similar transpartisan exploration.
We present Rob’s comment below…
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While the [Picadio] piece raises many important issues about the Second Amendment, it seems that what’s missing is an analysis of what the Second Amendment actually protects; how it’s currently exercised; and how those two factors could affect our future. It’s a simple matter to say militia use, in general, is protected. “Well regulated” can be interpreted in various ways. Original interpretations tend to be permissive, I think.
Certainly, the definition of militia is very permissive. Lots of collective action qualifies, but it’s undeniable that militia action starts with folks showing up self-armed. Forget rebellion against tyranny scenarios. Hurricanes, earthquakes, blizzards, mass power outages, riots, etc., all require and justify collective armed defense, which is why we all need more than one “militia weapon,” since nobody can stay awake 24 hrs. a day.
It amazes me to hear people discuss the issue with the implicit assumption that things can’t go wrong in our lifetime. The above disasters have meant that, probably in a majority of the country, if you dialed 911, there would be no answer or, if there was an answer, a response was days/weeks away.
Two related things interest me: One is the demographics. Our kids are going to inherit a lot of guns that they, in terms of culture and habits, are not really prepared to deal with. I asked my oldest daughter, who is 29, how she felt about this, and keep in mind, she likes guns and shoots very well. But she said, “I don’t really know what I’ll do with them.”
The other is technology. Our guns, well cared for, will last hundreds of years, ammo, at least many decades. But technology that will allow effective defense without killing or seriously injuring the recipient is not that far off. How will we deal with the use of deadly force once deadly force is practically obsolete?
Won’t this add a huge impetus to confiscation arguments? While these may not be Transpartisan issues, they are areas of interest for me around this subject.
– Rob Gibson
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Not only do we encourage you to add your own voice to this conversation by commenting on Rob’s response below, we also invite you to (re)visit the Picadio article and comment there as well. We also invite you to read Anthony’s latest contribution to The Transpartisan Review website, Privacy in the Age of Surveillance.
The above response was shared with us via email as an extemporaneous comment and has been edited for grammar and spelling. The feature image is provided CC BY 2.0 by Fibonacci Blue and features a pro-2nd Amendment rally on the steps of the Minnesota capitol building.
by A. Lawrence Chickering, James S. Turner & Anitha Beberg
Showcasing the Outlier Candidates in the 2020 Presidential Election
And they’re off! Twenty-three Democrats and two Republicans currently running for the White House. The Democratic field looks like a Where’s Waldo? children’s’ book. Nevertheless, from our transpartisan perspective, the least ‘professionally political’ candidates — Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg and Donald Trump — are the most interesting because their campaigns shed interesting light on real issues mostly ignored by the frontrunners.
The challenge of running for office, including President, is largely a theatrical challenge because success depends on visibility, and visibility depends largely on media attention. All, but Trump, struggle for media coverage. Theater begins in Act I as the characters come on stage. What they say moves the production along. The Outliers now have a chance to rewrite the script.
Understanding the Actors in Terms of the Transpartisan Matrix
Understanding all candidates requires background understanding of our Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, which ‘maps’ political values and positions far more accurately than the simple left-right spectrum in common use. For readers unfamiliar with the Matrix, we are providing here a description, which summarizes each of the quadrants, with a ‘Freedom’ and ‘Order’ Quadrant on both the left and the right. Readers already familiar with the Matrix may skip to the next section, Introducing the Players.
The left-right spectrum presents political values and issues as if left and right were both consistent and coherent sets of ideas. The core conceptual assumption of the spectrum is that each side is a discrete ‘package’ of ideas, in total conflict with the other. In this conceptual framework, there is no overlap at all between the ideas set on one side versus the other. This assumption is completely inaccurate. Yet it sets up a perfect darkness-and-light binary conflict of visions that, while ideal for candidates emphasizing their differences and for the media coverage on the evening news, has no value whatever for any other purpose.
The binary frame has nothing whatever to do with what real people actually value, which is much more complicated (and often conflicted within the left and within the right!) than the spectrum describes them. Our Four-Quadrant Matrix presents a map of what real people value even in politics, with a ‘Freedom’ and ‘Order’ quadrant on both the left and the right. Here is a graphic describing the Matrix:
Introducing the Players: Pete Buttigeig, Andrew Yang, and Marianne Williamson
A front page story in The New York Times recently explored the meteoric rise of the “playwright” Mayor Pete Buttigieg from an unknown Mayor of a small Midwestern city (South Bend, Indiana) to a serious candidate who is getting major media coverage and is raising significant campaign funding. The writer, Alexander Burns, describes Buttigieg’s style as ‘story-telling, wrapping conventional liberalism in an earnest, youthful persona . . .’
Burns quotes Buttigieg himself, citing his interest in ‘the interaction of “narrative and politics,” and how people connect with people beyond policy decrees.’ He believes that voters long for a ‘values-led message,’ and he is holding off a release of a heavy policy agenda to avoid ‘drown[ing] people in minutiae.’
We think Buttigieg is making a powerful statement of a truth we are emphasizing, which is also important to voters. He focuses on stories about the breakdown of civil society institutions. This aligns strongly with a consistent theme in our writing, which emphasizes strong, transpartisan institutional reform and self-governance, based on personal citizen engagement at every governance level, local, national and global.
Reactions to Buttigieg suggest he is striking a cord across the Matrix. He would strike an even stronger transpartisan cord if his policy proposals were consistent with and spoke to his vision. His biggest problem is not seeing how his insight and vision can be translated into proposals for institutional and policy reform. If he fails in this, he runs the risk of reducing his sentiment to an empty abstraction. The most obvious example of this failing became apparent in his first debate, when he tried to explain the continuing racial conflict in South Bend.
The Playwright Pete Buttigieg (peteforamerica.com)
In trying to explain, the first words out of his mouth were something like: ‘Because I failed to solve it.’ Those few words revealed a sentiment precisely opposite to the position quoted above, suggesting he has no clue what really matters. The other debaters shared his ignorance by their failure to respond to him.
‘I failed to solve it.’ Conflict between citizens cannot be solved by government officials. Only citizens themselves can solve such conflicts, citizens empowered to work together and engage each other to address issues of common interest. Government officials, especially using their convening power, have an important role to play by bringing people together and facilitating conversations that move people beyond conflict. But they are not principals to the conflict who can, by themselves, actively solve it.
Mayor Pete’s informal, engaged style evokes the intimate (close-by) relationships of OR, but his vagueness on policy until now may reflect real uncertainty about how to institutionalize policies promoting engaged relationships and spiritual connections that create ‘spaces’ for bringing people together and solving problems. Burns calls his policy ‘conventional liberalism,’ and he may be right, given his account of his handling of the race issues in South Bend (Katie Gallioto, Politico [04/10/2010]), but conservatives (especially Order Right) are also attracted to him, which surprises the author. It is not surprising, given the alignment of his ‘connected’ values with the OR.
One may assume that criticism of him comes mostly from traditional public policy types who see governments as the major (if not exclusive) policy implementers, solving all issues and problems. But his more specific need is to think more clearly about how subjective, personal, local connections can shape national and global policy—how to promote reforms that encourage those connections.
The second paragraph of a Buttigieg speech following ‘Now is the time to . . . vote for new ideas’ might sound something like this:
We’ve got to get away from this kill-switch mentality that we see on Twitter. I have seen my once disapproving parents dance at their gay son’s wedding and homophobic military officers take back their words. I believe in the power of redemption and forgiveness. This idea that we just sort people into baskets of good and evil ignores the central fact of human existence—that each of us is a basket of good and evil. The job of politics is to summon the good—summon back the human—and beat back the evil, which is in the stereotypes (adapted from Time, May 2, 2019).
