Transpartisan Notes

Do We Need a Functional GOP?

“Could the functions of a two-party system be performed in some other manner?”

Transpartisan Note #142

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

From the very beginning, we have operated on the belief that a system which incorporates more than a left/right bias is needed to discover productive solutions to our societal and political issues.

We do this by suggesting the expansion of the hyper-partisan left/right continuum to a left/right, order/freedom Transpartisan Matrix and present it as a handier, more helpful, less constrained metric to help translate unfolding political events into a serviceable shorthand. We see it as a more useable and broader framework than the left/right continuum to understand the natural, social-economic and cultural forces shaping our daily political life and the unfolding national and global future.

We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a tool to help clarify the voice of the people:

For example, this February 2nd, 2021 New York Times opinion article, Pundits are Wrong. We Don’t Need a Functional GOP, by Jennifer Rubin analyzes the future of the US Republican Party in terms we feel fit our Transpartisan Matrix approach. What do you think?

In the op-ed, Ms. Rubin begins with a very direct question:

A two-party system serves two functions. First, it provides choice to voters and discipline to each party. Second, it aids in organizing legislative bodies. But could those functions be performed in some other manner?

And suggests an interesting perspective:

[P]ining for a sane Republican Party — a “center right” party — makes sense only if one thinks such a party has a constituency and sufficient distance from the Democratic Party. Can you find a base for a party that, say, wants to spend a trillion dollars instead of $1.9 trillion on a covid-19 relief bill? Perhaps in a few states, but nationwide, it is unclear that there is a felt need for a Democratic-lite party, beyond rich donors. It is even harder to find a substantial base for a Barry Goldwater-style “small government” party. Neither side ran on such a platform in 2020.

She then turns to William Kristol, editor-at-large for The Bulwark, for a little wisdom on the nature of things:

It is no secret that modern conservatism, in large part a response to the Cold War, is ideologically spent. The Bulwark’s William Kristol got to the nub of it in a September post:

So perhaps we need to acknowledge that it has come to this: Real, existing conservatism as it exists in America in 2020 is an accomplice to, an apologist for, and an enabler of Trump’s nativist, populist, unconservative, and illiberal authoritarianism. …

[P]erhaps every political movement has a natural lifespan: Modern American conservatism was born in 1955, peaked in full flower in the 1980s, and then aged, mostly gracefully, for three decades. Until it could easily, if suddenly, be pushed aside in its dotage—forced, or induced, to surrender to its younger and stronger, if disreputable, distant relative.

Mr. Kristol returns to this idea (and an exploration of British thriller television programs) in a recent podcast that you can listen to here.

The Transpartisan Review reports on ideas, actions, and events that underscore the opportunity for ‘politics’ beyond the current hyper-partisan, deadlock threatening, hapless efforts passed off as politics by our daily media. We point out that the current Democratic/Republican – Left/Right political duopoly made up of 30% of the US constitutional political constituency controls 99% of all the country’s elected offices. The people want a voice.

We invite you to read Ms. Rubin’s article and “Find the Matrix.”

(Feature illustration by Andy Fluke CC BY-SA 4.0. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Like in the Good Old Days of Witchcraft

From Out of Left Field Comes the Cancellation of Cancel Culture, and a call for Republicans to Rediscover Original Republicanism

by Ralph Benko

A powerful counterforce to “cancel culture” is rising. Too few of cancel culture’s most vociferous critics, conservatives, have noticed. Why not?

The counterforce is coming right out of left field.

We of the radical (“from the root”, not “hooligan”) right, while correctly anathematizing progressives, have more in common with the labor-and-ethnic rank-and-file left than we do with the bosses of what William F. Buckley once called “the well-fed right.” Let’s join ranks with members of the rank-and-file America-loving left, many of whom are more conservative than most professional conservatives can understand.

If this be treason make the most of it.

That said, it’s not treason.

Consider the largely forgotten original Mission Statement of the National Review. There, in founding the foundational conservative magazine, Buckley tartly observed:

“Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals [what the progressives then were called], they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity. ”

The “well-fed Right” consistently mistreats radical conservatives, then and now. And the leaders of the well-fed Right inevitably, although incorrectly, view the left as a unified bloc. Big mistake. Let us of the radical right not blithely follow those whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated.

Radical conservatives, those in the spirit of William F. Buckley, rather than heavy-with-emoluments conservatives, have common interests and values with much of the labor-and-ethnic left. We would do well, and do well by our cause, to do well by our best prospective allies.

Exemplary of the kind of radical conservative Buckley extolled was the “America is Good” meme propagated by one shy thought leader of the right in the last election. My colleague, and sometime business associate, William R. Collier put the simple but powerful message that America is Good (and variations of that message by columnists like me) in front of the eyeballs of tens of millions of voters, unassumingly yet effectively at scale via social media at the peak of the recent election cycle. It flew largely under the political elite’s radar screen. Yet may have mattered a great deal.

Did the chivalrous “America is Good” effort play a significant role in thwarting the left’s plans to dominate many state legislatures (in preparation for gerrymandering the House to the left)? Did it thwart the anticipated grand expansion of Speaker Pelosi’s House majority, as a predicate to force the House to tack much harder left? Did this crusade keep progressives from winning a decisive majority in the US Senate to allow the crypto-socialist Senators to stack the legal deck in innumerable and insidious ways, as shamelessly advertised by Sens. Baldwin, Carper, Warner and Warren?

