IS THE TRANSPARTISAN MOVEMENT A THIRD PARTY?
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From: Bruce S.
Date: Sunday, May 31, 2009, 2:23 PM
Subject: Is the Transpartisan Movement a Third Party?
Reply to: 268189
ID: 268231

Dear Tom - Dear Everybody --

Tom, it was such a pleasure to see your message here. I've been thinking about it since yesterday, letting it soak in, and hoping that this slow-paced approach -- where we actually read and review each other's messages and take a little extra time to develop good communication ("dialogue") -- can help us do something in this framework that happens too seldom in online communications...

After thinking about this for 24 hours, and being very busy with other issues -- like creating a "digest format" for this Lightpages system -- I thought I would come back here, review this material, and offer a reply.

So -- I went to the link you suggest:

http://co-intelligence.org/S-PatandPat.html.

and printed it (that web layout prints very well for me) -- and started reading it, with a pink highlighter.

Well -- I didn't make it all the way through the article yet -- because I saw so many things right off the bat that seemed important and totally relevant. When I started laughing out loud, I figured I better start writing before I'm in over my head...

I do want to reply to this particular message you posted (below), and address those particular issues -- but before I do, as a kind of preface, I just want to excerpt a few bits and pieces from your article -- concepts that I personally feel are totally of the essence, and describe exactly the kind of politics I also feel we need...

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Your article is a fictionalized interview of a couple of imaginary politicians, writing in the year 2020, mentioning "The City That Runs Itself".

We'd read about it several months earlier and were intrigued by the level of cooperation between local government, corporations and community groups. We thought we'd have a vacation and learn some things that would help our organizing activities. Little did we know that visit would transform our lives.

Our encounter with these incredible communities woke us up to four facts:

1. Elected officials could do a tremendous amount to bring people together to solve problems, especially where citizens were already strongly inclined to do that.

2. This approach was a different kind of politics than we'd ever seen. In this kind of politics, a politician's platform has only one plank: We will weave together our community into a collective intelligence capable of dealing with any shared issue, achieving any shared dream and solving any shared problem. From this perspective, there is no more important issue for a politician.

3. No politicians we'd ever heard of had the skills and experience that we had accumulated, the exact qualifications needed to take on that mission.

4. No politician we'd ever dealt with had the depth and breadth of connections -- and the extraordinary reputations -- that we'd developed in the last few years.

Ok, this quote sets the stage. For me, the most potent concept here is a very simple one -- something I have felt for years, but which does tend to meet some resistance among forward-thinking people, who remain convinced that "getting the right positions on the issues" (or "figuring out who to blame") is really the question.

But you say

In this kind of politics, a politician's platform has only one plank: We will weave together our community into a collective intelligence capable of dealing with any shared issue, achieving any shared dream and solving any shared problem.

This is powerful. I've been doing my best to say the same thing for several years, and seldom saying it so well. If we took a week just to consider that one thought, that would be a week (a month, a year) well spent.

You are / we are -- talking about what democracy has always wanted to be, and has never yet quite become. I suppose there is a sheer ideational element to this -- we just gotta get the ideas clear, so as to become fully persuasive and illuminating -- and there is a also a critical element of cultural evolution, and not "being ahead of our time."

So -- is this collective-intelligence approach to community fully coming into its own -- is it "an idea whose time has come"?

Or, maybe more realistically -- is this an idea that some of us can now bring to our time in an effective way, because conditions are now more receptive?

Your imagineering essay continues to say

We came home eager to try creating a new form of politics in Iowa.

We weren't unfamiliar with politics. We'd met each other working for the Gore campaign in 2000. But he was still into macro-environmentalism, a focus on technological solutions and generating visions for the country from the top. We'd left politics because we wanted an approach based more on dialogue and action at the community level. Gore hadn't seen how building community co-intelligence was key.

That's what we're trying to do around here --- develop "an approach based more on dialogue and action at the community level."