Every candidate has such stories. Beyond the candidate, civic associations depend on finding empowered, empathetic, and engaged citizens. We highlight many of them in our more than a hundred Transpartisan Notes and additional articles posted in The Transpartisan Review since July 4, 2016. The role of traditional civic institutions as places of belonging for increasingly individuated people has grown weaker, leaving people feeling unconnected and isolated. The need, at this moment, is to develop new institutional structures, promoted by active citizens, to fill the void, bringing people together and solving problems.
Mayor Pete’s policy proposals must now join his stories. New and/or newly revitalized institutions must create welcoming homes for empowered citizens with compelling stories and new ideas. Visits to communities to showcase successes will ground ideas in the actual experiences of real people, telling their own stories.
If Buttigieg fails to develop such policies—or even if he succeeds—other candidates can adopt his style and manner and combine it with a powerfully connected policy agenda. There is plenty of room for this ‘connected’ campaign vision, especially as it will speak in powerful ways to the transpartisan constituency, vision, and opportunity.
The Outliers Explore the Other Quadrants
We suggest the challenge for Democratic Presidential candidates is to search beyond their current focus in the Order Left to the other quadrants. We find the other quadrants in the less conventionally political, outlier candidates. We started with Mayor Pete dubbed him The Playwright in our theatrical metaphor because his rhetoric comes across as powerfully ‘connecting’ and transpartisan. We see him as a scribe to rewriting the performance. We also find elements of the Order Right in his stories of engagement between people ‘close by’. It is no accident that Order Right conservatives are attracted to him even as most of his policy proposals are straight Order Left. Yang and Williamson seem to us to contribute additional access to the four quadrants of the transpartisan constituency.
Yang presents a High Tech Blueprint
Andrew Yang brings strong elements of the Freedom Right. We see no hint in Yang of Identity Politics or of seeing the disadvantaged as ‘victims’ oppressed either by oppressors or by culture, unable to help themselves. He comes from an immigrant family; his father was a scientist whose research at I.B.M. resulted in 69 patents with his name on them.
Andrew is an entrepreneur, politician, and philanthropist who founded Venture for America (VFA) in 2012. Its mission is ‘to revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship’ by training recent graduates and young professionals to work for startups in emerging cities throughout the country. That makes him a venture capitalist investing in entrepreneurship and job creation—core objectives of the Freedom Right. He was, as Freakonomics Radio interviewer Stephen Dubner said, ‘a pretty big winner . . . [but] along the way, he came to see that for every winner, there were thousands upon thousands of losers.’
VFA’s goal is to have its Fellows create jobs at companies where they are initially placed or by starting their own companies, which hire people. VFA has placed over 700 Fellows in 450 startups in 19 cities in 15 states, which have 219 of the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the Presidency. VFA’s programs, headquartered in Detroit, take place in Cincinnati, Detroit, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Denver, Providence, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Columbus, Miami, San Antonio, St. Louis, Birmingham, Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Nashville and Kansas City, a rainbow of the American backbone. Building a Presidential campaign out from these cities, where he has established personal ties, gives Yang a transpartisan tool of enormous potential.
Yang set up VFA to recruit recent college graduates to work in various startup industries, or the related industry of venture funding, for two years in economically challenged US cities. All Fellows attend a five-week summer training program in Detroit, Michigan, where they are taught and mentored by investors, venture capitalists, and innovation firms.
Breaking out of the left/right, blue/red dichotomy straightjacket frees him to re-imagine the electorate. Yang is almost the rhetorical opposite of Buttigieg—sharper tongued but bookish compared to the soft-spoken and eloquent yet policy-diffused Buttigieg. Yang’s campaign platform has 107 discreet policy proposals and he speaks with the sharper voice of someone who sees wide entrepreneurial potential.
The Entrepreneur Andrew Yang (yang2020.com)
He says things like:
As an entrepreneur, I feel driven to try and solve problems, and this [all the jobs are about to disappear] seems like the greatest problem that we face. And you think, ‘Hey, if I bust my ass for several years, I have a chance to potentially accelerate the eradication of poverty and helping my country manage through the most difficult transition in decades. And I think if I put my heart and soul into it, I have some chance of making that happen.’ And then if you don’t do that, you must be an asshole.
He describes one of his earliest jobs as a knife salesman.
Freakonomics Radio’s DUBNER asks: A knife salesman? YANG: Oh yeah, Cutco, I still know the sales patter. DUBNER: Let’s hear it. YANG: What’s really dangerous is not a sharp knife. It’s a dull knife, because then you start putting elbow grease into it, and that’s when accidents happen.’
Yang spices his campaign with proposals that make headlines like ‘The President should make $4 million a year’, and he supports a program that will pay Americans $1,000 a month. Yang proposes $4 million-a-year for the President to discourage post office corruption by abuse of free mail privileges extended to all former Presidents.
The $1,000 a month is a form of Universal Basic Income (UBI), which, despite some problems, is a concept with growing acceptance around the world. He proposes it as a hedge against the massive job elimination that he—and many others—see coming from new technologies such as robotics, Artificial Intelligence and information analytics. Andrew can contribute the High Tech section of the Transpartisan stump speech:
I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for President as a Democrat in 2020 because I fear for the future of our country. New technologies – robots, software, artificial intelligence – have already destroyed more than 4 million US jobs, and in the next 5-10 years, they will eliminate millions more. A third of all American workers are at risk of permanent unemployment. And this time, the jobs will not come back.
I’m not a career politician—I’m an entrepreneur who understands the economy. It’s clear to me, and to many of the nation’s best job creators, that we need to make an unprecedented change requiring bold steps. As president, my first priority will be to implement Universal Basic Income for every American adult over the age of 18: $1,000 a month, no strings attached, paid for by a new tax on the companies benefiting most from automation. UBI is just the beginning. A crisis is underway—we have to work together to stop it, or risk losing the heart of our country. The stakes have never been higher.
When we said the challenge for Democrats is to search beyond the Order Left to the other quadrants, no candidate is immune from that suggestion. In Yang’s case, his proposal to give $1,000 to every citizen over 18 should include a proposal to promote community and connections—and the spirit of Order Right relationships ‘close by’—which could especially help ‘difficult’ populations (e.g., people suffering addictions) that might lack the discipline to spend the bounty wisely. Yang does mention in his book The War on Normal People this type of proposal, but for some reason has ceased speaking about this during the campaign trail.
A UBI would address a significant proportion of the lack of work through increased humanity, caring, creativity, and enterprise. That said, we are going to have to do much more. Timebanking is a system through which people trade time and build credits within communities by performing various helpful tasks—transporting an item, walking a dog, cleaning up a yard, cooking a meal, providing a ride to the doctor, and so on. The idea was championed in the mid-1990s in the United States by Edgar Cahn, a law professor and anti-poverty activist as a way to strengthen communities.
Now imagine a supercharged version of timebanking backed by the US government where in addition to providing social value there’s real monetary value underlying it. This new currency—Digital Social Credits—would reward people for doing things that serve the community. By creating a new currency, the government could essentially induce billions of dollars of positive social activity without having to spend nearly that amount. We could create an entirely new parallel economy around social good.
Healing the Soul of America — Marianne Williamson Presents a High Touch Challenge
Marianne Williamson is a best-selling ‘spiritual’ leader and improbable politician. In 1992, Oprah featured her first book, A Return To Love, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for 39 weeks. She has published 12 other books, seven of which have been Times bestsellers and four of which have been #1. Her books have sold more than 3 million copies. She has 2.6 million twitter followers.
In 1997 Williamson published The Healing of America, which was republished and expanded three years later as Healing the Soul of America. The book kicked off an effort to bring her widely popular self-help message into politics. In it, she laid out plans to ‘transform the American political consciousness and encourage powerful citizen involvement’.
She published a 20th anniversary revised edition in 2018, and in it she wrote in her New Age, ‘spiritual’ language what could be the third paragraph of the ‘outliers’ stump speech:
It is a task of our generation [Williamson is 66] to recreate the American political system to awaken from our culture of distraction and re-engage the process of democracy with soulfulness and hope. Yes, we see there are problems in the world. But we believe in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right. Such is the divine authority of love: to renew the heart, renew the nations, and ultimately, renew the world.