We’re still waiting for a meta-analysis on that campaign to be published in a future issue of the Journal of Irreproducible Results. We’ll probably never know. And yet…

Key proponents of the goodness of America were disappointed that Donald Trump narrowly bucked the winning center-right tide. Irrespective of this, the American people—the actual voters—dealt a body blow to the “Cancel America” crew. The rank-and-file believers in America-the-good rose up politically to cancel the cancellers. It was an across-the-spectrum, left and right, civic movement of America-lovers. Not a partisan thing.

Fellow members of the radical right? Look askance at “the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.” Rather, let’s take a closer look at our natural allies, hidden in plain sight.

No, not the Proud Boys and other hooligans stoked by demagogues. These do not rightly belong to the right any more than the Antifa anarchists belong to the left. These are provocateurs and to be abjured.

The natural allies of the radical right are those of the left who, just like us, hold America good. If radical conservatives will stand united with the labor-and-ethnic left, united we stand. If not, divided we fall.

I’ve repeatedly observed that the left is not monolithic and that the labor left and ethnic left have more in common with us conservatives than they do with progressives. I’ve advocated this proposition over many years, here, as well as (partial list) at such center-right venues as Forbes.com, The Economic Standard, at Townhall, Western Journal, and The American Spectator, and my weekly column at Newsmax. Trump’s electoral inroads with workers and people of color evidences its veracity.

And yet the conservative movement, and the GOP, remain slow to grasp the implications. Not for nothing is the GOP called, as a widespread in-joke among conservatives, the Stupid Party.

The labor-and-ethnic left is conservative in most of what matters most to most conservatives: law-abiding, hard-working, traditional values, religiously observant, patriotic. Most of the labor-and-ethnic left holds America to be good. Not perfect, but good. The rank-and-file left doesn’t fancy the wokester jokesters and their cancel culture any more than we do.

They care about jobs, economic security and earned upward mobility. So should we.

It’s challenging for innocent readers, working-and-middle-class political outsiders, to detect the chasm between the labor-and-ethnic left and the progressives, between the proletariat and the commentariat. That chasm is real. It’s important.

The commentariat, the progressives, are the loudest, yet perhaps the smallest, faction of the Democratic Party. The media paints progressives as the leaders of the left, blinding innocent civilians to the human terrain. Meanwhile, the right tends to be blind to our natural allies and tone deaf to their legitimate concerns, concerns which are very much in accord with the philosophy of most conservatives.

The evidence that the left is not monolithic, philosophically or politically, is vivid. Many, prominent, “well-fed-Left”, presidential aspirants in the recent Democratic primaries, including some billionaires and political celebrities glorified by a progressive media, went down to stunning defeat in the Democratic presidential primaries.

These formidable figures lost by catering to the Democrats’ progressive faction (as overrepresented in the elite media). Sayonara, Beto!

Articulate progressives, with their passions about anthropogenic climate change, obsession with intersectionality, and criticism of America as irredeemably racist, sexist and misogynistic, dominate the elite bastions of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the white-collar professions, academia (the left’s version of the Republican country clubs), and, most perniciously, the elite media.

The progs hog the spotlight.

And yet, notwithstanding the myriad puff pieces devoted to the progressive doyennes, and some monstrously lavish spending, the outspent, unassuming, down-to-earth labor-left-leaning Joe Biden handily routed all the elite left’s political darlings. Biden spoke to the aspirations of workers to earn middle class economic security and creature comforts.

For all the sound and fury signifying nothing generated by the media, paid and earned, the actual voters nominated, then elected, Joe Biden. Not his progressive rivals.

The progressives have an Achilles heel. Their claim to legitimacy is based on the false narrative that progressives are the legitimate representatives of working people. This is obviously untrue. That is, it is self-evidently untrue to everyone except the progressive faction (including the media elite) itself.

Yes, progressives duly pay lip service to the interests of workers. Yet in practice progressives prioritize obscure issues in preference to the ones real workers care about. Progressives talk the proletariat talk. Then walk the commentariat walk.

Furthermore, progressives rarely advance flesh-and-blood blue-collars into positions of elite leadership. They typically assign their sinecures to members of their own in-crowd.

There’s a word for this: cronyism. That does not go unnoticed. Except, of course, by the elite progressives.

Now, (per their own Daily Kos) with the progressives’ “unmitigated catastrophe” at the ballot box last November, a Rebel Alliance of the rank-and-file labor-and-ethnic left is striking back. How did I discover this hidden-in-plain-sight fact?

I, a hardened guerrilla leader of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, am also a proud dues-paying, card-carrying member of the AFL-CIO. Comes now our ever-feisty friendly rival, the Teamsters. Teamsters’ Local 623 director of operations Dustin Guastella (writing for himself, not the union) at Jacobin Magazine, recently nails it in Everybody Hates the Democrats.

“Consider Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, which even the ultraliberal magazine the Atlantic chided for its “Excessive Wokeness.” Warren combined a popular economic agenda with an often-awkward attempt at courting Teen Vogue-reading radicals. This approach was admired among activists, media commentators, and some professional-class voters, but almost no one else — especially not the oppressed groups she aimed to attract. Warren came in fourth among black voters in her home state.

