Transpartisan Notes

Transpartisan Conservative Icon

Goodbye, A. Lawrence Chickering III

by Ralph Benko

(This article originally appeared 09/05/2023 on Newsmax.)

Lawrence Chickering now joins Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jim Turner and a few other heroic figures in that wine-soaked bistro in Paradise where Ascended Masters carouse.

Never heard of him? Here’s why.

He lived as the ineffable virtue — the Te — behind human flourishing, ducking fame. That said, he may have saved your life … or, at least, liberty … and his greatest work, one in progress, may transform billions of lives for the better.

Who was this International Man of Mystery? Chickering, one of relatively few left-coast right-wing intellectuals, was quietly the annual skiing buddy of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Milton Friedman.

Noted Chickering:

“It was magical. We talked and laughed and skied our hearts out. … Each of the next 17 years, we stayed in the Alta Lodge and skied on the second weekend of January in the center of powder-snow country. … But it was special, just the three of us, and we resisted the temptation to expand the group.”

How could this matter to you? Because, fellow Conservative,“united we stand, divided we fall.” He united us.

One of the key factors behind the rise of conservatism was building a working alliance between paleoconservatives, like Buckley, and libertarian conservatives, like Friedman. Chickering:

“…Milton represented the libertarian side of conservatism (what I call the freedom Right), and Bill combined the freedom and order Right, this was an 18-year conversation on global events, but also on the tensions between the two great themes in modern conservative thought. Our conversations helped clarify answers to what Irving Kristol once said was the greatest unsolved intellectual challenge: to integrate libertarian and traditionalist thought.”

Beyond his contribution to this existential achievement, Chickering reputedly was instrumental in persuading Reagan to embrace the Strategic Defense Initiative, “Star Wars,” which some, myself included, believe played a major role in America’s Cold War victory, bluffing the Sovs into submission.

Per Sourcewatch:

“Contact with Lawrence Chickering of the policy think tank Institute for Contemporary Studies (ICS) led to [maverick physicist Jack] Sarfatti acting as a consultant for the Reagan Administration’s fledgling Strategic Defence Initiative (or Star Wars project). …” Per Sarfatti, “[Marshall] Naify, Lawrence Chickering and I had lunch at Enrico’s maybe in 1981, where Naify spent at least half an hour describing in detail what would later be Star Wars SDI. Chickering worked directly with Ed Meese.”

Lawry helped consolidate the center right. He helped sell Star Wars to Reagan. Cold War won, Chickering turned his eye toward winning the peace.

As described in his thumbnail biography at The Transpartisan Review (on whose advisory board I was honored to serve, despite my being an out-of-the-closet revanchist Cispartisan):

“In 1985, he co-founded … 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.”

Perhaps Educate Girls Globally, which he founded and served as president, then president emeritus, will prove the greatest of his legacies. “Lawry has dedicated more than 30 years designing and implementing reforms in government institutions to help promote change and empower citizens, especially the disadvantaged. He believes that citizen engagement is the key to reducing conflict in political life as well as to solve real problems. In 1999, Lawry founded Educate Girls Globally to promote education for girls by working with the government and key stakeholders to reform government schools.”

To his great satisfaction, he watched this initiative flourish, reaching widespread adoption in Asia… and beginning its spread to Eastern Europe. Per his obituary:

“More than 25 years ago, inspired by the response of the head of the IMF when asked “What is the most effective way to eliminate poverty in developing countries?” Lawry took the answer of “educating girls” and ran with it. He created a vision of female empowerment, which ultimately culminated in establishing his non-profit, Educate Girls Globally (EGG). This organization championed female education in areas previously unreached in India with plans for global expansion.”

And during our all-too-rare get togethers, he would happily recount how, in its 25-year-long-overnight-success-story, EGG’s program was being enthusiastically embraced by many provincial governments in India, going to scale in what portended a tsunami of humanitarian flourishing.

Potentially bigger, I privately thought, than Milton Friedman’s passion for school choice.

So farewell, Lawry. You played the Cheshire Cat to my Alice, hovering over the vast right-wing’s Mad Tea Party.

Instrumental in helping the Right Wing Conspiracy become Vast. Helped rattle the Evil Empire into dissolving itself. And advancing female dignity in the world’s largest nation.

President Biden? There are few worthier candidates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom than A. Lawrence Chickering III.

Adieu, Lawry. Enjoy that continuing conversation in Paradiso’s bistro!

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League , author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Redefining the Future of the Economy. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.

A Tribute to My Friend & Partner

by Lawry Chickering

I was privileged to share a remarkable relationship with Jim Turner. Over the past few years, as we worked together, we spoke as many as four or five times a week, often at length. We complemented each other, bringing our different gifts, strengths, and talents to the table and were often able to complete each other’s sentences. Despite our political differences, we became – or so it seemed at times – one mind.

Jim had as wide and deep an intellect and spirit as anyone I ever met. He was a man for all seasons and a true partner – for which I am eternally grateful – with a quiet and unassuming genius, furthered by an astonishing memory for anyone he ever met, for anything he ever read, and for all he ever accomplished. His perspectives on life and current events were always fresh. How he had time for me and so many with whom he worked and loved while engaging in a full time, public interest law and consulting practice is still beyond me. As they say, “We may never see his like again!”

I first met Jim Turner in 1993 at an event hosted by Susan and John Marks for my book Beyond Left and Right (ICS Press, 1993). With Jim coming from ‘The Left’ and myself from ‘The Right’, an unusual collection of people were there: including Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb from ‘The Right’; the hosts Susan and John Marks (founder of Search for Common Ground) and a number of others from ‘The Left’; and a third group who saw themselves as ‘Transpartisans’, resisting formal association with either side.