Her candidacy challenges the political system from the ‘far-out’ world of the New Age, which is to say, from radically different epistemological assumptions and rhetoric than the assumptions and rhetoric that dominate mainstream politics. Relying on direct appeals to spiritual and religious ‘higher’ powers that are difficult for mainstream political figures to understand, she speaks entirely from and to her New Age audience and makes no effort to ‘translate’ her message for politicians.
Her message speaks powerfully to her core audience. We (Chickering and Turner) had the eye-opening experience of being retained by Williamson’s publisher to assist her in her 1997 book tour, and we saw—live—her powerful appeal. We saw her in various venues, including some in Washington, DC, when she inspired 500 activists over an entire weekend meeting Washington policy pros and speaking to enthralled crowds at churches, fund-raisers, and book signings, uplifting them by reinvigorating the soul of America into the political process. Her purpose, which continues today, was to promote the ‘spirit of America’ into Washington politics.
Media figures have struggled to understand her appeal, and many of them, commenting on her final appeal to Love in the first debate could only relate to it by laughing.
The Healer Marianne Williamson (marianne2020.com)
Although we understand why her appeal, articulated in ‘soft’ New Age terms, cannot reach beyond her own audience, we are interested in her because when one ‘deconstructs’ her rhetoric, it becomes clear that she brings essential pieces of the Matrix into the debate. One way to state possibilities raised by her candidacy is by this question: can the brittle, ‘objective’ political contests that control our governing institutions accept and harness the ‘subjective’ energetic outpouring that is emerging and becoming manifest in communities across the country and around the world?
The challenge to understand Williamson’s appeal to ‘LOVE’ is to relate a word normally used only in the most intimate, personal relationships to describe relationships that are entirely impersonal in the political world. That is, in fact, the central political challenge of our time: how to impart into national politics the values of local politics and private life into national politics. These two political realms, national versus local, yield very different outcomes. In local and personal relationships people work cooperatively, while our national politics is torn apart by conflict, distrust and resulting political paralysis.
Local politics reflects the realities and truths of what people value in private life—which is engaged, private interactionsand contact—while national politics and policymaking are driven by calculations of private (political) advantage, pitting opponents against each other in darkness-and-light morality plays, choreographed for the mass media addiction to conflict. James Fallows wrote a book exploring this very subject and exploring the same issues in national versus local politics, based on traveling 100,000 miles to every part of the country.
National policy-making is a ‘representative’ system, in which empowered, active policymakers ‘make policy’ for disempowered, passive citizens in an almost entirely impersonal, mechanistic system. Everybody is a machine in the mechanistic system of national politics, and that explains why so many people are alienated from it—because it forces everyone to be dead.
That is the world Marianne is trying to speak to in her larger mission to ‘transform the American political consciousness and encourage powerful citizen involvement’. Our interest in her is that more than any other candidate, she is working to import into national politics subjective, spiritual values, which are crucially important in both private life and local politics. This means deconstructing the word ‘love’ into the language of proposals for institutional and policy reform.
Marianne has made almost no effort to translate her spiritual appeals into policy proposals. One fleeting moment occurred in the first debate when she responded to assertions, led by Bernie Sanders, about ‘the right of health care for all.’ Williamson shot back that the health care system they were advocating was a system focused on sickness, rather than health. Her idea was that the subject being debated should be HEALTH not ‘spending money on health care’, which, in practical terms, meant spending money on Western, allopathic medicine and the American Medical Association alone while ignoring alternative modalities, including self-care.
Her translation challenge is primarily for those in the Order Left quadrant, suffocating under a vision of relentless exploitation and repression, whose vision of hope is confined to proposals enforced by legal orders and the heal of a boot. They see no possibility for empowering ‘victims’ with the freedom quadrants, connecting people by transforming relationships with those ‘close by’ (from the Order Right).
They cannot see beyond the Order Left quadrant, commanding people ‘to be good’. They cannot see why programs fail everywhere that feature only commands because they are unaware of programs everywhere that are achieving positive results by empowering people, including the poor, to experience the empowering effect the Freedom Quadrants can bring to people in community (the Order Right). Their successes occur even working with the most ‘difficult’ populations in the most ‘difficult’ regions. Those experiences contain the lessons for accomplishing social change that are often called ‘miracles’.
When Marianne (as quoted above) affirms her belief ‘in a universal force that, when activated by the human heart, has the power to make all things right,’ she is right even if her words still fall short of speaking to political elites. She indicates she understands how to accomplish real policy change when she endorses the crucial element of ‘powerful citizen involvement.’
Focusing on Health would combine traditional health care with a variety of alternative care modalities, including self-care. Self-care would bring in community and connection, encouraging it, which is part of Williamson’s appeal to love as a metaphor. A really serious debate on the subject would focus on Health and would explore different components contributing to it without making false claims about the perfection of other health care systems without mentioning their severe problems.
In terms of the Matrix, Williamson’s appeal to Love is a metaphor for integrating the Four Quadrants. If you follow her ‘love’ logic, first treat others, as you want them to treat you. In our transpartisan political sense, this means being open to those in quadrants other than your own.
Williamson argues that our democracy will work only when people start listening to each other. Across the country local jurisdictions are promoting this by creating new, programs, policies, and processes that encourage the transpartisan values of personal engagement and listening to all voices.
When Marianne starts introducing into her stump speeches ideas for policy reform that promote active citizenship, working together promoting change that only active citizens can achieve, people will stop laughing.
The perspective presented here aligns with the futurist John Naisbitt’s vision, which he first developed in his 1982 best-selling Megatrends, a corporate leaders’ guide to the future. Naisbitt asserted, based on culling thousands of newspaper articles and interviewing dozens of experts in science, medicine, sociology, psychology, education, business, and theology, that in a world of technology, people long for personal and human contact.
We believe that a major cause of voter alienation from the political system comes from individuated citizens seeking empowerment to engage each other as change makers. It needs to happen in public spaces such as schools, health projects, law enforcement, and other arenas of social need. This vision is hardest to realize for the Order Left in relation to ‘victims’, following Identity Politics, unable to escape the Order Left Quadrant, and failing to see how freedom (FR and FL) is essential to facilitate conscious connections that are crucial to empower the disadvantaged and free them from their roles as ‘victims’.
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A. Lawrence Chickering is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Transpartisan Review. He has helped establish several public policy organizations. In 1985, he co-founded (with Nicolas Ardito-Barletta) the International Center for Economic Growth, which worked with economic policy organizations in more than 100 countries to promote economic and social reform. In 1999, he founded Educate Girls Globally, which works in India and will soon expand to Africa and the Middle East. In 1993, he published Beyond Left and Right. In 2008, he and James Turner co-authored Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life. Chickering’s other transpartisan publications include The Silent Revolution (1991, co-edited with Mohamed Salahdine) and Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security (2006, co-authored with I. Coleman, P.E. Haley, and E. Vargas-Baron).
James S. Turner, founding partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Swankin & Turner, is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Transpartisan Review. As one of the original Nader’s Raiders, he directed the project and wrote the report, The Chemical Feast: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Food Protection and the Food and Drug Administration. He has served as Board Chair of Citizens for Health and Voice for HOPE (Healers Of Planet Earth). He has appeared before every major consumer regulatory agency, including the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal Trade Commission, as well as the Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health. He considers himself a progressive Democrat.
Anitha Beberg is the Founder and CEO of Seva Exchange Corporation, which works with organizations supporting blockchain for social impact and universal basic income, including TimeBanks.org, Mannabase, and Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard’s 2020 Presidential Campaigns. Anitha wants to use her software background to galvanize global volunteerism by reinventing timebanking services for the modern digital economy.
With this Note, we are introducing a new feature to our occasional Transpartisan Notes. These “Election 2020” Notes will focus on both issues and candidates. We plan to endorse candidates or advocate particular solutions rarely, if ever. Rather, we intend these notes to present a snapshot of our impression at the time of writing.