…

“Even the political style of the Left seems designed to turn away potential new recruits. Far from signaling a commitment to vital social causes, being “woke” has become synonymous with an embrace of niche cultural attitudes found only in highly educated urban districts and among Twitter users — 80 percent of whom are affluent millennials.

…

“After all, professional-class progressives only make up about 13 percent of the electorate, and they almost never vote for anyone other than Democrats. Alternatively, as Peter Hall and Georgina Evans show, about 22 percent of voters’ dislike cosmopolitan and increasingly out-of-touch liberal cultural appeals but believe in a progressive economic agenda — and these voters are largely working class. Winning the loyalty of the majority of working people in this country will require breaking out of the existing liberal fortresses and appealing to workers across our massive continental democracy. But pairing a popular economic program with alienating rhetoric, chic activist demands, and identity-based group appeals only weakens the possibility of doing so.”

So, says Guastella, one of the most discerning thought leaders of the labor left today.

Then … here comes the ethnic left. Typically, I employ “ethnic left” to allude to People of Color. And yet the French have an undeniable, sometimes infuriating, sometimes beguiling, ethnicity.

At the height of the #MeToo movement there came an open letter signed by a hundred courageous French women (the most celebrated of whom, Catherine Deneuve). Per The Irish Times:

“’Rape is a crime,’ the text signed by Deneuve begins. ‘But heavy-handed or clumsy come-ons are not an offence. Nor is gallantry a macho attack.’

“The letter goes on to denounce the ‘puritanism’ which seeks to ‘eternally confine women to the status of victims, of poor little things under the yoke of phallocratic demons, like in the good old days of witchcraft.’

…

“’This summary justice has already claimed victims: men punished professionally, forced to resign, when they had done nothing more than touch a knee, try to steal a kiss, spoken of ‘intimate’ things during a professional dinner or sent a sexually connoted message to a woman who was not attracted to them.’”

Fast forward three years. The semi-woke (and perpetually conflicted) New York Times suddenly reveals how the community of French intellectuals — a formidable cultural force—have gone on the attack against cancel culture, with real impact:

French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.

Conrad Black, at American Greatness, says of this fresh torch of enlightenment raised beside America’s golden door against out-of-control woke leftism:

“France has shaken the world many times in its history and is frequently insouciant about the consequences of its political actions. Some of its security measures and intellectual attitudes may be too authoritarian for the advanced English-speaking countries, but the bold self-confidence of its rulers and always influential and prestigious cultural and media leaders are a model that should be useful in conducting the West out of its present profound torpor of self-doubt and self-dislike.”

The progressives are alienating their purported base, their source of pretension to legitimacy. There are ample people on the left as well as the right who love their country. In America, there are Democrats as well as Republicans who hold America to be good.

There is a natural transpartisan alliance to be forged against the axis of the nihilistic cancel culture. Now is the time for real, i.e. radical, conservatives to rise to the occasion.

Here beckons an opportunity for solidarity, for unity in putting an end to pernicious wage stagnation, the root inequity strangling the American dream for too many American workers. Wokeism is but a symptom, although an especially obnoxious one. Wage stagnation is at the root of the presenting civic toxicity that now manifests as cancel culture.

Radical? “From the root.” It is high time to root out the economic stagnation at the root of the civic, cultural, and political woe that now besets America and the world. The workers of the world are the natural leaders of the challenge to out-of-control woke leftism. Let’s welcome the leadership of the labor-and-ethnic left in the cause of cancelling cancel culture.

For us to meaningfully participate, however, we radical conservatives must get over our tone-deafness. Conservatives, to be truly conservative, must extirpate our odd hostility toward labor. Hostility toward the proletariat is not an authentic conservative stance. It perpetuates a “country club”, well-fed-Right snobbery that is profoundly anti-conservative.

And it is politically suicidal.

Two of the greatest conservative figures of the modern era, Rep. Jack Kemp and President Ronald Reagan, were union presidents. Kemp led the AFL (American Football League, not American Federation of Labor) Players association. Reagan masterfully led the Screen Actors Guild. Both fought for workers’ rights.

And one of the most iconic of union presidents, John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, founding president of the CIO, was a Republican. He was something of a supply-sider, cooperating with mine owners at adopting labor-saving technologies so long as the miners themselves meaningfully shared the ensuing profits.

If the right will follow the example of Kemp, Reagan and Lewis, repenting of its hostility to organized labor and championing the interests of workers, unionized or not, a powerful new coalition can be forged. A coalition between the labor-and-ethnic left and the radical (not hooligan) right could decisively put an end to “out of control woke leftism.”

That coalition can powerfully cancel “cancel culture”. It can also become a force to be reckoned with in restoring the founding republican ethos of the common good and neutralizing the excesses of neoliberalism.

What role could Republicans play? The New Republic editor and owner Win McCormack, in an important recent essay Meritocracy on Trial, calls for a revival of “the republican tradition in Western political thought, which stresses the common good, (counterpoised) to liberalism’s emphasis on individual autonomy.”

America and much of the West are in a state of civic near-paralysis and social toxicity. Nihilistic cancel culture is one pernicious symptom. The labor-and-ethnic left are now leading the way back toward civic and cultural health. They are doing so by reviving calls for the common good.

To meaningfully participate in and advance the great work Republicans now have a profound opportunity to follow the lead of the labor-and-ethnic left, rediscovering and reclaiming radical republicanism. Let us members of the radical right seize the opportunity to guide the Republicans back to real republicanism and help bend the arc of history toward justice.

