The Transpartisan Narrative - a third way
Transpartisanship represents an emerging field in political thought distinct from bipartisanship, which aims to negotiate between “right” and “left,” resulting in a dualistic perspective, and nonpartisanship, which tends to avoid political affiliation altogether. Rather, transpartisanship acknowledges the validity of truths across a range of political perspectives and seeks to synthesize them into an inclusive, pragmatic container beyond typical political dualities. In practice, transpartisan solutions emerge out of a new kind of public conversation that moves beyond polarization by applying proven methods of facilitated dialogue, deliberation and conflict resolution. In this way it is possible to achieve the ideal of a democratic republic by integrating the values of a democracy — freedom, equality, and a regard for the common good, with the values of a republic — order, responsibility and security.
The Transpartisan Field
Transpartisanship is increasingly being used to describe the collaborative efforts of citizens and leaders who seek to discover and implement the best possible policies regardless of political ideology. Transpartisanship practices and methods are currently being employed by all levels of government (national, state, and local), various citizen groups, nonprofit organizations, corporations, consulting and conflict-resolution firms, university programs and more. Together these efforts have generated a considerable body of work that is forming the Transpartisan field.
We clearly need to move beyond the broken and toxically pathological partisanship of the last 40+ years or so. Binary partisanship will never be able to solve the looming changes that will be driven by Peak Oil and Global Climate Disruption. Why? because only if we are united into something greater than the sum of our parts, will we be able to successfully master the large scale changes we are confronting and which we can not avoid.
permalink | Jock Gill | Climate Change, Democracy, Empowerment, Politics
I am deeply suspicious of claims of this sort of “transpartisanship.” Whenever I hear people starting to talk along these lines, I smell a rat.
I confess to being a rather partisan guy myself. I’ve spent decades in the trenches of the Democratic Party. I have no illusions about the sanctity of the Democratic Party, but after watching how the right-wing has systematically destroyed so much of the country I loved, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan, I have no doubt that right-wing-driven Republicanism is a much graver danger to our civil liberties, to the poor and the middle class, to the environment, and to peace.
So talk of transpartisanship puts me on alert to begin with. Who’s behind this latest venture?
It doesn’t take very long to find an initial answer. I went to the website, and the first thing I see on the home page is that Grover Norquist and Dave Keating are keynoting a panel at the Claim Democracy Conference.
Grover Norquist has been one of the most vicious right-wing operatives of the last decade or two. Here’s a sample quote: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist has been close friends with swindler/briber Jack Abramoff since college, when he ran Abramoff’s successful campaign to become national chairman of the College Republicans.
After Clinton was elected in 1992, Norquist began convening a weekly meeting (the Wednesday Meeting) which became a principal informal organizing group for the right-wing assault on the government. There’s plenty more where this came from. If I were going to pick an ally for making America a better place to live for people who are not Republican and rich, Norquist would be at the very bottom of the list. At one point, he compared the morality which permits the U.S. to have an estate tax to the morality that permitted the Holocaust.
Dave Keating, according to the website of the Club for Growth, “is executive director of Club for Growth, a political action group that promotes tax reform and reduction, Social Security reform and other pro-economic growth issues. The Club is the nation’s largest political action group supporting pro-economic growth policies. In this election cycle, the Club and its members raised over $15 million, including over $5 million in hard money donations. Under his direction, Club membership increased 15-fold since 2000.”
The Club’s stated goals are the right-wing fiscal conservative goals:
* Making the Bush tax cuts permanent
* Death tax repeal
* Cutting and limiting government spending
* Social Security reform with personal retirement accounts
* Expanding free trade
* Legal reform to end abusive lawsuits
* Replacing the current tax code
* School choice
* Regulatory reform and deregulation
Here’s what Mike Huckabee had to say about the Club for Growth, after the group criticized some of Huckabee’s tax hikes while he was governor. On Fox News Sunday Nov. 18, he called the “tactics” of the Club for Growth “some of the most despicable in politics today. It’s why I love to call them the Club for Greed because they won’t tell you who gave their money.”
