Pope Francis: Reformer, Democrat, Revolutionary or Old Guard?

On the evening of March 13, 2013, a narrow column of white smoke rose from a chimney above the Sistine Chapel, in Vatican City. The College of Cardinals had just chosen one of their own—a Jesuit from Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio—to become Pope Francis, the first Catholic leader to adopt the name of the patron saint of peace and of the poor.

There are hopes the first Latin American Pope, having adopted the name of Francis, will be a reformer who opens the church and who will seek to mobilize 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide to drive a transition to a period of greater fairness in economics and in politics. As the world’s population continues to expand toward 8 billion, socio-economic disparities are expanding on every continent.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Joseph Robertson is Executive Director of Climate Civics International (climatecivics.org). He represents CCI in the UNFCCC negotiations and other United Nations processes, and in the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative. He is Chief Strategist for Resilience Intel and the Climate Value Exchange, and a member of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition Advisory Group. Joseph is a principal in the Good Food Finance Network, co-leading efforts to establish a new co-investment platform for food systems transformation and the Integrated Data Systems Initiative. He previously served as Interim Director for the Food System Economics Commission, during its start-up phase, and as Senior Advisor, Sustainable Finance, for the EAT Foundation. He is the founder of Geoversiv (earthintel.org) and The Navigator (navigatornews.net).

We are Citizens; the Time is Now

In the first State of the Union address of his second term as president of the United States, Barack Obama outlined an ambitious agenda, to reform economic and social policy, education, immigration, energy, gun control laws, and laws governing gender equality. He laid down the most direct and explicit challenge to lawmakers on climate policy, saying “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

The Congress has a choice on climate policy: comprehensive, market-based bipartisan policy, or an aggressive register of executive actions to tighten regulations and ensure US carbon emissions drop at the necessary rate. He called specifically for a “bipartisan market-based” approach, but left the specifics to lawmakers. Fortunately, thousands of citizens are already building political will for a bipartisan, market-based approach with none of the flaws of cap and trade. (Learn more here.)

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Working Together Makes Us Free: Inauguration 2013

The year is 2013. The world did not come to an end in the last month of 2012, as so many had feared. Cynicism and existential terror have not won the future. It is Martin Luther King Day, three weeks to the day after the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—which declared in the gravest of moments in our national history that we will be a true democracy, one day. As Barack Obama is sworn in for his second term, the nation aches with a desire for forward motion.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, in what is perhaps the most effective, action-oriented treatise on democracy, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all [people] are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Near the start of his 2nd inaugural address, Pres. Obama said “Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the reality of our time, for history tells us that while those truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing.” He described the essence of the challenge we all face as that generational and never-ending effort “to keep safe our founding creed.”

The first truth of democracy is that all human beings are conscious spirits with a right to make decisions about their fate and the circumstances of the society in which they live. The second truth is that our life, our liberty and our pursuit of happiness, focus most intently on the intimate relationships that constitute the substance of our lived experience: family, chosen and cherished friendships, and romantic love.

The poet Marilyn Chin said in an interview in 2012 that “the bliss of eros must sooner or later be interrupted by the bad news of the world.” This, of course, is the cause of much rebellion, mistrust and conflict: I may find my corner of relative erotic, familial or community bliss, but degradations rooted elsewhere will, somehow, creep back in. We are challenged to address the failings of the social structures we inhabit.

It is then the work of our romantic, familial, community and individual selves, in the space of our democracy, to bring human souls together in a viable fabric of meaning, which can thrive and defy and make magic, even in the face of the hoax-math, illusion and tragedy, so active around the edges of the political sphere.

The fact is: that interference of the world in our affairs is also part of what it is to live in a democracy. The third truth of democracy is that it acts as a framework through which we can take a measure of collective or composite ethical conscience. What Chin calls “the cries of those less fortunate” are an existential summons to each of us.

That summons requires that we ask ourselves: Are we up to the ethical challenge of forging “a more perfect union”—an optimal commonwealth in which the benefits of democracy, however local or remote, accrue genuinely and irrevocably to all people? Are we free enough to do so? Can we be the democracy we seek, unafraid of any challenge, unwilling to cast aside any human being?

Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, cited the author of Roots, Alex Haley, who said he had lived his life by six simple words: “Find the good, and praise it.” He was speaking, in this case, of the peaceful transition of power, how we recognize and honor the inauguration of a democratically elected president, without mob violence, rebellion or political disintegration.

Alexander subtly hinted at the challenge his party now faces, after four years of relentless and nearly uniform attacks on Pres. Obama and his legislative agenda. It is necessary to recognize that the inauguration of Barack Obama for a second term, and the peaceful transition of power that comes with it, are in themselves a triumph for democracy and human liberty, and so his party will need to find the true heart of their commitment to public service, praise the good in our system and in the work of this president, and collaborate constructively for the benefit of the nation.

Merly Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers, asked God to bless “all those who contribute” to constructively serving the improvement and upkeep of our democracy. She added that “We ask you to grant our president the will to act courageously but cautiously when confronted by danger… to act prudently but deliberately when faced with adversity…” and to “strengthen us for the journey that lies ahead.”

Firm in his call for principled, pragmatic problem-solving that honors the dignity of all people, Pres. Obama revived his call for people in public life to see beyond the perceived boundaries of party or class, declaring that “Through blood born by lash and blood spilled by war, we have learned that no nation can survive half-slave and half-free.”