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 and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.

(Image is an oil study of Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” from 1830. Additional editing by Andy Fluke.)

Is the Republican Party a Lost Cause?

“And if so, should it be?”

Transpartisan Note #141

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

In the wake of the riots on January 6, the Republican Party has been falling apart in front of us. In a July 14, 2020 op-ed on The Bulwark, our friend Bill Kristol, a well-known, never-Trump Republican, asked the same question with the same subtitle.

From our transpartisan perspective we answer both yes and no. We also believe that equal challenges face the Democratic Party, even though they are less obvious for Democrats at the present time. Two-thirds to three-quarters of the constitutionally-eligible, American electorate does not formally identify with either the Republican or Democratic Party. We think we are witnessing the death throes of the political duopoly, in which a small fraction of the electorate controls 100% of formal power.

Could we be experiencing the birth pangs of new American political institutions? Institutions which will integrate ‘freedom’ and ‘order’ rather than set them against each other as two warring philosophies?

Kristol is ambivalent about whether the GOP can be saved, highlighting the issue of whether it can sever its relationship with Trump. As long as it is Trump’s party, Kristol suggests, “it deserves to be a lost cause.” It needs to find a way to stop being the party of Trumpism. But even if it can, it still must deal with the ‘political and moral stain’ of its past, tied to Trump.

He starts outlining a way to create ‘a conservative party that [isn’t] a nativist, proto-authoritarian, nationalist-populist party’; a conservative party with ‘a new center’. If it is to be saved, he notes finally, it will need leadership from people who were Trumpist fellow-travelers, not from the never-Trumpers, whom Trumpists will not forgive for being right about Trump.

Kristol says his heart is with the ‘lost cause’ faction. He concludes, elegantly, with quotes from T.S. Eliot and Pascal, who touch on the final question: ‘The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.’ ‘Heart or mind? Lost cause or worth trying to save?’ In his final sentence, Kristol says he doesn’t know.

The issue tormenting both Kristol and (we would say) conservatism is not of recent origin. It has been lurking beneath the surface of both conservative and liberal thought since at least the 1950s and, we think, much longer than that. In fact, the Whigs replaced the Federalists in the 1820s, and the Republicans replaced the Whigs in the 1850s over the same issues.

The issue we refer to is conflict between individual freedom and the need for a concept of the higher good. This issue is important for both the Left and the Right, but neither has solved it. We refer the concepts ‘freedom’ and ‘higher good’ with the words ‘Freedom’ and ‘Order’, which are the two essential concepts in political history the integration of which is essential to a transpartisan politics.

Freedom is a troublesome concept because it has both positive and negative meanings. Although both are important, conservatives focus on the negative meaning, especially in focusing on freedom from government. They tend to avoid the positive meaning, which, unfortunately, is essential to reveal a higher good.

Unless conservatives can articulate how freedom can lead (positively) to order (some positive good), conservatism will appear incoherent, if not actually malevolent. Political candidates who focus entirely on freedom from government, without showing how freedom is essential for many positive goods, will spark accusations from left-liberal opponents that they are the Party of Greed.

‘Freedom’ without ‘order’ leads to nihilism or greed, and ‘order’ without ‘freedom’ means despotism.

 

Introducing a Strong Concept of Citizenship

We believe that the best issue to show freedom and order working in harmony is where citizens are given strong, positive roles in actively supporting public-private partnerships in education, health care, law enforcement, and other areas. Both political parties today acquiesce to a ‘weak concept of citizenship’, wherein citizens passively receive government services but with no active role to play themselves.

The emphasis on governments as the only significant actors is analogous to the general dependence on experts to solve problems, with little space given to citizens. It is true in education (notwithstanding the widespread understanding of the importance of children’s motivation to learn) and also in health care which, in public programs, is all about doctors and hospitals, with only minor attention given to patients’ self-care.

Civil society programs on different issues provide opportunities to show how citizens, as co-owners, can play crucial, active roles, working with governments. Political leaders who understand theatrical opportunities to showcase citizen problem-solvers, can offer important strategic and tactical guidance. These opportunities can come in the form of visiting successful programs, focusing on their positive impacts, and highlighting the important roles citizens play in them.

Integrating freedom with order is the great unfolding challenge which both Right and Left ‘solve’ by avoiding. The Right does avoid it by appeals to traditional religion or (in secular terms) civic virtue. The Left, after Rousseau, avoids it by looking to the Noble Savage for redemption.

Implicit in both the modern Right and modern Left is the belief that leaving the Garden was either for the Right a sin (The Original Sin) or, somehow, for the Left a mistake. Both avoid the challenge of freedom with strategies that focus on going nostalgically back to some imagined, greater past in which memory of all problems and troubles disappear. Both struggle with vision looking forward, intent on discovering Order through Freedom.

The Right tends to address the issue by seeking to impose order by demanding better and stronger values either by public or private institutions, while the Left tends to address the issue by imposing order through government decree. Transpartisan politics offers a home for the two-thirds or more of the population that seeks to empower people to self-improvement and cooperation by embracing them as co-owners, freeing them from having only the Right/Left burn-down-the-house death struggle of current daily politics. We especially find this impulse in public spaces, such as schools, health care, law enforcement, and other community grounded undertakings.

President Biden’s Inaugural Address explicitly expressed this need. Time will tell if actions are able to meet or surpass rhetoric. In the meantime, Republicans regroup.