Our partnership first began when transpartisan activist and mutual friend John Steiner encouraged us to coauthor a sequel to Beyond Left and Right. The result was Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life (Da Vinci Press), published in 2008. We focused on the Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, which became the central theme in our search for a transpartisan politics (as it was in Beyond Left and Right). Though we continued to explore political issues with the Transpartisan Matrix, we also used it to map values in individuals, discovering that any individual can be mapped to multiple quadrants based on their perspectives on different issues.

Jim was especially captivated by the Matrix, which highlighted the need of individuated, modern people to integrate their demand for freedom with a commitment to the larger good. He would often say, during our weekly Zoom calls, that he saw matrices in almost every article he read and would argue that each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, embodies all four quadrants.

We believed the current political spectrum was not intelligible as a binary spectrum of two conflicting positions (conservative and progressive), but as a matrix with four quadrants, with slightly different concepts of Order and Freedom on each side, Left and Right. Each Quadrant has truth in it, in our view, but each is incomplete.

Most of the current political debate is based on single-quadrant positions, and the struggle in the real world is reaching beyond individual quadrants, including insights from the other three. Jim and I agreed that the logic of the Transpartisan Matrix makes it hard to understand the words progressive and conservative as having any meaning at all. No wonder it is so hard to find anything that is working in promoting social change from single-quadrant Democratic and Republican governments.

Jim and I both loved the theater of our collaboration, integrating insights from both sides of the debate. Almost no one believes in the possibility of a transpartisan position integrating the best of both left and right. The first task is to integrate the quadrants within each side, which neither has accomplished. Without eliminating internal conflicts (which are concealed in the public debate), both sides are incoherent. It is important to understand that every successful social service program integrates all four. Many examples can be found in articles from The Transpartisan Review and our series of Transpartisan Notes.

Independently, Jim and I came to believe that the mechanistic/transactional world view needed to be replaced by a more organic one; that all people mattered in public policy decisions, not just elites and elected officials.  These sentiments brought us together to write our book in 2008, which we then followed up, in 2016, with The Transpartisan Review, our digital journal of politics, society, and culture dedicated to transpartisan thought. This collection of three printed issues, 150 essays, and multiple articles provided both an outlet and an opportunity for us to explore the Transpartisan Matrix, together, over the past six years.

We also shared an important philosophical and spiritual interest in the teachings of the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner. Many years ago, the New York psychiatrist Franz Winkler introduced me to Steiner’s writings and mentored me on his six spiritual exercises described in a paper published in 1905.1 One of Steiner’s central tenets, driving the whole history of literature, art, psychology, and politics was advancing consciousness of the subjective self. This subjectivity referring to the emergence of people as subjects. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this insight in all of Jim’s and my writings.2

Along with Steiner’s work, we discovered a shared interest in the music and theories of Richard Wagner. Franz Winkler, in fact, wrote a book on Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas (based on Norse mythology) and Parsifal, which presented, in dramatic and musical form, mystical and spiritual themes very similar to those that Steiner would write about (Wagner died in 1883 when Steiner was in his early twenties). Jim and his partner Betsy Lehrfeld regularly attended meetings of the Wagner Society of Washington, DC. I had hoped to join them on my next trip from California, which is now, sadly, impossible.

Many leading figures in the transpartisan movement, including Jim, believe that a transpartisan vision is impossible without a concept of Spirit, beyond the self but, in the modern era, accessible only through the self. Several years ago, I sent Jim a draft paper entitled ‘Is a Transpartisan God Possible?’ It sketched a concept of the divine in terms of an underlying belief that, in conceiving his creation (Man), God’s overriding concern would have been to preserve a central position for the possibility of his significance. This required understanding that far from being a sin, Adam and Eve’s decision to leave the Garden of Eden was in Man’s Nature.  To remain in innocence (with undifferentiated selves) in The Garden would have consigned him (us) to lives as infants – not either very interesting or morally and spiritually significant.

While these themes may seem far removed from the extraordinary political troubles in our own time, Jim and I were convinced they are intimately related to the struggles we are having with how to find new sources of values and meaning to replace preconscious tradition, which has declined so much, especially since the end of World War II.

Our external conversations have now become internal ones. Jim can never be replaced in my life or in the lives of so many. There is and will always be a hole in my spiritual heart. I take comfort in knowing his great spirit lives on, and the love and respect we shared will continue to influence who I am and what I do.

 

NOTES

  1. R. Steiner, ‘The Stages of Higher Knowledge’, 1925. Psychologist Roberto Assagioli describes the same exercises in his 1973 book The Act of Will. Similar exercises, with subtle differences, also form an important foundation for the modern practice of Mindfulness.
  2. We are indebted to scholars and critics as diverse as Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, critic Lionel Trilling, and many others for tracking the emergence of consciousness and the subjective in The Old Testament (the oldest books versus more recent books); The Iliad versus The Odyssey; and in literature over the past four hundred years. The most dramatic illustration of advancing subjectivity may be found in two paintings in Room Two of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (See Transpartisan Note #93.)

In Memory of James S. Turner

A Tribute from Citizens for Health

from Citizens.org

James S. Turner, an attorney and consumer advocate who was an original “Nader’s Raider,” passed away suddenly at his Washington, D.C. home on January 25. He was 81.

While working with Ralph Nader, Mr. Turner wrote the 1970 book, The Chemical Feast: Ralph Nader’s Study Group Report on the Food and Drug Administration. 

Time Magazine commented at the time that Mr. Turner’s book “may well be the most devastating critique of a U.S. Government agency ever issued.”

Believing that private sector attorneys could energize the consumer movement, in 1973 Mr. Turner joined with David Swankin, a former aide to White House Consumer Advisor Esther Peterson, to create the law firm of Swankin & Turner, in which he remained an active principal for nearly five decades until his death.