Here we present our first Note in this series on an unlikely candidate, Rep Tulsi Gabbard, Congressional Representativefrom Hawaii running for the Democratic nomination for President.
Although Gabbard lags far behind the front-runners for the Democratic nomination (hovering around 1%) at the moment, she embodies, in her presence, a powerful transpartisan spirit in a way different from any of the other candidates in either party.
Gabbard was raised in a multicultural and multi-religious household. Her father is of Samoan and European ancestry and a Catholic who is active in his church. Her mother, who was born in Indiana, is of German descent and is a practicing Hindu. Gabbard chose Hinduism as a teenager.
Gabbard is, in our view, so far the only candidate in this Presidential election choosing to manifest less as a political mechanic than as fully HUMAN. Another word for ‘human’ might be ‘transpartisan’ because she speaks to, and seeks the support of, everyone, while understanding a wide range of issues in a way that attracts widespread support. She makes no effort to appeal to fear, which is the most powerful weapon in most candidates’ arsenals, and she avoids the polarizing language that promotes perpetual conflict in our politics. She avoids pledges to ‘fight’ enemies (see Bernie and Warren). At the same time she is, as one of the first two female combat veterans elected to Congress, tough. Her rhetorical evisceration of Kamala Harris in the second Democratic debate was one of the most memorable moments of the debates so far.
Along with her multicultural upbringing (and her coming from Hawaii, like Barak Obama), we think her religion plays a role in her transpartisan affect. If anyone is tempted to oppose her because of her religion, they discover that, although a combat veteran, she embraces a strain of Hinduism reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi, avoiding conflict. Her stance avoids what many people object to about religion: it avoids imposing values on anyone. In fact, we saw her response to Kamala Harris as based precisely on a modern commitment to individual rights, which explains, we believe, why it appealed so widely.
One reason Gabbard is so appealing, we think, is that Hindus tend toward the fatalistic — in Western terms, Stoic — which liberates her from the heavy-breathing earnestness that is so off-putting in other candidates, including Trump. In fact, it is precisely that earnestness that drives so many candidates to campaign on imposing their values on others — the Order Quadrants in the Transpartisan Matrix.
Gabbard’s authenticity — another crucial quality that seems lacking in other candidates — is indicated by her service in the military, serving two tours of duty in the Middle East.
She is young, and her knowledge of mainstream issues needs to be strengthened. (Her position on foreign and security policy, for example, needs to reconcile two themes that seem to conflict in her current formulation — one representing her position as a ‘hawk’ and the other as a ‘dove’.)
It is still early in the campaign. There is plenty of time for her to strengthen her message on issues, especially to integrate them with her fundamentally transpartisan spirit.
At this point in the campaign, we have no intention of endorsing a candidate. We will not endorse any candidate unless we feel she exemplifies transpartisan values. At this point in the campaign, however, Tulsi Gabbard — in our view of her character — is the standard by which we intend to measure all the others.
We are pleased to publish an extraordinary article by our colleague Ralph Benko on four ‘right wing nuts’ who love Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). They are: Steve Bannon, who sees in her ‘”gameness” or competitive heart—the combination of grit, determination, fighting spirit that you can’t coach’; ‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams, who called Trump’s election because (per Politico) he ‘had mastered the principles of hypnosis’, and gave AOC A+ ‘on her persuasion skills in a tweet’; himself as the fourth, with the third being a ‘young, conservative Jedi’, ‘my cautious protégé’.
He relies on the great libertarian F.A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) to explain what libertarians might learn from socialists. Hayek focuses on the importance of socialists’ ‘visionary character’. ‘[T]he very courage to indulge in Utopian thought,’ Hayek writes, ‘is . . . a source of strength to the socialists which traditional liberalism sadly lacks [italics added].’ Benko adds: ‘[C]arping on the impracticality of AOC’s sweeping agenda [is] possibly fatal’ to the conservative cause.
Benko’s tribute to AOC follows: ‘[W]ith her “grit, determination, fighting spirit,“ her “visionary character“ and “courage to indulge in Utopian thought“ is by her character – not by her socialism – a beacon of human dignity and liberty.’ Benko thus celebrates Hayek a libertarian icon for the insight that libertarians (the Freedom Right) need to move beyond their quadrant and embrace the visionary idealism of some on the socialist (Order) left.
When Hayek laments that traditional liberalism ‘sadly lacks’ an idealistic vision, he highlights the transpartisan truth that the Freedom Right quadrant is a partial truth, which needs a vision of the higher good—a vision from the Order Left—to be complete.
Milton Friedman, another libertarian icon, made the same point differently and left room for idealistic vision. He often said he thought the Israeli kibbutzim are a ‘triumph of capitalism’ because they are ‘freely-chosen’. Since he obviously knew that many socialists also regard the kibbutzim as a triumph of socialism, he implicitly was acknowledging overlapping, transpartisan idealisms.
Irving Kristol, who was not a libertarian, once wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism, making the same point positively: his missing ‘cheer’ was the lack of any higher vision. (No wonder some libertarians dismissed him as a socialist.)
All three stopped short of affirming the transpartisan logic that to understand what is really ‘true’ requires recognizing that each quadrant is true but incomplete. To be complete, the Freedom quadrants need a vision of the higher good from the Order quadrants, and the Order quadrants need a vision of Freedom from the Freedom quadrants. The three ‘conservative’ thinkers above reveal how the terms of discourse lock partisans into separate quadrants—here, both the Freedom Right and Order Right. The real challenge is to articulate integration of all quadrants so their integrated potential is recognized in the real world.
The left has a similar split. For example on the issue of climate change climate activists like Ocasio-Cortez and Washington State Governor and Presidential Candidate Jay Inslee attack the Democratic establishment climate position expressed by former Vice President and Presidential Candidate Joe Biden as too little too late. (For a detailed summary of their ‘argument’, see ‘Why Jay Inslee picked a fight with Joe Biden on climate change’, by David Roberts, Vox, August 2, 2019.)
Roberts summarizes the intra-Democratic Party debate as ‘It’s not about long-term targets; it’s about short-term commitment.’ More precisely, the Democratic climate argument walks around the issue of how much of people’s behavior should be ordered by government and how much freedom to choose should government leave to people.
Roberts says ‘Democrats have never really grappled with the details of aggressive, short-term climate policy. And because the unbroken wall of Republican opposition makes substantial federal climate policy impossible anyway and perpetually holds the debate to the remedial “is it real” level, Democrats never really get called on it.’ Until now, as power hovers within their grasp.
From our transpartisan perspective, we see the Democratic climate policy debate (like many other Democratic Party policy debates) taking place primarily in the order left quadrant – how much can government make people do? On many issues the Democratic Party seems locked into the Order Left quadrant, struggling to acknowledge the importance of the Freedom Quadrants. Failing to acknowledge the other quadrants cripples the Order Left’s vision for empowering the disempowered. This failing explains more than anything why so many policy interventions for the disadvantaged fail – because without a vision of the role for freedom, they disempower the materially poor and consign them to permanent economic dependency.
One Democratic voice, Marianne Williamson’s, speaks of ‘healing the soul of American’ in tones that resonate with the Freedom Quadrants. This may help explain why Dana Milbank, a left-leaning columnist for The Washington Post wrote ‘Democrats Should Listen to Williamson’ and conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote ‘Marianne Williamson Knows How to Beat Trump: We need an uprising of decency.’
When Hayek lamented that traditional liberalism lacks any idealistic vision of a higher good, he could have added that the same can also be said about the Order Left, which seems to lack real understanding of the role that Freedom must play in an idealistic vision. True idealism is believing that free people will choose the good. Two ingredients are necessary to realize idealism: freedom and a vision of the higher good.