Jumping ahead just a little bit, you write

The Democratic and Republican candidates didn't know what hit them. We never took any positions on issues. We just sponsored dialogues and said that we'd create dozens more if we were elected. We pulled together one major citizen dialogue after another...

That's as far as I got.

"We never took any positions on issues."

Yes.

Can you imagine a new political party that offers this statement as the essential element of its "party platform"?

Sorry, but I just cracked up at this point. I am so strongly in agreement with this. It's a huge concept -- hugely simple. You can write it in a sentence.

Might take several years to communicate it to a world that has politics burned in as a battleground of divisive ideologies.

But for the people who are ready -- or maybe the young ones with less scar tissue and brain damage -- this idea might be received with tremendous enthusiasm, as "like totally obvious...."

Start at the beginning. What is democracy, and what is the best way to do it? What should it include? How can we do it well? What makes it so great?

Look at the historical precedents, and include them and be influenced by them -- but don't be limited by them. Even the greatest philosophers of democracy -- it seems to me -- have never fully unfolded or expressed or conceived the power and brilliance of these possibilities that are trying to emerge today.

Just go back to the beginning, and start ticking off all the stuff democracy can and should be doing, and why it is so great (getting all points of view on the table, every point of view with its motivated advocate, etc., with things like the scientific method hovering in the background as a corrective influence).

If we asked a question like that, aiming for a relatively brief and simple answer -- we could probably spend several days on your Co-Intelligence.org web site, just harvesting possibilities into one big master list. That would be a very strong place to start. Then, we could simply open up the conversation to all comers, to add in anything we might have overlooked....

Rewriting the concept of democracy from the ground up, from the grassroots up -- in the most direct simply humane and natural way -- and then, of course -- integrating the whole thing with the incredible connective and organizing power of the internet....

*

I think this is enough for now. I've got several more things I'd like to mention -- but let this be enough for the moment. Thanks to all for being here, thank you Tom.

--- On Fri, May 29, 2009, in msg268189, Tom Atlee wrote ---

Great message, Bruce.

But "we're all on the same team" has so far been used to attract people to a partisan side.

The real revolution, it seems to me, will be when we use our knowledge of integral PROCESS to create a party that can legitimately say it represents the whole, because its policies and platform were crafted by people from across the political spectrum working together toward common ground and/or towards respectfully diverse parallel activities.

The big tent that is so far missing is how to create coherence out of difference and dissonance. On the one hand, we have a lot of know-how about that. On the other, I believe we are at Kitty Hawk on it. We are at the stage of competing ideologies and methodologies without yet any agreed-on process for using all that diversity to deepen our understanding of how to actually usefully integrate diversity!! So before an integral-process political PARTY could be formed, there would have to be a political MOVEMENT to get more sophisticated in this essential skill. We'd admit we didn't know, that we have a lot of things to try, and that we're doing lots of experiments to learn more. "So come join us in the experiment." (This is, incidentally, the spirit of the rapidly-growing "Transition Towns" movement.)

People who were part of that political movement could run for political office as independents who were explicitly part of that political movement. One vision of how such a political campaign would be run is offered in an "imagineering" story I wrote several years ago, at

http://co-intelligence.org/S-PatandPat.html.

Also, an article on integral politics as process may be coming out in the next Integral Review.

At the point we can ACTUALLY manifest "we're all on the same team" of policy makers and community revitalizers, we'll be ready to have a "People's Wisdom Party" or something like that, worthy of the name.

Until then, I'm wary of partisan use of "we're all on the same team" because it runs the risk of pretense or claiming a universality that STILL has significant people outside of the tent. This will always be true to the extent that insiders (no matter how wise and transpartisan) are making the policy decisions that represent the whole.

Coheartedly, Tom

--- On Fri, May 29, 2009, in msg268184, Bruce Schuman wrote ---

I was watching MSNBC the other day -- I think it was Hardball with Chris Matthews -- and the two guests were Bill Press and Pat Buchanan.  I like Hardball and I like Chris Matthews -- I get a lot out of that show.  I like MSNBC in general -- though I think it has declined a bit since the loss of Tim Russert.