(Image from WikiMedia. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

In This Together 2021

Mobilizing “Solutions Voters” in a bid to save American democracy.

Transpartisan Note #140

shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Last summer, we featured an article by TTR friend and advisor Bill Shireman that put forth a strategy on Beating the Politics of Polarization involving a transpartisan theory that would have renegade political strategists mobilize “Solutions Voters” in a bid to save American democracy. In a follow-up commentary, we shared the story of In This Together, Bill’s transpartisan initiative that grew from an event where a dozen billionaire political donors (from all sides of our Matrix)  gathered by video with business leaders, foundation chiefs, scientists, advocates, and political strategists.

Bill Shireman, and his innovation partner, Dallas real estate scion Trammell S. Crow, were at the heart of this initiative from the start. Aiming to make considerable impact during the 2024 election season, the two continue to share this bold plan on their quest to save American democracy.

Bill and Trammell recently joined Stuart Scott and Dale Walkonen on FacingFuture.TV to talk about their initiative, their book of the same name, and how the ever-widening political divide has prevented us from coming together on the things most important to all of us. You can watch their conversation here.

We would also like to share an episode, featuring Bill, of the Fractal Friends podcast from earlier in January where, along with discussing how our ineffective political system is designed to encourage divisiveness, Bill shares the transpartisan message that a vast majority of us are eager and able to find solutions to all of the problems.

Our opinion hasn’t changed, especially in light or the red and blue waves that crashed together last autumn. The 70% that do not register as either Democrats or Republicans make their political statement in a voice so scattered that political leaders do not, or pretend to not, hear it. In This Together offers an opportunity for that voice to be focused and heard, making it one of many new initiatives leading the way towards a more transpartisan future. We will continue to watch In This Together carefully and report on its progress throughout 2021.

(Image from Pixabay.com. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

Unite America Responds to the Capitol Riot

“Capitol Violence Underscores Need for Political Reforms”

Transpartisan Note #139

shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We present this statement about the violence at the Capitol on January 6th from Unite America, one of the many groups we see as expressing the TANSPARTISAN Impulse in American society.  It speaks from an important point of view seeking expression within the American political process.  We believe the statement is an important contribution to understanding the nature of the events that are taking place in Washington DC and how Americans are responding to those events.

Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, shared this commentary about the Capitol Riot with RealClear Politics, expressing what many of us felt as we watched the events unfold:

A week ago, our nation was sorely tested as a deadly insurrection fueled by self-interested politicians and partisan disinformation aimed to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.

Those images made clear for all to see that our political division and gridlock no longer simply undermine the functioning of our government; they now threaten the very continuity of our democratic republic.

This is a moment not only for unequivocal words, but also for bold action: We must hold the leaders who betrayed the public trust accountable, and we must greatly accelerate nonpartisan reforms to break the doom loop of political polarization that is fueling growing unrest.

Unite America is, as described on their website, “a movement of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents working to put voters first by fostering a more representative and functional government.” They invest in campaigns to enact reforms and elect candidates so that “the right leaders have the right incentives” to solve our country’s greatest problems:

In 2020, Unite America supported a cross-partisan slate of candidates who had committed themselves to putting country over party and championing reforms to improve our political system. We are proud that most of these leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, voted to uphold the will of the people in the last election. In particular, we express enormous gratitude to Rep. Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican, who has been outspoken regarding the integrity of our elections and the need for honesty from our political leaders.

“It didn’t have to end like this, with five people dead, including a Capitol Police officer. This should be a moment of reckoning for the country as a whole, and the conservative movement in particular,” Meijer (pictured) said. “If the Republican Party ever hopes to regain the public’s trust and lead the country forward after this heinous assault, it must first be honest with itself.”

We agree. We also believe there must be accountability for all 147 members of Congress who voted to object to the Electoral College results certification — putting party over country — just hours after the U.S. Capitol was breached by a violent mob. Generations of Americans have risked their lives to protect that building and what it stands for, yet these members refused to even risk their jobs to uphold their oath of office to protect and defend our Constitution.

Unite America’s core mission to invest in “nonpartisan ballot initiatives and legislative campaigns that increase competition, participation, and accountability” supports “pro-reform, pragmatic candidates committed to putting people over party,” as Nick explains:

The key to fixing our politics is not just to change who we elect, but how we elect. As long as our leaders’ path to election runs through the extreme bases of both political parties, and as long as both political parties are insulated from any kind of new competition, our country will continue to be torn apart and our democracy will continue to fray.

The events of Jan. 6, 2021, must prompt a clarion call for Congress and state legislatures to eliminate partisan gerrymandering, closed primaries, plurality-winner elections, and barriers to voter participation that collectively disenfranchise citizens, distort representation, and fuel our division.

Read the full piece at RealClear Politics. RCP’s “daily editorial curation and original reporting” present balanced, non-partisan analysis that empowers readers to stay informed.

(Image CC BY 2.0 from Tyler Merbler on Flickr.com. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

AllSides Talks

When was the last time you talked politics with someone on the other side?

Transpartisan Note #138

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

At the heart of the transpartisan impulse lies the imperative to bring people with differing opinions together, encourage them to respect each other’s biases, and offer them the opportunity to seek solutions for their communities through meaningful conversations across political divides.