Hayek’s comment, however, highlights the widespread belief among most conservatives [both freedom and order] that their only role—as Wm. Buckley famously said—is to say to the left: ‘STOP!’ Affirming the FREEDOM RIGHT quadrant is essential for conservatives to see a role for themselves in any positive vision of the future. For the left, with its tendency to say ‘wrong’ to any conservative idea, affirming the other quadrants would give its vision operational force.
Freedom is the soul of America. Order is the talent of America – we ‘make things’. Integrating Freedom and Order, from left and right, is the power of America. Demands for an uprising of decency present a transpartisan opportunity to make ours the best of times.
Transpartisan Tools for Would-Be Presidents Harnessing the Power of Political Theater
And they’re off! Twenty-three Democrats and two Republicans currently running for the White House. The Democratic field looks like a Where’s Waldo? children’s’ book. Nevertheless, from our transpartisan perspective, the least ‘professionally political’ candidates — Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg and Donald Trump — are the most interesting because their campaigns shed interesting light on real issues mostly ignored by the frontrunners.
The challenge of running for office, including President, is largely a theatrical challenge because success depends on visibility, and visibility depends largely on media attention. All, but Trump, struggle for media coverage. Theater begins in Act I as the characters come on stage. What they say moves the production along. The Outliers now have a chance to rewrite the script.
Live from the Political Theater
All but Trump struggle for media coverage. Trump creates his own media. The folks who control mass media access tend to cover Trump as a stylized cartoon, repeating his self-created media show. They do not understand how much of Trump’s appeal comes from his symbolic opposition to crucial, missing pieces in the mainstream debate. The missing pieces are those that connect the four quadrants in the Matrix. They would describe our political crisis as a whole, with a connected vision of the solution that all sides continue searching for. The media tend to treat the other unconventional candidates as deluded children, who are lost.
Since the media pros are in the entertainment business, delivering audiences to advertisers for money, their dismissive strategies make sense as long as the cash rolls in. And roll in, it does.
Then CBS chairman Leslie Moonves captured the exultant media understanding that the political crisis has created a profit bonanza for them: ‘It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS . . .. The money’s rolling in and this is fun,’ Moonves said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this . . ..’ On December 17th 2018, Moonves was fired for cause—sexual misconduct allegations. ‘The people’ always have ways to reign in ‘the powerful.’
This rapidly changing, difficult-to-predict, wildly vacillating world, we believe, is largely influenced by a failure in the debate to explore the Whole Problem that is our political crisis and possible approaches to address it. Voters want this larger conversation, and some of the outlier candidates are articulating parts of it.
Understanding and explaining the widespread voter alienation and proposing reforms to reduce it would transfuse new ideas into a debate that has little to offer in new ideas. It would produce a sensational media story, theatrically pitting a candidate against the other candidates and also against the media.
Anyone who runs against the media and the candidates from both parties — and explains that posture in serious ways — would be on their way to instant super-stardom in the center of the stage. Developing a policy agenda that draws from both sides and learns to identify how transpartisan proposals benefit from and integrate the four quadrants will dominate all conversations.
Conflict and polarization undermine policies in all areas including foreign policy because no one can trust the government to sustain policies people can rely on. With such conflict, no reform proposal has any chance to succeed. It is time to start listening to positions that bring people together and have a chance to solve real problems. None of the major positions in the current debate comes close to making that claim.
Missing Elements in the Matrix
Our Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix sketches the multiple values that people (voters) value. The crisis in our politics arises from the tension between the people, committed to all four quadrant values, with supporting institutions and policies, and the political system and media, which see the quadrants as separate, conflicting visions. The current debate, as represented by both political candidates and the media, presents only disconnected ideas from each quadrant.
To some extent, the ‘outliers’ and unconventional candidates present parts of the missing whole. Except for Trump, their challenge is to win the media attention that will give them the visibility they currently lack.
Being in the entertainment business, the entry fee is the theatrical quality that makes up ‘stories’. Donald Trump is the destructive master of this. The challenge for anyone opposing him is to develop a strategy for stories that bring people together, avoiding Trump’s master theme of stories that often promote conflict between citizens and tear the country apart.
These principles suggest strategies for political outliers to transcend partisan politics and win media coverage—and thus publicattention—for new ideas with transpartisan appeal. The importance of ‘transpartisan’ here lies in a vision that integrates the quadrants and speaks to the large number of voting age-eligible citizens (as many as 70%) who are alienated from the mainstream system and who avoid participating in it.
Herewith some thoughts on the broad electoral tournament as a Matrix; storytelling to reach them; and breaking open the hard-shell policy conventions with new ideas from and for the Transpartisan constituency.
Lessons from Trump: The Disempowered Citizen/Voter Constituency
1. Voters: ‘Populism’ is ‘in’; yet in the current debate ‘the people’ are a tiny minority of voting age-eligible citizens standing in for the totality of ‘The People’. The vast majority of ‘The People’ avoid association with either major party. They register as Independent or, so turned off, don’t register at all. These citizen outliers form the political outlier’s primary audience.
The 2016 Presidential popular vote split 46% for Trump and 48% for Hillary. If you compare the vote for each to the votes that each did not get, the numbers are 26% for Trump, and 74% who did NOT vote for him. 27% voted for Hillary, and 73% did NOT vote for her. Over 70% of age-eligible citizens failed to vote for the winner who is now our President. That 70%+ seeks new ideas and new candidates.
We are governed by a small minority. Why are so many opting out? The material is there for a national debate. The answer could become a powerful media ‘story’. The following sentences might lead off a campaign, especially if the candidate surrounds him/herself with representatives of their ‘base’—the American People, especially when the People are represented theatrically by mixing people from the ‘victim’ groups in Identity Politics that form the electoral ‘bases’ of the two major parties (white working people [especially with Southern accents], blacks, women, LGBTQ, those covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and so on:
“I am running for the votes of the large majority of citizens who are turned off by conventional candidates of both governing parties who act as more dedicated to their closed system than to government by the people. Their closed system has produced the conflict that is paralyzing positive public action. An open system would bring people together and empower them to play active roles in solving public issues from education to health and others. Now is the time to register and vote for new ideas.”
In addition to the disengaged, one of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans according to Vox (Oct 16, 2018), is that between 6.7 and 9.2 million Americans switched from Obama to Trump. Since the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, Vox went on, ‘It’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.’
2. Learning from Trump. Trump, by chance, skill, instinct, or electoral interference, navigated through the voting morass to a narrow, minority, Electoral College victory. We think seeing the electorate as a Matrix, broader than a left-right spectrum and with four quadrant values, offers an expanded way to see, understand, and respond to the electorate’s intentions and to its 2016 reaction to Trump. By looking closely at outlier candidates in the current campaign, we can gain further clues to understanding why integrating the quadrants is essential to end the crisis in our politics and bring people together again.
Shoehorning today’s electorate into the tiny confines of a left/right spectrum unnecessarily distorts public communication. New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat made the point when he introduced a matrix into his analysis of American politics (‘In Search of the American Center,’ NYT 6/21/17) based on data from The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. Douthat also relied on a report by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America, using the Democracy Fund data. These data formed this matrix.
We wrote about this matrix when Douthat’s article first appeared. We focused on the empty lower-right quadrant, noting that this matrix ‘does well capturing voters, but poorly describing the totality of the electorate, which includes the 44% of nonvoters.’
Our more general Transpartisan Matrix (left/right and freedom/order axes) accounts for non-voters. We believe it offers a broader picture of the U.S. political system and electorate and of their transpartisan political values and opportunities. Here is that matrix.
Trump, viscerally, intuitively, and in real TV entertainment mode, scattered stories, slogans, insults, and preening all over our Transpartisan Matrix. Since he chose to switch from being a nominal Democrat to being a nominal Republican, commentators worked hard to put him on the conservative side of the left/right spectrum, but many traditional conservatives called him a ‘fake’ conservative.
In fact, he intuitively reached out to the counter-authority (freedom) quadrants. Bernie Sanders did much the same on the Democratic side. Sanders gathered a motley crew of, like himself, ‘independent’ followers not seen before and not expected in elections.