So what I’m seeing here, featured under the heading of “Latest News” in the right-hand column of every webpage, is a promotion for two of the meanest right-wing mother-fuckers in the entire country. These two guys managed to accumulate real political power, and have used that power exclusively to advance the interests of the rich and powerful. The candidates that they have supported have been uniformly on the extreme right of the political spectrum. The Club for Growth routinely supports candidates in primaries against sitting Republicans who have not been right-wing enough to suit the Club’s taste.
I looked through the list of people on the “steering committee,” whatever that is. There is no one on this list who have exercised the kind of political power on the left that Norquist and Keating hold on the right. The closest claimant would be Move.on co-founder Joan Blades. No offense to Blades, but she does not have the kind of deep-rooted political power that Norquist and Keating do.
If you’re looking for long-term solutions to the problems that are facing our country and our world, it is doubtful that such solutions will emerge from spending time with people with life-long histories of operating as right-wing political thugs.
Question: Is Reuniting America a strong Transpartisan organization, or is it just a cover for “right-wing-driven Republicanism”?
Reply from Roberts S. Steele:
Jock, it’s a great question.
Transpartisan is a meme, not a team. Don Beck and Jim Turner (Naderite #2, Naderites for Gore 2000) are the leading intellects.
The meme has been adopted by and is resident on the web site of Reuniting America, an extraordinary continuum of organizations from the ACLU on the left to Citizens for Tax Reform on the Right, in the aggregate 110 million members, but none of whom have actually heard of or understand the meme.
The leadership of Reuniting America, 75-100 strong, does recognize the meme, and they see the value of a meme that helps bridge divides to achieve common goals (for example, from left to right, there is stark concern over the erosion of civil liberties), but they have a deep commitment to behind the scenes retreats rather than public advocacy or endorsement.
Hence, at this time, and this is characteristic of both Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, the two well-rounded adults running for office, politics is being defined in bipartisan “save the spoils system” terms, and, apart from token outreach to Independents, both sides of the spoils system are ignoring the Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and others.
Neither party favors electoral reform (see the eight points at Earth Intelligence Network or at this URL:
http://www.earth-intelligence.net/extra/page/?action=page_show&id=69&module_instance=12
because electoral reform would restore the sovereignty of We the People, and destroy 200 years of rule by secrecy, scarcity, and elite conspiracy to rig the game to favor the few over the many.
The fact that Mayor Michael Bloomberg got sucked into a bi-partisan sham in Oklahoma, was questioned by reporters about the difference between bipartisanship and transpartisanship, received an entire briefing book on transpartisanship, and yet chose to stand pat and not question the bipartisan race prior to Super Tuesday, suggests that at this time transpartisanship is a still-born meme. Bloomberg has the power to make transpartisanship the meme of our era, restoring America the Beautiful. All he needs to do is form a transpartisan cabinet led by Bill Bradley (D-NJ) and Susan Collins (R-ME), and produce a balanced budget online for a national dialog, by the 4th of July.
So we are left with two questions:
1) Will the transpartisan meme remain still-borne?
2) Why, exactly, is Michael Bloomberg allowing the bipartisan mockery of democracy to continue without a transpartisan alternative?
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Sidenote: Patrick Buchanan is evidently the independent candidate and Ralph Nader may be the green candidate. This means that if Bloomberg did want to run, or to finance a ticket, they could, should be the transpartisan ticket, but they have to walk the walk and talk the talk, and I do not see anyone out there doing that.
[This comment comes from friend Kate Thompson.]
One person I know, who’s very much involved in this transpartisan project, is a terrific guy who has been a thoughtful progressive activist for 40 years. I gather this initiative grew out of another called Let’s Talk America, which was an honest and serious effort to reduce polarization in this country in the depths of the Bush years. I know others who were involved in both, and can vouch for their characters and intentions.
I don’t know what Grover Norquist’s motivations might be in joining one of their events, but I think further digging would show you that the people behind this are for real - they may be idealistic, but I doubt they’re naive enough to be railroaded by the Right.
Kate T.
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