On January 23, 2021,  AllSides, the news platform that provides balanced perspectives by sharing information and ideas from “all sides” of the political spectrum, will be hosting AllSides Talks: a day of political dialogue embracing the very ideals that inspire this transpartisan impulse.

Asking “when was the last time you talked politics with someone on the other side?”, AllSides Talks  plans to bring hundreds of people from across America to “meet for one-on-one and small group conversations to discuss issues that matter to all Americans.”

Getting involved is easy. First AllSides Talks asks you to answer a few generic and non-intrusive questions about your political leanings and the issues facing America right now. You will then be matched with someone from another part of the country who answered the questions differently than you. If you choose to meet, you can arrange a video call using tools provided by AllSides to help make it a great conversation and experience.  We think this is good experiment to learn ways to integrate shared experiences dividing American politics.

The AllSides mission – to strengthen our democratic republic by freeing people from filter bubbles so they can better see the world and each other – is on full display when visiting their website. Using a unique “media bias rating” system to assess over 800 media outlets and authors, AllSides presents daily news and information from multiple sources with differing biases. The reader then gets to read and experience events from a variety of perspectives. This is an important initiative designed to remove the information separation contributing to political fights. We believe it is best for everyone to know where we disagree.

We feel the more opportunities the 70% of voting-eligible, politically-unaffiliated citizens have to engage with one another and the organized political parties, the more this “transpartisan impulse” will take hold. The more focused the remarkable, political energies exploding across American and global society are, the more positive the change within the political system will be.

Join your fellow citizens on January 23rd to be part of the process.

(Image from the AllSides website. Additional text and editing by Andy Fluke.)

A Transpartisan Vision from the Freedom Left

The Impossible Summit

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

It was shamelessly ‘out there’: a celebration of impossible aspirations and dreams. It was a “virtual coming together”, as one of the organizers put it, “of the Cultural Left.” The Impossible Summit: A Global Change Agent Event, an online gathering of ‘over 50 Visionaries and Activists Reinventing our World’ – including several conservatives, such as the co-author of this article, Lawry Chickering – took place from May 20th – 25th, 2020. A second, 3-day, pre-election event streamed from October 30th to November 1st and focused on Impossible Relationships: Waking up from Being Woke and Bridging Difference to Build a Better World.

The homepage for the first gathering began with this:

Calling All Dreamers and Doers!
Where do radical solutions come from? What transforms resistance into possibility?
How have impossible dreams been achieved in the past?
Who is achieving them today? Do you have an impossible dream of your own?

The activities brought together more than fifty visionaries, activists, and change agents; featuring keynotes, workshops, discussions, wellness activities, sharing & healing circles, and more. The objectives included articulating a core set of emergent ideas around love, responsibility, and contribution; increasing support both within and between change agent communities and the world at large; and creating new models of living, working, learning, and social engagement.

A Transpartisan Initiative

The program featured a wildly diverse collection of activists and dreamers. The list of participants said everything about the organizers’ intentions: a ‘Zoom Happening’ of radical change-makers, meeting online at the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic. A phenomenon forcing institutional change in every section and aspect of every country including the United States.

Surveying a list of participants impressionistically suggested a cross-section of the Freedom / Left: agnostic about, if not antagonistic to, rational individualism (agnostic about religious absolutes, antagonistic to industrial certainty in both industrial capitalism and industrial socialism), celebrating THE HEART in balance with if not over THE MIND. They are exuberantly DIVERSE and connected by their shared humanity, and joined in commitment to inner development as the central mechanism to check the overreach of grand, mechanistic social engineering projects aimed at changing other people.

The closing session tried to find threads connecting the Impossible Vision. The tone was of poetic dreams – ‘leading from the heart’ and ‘letting the mind follow’ – but with one theme constantly recurring: the illusion of our separation.

The challenge, hinted at but unfortunately unrealized in the discussion, is to describe a path that shows these concepts are true. They are true in avoiding political assaults on ‘the power structure’ as their primary expression. They are true, putting the point another way, for attempts to avoid changing other people, while promoting the power of changing oneself. Most participants at The Summit aimed at changing themselves – toward inner development – which sees the path to social change running through the connection of empowered, engaged people.

Success Story: Educate Girls Globally

In his presentation about Educate Girls Globally, which he founded, Lawry Chickering described EGG’s process, empowering girls oppressed by traditional male cultures to become powerful leaders, role models, and advocates for change. While the concept is impossible to achieve in mechanistic, industrial terms, EGG shows how, with inner development, empowered girls can become powerful change-makers in very difficult environments.

Girls’, themselves, make EGG’s extraordinary success possible by engaging with village elders and other traditional leaders who support them. Fathers who saw girls as weak, vulnerable, and needing masculine protection, discovered, in the equivalent of an instant, that their daughters could actually be powerful, individual forces. When empowered, these girls became a valuable asset to family, community, and nation.

Personal Experience and Engagement

The Summit explored the impact of social contact in promoting the trust that is essential for all forms of connection, powerfully showing how separation is illusory and can be overcome. Such contact shows how the heart can lead, allowing the mind to describe and validate connections in terms that describe mind-validation of visions needing proof.

In their path-breaking 2013 book Our Towns, James and Deborah Fallows share how they traveled in their private plane 100,000 miles around the U.S. and described two very different countries and political systems. In our terms set out above, one system is the connected life of local communities, featuring united cultures of people working together in common purpose, finding heart-described pathways to mind-organized programs. The other is the highly polarized culture of our national political system, which is consumed with conflict – rooted in political planning, budget, and enforcement battles – about almost everything.