These follower’s unique integration of pro and antigovernment sentiment was best captured by a campaigner who said “I want the government to keep its hands off my Medicare.” “What ant-governmental sentiment do you see for Sanders?” asks one freedom advocate. “His proposals are ALL-GOVERNMENT.”
Our point is elections are at least as much (we think more) about the constituencies than candidates. It appears to us that many free-left constituents saw Hilary as more authoritarian than Bernie and many of them saw Bernie as more authoritarian than Trump. We think this might be a beginning for understanding why 6 to 9 million voters went from Obama to Trump. It also points to a way of understanding why more than twice as many people did not vote for Trump as voted for him.
In a straight-on battle between a devotee of conventional authority (Clinton) and a free-swinging, anti-convention, anti-authority, media master (Trump), voters had a hard time choosing, and Trump squeaked through. In a straight-up battle between conventional authority and free-swinging anti-authority, Trump could win again—especially if 44% stay home.
We take away this lesson from Trump: a disciplined critic of conventional authority telling compelling stories, illustrating systematic ideas, and creating a positive vision of how empowered citizens could be recruited to play active, engaged roles in bringing people together solving problems might, win or not, significantly affect the course of the 2020 election and America’s future. Stories could range from education to health and law enforcement even to security policy.
When we look more closely at the outlier candidates, we can learn more about this opportunity. Before we consider some of them, we want to say a few more things about the challenge of integrating the four quadrant values and why this is essential to the larger purpose here.
Integrating the Quadrants—Learning from Critiques of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’
The key values here are ‘order’ and ‘freedom’. The quotation marks are important because these words mean different things to conservatives and to progressives. For example, ‘freedom’ to conservatives tends to mean economic freedom, freedom from government. ‘Freedom’ to progressives is concerned less with economic freedom than with social freedom, freedom from values imposed by tradition, especially religion. ‘Order’ to conservatives means traditional order, often religious. ‘Order’ to progressives means Justice through equality.
What can one learn from critiques of these positions by opponents, and what do the critiques reveal about crucial missing pieces in each quadrant value?
Order Right (OR) – Critics of the Order Right (OR) focus on authoritarianism, the absence of freedom. Subjectively, OR is for many people and in its purest form a preconscious position, lacking the significance of conscious choice, which relies on and opens the way for freedom.
The most important positive (transpartisan) OR value is relationships ‘close-by’, which draws its strength from personal, spiritual connections. The missing piece is consciousness and freedom, which piece explains the counterintuitive, crucially transpartisan relationship that OR has with the Freedom Left (FL—see below).
Order Left (OL) – Critiques of the Order Left (OL) focus on authoritarianism, mechanized relationships, in which everybody is dead without consciousness and freedom, and lack of significance, which depends on free choice. Rousseau’s famous statement about the importance of forcing people to be free is at the heart of a pure Order Left vision.
Freedom Quadrants (FR and FL) – Critiques of the Freedom Right (FR) focus on greed and egocentrism – the absence of a higher good (order), without which all action also lacks significance. Critiques of the Freedom Left (FL) focus on anomie, libertinism, exploitation — absence of a higher good, which the left understands in terms of justice.
The most important positive (transpartisan) value is significance, which results from combining both order and freedom. Both values are essential to significance and meaning. Order, either preconscious (OR) or imposed and mechanized (dead from OL), without consciousness freedom has no meaning; and freedom, either economic or social, has no meaning without a vision of order (the higher good). Spirituality is essential because order without consciousness is mechanized, dead.
These thoughts may help reveal values in the outlier candidates that suggest elements that integrate the quadrants. All of these values, we think, imply significant roles for active citizens engaging each other in positive ways, revealing real integration of the quadrants.
We see and, in our writings, point to active citizens routinely engaging each other in positive ways across the country and around the world. We see this citizen action transcending traditional political and economic institutions.
We also see those institutions—political parties, governments, corporate head-quarters—fighting back to hang onto their power. This struggle between empowered citizens and weakening institutions seems to us to characterize political paralysis.
We believe ending the paralysis requires integrating empowered citizens into working institutions. In turn this requires escaping the left/right straight jacket. We see the Transpartisan Matrix as a first step in one approach to transcending left/right paralysis.
POLITICAL THEATER ACT I: Why the Old Script Needs Rewriting
Theater begins with Act I bringing the characters on stage. The content of what the characters say moves the production along. The Outliers have a chance to rewrite the script.
1. The Current Script – The traditional script for Presidential candidates is to act ‘Presidential’—remote, charismatic, promising effective leadership for positive agendas. Even as they differ on specifics, opposing candidates currently agree on one, central belief: they will use the federal government and the ‘rule of law’ to lead the way to their view of a ‘better tomorrow’. The 70%+ less politically engaged doubt the federal-government-will-lead promise. Their doubt comes in part from the same place as the doubt they feel toward past centralized authorities, especially the Church.
Before addressing the heart of developing an agenda for institutional and policy reform, we want to add a few words about the subversive role that ‘the rule of law’ is playing in mechanizing relationships, promoting conflict, and obstructing the engaged citizenship that is essential for real solutions.
‘The rule of law’ is a demanding mistress. It performs, primarily, as warfare by other means. Conflict decided by mortal combat (war) in the middle ages now gets resolved in ‘the courts.’ This is still conflict, meant to be conducted justly (blind justice weighing the evidence).
In fact, court conflicts tend to be decided by and for those who have social power. Courts make social change as a byproduct of resolving conflicts. To expect courts to reform society leads to disappointment—for both the left and the right. Courts are objectively mechanistic. They have far more interest in a smooth-running society than in individual welfare.
While Democrats call for more government and Republicans for less, neither has a vision for actively recruiting empowered citizens into their campaigns or into active participation in schools or housing projects or health programs—recruiting them as principals into public institutions. Both see a strong government providing services to passive citizens, in the model of passive consumers, which Republicans tend to oppose and Democrats tend to support.
However, in today’s world, citizens, consumers, and non-voters affected by government policy see themselves less as objects and more as subject-actors and partners. More to be listened to, as partners, than pitied and commanded. They engage in ways that mobilize larger communities in support of solutions, engaging in ways that are extremely difficult for governments. [1]
Existing institutions, particularly political institutions, have yet to figure out how to best accept this engagement and encourage it. All programs that successfully engage ‘difficult’ populations, mostly NGOs, operate from this ‘strong concept of citizenship’.
The passive producer-consumer relationship is detached and separated. The passive citizen model of the relationship between governments and The People explains, we think, an important reason why citizens are alienated from the political system—especially from the two major parties.
Since the 1950s, society has been marked by an ongoing decline of tradition in structuring identity in favor of increasing ‘individuation’ and demands for self-expression, which has profoundly changed all social relationships. The power of personal connection—enhanced by new information media—has been replacing passive with active citizens.
The challenge of individuation is especially great in relation to all very large organizations, including religious organizations. [2] This broad social current is increasingly influencing politics as citizens demand greater roles in creating institutions and making them work. Yet our political institutions, including the legal system, have been the slowest and least responsive in adapting to citizen demands for empowerment.
Political system lethargy creates the impression of disengaged people. The real story, however, is about the system’s lethargy, and it is all but invisible in the current political, all-powerful-government, mythos. As Les Moonves and his cohort now know, The People, pushed out of politics, have other ways of being heard.
The institutions most needing active citizen participation include schools as the highest priority, with health care right behind, followed by policing, national security and all other social institutions that affect individual lives. While engaged citizens offer live examples of success, even working with the most difficult social populations and problems, politics backed by law and then police and the army shuns them and leaves large groups of citizens behind.
John & Doris Naisbitt discuss global Megatrends. (GlobalLearningTV on YouTube, 2015.)