From representing organizations such as the Consumer Federation of America as well as individual consumers, to consulting for major businesses on consumer policy, the firm of Swankin & Turner has fought for consumer interests and advocated consumer policies across a broad range of issues while influencing regulatory matters concerning food, drugs, health, the environment, and product safety.

Mr. Turner appeared before every major consumer regulatory agency, including the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Agriculture, and National Institutes of Health. Mr. Turner served stints as special counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Food, Nutrition, and Health, and to the Senate Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Research. He was also a policy consultant to major corporations in the food, pharmaceutical and telecommunications industries, including Kraft Foods, The Quaker Oats Company, Hoffmann-LaRoche, and AT&T.

He vigorously advocated for emerging consumer health initiatives. He represented a coalition that successfully opposed an effort by the Federal Trade Commission to ban the words “organic,” “natural,” and “health food” from commerce by arguing that those terms are meaningful to protect consumer choice.

He was instrumental in winning passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which defines and regulates dietary supplements as food rather than drugs, and the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, which established uniform national standards for the production and handling of food labeled as “organic.”

Mr. Turner also represented healthcare professionals fighting anticompetitive federal and state trade rules. He played a key role in mainstreaming the practice of acupuncture and served as lead attorney on a petition to the FDA that resulted in the classification of acupuncture needles as medical devices “safe for general use” by trained acupuncture practitioners, and in legalizing the importation and distribution of acupuncture needles in 1996.

He persuaded the Federal Trade Commission to cease its investigations targeting chiropractic care. He represented dentists ordered by state licensing boards to withhold information from their patients about the effects of mercury in dental amalgam fillings, including risks to patients, dental workers, and the environment. Mr. Turner’s original advocacy was ultimately vindicated by a Food and Drug Administration Safety Communication on dental amalgam in 2020.

In 1978, Mr. Turner founded and became President of the not-for-profit National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy (NISLAPP) in order “to bridge the gap between scientific uncertainties and the need for laws protecting public health and safety.” In 1992 he began to take a leadership role in Citizens for Health, a consumer organization defending individual choice and access in health matters and nutrition and served as Chairman and President for many years until the time of his death.

In 1996, he helped start Consumers for Dental Choice, which in turn led an international coalition of environmental, dental, and consumer groups to gain adoption of an anti-amalgam provision in the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Mr. Turner’s recent advocacy included working with consumer groups advancing preservation of federally recognized homeopathic medicine, opposing dangerous exposure to radio-frequency radiation, and protecting access to innovative healthcare modalities, including energy medicine.

Mr. Turner served as a consumer consultant to and sat on advisory boards and committees of governmental agencies, including the U.S. Department of State, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as business groups such as the Food Safety Council. He was also active on numerous boards of directors, boards of advisors, and legal and policy committees in nonprofit, educational, professional, and activist organizations; examples include Americans for Homeopathy Choice, the National Commission for the Certification of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the American Herbal Products Association, and Voice for HOPE (Healers of Planet Earth).

He was a graduate of The Ohio State University, which he attended on a U.S. Navy scholarship, and served in the OSU Student Senate for three years. He received his law degree from The Ohio State University College of Law (now Moritz College of Law), where he served as Chief Justice of the Moot Court. Between undergraduate school and law school, Mr. Turner was a Lieutenant on active duty in the U.S. Navy, where he graduated with distinction from Naval Justice School and served as a Nuclear Weapons Handling Officer and Gunnery Officer aboard the U.S.S. Purdy and the U.S.S. Austin.

In addition to The Chemical Feast, Mr. Turner was the co-author of Making Your Own Baby Food and produced numerous articles, book chapters, speeches, and lectures. In collaboration with A. Lawrence Chickering, author of Beyond Left and Right: Breaking the Political Stalemate, he co-authored Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life, and co-founded and co-edited The Transpartisan Review, a journal dedicated to demonstrating how politics, culture, and society can be better understood as a matrix than as a continuum. Mr. Turner founded small-press Potomac Valley Press, which published Healthy Harvest: A Directory of Sustainable Agriculture & Horticulture Organizations (1985-1989), and hosted an organic community garden at his Washington, D.C. home for more than 30 years.

Mr. Turner is survived by his law partner and life partner of 45 years, Betsy E. Lehrfeld, Esq., his son Christopher B. Turner, Esq., and his daughter, Victoria M. Turner. The family is asking that in lieu of flowers, those wishing to honor Mr. Turner consider donations to the Citizens for Health Education Foundation, https://citizens.org/donate-citizens-health-education-foundation/.

Find-the-Matrix: Different Standards

Why This Liberal Mayor Doesn’t Want a Lecture From Progressives

Transpartisan Note #150

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Matrix sits behind most, if not all, of todays’ partisan political smash-ups. Here New York Times Silicon Valley columnist Kara Swisher interviews San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed about law enforcement.

Two paragraphs from the summary of the Swisher/Breed interview point to the Matrix in the “defund the police” scrum. The left/right “defund vs. give more money to” the police (the cartoonish characterization of the nation’s wrenching law enforcement debate) gets a lot of ink in all kinds of “journalism”. In the process it dumbs down the discourse on national law enforcement.

Left/Right debates like this one sketch out the horizontal axis of the Matrix in cartoonish often clownish entertainment terms. Cartoons have consequences. In this case, they provoke harm to protesters and police, incivility within families and between neighbors, and a malaise of doubt as both “freedom” and “order” fall victim to media events that range from dignified to histrionic.

“Freedom” and “Order” form the vertical axis of the Matrix. On both the political left and right, debates rage between and within those championing order and those searching for freedom. Resolution of issues through the solving of problems, we suggest, most often occurs when all four quadrants of the Matrix – order left and right and freedom left and right – share in developing the resolution.