These cultures display an extraordinary aspect of contemporary life; they represent more than different people fighting each other (a small part of the politics). Instead, they consist of many of the same people found in both the national and local political cultures. Why the difference?

The answer may be fairly simple: national politics has been reduced to dealing with the grand, mechanistic visions of politicians. As people, national politicians tend to be pushed away from personal contact and trusting relationships, with egos that call for accomplishing heroic things – for better or worse. Local political cultures, on the other hand, feature intense personal contact and trust, which bring people together from every walk of life and diverse cultures in common purpose, showing how people can live happily together without friction.

A second difference is that local people receive information about national politics almost entirely from national media, while information about local politics comes primarily from personal experience and engagement. While minds dominate debates on national politics, hearts are the principal actors in local venues.

The Fallowses try to imagine how the behaviors and trust governing local cultures might be imported into the toxic environment of our national politics. To use our language, the question is how transpartisan, local-cultural practices can be transferred to national politics. The answer may be suggested by this question: if girls can be empowered to play strong leadership roles in traditional parts of rural India, why can’t personally-engaged, American citizens be empowered to play strong roles in national politics? Why can we not learn from successful experiences like EGG?

* * *

The Second Workshop (October 30 to November 1)

The pre-election theme of the second, 3-day workshop was Impossible Relationships: Waking up from Being Woke and Bridging Differences to a Better World.

“Let’s complete one another instead of compete with each other.”
What if we all could just get along despite our differences?
What if we could agree to disagree but still find enough common ground to be innovative and pioneering? Even be forgiving so that we could heal and move forward?

One panel on this theme focused on ‘Unpacking the Cult of Righteousness: Claiming Our Own Sovereignty and Recognizing Our Roles in Perpetuating Polarity, Dominance, and Hierarchy’. Another looked at ‘Bridging Political Differences: Turning an Adversary into an Ally’, examining especially constructive engagement and solution-oriented politics.

From our Transpartisan observation point we would edit these titles by underscoring and emphasizing ‘ … Our Roles in Perpetuating Polarity, Dominance, and Hierarchy’ and ‘… Recognizing an Adversary as an Ally’. Transpartisan rests on the observation that the social and political currents of our culture flow beneath our institutions. Where our institutions lack congruence with our social and political currents, they fray and begin to disintegrate. How we respond, and with what intensity, determines how well these institutions are able to reorganize toward renewal and revival.

We see the contemporary social and political currents swirling around us as a massive surge of individual empowerment, driven by new information technologies and advancing demands for individual empowerment and self-expression. This trend toward individualism is straining the consensus and cohesion reinforcing every social institution. Another panel looked at ‘Bridging Political Differences: Turning an Adversary into an Ally’ or, as we would say, recognizing an apparent adversary as an actual ally focused on valuing viewpoint diversity, constructive engagement, and solution-oriented politics.

Reality of Connection vs. Illusion of Separation

We believe that everyone interested in particular issues has something to contribute to the resolution of those issues. Such recognition was important for the final panel at the conference which explored how people can develop new and empowered relationships with issues or people that scare them. People become frightened, we believe, in different ways, and each individual experience can contribute to taming the fear.

The final session struggled with the issue of emphasizing the heart over the mind – overcoming the ‘illusion of separation’ – because it failed to successfully address the issue of promoting the personal engagement that brings people together in trust. We believe the Transpartisan process, grounded in the Transpartisan Political Matrix – order right and left; freedom right and left – provides important initial steps toward building that trust.

The crucial element the Matrix addresses is in relationships that combine collective purpose and shared ownership. One can see how these elements are strongly present in schools; in shared community / police responsibility for law enforcement; in community health centers (including drug and alcohol rehab); in public housing projects; and in similar areas applied in other, hostile countries on behalf of foreign and security policy.

In this case, we would advocate heart and mind together rather than choosing a hierarchical relationship between them. We are comfortable avoiding the ‘illusion of separation’ by highlighting the reality of connection.

We believe the vast majority of the voting eligible public – 70% of which do not formally align with either of our major political parties – know that heart and mind interact with each other and the reality of connection overrides the ‘illusion of separation’ without necessarily articulating that knowledge, just as they know the force of gravity even if they cannot explain the laws of thermodynamics.

The objectives of building trust, integrating heart and mind, and welcoming the reality of connection in place of the ‘illusion of separation’ depend on empowering citizens locally, nationally, and globally around institutions that intimately affect their lives: in shared ownership of public schools; in shared responsibility for law enforcement between individuals, communities and the police; and in community-based initiatives promoting health, housing, food, and all other essentials of happy, humane living.

In foreign and security policy; shared community drug programs; and race, gender, and ethnic integration, examples exist of empowering citizens in self-governing initiatives building freedoms and liberty in democratic institutions across partisan political orthodoxies. While the general belief that most ordinary people don’t want to participate in civil programs often persist, real experiences in many countries, including dramatic examples in the United States, suggest otherwise when programs focus on issues of intense interest (see EGG example above).

We think that, if presented in a transpartisan way, appealing across the orthodox political spectrum within the Transpartisan Matrix, a radical movement coming from the Freedom / Left quadrant of the Matrix could play a strong leadership role. Furthermore, it could help empower citizens, formal and de facto, from the Freedom / Left and act as a model of integration with people occupying positions in the other three quadrants. On many issues, integration of the four quadrants can play, and is playing, a role that would not only bring diverse people together, but would also contribute to solving many problems that central governments have shown consistently they cannot solve.