Bill Press said something striking, something that has been buzzing around in the back of my brain...

He simply said that he would love to see the emergence of a third party.

I have never really been a believer in third parties -- though neither am I fond of the dualistic either/or "my team will beat your team" approach we seem compelled to follow in today's environment.  Ralph Nader, or the Greens, or the Libertarians, or the very fringe parties, seem like little more than interesting but near-meaningless static around the periphery of our real conversation.   And a third party, conceived as a traditional party, "another team" -- seems like a weak concept to me.

But this new idea -- "we are all on the same team" -- that seems to be the message America wants to hear.  Yes, we are polarized, and we don't understand each other very well -- but there is this grassroots call, this sense that down at the local level, people do like each other, and can work together -- and they are tired of -- exhausted by -- the incessant battling of our leadership around categories that do not seem true.

So -- enter the Transpartisan movement -- a solution looking for a voice...

I had this little vision last night, as I was hiking up Painted Cave Road at sunset.  My idea was -- Joseph McCormick goes on tour -- going from city to city, from state to state, campaigning as he said yesterday he loves to do -- sitting in the coffee shops with the people of the towns as they come in for breakfast -- and just -- bringing this message everywhere.  We can work together.  We can be friends.  We need each other, and there is a better way...

I think that message can be made simple, and very marketable.  I think the essence can be communicated very quickly.  In my own experience, when I start putting this idea on the table, people tend to light up.  This is what they want to hear.  Obama talked like this, and got millions of people excited.  And now he's stuck up at the top of the wedding cake like a perfect cherry -- and it's getting tougher for him to stay fully in resonance with the people...

He needs some advocates -- not Obama advocates -- but Transpartisan advocates -- people who resonate to the universal message of trust, cooperation, collective intelligence and community genius.  Obama was a "community organizer" -- and though some may see him differently, in my eyes, every move he makes carries that resonance, that refreshing honesty, that message of universal simplicity and humanity.  We need this kind of "community organizing" going on everywhere. 

I think I heard Bill O'Reilly the other night say that the Republican party is in serious danger of total atrophy.  It's drying up like the empty ideological shell of of a dying world view -- a world view no longer tuned to realities of today -- the incredible teeming diversity of the American (and indeed global) melting pot...

But this is not to say -- that the Dems have now got the territory to themselves.  They are still deeply wedded to mutually-exclusive either/or thinking, it's still totally about our team winning -- beating their team...

What America wants to hear, it seems to me -- what the world wants to hear -- is that we are all on the same team -- and everybody is invited to play.

This message is simple, and big.  It flows easily.  People get it. 

But still -- it needs advocates, it needs voices -- it needs clarification.

My little thought last night -- my "5-cent vision" as I was going to call it -- was something like -- Joseph (and others) come into a town -- and don't leave until somebody in that town has bonded to this action, and agrees to anchor our radiating network at their locale.

Of course, all of this is organized and integrated over the internet.  We build cohesion in every direction, inviting involvement from every sector, from every person.  It's a big movement -- a big tent, as they like to say.  It includes everybody -- everybody who cares about community, everybody who cares about their neighbors, everybody who cares about life on one small planet.

Just stay there until the flag is planted and waving sweetly and secure.  Then move on to the next point in the grid, and plant the next flag.  We'll keep all of that hooked together, in a hundred other ways, influencing every voice and opinion in the American conversation...

For me -- this doesn't seem like a grand ambition, a utopian fantasy, a wild hope.  It's more like -- America waiting to exhale...

This movement -- can be driven by natural human tendencies -- to be happy, to be kind, to be centered, to be healthy.  It can make friends in every direction, and build bridges in every direction.  A thousand points of light, a million points of light -- all simply driven by natural human instincts to love, to kindness, to basic human decency.

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