Here are the two paragraphs in the summary of the Swisher/Breed interview that give a taste of the Matrix from the left. Note that London makes the point of her experience growing up and her internal efforts to provide both security and trusted police. We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a tool, for those interested, to dig further into contemporary political issues than the partisan arm wrestle for power offers most people.

San Francisco’s politicians are struggling to find a Goldilocks balance when it comes to public safety, and Democrats across the nation should pay attention. After declaring a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood to deal with what she called a public health crisis of opioid use, Mayor London Breed has been criticized for taking too strong a hand in forcing people to seek treatment for drugs or mental health problems.

…

“In this conversation with Kara Swisher, Breed talks about the crackdown she’s leading and whether she was ever the ‘defund the police’ mayor some in the media painted her to be (and critiqued her for stepping away from). Breed says her experience growing up in a public housing development in the Western Addition neighborhood gives her a perspective many of her critics may not have. ‘They have a theory as to what they believe based on their ideology, but they’re also white,’ she says. ‘They are not Black people who had these unfortunately traumatizing experiences in communities where there’s not trust with the police, but also there’s a desire to be safe.’

You can listen to the entire interview on a recent NYTimes Sway podcast. A transcript of the interview is also provided. For a bit of additional spice consider this quote form the summary of the interview:

Swisher and Breed discuss “…how Black mayors like Breed, Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago are ‘held to a completely different standard.’”

FIND THE MATRIX…PENETRATE THE NEWS!

(Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Find-the-Matrix: Biden-Cheney 2024

Friedman Goes Transpartisan?

Transpartisan Note #149

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times opinion writer with deep roots reporting from the Middle East, asks, in his January 11, 2022 column, why look to Israel’s current government for insight into contemporary American politics?

“Answer,” he writes, “it’s the most diverse national unity government in Israel’s history, one that stretches from Jewish settlers on the right all the way to an Israeli-Arab Islamist party and super-liberals on the left. Most important, it’s holding together, getting stuff done and muting the hyperpolarization that was making Israel ungovernable …  [and] I,” Friedman writes,” pay close attention to the Israeli-Palestinian arena … a lot of trends get perfected there first and then go global … It’s Off Broadway to Broadway …”

Then he asks a second question:

“Is that what America needs in 2024 – a ticket of Joe Biden and Liz Cheney? Or Joe Biden and Lisa Murkowski, or Kamala Harris and Mitt Romney, or Stacey Abrams and Liz Cheney, or Amy Klobuchar and Liz Cheney? Or any other such combination. Before you leap into the comments section, hear me out.”

We suggest hear him out.

He says, “… [R]ightist Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and left-of-center Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid (they are to switch places after two years) … swallowed their pride” and came together to defeat then-Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, “a smarter Donald Trump.”  For the first time, an Israeli Arab party, the Islamist organization Raam, played a vital role in cementing an Israeli coalition.” Could it happen here?

We see normal politics as featuring adversaries promoting single-quadrant solutions, which, by resisting the other three quadrants, inevitably fail. We see and are committed to including in the political debate integrated, four-quadrant solutions to individual issues. We see this as emerging transpartisan politics illustrated by Our Towns Deborah and James Fallows’ book on local America reporting that “a local-level wave of renewal and re-engagement is already underway.”

Friedman’s article cites Israel’s United Government, bringing together all-quadrants on all issues as a democratic republic’s response to threats to democracy. He offers it as a government form and possible model for Americans to follow in resisting threats to democracy by Netanyahu/Trump-style administrative state paralysis. He hints that a unity (transpartisan?) government holds countries together, gets stuff done, and mutes the hyperpolarization that makes a country ungovernable. Does he have a point?

Read Friedman on the Biden-Cheney ticket impulse and Find the Matrix.

FIND THE MATRIX…PENETRATE THE NEWS!

(Images from Wikimedia Commons.)

You Can End Inflation Mr. Biden, by Convening Bretton Woods II

Introduction

by A. Lawrence Chickering & James S. Turner

Today we publish our colleague and advisor Ralph Benko’s current thinking on the Gold Standard as a transpartisan issue. We do so as a conversation starter about how to finance government in a transpartisan society and the implication of government financing choices for society at large.

Ralph explores an important topic when visiting the Gold Standard issue. He points out how Nixon going off the Gold Standard threw everything into a significantly different financial context. According to Ralph we are still sorting out the consequences of this decision.

The existential difficulty comes from assigning a value to gold, any value, to make the system work, such as $2000-an-ounce as Ralph suggests. How the value, currently at $1,775-per-ounce, is determined and maintained are the “devils’ questions in the details”, making Ralph’s overarching view, which is so hopeful, an absolute scare-the-bejesus out of anyone with authority when they hear the word “gold standard”. Especially when combined with the words “lets’ go back to the”. Setting the value of gold is a political task that cannot be sidestepped.

There is a conversation to be held here. The Gold Standard, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), Cryptocurrency, and the Automated Payments Transactions Tax (APT) all lie at the heart of the transpartisan – “how-do-we-pay-for-government” – conversation. We have pursued this conversation in the article The Transpartisan Effect, taking to heart John Maynard Keynes observation made during a 1942 BBC address that “anything we can actually do, we can afford”:

“Why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital … an ample theater, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, cafes, and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and so much more. Anything we can actually do, we can afford. … We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?…” (For more on Keynes, see the 09/17/21 NYT op-ed podcast by Ezra Klein.1)

Ralph’s article could give this conversation a boost. We look forward to hearing from and will be sure to respond to those who comment on this article.  Let’s talk about money.

(1) Covid Showed Us What Keynes Always Knew, The Ezra Klein Show, NYTimes, September 18, 2021.