The 70% of the voting-eligible, American public struggling to be heard recognizes that intense emotional fights between partisan Republicans and Democrats does little to better the lives of individuals living in the United Sates. The transpartisan impulse animating the Freedom / Left Impossible Summit offers one path to better living through empowered citizens.

(Image from the Impossible Summit website.)

Find-the-Matrix: Black Rappers for Trump

Transpartisan Note #137

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

We offer the Transpartisan Matrix as a descriptive, analytical, and energetic snapshot of contemporary American politics. Take a look at NY Times opinion writer Joe Coscarelli’s latest piece, Lil Wayne, Latest Rapper in Trump’s Orbit, Sees Backlash Over Photo from October 30th, 2020 and find the Matrix.

Coscarelli’s article reports how several powerful rappers (including Lil Wayne, Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube) flirt with, embrace, or endorse President Trump and explores the backlash they received from other influential musicians and ardent fans.

The article, epically in its last paragraphs, captures the dynamic of the matrix – individual and structural pressures working on the Republican Right and the Democratic Left undulate across the political horizon. Successful outcomes for communities, we believe, result when politics integrates all four of the Matrix quadrants.

Those last paragraphs read:

In an interview, the writer, filmmaker and activist Dream Hampton called it “the hubris of the celebrity” for rappers to “kind of saunter in during the fourth quarter, talking about making demands.” She noted that while Black men will still overwhelmingly vote for Democrats – Mr. Biden leads 78-11 among Black men, according to a recent Times/Siena poll – a macho affinity for President Trump and the allure of economic success could explain his inroads with a certain segment of the hip-hop community.

“It’s the same reason they were referencing him in the ’90s – it’s about the lie of the American dream,” she said. “It’s about the lie of Black entrepreneurship somehow being a panacea to these larger social problems. Hip-hop became a stand-in for that, lifting up individual Black accomplishment.”

We think that the Transpartisan Matrix contributes to understanding what happened on November 3rd. Two days after the election, NY Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote:

…the surprise of this election. Although it is still too early to make any definitive statement about the shape of the electorate (broad white support for Trump notwithstanding), it is clear that the president made modest inroads with Black and Hispanic voters, especially men. This is most apparent in the states of Florida, Georgia and Texas, where Trump outperformed his 2016 totals in several areas where Hispanic voters make up a majority.

We don’t yet know why Trump made those gains — although the aforementioned performances, which figured prominently in his outreach to those groups, may have something to do with it — but this shift is a useful reminder that politics does not move along a linear path. For all of our data, the political world is still a fundamentally unpredictable place.

We use the Matrix to provide a view of the voting from an angle different from Red/Blue, Republican /Democrat, Conservative/Progressive, or any other dualities.  We see dualities as overly linear. We see the Matrix as a small step toward guiding the breakout from dualism.

Read about Lil Wayne’s outreach to President Trump and Find-the-Matrix.

(Images of President Trump [public domain] and Lil Wayne by Chris Allmeid [CC BY-SA 4.0] found on Wikimedia Commons.)

Amy Coney Barrett

Justice Through a Transpartisan Lens

Transpartisan Note #136

by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called new Justice Amy Coney Barrett “un-ashamedly pro-life” (NYTimes 10/14/20). This is history being made, folks. This is the first time in American history that we’ve nominated a woman who is unashamedly pro-life and embraces her faith without apology. And she’s going to the court.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) joined in praising Justice Barrett saying “…the Constitution clearly states the ‘right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,’ and Justice Barrett will interpret those words as written, which is a win for law-abiding Americans, including myself.” (Fox News 10/26/20)

In the debate over expansive versus limited government, the pro-gun, anti-abortion position – usually expressed by “conservatives” – presents the new justice with complex legal terrain.  The Constitution, the combined positions say, requires the Government to ban abortions and permit guns.

The “liberal” position reverses the demand saying the Constitution requires permitting abortions and allows restricting guns including banning some guns. A government that bans guns or abortions is expansive. One that allows guns or abortions is limited.

Justice Barrett laid out her legal strategy – follow the constitution.  As she expresses consistent opinions integrating expansive government needed to ban abortions with limited government necessary to require permitting guns, her originalist Constitutional reading might well lead to new law.

A failure of consistency might well lead to a new appreciation of the law’s limitations in social problem solving and a shakeup of the court. In our view, the Transpartisan Matrix gives clues of what this nation is up against as our society and government navigate their next evolutionary stage.

Surveys suggest that about 20% of Americans support abortion on demand. Eighty percent support some level of limitations. Surveys also suggest that 20% or so support all guns in the hands of law enforcement or the military. Eighty percent support some form of access to guns.

In the Transpartisan Matrix, those supporting free access to guns would be considered on the free right. Those supporting free access to abortions would be considered on the free left. Those seeking gun restriction and abortion restriction are order left and order right respectively.

The matrix assists in finding the precise legal pathway to the integration of limited and expansive government powers and helps remind us that authorities using government power to restrict my adversaries might also use that power to restrict me.

Welcome to the court Justice Barrett. May you help the union of freedom and order live long and prosper.

(Image is an official White House photo and in the public domain.)