The old script is losing contact with people. Futurist John Naisbitt saw this starting to happen in his concept of ‘high-tech, high-touch’ in his bestselling 1982 book, Megatrends, a guide for corporate leaders to understand the future. Based on researching thousands of newspaper articles and interviewing dozens of experts in science, medicine, sociology, psychology, education, business, and theology, he asserted that in a world of technology, people long for personal, human contact.
The tech/touch separation, we believe, powerfully affects contemporary politics as transpartisan voters seem to scan for candidates who are looking for connection, which an active self-governing role in public institutions. Connected candidates can build empathy with and empower constituents by making live site visits to successful programs. They will connect best with voters if they speak in the friendly, informal language like that which Mayor Pete Buttigieg uses and most politicians avoid. Voters will respond to and connect with any candidate who speaks in their language: plainly, with empathy, and even profoundly to them.
The challenge of opening opportunities for citizens to ‘break in’ and become active in public spaces is partly caused by political institutions that want to maintain control of the theater. But the problem is not limited to political institutions alone. There is a larger, related problem that needs to be understood and addressed: ‘The Media.’
The Mass Media and the Theater of Politics
While pretending to be in the news business, the mass media are really in the entertainment business, delivering audiences to advertisers. While some people complain about media’s ideological bias, we believe that theatrical bias is at least as distorting as any ideological bias.
Theatrical bias determines the stories the media cover, and it often emphasizes conflict as the most entertaining material attracting audiences. The media own the theater, and they decide what to show. Their bias toward conflict of course fits powerfully with politicians’ bias toward conflict to differentiate their ‘products’ from each other.
The media’s theatrical bias toward conflict is aligned with the highly centralized government system combined with theatrical, convulsive public policy change. How are our television impresarios supposed to show ‘organic change’ on the evening news? Organic change is powerful precisely because it is NOT THEATRICAL. Theatrical change brings theatrical conflict—which destroys hopes for real change.
Our centralized/high conflict system is modeled on the Medieval Church. Its time has now passed for the same reason that highly centralized religious institutions are now struggling to maintain credibility with their followers. Tradition has weakened before increasing demands for individual knowledge and self-expression.
When citizens are disempowered—when the old script still dominates the stage after the show has closed—they surrender to ‘narratives of grievance’ and demand things from governments that can only come from empowerment. When narratives of grievance dominate political discourse, people are always turned ‘OUTWARD’ (toward the government and the TV cameras).
Empowerment creates shared ownership of public spaces, starting with schools and continues on to every aspect of contemporary daily living. When citizens are empowered, they turn INWARD (engaging each other, working for common purposes—which is to say away from both government and the TV cameras). Their power will be felt if not within the formal political system, then without it.
When ‘narratives of grievance’ become the dominant language of politics, polarization and conflict take over—especially when the two principal leadership groups—political leaders themselves and the mass media, who own the theater— ‘maximize profits’ by surrendering to grievance language and promoting it.
Strong citizen engagement on issues as diverse as school and health policy, criminal justice and penal reform, and local food production are now appearing throughout the Matrix, across the country, and around the world. It is in such citizen activism and engagement that the four quadrants in the Matrix become integrated. We believe that candidates will strike their most potent transpartisan appeals when appealing to this ‘connected engagement’.
2. Connecting Policy to Stories – Issues on which people are acting locally, we think, are ideal instruments for candidates to promote citizen engagement and political connection nationally. Focus on such issues would combine the most important approaches to citizens’ empowerment with reforms more powerful than any ideas currently in play. This approach suggests combining three campaign strategies:
First, concrete proposals for institutional reform empowering citizens as active participants in programs such as schools, health centers, law enforcement, and other subjects , which address major social issues;
Second, Buttigieg’s story-telling rhetorical style, connecting candidate and voters in narrative examples of the value of self-governance and how it works; and then
Third, combining these rhetorical appeals with live visits to model institutions that are succeeding with both affluent and ‘difficult’ populations. Candidates need to recruit citizens who are active in citizen-empowered organizations as advocates for and exemplars of this new empowered vision.
Engaging citizens through a direct appeal. (Designated Survivor, S.3 E.1)
For anyone skeptical that such engagement with empowered citizens can play any role in a Presidential campaign, we cite as a theatrical example the third season of Designated Survivor, starring Kiefer Sutherland and produced by Davis Guggenheim, the legendary political campaign film maker who directed Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. In one episode, Sutherland is President and is running for re-election. A conventional, staged & canned speech to an audience falls through, so he improvises and gives a spontaneous talk to people on the street. They went wild, and his direct appeal to citizens breathed new life into his campaign.
From Mayor Pete Buttigieg we are learning that stories about citizen engagement can add substantive and rhetorical momentum to political campaigns. They make real experiences come alive and create intimate experiences for anyone sharing them. These stories—every candidate and community has them—can be enhanced by visits to model institutions and programs that work and by intimate conversations with empowering citizens who are living their empowerment.
The visits can be produced (‘staged’) to create powerful contexts for ‘stories’ for media that have an unlimited appetite for compelling narratives. Combining stories with location, people, and narratives explaining their success could, when well-conceived and produced, combine into powerful, concrete proposals for new leadership and institutional reform that are also compelling media.
‘Reform’ means reform in and of any and all institutions—schools, hospitals, policing, criminal justice, housing, work, gender, all aspects of community life. A campaign highlighting powerful, real life examples of current success showcasing empowered citizens as real change makers working in civil society institutions, will greatly expand the political stage and bring citizens onto it. They will showcase how active citizenship is an essential feature of every healthy democracy and every successful political campaign.
3. Empowering Citizens Without Mobilizing Political Opposition – Connecting stories and rhetoric to successful experiences is actually the easy part. A more difficult part is the policy challenge of empowering citizens in institutions that are failing and where citizens are disempowered. The challenge is empowering citizens without mobilizing political opposition from current power structures (e.g., teachers’ unions)?
Powerful examples exist showing how to do this even on issues consumed by political conflict on this very subject. The issue is demands for empowerment and ‘choice’ in education, which is very conflicted in either of the two forms it takes in the U.S.: charter schools or full voucher programs. This is too large a subject to discuss in detail here. A summary of a solution is to focus choice on empowerment, available to all schools. When benefits are available to everyone and no one needs to fear being ‘left behind’, all fear disappears, and it can gain political support from everywhere and will enormously reduce opposition. [3]
The mechanism of empowerment will also be important. In Western democracies, change happens mechanically, ‘on Tuesday’ (the arbitrary day when a vote or decision happens). When change is mechanical ‘on Tuesday’, fear of uncertainty from a sudden change, tends, by itself, to mobilize opposition (recall the saying ‘People tend to prefer a known evil to an unknown good’).
Programs featuring choice without opposition happen when change mechanisms are implemented organically (gradually) rather than mechanically (by order). When change is organic, there is no difference between Tuesday and Wednesday; and there is no moment when pressures build for opposition. Educate Girls Globally (EGG), promoting citizen empowerment in government schools in India, has used an organic process to install its program in thousands of schools serving hundreds of thousands of kids, and in fifteen years it has not encountered significant conflict or opposition in a single school.
The challenge of running for office, including President, is largely a theatrical challenge because success depends on visibility, and visibility depends largely on media attention. Theater begins in Act I as the characters come on stage. What they say moves the production along. The Outliers now have a chance to rewrite the script.
Conclusion
Conflict in American politics, both within the parties and between them, is one among several forces alienating voters and driving them away from the political system. When voters are so polarized, government is paralyzed. Institutional factors push both politicians and the media non-stop to sustain conflict.
Understanding and explaining these factors could produce a sensational media story, putting anyone who raises the issue in the center of the stage. Anyone who in effect runs against the media and candidates in both parties and explains that posture in serious ways would be on her way to instant super-stardom. Developing a policy agenda that draws from both sides and learns to identify how transpartisan proposals draw from and integrate the four quadrants will dominate all conversations.