“The world discovered that John Maynard Keynes was right when he declared during World War II that ‘anything we can actually do, we can afford,’” writes Adam Tooze. “Budget constraints don’t seem to exist; money is a mere technicality. The hard limits of financial sustainability, policed, we used to think, by ferocious bond markets, were blurred by the 2008 financial crisis. In 2020, they were erased.”

 

You Can End Inflation Mr. Biden, by Convening Bretton Woods II

by Ralph Benko

(This article originally appeared 11/23/2021 on Newsmax.)

There is one, unconventional way to quell inflation without recession; it would save Joe Biden’s presidency. Conventional folk think the gold standard an anachronism.

Think different.

Inflation is putting Biden into desperate political peril. His popularity rating is lower than any modern president (except Trump) at the comparable time in his presidency.

Sending shockwaves through the political class, the Republicans dominate Democrats in the generic poll. I’m not an alarmist. But this scenario is, as it should be, alarming to Democrats.

It’s also alarming to me, a paleoconservative Republican. I, the “second most conservative man in the world” (per a Washington Post columnist), fear that a GOP political hegemony will degenerate into the Republicans’ default country-club Republican policies of mercantilist oligarchy in supply-side drag.

The reversion to Republican mean, ThurstonHowellIIIconomics, “freshen Lovey’s martini Gilligan, chop chop!” Pretty mean!

Mr. President? Go for the gold!

It’s curious. Yet political transformation often comes from the unexpected source.

Nixon’s anti-communist credentials from his congressional days persecuting Soviet gentleman-spy Alger Hiss immunized him to claims of softness on Communism.

Nixon to China!

Welcome to the “Twilight Zone” of politics where the right does the left thing, and the left does the right thing. And everybody grumble-cheers.

It goes both ways. From out of left field, wholesale deregulation was pioneered by President Jimmy Carter.

The big push for dropping the top income tax rate, attributed to Reagan, came from top Democrats: Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill., and Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., dropping the top rate from 70% to 50% (Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., voted aye).

Then, Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., to 28% (Sen. Joe Biden voting aye). President Bill Clinton gave the capital gains tax rate a whopping cut. (Sen. Joe Biden voted aye.)

Now? Inflation is a dagger at the jugular of the Biden presidency.

What to do that would be safe and effective and dramatic enough to persuade us pesky voters that Biden has a firm grip on ending inflation?

Let’s walk the cat backwards. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who shut down the London gold pool, and President Richard M. Nixon, who “temporarily” closed the “gold window,” were the perps letting the inflation genie out of the bottle.

The world monetary order of the prosperous, low inflation, post-war era was constituted by the Bretton Woods Agreement. This was an international gold standard, with a critical flaw.

Making the dollar, as well as gold, the official reserve asset for central banks was a subtle, fatal error. It led to a “melancholy, long, withdrawing” of gold from America’s reserves, plaguing both America and the world.

As foreseen by distinguished French economist Jacques Rueff, mentor of supply-side titan Lewis E. Lehrman (my own mentor), that world monetary order was doomed to a slow death.

On Nixon’s watch, the final nail was driven in.

Nixon, under the insidious influence of his treasury secretary John Connally – a moral bankrupt who died a spectacular literal bankrupt – officially closed the gold window. The pernicious Nixonian system of floating exchange rates today curses us to inequitable economic stagnation.

The fiduciary (paper) dollar is the last remnant of the “Nixon Shock.”

Republicans have proven incapable of unwinding it for very parochial reasons.

The classical gold standard, which had collapsed at the very start of World War I, was falsely indicted for causing the Great Depression under Herbert Hoover a generation later.

It wasn’t the Republicans’ fault.

It was, in the words of  Rueff, a grotesque caricature of the gold standard that collapsed, an earlier gold-exchange standard.

Then FDR, under the guidance of the leading commodities economist of his day, George Warren, properly revalued the dollar from $20.67 to $35. The Great Depression lifted immediately and spectacularly. Per Pulitzer Prize-winning Liaquat Ahamed’s definitive account:

“During the following three months, wholesale prices jumped by 45% and stock prices doubled. With prices rising, the real cost of borrowing money plummeted. New orders for heavy machinery soared by 100%, auto sales doubled, and overall industrial production shot up 50%.”

Bad monetary policy by FDR’s Treasury, in which FDR acquiesced, thereafter caused a second dip in the Great Depression. That said, that first prosperity surge points the way out.

Joe Biden has an opportunity to go down in history as equal to or greater than FDR. How?

By convening a new Bretton Woods conference. Just as the late, great Paul Volcker, who quelled inflation in the 1980s, called for.

There, Biden should legally remove the dollar’s (and all currencies) reserve currency status while revaluing the dollar to around $2,000/ounce, or slightly higher, to preempt a worker/debtor damaging deflation such as crushed Britain in 1925.

Thereby, Mr. President, forge a legacy to rival that of FDR’s.

End inflation, restore equitable prosperity; enjoy the popularity and golden age legacy that Bretton Woods II, done right, would bring you.

Read more of Ralph Benko’s exploration of this topic with his latest piece, Biden’s Whiff on Inflation Makes the Gold Standard a Great 2024 Campaign Issue, from Newsmax.com, December 6, 2021.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ralph Benko, co-author of “The Capitalist Manifesto” and chairman and co-founder of “The Capitalist League,” is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $83T. He served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, has worked closely with the Congress and two cabinet agencies, and has published over a million words on politics and policy in the mainstream media, as a distinguished professional blogger, and as the author of the internationally award-winning cult classic book “The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World.” He has served as senior advisor, economics, to APIA as an advocate of the gold standard, senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce and serves as general counsel to Frax.finance, a stablecoin venture.

(Feature image by Noah Zeitlin on Flickr.com, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

A Practical Primer for President Biden

How Saul Alinsky Can Rescue the Biden Administration From Political Annihilation

by Ralph Benko

(This article originally appeared 09/20/2021 on Newsmax.)

Can President Biden avert a crushing legislative defeat that would terminate his honeymoon and effectively paralyze his presidency? It’s a dramatic moment.

The Sunday New York Times lead story on September 19 by Jim Tankersley lays bare the high stakes:

“No president has ever packed as much of his agenda, domestic and foreign, into a single piece of legislation as President Biden has with the $3.5 trillion spending plan that Democrats are trying to wrangle through Congress over the next six weeks.

The bill combines major initiatives on the economy, education, social welfare, climate change and foreign policy, funded in large part by an extensive rewrite of the tax code, which aims to bring in trillions from corporations and the rich.

That stacking of priorities has raised the stakes for a president resting his ambitions on a bill that could fail over the smallest of intraparty disputes. … But the sheer scope of its contents has opened divisions among Democrats on multiple fronts, when Mr. Biden cannot afford to lose a single vote in the Senate and no more than three votes in the House.”

To compound matters the House progressive caucus has taken Biden’s signature legislative priority, the $1.5 trillion bipartisan “infrastructure” bill, hostage. They are demanding a simultaneous vote on their $3.5 trillion pink pork monstrosity.

If the progressives don’t flinch, their threat is to kill the hostage infrastructure bill if they don’t get what they want. That would effectively end Joe Biden’s presidency, converting him to caregiver in chief.

Meanwhile, if the $3.5 trillion pink pork monster passes it likely will lose him his House and Senate majorities next year. Sacrificed to the Revolution!

Why such an ambitious but fraught gambit? Because Biden can’t afford a revolt by his party’s progressive base.

Biden is not unsympathetic to the progressive agenda. Neither is he dogmatic about it.

Biden’s plan seems to be to pacify his fanatics by supporting their agenda while counting on Sens. Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sinema, D-Ariz., to stop it. That will shield him from the left’s fury while blunting the ire of the voters.

Shrewd. But now his legislative baby has been taken hostage.

What’s a president to do? Saul Alinsky to the rescue!

The House Democrats are blurring the crucial distinction between “radical” (a good thing, meaning “at the root”) and “fanatical,” a bad thing. By walking that back Biden can keep his presidency from going over the cliff.

Time for Joe Biden to consult his base’s holy scripture, “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky. The subtitle? “A practical primer for realistic radicals.”

Alinsky there wrote:

“I detest and fear dogma. I know that all revolutions must have ideologies to spur them on. That in the heat of conflict these ideologies tend to be smelted into rigid dogmas claiming exclusive possession of the truth, and the keys to paradise, is tragic.

Dogma is the enemy of human freedom. Dogma must be watched for and apprehended at every turn and twist of the revolutionary movement.

The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous.”

He went on,

“…to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory.

If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead.

A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises — which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum. Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian.

If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be ‘compromise.'”

I wish America well and thus, despite our several disagreements, wish President Biden well.

So, I call upon presidential Senior Adviser Cedric Richmond to remind the president of the radical Saul Alinsky’s counsel of practicality.

I then urge them to invite that great pragmatic radical in House leadership, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to the Oval for a chat with the president to refresh Raskin’s recollection of Alinsky (a worthy posthumous candidate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, while at it) equipping Raskin to coach Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to abandon fanaticism and embrace radicalism.

Take the 30% win. Pocket the bipartisan “infrastructure” deal which itself holds abundant pink pork.

Heed Alinsky’s “practical primer for realistic radicals.”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League , author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and Redefining the Future of the Economy. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.

Find-the-Matrix: Global Radicalism vs. the Power of Citizens

What academics lament,
the power of community can overcome.

Transpartisan Note #148

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

In a recent NYTimes essay, Trumpism Without Borders, Thomas B. Edsall suggests that the “peculiarly American characteristics” of Donald Trump’s presidency has blinded us to the spread of radical disorder worldwide, writing:

“America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism, and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump.”

Mr. Edsall goes on to explore this idea by examining the work of Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky who see a “common thread to these seemingly disparate developments” as a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline”.

“The authors elaborate in their paper, ‘A post-liberal theory of stratification.’ Loss like this, they write, can be experienced by children as a dramatic decline in their chances of achieving a standard of living as high as that of their parents. It is experienced by men as a decline in the gender pay gap, occupational segregation, and other types of loss relative to women. It is experienced by manufacturing workers as a sharp loss in the number of high-paying union jobs. It is experienced by “rust belt” families as a loss of employment and earnings to China and other countries.”

…

“The politics of loss have, in turn, empowered the populist right by encouraging the view ‘that disadvantaged groups have unfairly benefited from legal protections, egalitarian social movements and government and charitable assistance. These initiatives, far from facilitating fair and open competition, are instead seen as overshooting the mark and providing unfair advantage,’ ushering in “a new era of high grievance, high conflict, and high ideology.”

 

Edsall’s article is an interesting read, expanding beyond Jackson & Grusky’s assessment of this “ubiquity of loss” to include the Danish political scientist Pieter Vanhuysse’s elaboration on the issue:

“… a major strain on democracy is the rise of unequal life chances along multiple dimensions. Take education/human capital: as automation and digitization will also be major forces perturbing the world economy, it is likely that new divides will sharpen between human capital haves and have-nots at the level of both nations and persons. These inequalities, Vanhuysse argued, may be exacerbated by seemingly unfair practices. For instance, richer nations are likely to engage still more in poorer-to-richer nation brain drain practices, coming from the lower- or middle-income countries that invested massive public resources in producing these skills.”

Mr. Edsall presents plenty of examples corroborating Vanhuysse’s views with comments from Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University; Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, economists at M.I.T; and three recent public policy publications on global trends including “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020” from the World Bank.