Conflict and polarization undermine policies in all areas including foreign policy because no one can trust the government to sustain policies people can rely on. In an environment of such conflict no reform proposal has any chance to succeed. The longer this conflict continues, the more alienated people will become. It is time to start listening to positions that bring people together and have a chance to solve real problems. It is impossible to say that about any of the major positions in the current debate.
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Endnotes
[1] They are not impossible, but they are not ‘natural’ for governments, which are used to promoting change by commands. Educate Girls Globally began in 2001 convinced that people in poor, traditional communities can mobilize, build skills, and act to shape new futures for their girls.
[2] Since 1417, we have been, for example, in an era of ‘two Popes’, representing competing visions of church authority: tradition-directed versus increasingly self-directed. At present, these conflicting visions are represented by Benedict and Francis, both living at The Vatican in Rome, as their respective followers vie for the soul of the Catholic Church.
A. Lawrence Chickering is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Transpartisan Review. He has helped establish several public policy organizations. In 1985, he co-founded (with Nicolas Ardito-Barletta) the International Center for Economic Growth, which worked with economic policy organizations in more than 100 countries to promote economic and social reform. In 1999, he founded Educate Girls Globally, which works in India and will soon expand to Africa and the Middle East. In 1993, he published Beyond Left and Right. In 2008, he and James Turner co-authored Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life. Chickering’s other transpartisan publications include The Silent Revolution (1991, co-edited with Mohamed Salahdine) and Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security (2006, co-authored with I. Coleman, P.E. Haley, and E. Vargas-Baron).
James S. Turner, founding partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Swankin & Turner, is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Transpartisan Review. As one of the original Nader’s Raiders, he directed the project and wrote the report, The Chemical Feast: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Food Protection and the Food and Drug Administration. He has served as Board Chair of Citizens for Health and Voice for HOPE (Healers Of Planet Earth). He has appeared before every major consumer regulatory agency, including the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal Trade Commission, as well as the Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health. He considers himself a progressive Democrat.
For July 4, 2019, the third anniversary of the launch of The Transpartisan Review, we share our introductory comment on the US 2020 Presidential election. To date we have posted:
112 Transpartisan Notes and eight articles written by us,
edited and published three editions of The Transpartisan Review,
During these three years, the recognition of what we see as The Transpartisan Impulse and significance of the more than 70% of Americans Constitutionally eligible to vote who refrain from identifying with either the Republican or Democratic parties continued to grow. We expect this Transpartisan constituency to play an even large role in 2020 than it played in 2016. We plan to continue pointing out its presence in the 2020 election beginning with today’s post.
To this end, we present the first part of a series of articles examining the election, See How They Run, Part 1. With this first piece, we look at the current political climate and how our Transpartisan Matrix can inform us about the long, electoral road ahead. We also take a closer look at Democratic candidate Mayor Pete Buttigeig and learn that stories about citizen engagement can add substantive and rhetorical momentum to political campaigns.
Mueller hits a single. Next up, Congress. On deck, the people. The Report is out. Talk shows and late night comics buzz nonstop. They work overtime to continue the story through the next election and, if possible, beyond.
“Trump ravages the White House” stories print money for the media. What the president of CBS said during the 2016 election remains true today. Trump may or may not be good for the country but he is great for the media.
“Man,” the CBS boss said, “who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun.” There is use for much talk about next steps. Mueller turned a lot of “fake news” into useable fact.
The Special Counsel made three powerful distinctions:
The office of Presidency is bigger than the current or any occupant of that office;
A powerful cyberattack on the nation is different from the Trump Keystone Kops desire to benefit from that attack;
An unbridled desire to obstruct justice falls short of legal liability if it fails to actually obstruct justice.
These distinctions give us all we need to know to draw some simple conclusions:
First, Mueller decided—sensibly, in our view—to pass the question “can a sitting president be indicted” to Congress. An “impeachment” is an indictment by the House of Representatives. It finds enough (substantial) evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors for a Senate trial. The House impeached (indicted) two presidents (Johnson 1868 and Clinton 1998). The Senate convicted none. One (Nixon 1974) resigned when threatened with impeachment.
People disagree about the power of evidence proving Trump’s criminal behavior. Mueller decided that whatever Trump’s intent his ineptitude and staff rebellion meant no need at this point to call on the courts to rein him in. We think Mueller came to the right conclusion. Ultimately the decision to remove a sitting President, absent clear and present extraordinary danger, should be—must be—is—a political decision investigated by the House and, if needed, decided by the Senate.
Transpartisan focuses on the Presidency as well as this particular President. Powerful post WWII forces of individuation—people increasingly expressing their unique “identity”—now shape the nation. For Democrats, Republicans, and the two-thirds plus of the electorate who fail to register as either, experience Presidential resiliency is being threatened by the breakdown of group identity.
Since 1945, the nation has seen one Presidential assassination, one resignation, one impeachment, one unelected President, and two presidents deciding against a second term. Is the Presidency holding? Mueller says yes—for now.
Second, Mueller decided that Trump attempting to benefit from obstructing justice and a cyber-attack did not rise to the level of a “legal” matter for the courts. He left it as a “political” matter for the Congress. With Mueller out of the way, the issue now is for Congress to go or not go for impeachment and removal. [Attorney General Barr is also out of the way. The abundant evidence of Mueller’s Report leaves Barr room to withstand accusations of ‘political’ intervention for protecting the President since he acts, his defense says, to protect the Presidency in general rather than this particular President.]
If you think the evidence is sufficient to believe the President has committed a crime, then the substantive case for impeachment is established; and Congress should impeach Trump on the merits. If you agree with Mueller that the evidence is insufficient to establish a legal case for criminal activity the President might still be impeached (indicted).
The legal test is different than the political test. The political question is—on the merits—does the pattern of attempted obstruction and failure to respond to the cyber-attack endanger the nation so precipitously that Trump should be impeached by the House and then removed by the Senate. Is the matter serious enough to preempt the will of the people at an election a little more than a year and a half away?
The Transpartisan Matrix, free and order, right and left, says the order quadrants (both Republican and Democratic) resist impeachment while the free quadrants are split. The rank and file democrats seek impeachment while the rank and file Republicans still hold out against impeachment. Speaker Pelosi says only bipartisan impeachment will be on the table. Thus, investigation for more facts while the people wait on deck for the November 2020 election.
Third, Mueller found that an unbridled desire to obstruct justice falls short of legal liability if it fails to actually obstruct justice. The debate on the talk shows and late night jokes are now focused on the political issue. Impeaching a President only eighteen months from an election that will empower voters to ‘impeach’ him by voting him out of office would create great uncertainty that no politician wants to embrace. And the election may not be definitive.
Nixon left office 19 months after winning the Presidency by the largest landslide in American History (60.7% of the vote). No politician wants to turn a Presidential election into a coin-flip. This explains why both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, the Democratic Congressional leaders, are thumbs down on impeachment. Trump in office might provide them with their strongest electoral issue in 2020.
In coming days we will see how they do it, if they can. Their dilemma is intensified by the continuing temptation to persist in the drum-beat on the President’s ‘misdeeds’ that Mueller’s Report records in minute detail. The longer the drum-beat persists (which the Democrats, supported by the media, may find irresistible), voters will increasingly start to ask: if he is so bad, why don’t you impeach? The Democrats will say the Republicans won’t let us.
The media, in the entertainment business, will love every minute as they continue achieving record audiences hoping the drama will never end.
Featured image of Robert Mueller from official White House photograph.
The Capitalist Manifesto: The End of Class Warfare, Toward Universal Affluence is the latest work from TTR contributor and advisory board member Ralph Benko whose contributions to The Transpartisan Review include 
A. Lawrence Chickering is co-founder and co-executive editor of The Transpartisan Review. He has helped establish several public policy organizations. In 1985, he co-founded (with Nicolas Ardito-Barletta) the International Center for Economic Growth, which worked with economic policy organizations in more than 100 countries to promote economic and social reform. In 1999, he founded 
James S. Turner, founding partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of 
Anitha Beberg is the Founder and CEO of 