But it’s Daniel Esty, a professor of environmental law at Yale, description of “how tribalism, hostility toward outsiders, notably immigrants, and the emergence of what some call ‘exclusionary nationalism’ all serve to undermine prospects for global cooperation” which strikes a nerve:

“Global collaboration on concerns such as climate change has become more difficult even as the urgency of the issue and the inescapability of global-scale action with no nation free-riding off the efforts of others become ever more clear. The broad-based rise of tribalism/nationalism sharpens “us” versus “them” thinking and makes cooperative responses to any realm of international policymaking — pandemic response, climate change, and trade — more challenging.”

These arguments come from those who would see The Transpartisan Review in their camp, so to speak – their natural ally, supporter, and advocate. However, despite being important perspectives and based largely on shared factual analysis, we see these views as 180 degrees distinct from the realities and possibilities of the solutions available to embrace.

The structural problem of their analysis is a debasement of the process in a way that the vast majority of people (who have the good sense to see the problems and have ways to resolve them) are purposely and/or inadvertently excluded from the structures designed for decision making, both for themselves and their communities. Their analysis is necessary and comprehensive, but ignores the potential of the very individuals and communities struggling with these societal challenges their examinations set out to expose.

Likewise, their analysis ignores the positive impact that community-based solutions can provide to many of the issues they examine. In fact, we see, from a transpartisan perspective, a potential benefit from all issues when addressed by an engaged community. For example, seeking solutions to the loss of manufacturing jobs can lead to the creation of higher-paying jobs, modernized work conditions, and better education if addressed properly. These solutions are more likely to come from engaged citizens immersed in the issues affecting their lives than from decision-makers and lobbyists with political or financial agendas who make up an integral part of the system needing comprehensive change. Breaking down the barriers to citizen participation in daily living is at the heart of the transpartisan process as we see it.

Read this article and look for the Transpartisan Matrix we see. Whether you see a Matrix or not let’s discuss this article and its value/relevance to our Transpartisan undertaking in the comments below.

(Photo by Artem Beliaikin from Pexels. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Mapping the Transpartisan Terrain

Transpartisan Note #147

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

The Transpartisan Movement has emerged out of increasing political conflict, which has made it difficult for governments to govern effectively and sustainably. Over the past ten or fifteen years, growing numbers of organizations have emerged to search for and promote a new ‘transpartisan’ politics, integrating the useful aspects of both Left and Right into a vision that reduces conflict and promotes policies to solve problems that have proven difficult for both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Why the Issue Matters

This discussion explores the efforts of ‘transpartisan’ organizations to reduce conflict and promote collaboration in our politics. Despite efforts going back more than a decade, progress has been hard to see—at least in terms of the crude measurements below. This ‘Mapping’ exercise was designed to identify leading examples of these efforts and evaluate them. We hope the effort helps improve current approaches as well as develop new, more effective ones.

The Challenge(s) We Face

Political challenges. The book Our Towns, by James and Deborah Fallows, provides a narrative of a political challenge(s) that we believe is quite fundamental. They traveled 100,000 miles around the country and observed two very different political cultures operating simultaneously, with nontrivial numbers of the same people (it appears) operating in both. One is the centralized political systems organized around the federal and state governments, with information about them almost entirely dependent on the mass media, especially broadcast and cable television. This system is torn apart by partisan conflict, which systematically undermines almost all efforts at effective government. The other is the powerfully collaborative governance of people working together to solve every imaginable kind of local problem. Information about this system is gained either by local or social media, or by personal experience.

These two political ‘systems’ can also be seen statistically, featuring 30% of age-eligible citizens, 15% on the Right (Republicans) and 15% on the Left (Democrats), who are partisans. On both sides they have deeply moral views of issues, which addict them to conflict and moral condemnation of opponents. The other 70% of age-eligible citizens are transpartisans (also called ‘problem-solvers’), who work together and accomplish enormous good at the local level, solving local problems.

The 30% of partisans control nearly 100% of elected officials at both national and state levels.

Besides controlling all major governments, the partisan political class, working in implicit alliance with the mass media (especially television), dominates the public debates on both federal and state issues. We believe this 30% of partisans controlling nearly one 100% of all elected positions is one, if not the principal, cause of the conflict and polarization that paralyze our centralized political institutions and make effective central governments all but impossible.

Social and psychological challenges. Through the end of World War II tradition provided the principal source of social order and trust for most people. In the 1950s, demands for self-expression started to challenge tradition in all social and political sectors, and in the sixties the challenges exploded throughout the society.

The decline of tradition and increasing demands for self-expression set in motion complex, manifold effects in all social, artistic, and political arenas—all of them destabilizing established orders. Edmund Burke stated the essential challenge in 1781 as follows: ‘Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.’ Without order, therefore, from either within or without, neither society nor freedom is possible. The question facing us was how we would find ‘within’ the order we had gotten over centuries from tradition ‘without’.

What Transpartisans are Doing at Present to Meet These Challenges

Addressing the political challenge. Transpartisans believe good ideas win. Although they claim to be promoting new ideas, reframed from current debates, the great majority of transpartisan organizations and advocates come from the conflict resolution or conflict management fields, and they focus all their efforts on bringing together people on issues defined by the current, larger political debate.

By concentrating their efforts on the terms of the current debate, these organizations, without intending this result, restrict and limit themselves to issues as defined by the partisan 30%–assuming there are no other ways of seeing the issues. Some critics will engage and struggle with this mechanism as a way of defining the issues they consider important. They wonder if this framing of issues does not serve the partisan political class by focusing entirely on their narratives. Transpartisans operating to engage the partisan system on the issues they focus on fail for several reasons:

    1. Almost none of them makes any effort to represent or appeal to the 70% of age-eligible transpartisans, who focus on solving problems.
    2. By starting from issues framed by the current debate, they implicitly embrace the hidden assumptions about what is important from approaches that have shown no capacity either to reduce conflict or to solve problems (see #6 below for more on this).
    3. By avoiding consideration of new ways of approaching problems, they do not learn from successful programs. They cannot learn, for example, from methodologies that are working even with the most ‘difficult’ populations. (‘Working’ here not only means achieving unusual results working with them. It also means framing issues in ways that bring people together and transcend political opposition.)

In The Transpartisan Review we have often referred to this point, highlighting a number of specific programs, including the Delancey Street Foundation (drug and alcohol rehabilitation, founded in San Francisco, now with satellite programs in other cities); the Girls’ Community Schools, sponsored by UNICEF in ‘the epicenter of radical Islam’, around the city of Asyut in Egypt; other girls’ empowerment programs in similar regions in Pakistan dominated by radical Islam; Educate Girls Globally (empowers girls to drive change in schools and low-income communities); and the All-Stars Program (offering renowned programming in fitness and performing arts in New York City).

    1. By embracing issues defined by the partisan and polarized national debate, they only reinforce the negative roles of the mass media and the political class, who are locked into polarized positions that appeal to their theatrical psycho-drama, scripted largely by conflict.
    2. In terms of our (Lawry Chickering and Jim Turner) analytical tool for understanding politics, the Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix, transpartisans who define issues based on the current partisan debate show little or no consideration of the complex interaction of values and approaches that might both bring people together and solve problems. There is only perpetuation of the simplistic Left-Right political spectrum, which rigidly and absolutely separates political and ideological positions, asserting that all wisdom is either on one side or the other, that neither side has anything to learn from the other—ever.
    3. Finally, these organizations and advocates are failing because they make ‘public policy’ and government efforts to solve economic and social problems all about governments solving problems mechanically. They rarely, if ever, consider the crucial role that citizens can play—organically and subjectively—on issues including, but not limited to, school reform; health and health care; law enforcement and criminal justice issues; drug rehabilitation; and even foreign and security policy. Without the active participation of the 70% transpartisan citizens in each of these areas, there will never be anything approaching solutions to any of them.

Addressing the social and psychological challenges. There is little understanding of these issues in transpartisan organizations. That does not mean they are doing nothing to meet these challenges, however. Communication (dialogues) can provide an important source of order and trust, which will help address at least part of the social and psychological challenges. There is much more to these challenges than this, which are beyond the scope of this Note because none of the current, major organizations we have examined is addressing them.

Note on The Transpartisan Review, Searching for New Approaches

The Transpartisan Review’s Four-Quadrant Transpartisan Matrix adds complexity to the simple Left-Right spectrum, which dominates both the mainstream debate and efforts to influence it. The most important intellectual element The Transpartisan Review adds is consideration of the increasing importance of subjective issues that intensify the challenges presented by equality and justice, which are the favored arena of the Order Left. When tradition dominates social life, people tend to accept inequalities defined by tradition. Increasing individuation (consciousness of self) intensifies peoples’ perceptions of inequality and injustice. Individuation will also tend to stimulate the desire and even demands for an active, citizen role in solving problems.

At the heart of The Transpartisan Review’s approach to meet this challenge is a commitment to empowerment of citizens through shared co-ownership of public institutions such as schools, health care, and law enforcement. In this perspective, ownership (shared ownership) turns people inward to improve what they own (co-own) and reduces the dominance of impulse to the Politics of Grievance, complaining about perceived injustices.

Until now, The Transpartisan Review has limited its consideration of these issues to intellectual and philosophical analyses. We have largely ignored theatrical challenges in presentation, which are essential to gain the attention of a theatrically-minded mass media to the substantive issues at hand. The Transpartisan Review is exploring theatrical strategies that would force/entice the media to provide it’s consumers with prominent coverage of new, reframed ways of looking at problems. Despite their prioritizing delivery of audiences to advertisers, mass media is still the most effective way to showcase solutions which bring together the constituencies often depicted as enemies (for theatrical purpose), who nonetheless have become allies when pursuing four-quadrant strategies on particular issues.

What We Need to Do to Face the Challenges

We could have listed our first entry here under failures above, but this first entry under what we should do differently is so far removed from the ‘transpartisan’ agendas of either organizations or advocates that it seemed ‘strained’ to inject it there. It requires some background to explain. We need to start here with an assertion: good ideas often do not win. Understanding how 30% of people who are partisans control 100% of elected officials in state and federal offices requires understanding how an implicit alliance between the 30% in the political class, and the mass media are sustaining a theater of conflict that is our political ‘debate’. The discussion below argues that the overwhelming majority of ‘transpartisan’ organizations, which think they are in the transpartisan business while reinforcing partisan conflicts, need to be added to the destabilizing forces.

The world runs not on ideas, but perceptions of ideas. In this world of media, both mass and social media, the principal terms of debate are determined by a political psychodrama defined by the 30% in the political class (15% on each side) working in implicit collusion with the mass media, which while claiming to be in the news business are really in the entertainment business, presenting adversaries as representatives of Darkness and Light in a psychodrama. Donald Trump, whose only successful professional experience has been as an entertainer, was perfectly cast—casting himself—as the Prince of Darkness, representing the racist masses.

While many people believe that post-Covid people will go back to doing what they did before, there are important signs they are breaking in important ways from the past, at least economically.

    1. Our priority is to develop a perspective that sees politics as theater—starting with what the major current parties are doing; and then imagining an alternative theatrical path to a Four-Quadrant future acted out theatrically so the media will be forced/seduced to cover it, even celebrate it.
    2. Establishing critical mass and challenging perceptions well established will require concentrating force so the media will be excited to cover activities staged to challenge governing narratives on issues.

(Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.)