For a long time, Barack Obama’s warning that “a chorus of cynics” would tell us that achieving a “more perfect union”, rooted in the core truths of democracy, is not possible, rang all too true. For the years 2009-2012, cynics took this propaganda to a radical extreme, going as far as to suggest, at almost any opportunity, that efforts to provide for a more democratic, liberated and resilient American experience, must be an expression of “hatred” toward America, an attempt to “destroy” American families, or to “crush” the spirit of free enterprise.

Over that time, however, we have witnessed the persistence of humane imaginative patriotism, in the face of so much naked cynicism. Efforts to adjust problematic policy standards, to allow for a more democratic, liberated and resilient American experience, and to build that more perfect union, have proven to be expressions of love for America, for its history, its people and their future, attempts to empower families and breathe life into the collaborative creative spirit of enterprise that undergirds American democracy, the middle class, Main Street and the aspirations of hundreds of millions.

Pres. Obama specifically noted this element of his agenda and of American culture more broadly, saying “Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work … are constants in our character.” He added that public servants need to consider that “preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action,” a requirement that defines the meaning of their work in the sweep of American life.

The 2012 election seems to have been a national vote in favor of Robert Kennedy’s faithful admonition that “The American dream need not forever be deferred.” The people of the United States have voted for possibility, demanding that the Congress join the president in moving American democracy forward intelligently and with respect for life at the human scale.

The president’s voice nearly cracked when speaking of the “many who barely make it” in our economy. He sought to set the tone for how to address economic inequity and systematized community degradation, saying that “While the means will change, our purpose endures: a nation that rewards the efforts and determination of every single citizen.”

The president promised: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” also noting that “The commitments we make to each other … do not sap our initiative … they free us” to be the society we hope to be. He added that we cannot afford to cede the clean energy transition to other nations, saying that achieving that position of world leadership will give meaning to our creed.

In two statements that received resounding applause, the president said that security does not require “perpetual war” and reminded members of Congress that “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle or substitute spectacle for politics.”

Taking the long view of democracy, he sought to frame the nature of pro-active social policy reform, saying “We must act knowing our victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here four years, and forty years, and four hundred years hence,” to make good on the promise of our founding.

Richard Blanco’s solemn, generous and deliberative poem cast the moment in the light of a collective joy at having the opportunity that is a true democracy, if we can manifest it. A partial transcription:

A simple truth … charging across the Rockies … told by our silent gestures … millions of faces in morning’s mirrors … pencil-yellow school buses … apples and oranges, arranged like rainbows, begging our praise … on our way … to ring up groceries, as my mother did, for 20 years, so I could write this poem, for all of us … equations to solve, history confronted or atoms imagined … the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain the tragedy of 20 children marked ‘absent’ today and every day … one ground, our ground, rooting us to ever stalk of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat and hands … hands gleaning coal or planting windmills that keep us warm … one breath … breathe … hear it through the din … hear the doors we open each day for each other, saying Hello, Shalom, Buon Giorno … Namaste or Buenos Días, in the language my mother taught me … one wind … one sky … thank the work of our hands … stitching another wound … the last floor on the Freedom Tower, jutting toward the sky that yields to our resilience … sometimes giving thanks for a love that loves you back … forgiving … heading home … through the plum blush of dusk … always home … one sky, our sky, and always one moon … all of us, facing the stars, Hope: a new constellation waiting for us to map it, waiting for us to name it, together…

Pres. Obama ended his address with an explicit recognition of that vital ethical summons: “Let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.” There is a mandate, now, for collaborative creative problem-solving and principled progress toward full democracy and genuinely open opportunity, at the human scale.

As Lucie Brock-Broido has written: “Make a fist for heart. That is the size of it.” Citizenship is about honoring the great strength of people honoring the dignity of human connections; democracy is about the fabric of informed conscience and shared interest citizens enact, to protect the liberties of each by opening liberty to all.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Education Must Be Leading Priority for Vibrant, Sustainable Future

National priority: world-leading education

The United States of America has been, since its birth 236 years ago, a world leader in promoting universal public education. It has also been a world leader in promoting universal access to higher education and to advanced degrees. That history has made the US a leader in technological innovation and advanced problem solving for two centuries. That legacy is under threat, and our list of national educational aims demands immediate attention.

In the current budgetary and economic climate, cuts to public education, the rolling back of teachers’ salary opportunities, job security and benefits, and the underfunding of financial aid for higher education, are threatening to stunt the quality of education available to millions of Americans. But education is the key to strong, resilient democracy and the only way to build a secure and prosperous future.

The National Strategic Narrative report, from two top Pentagon analysts working for then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, found that the United States must put top-quality education above all other priorities, privilege the virtues of sustainability in economic and security policy, and leverage mutually beneficial relationships with foreign powers, in order to build a truly vibrant and secure 21st-century democracy, with a global strategy adequate to the challenges we face.

The value of top quality education for the future of any society is almost incalculable: it affects the relative value of all other elements of the economy, and the efficacy of all areas of public policy, governance and democratic process, including security policy and conflict resolution. There is substantial evidence that lack of universalized top-quality education imposes major costs on entire societies.

Those added cost burdens, from economic and policy inefficiency, to counterproductive security actions, degraded infrastructure and sluggish entrepreneurial activity, can degrade the quality of life for most people in a society, degrade the quality of public discourse and public policy action, and undermine national security and economic prosperity, generally.

Lower quality educational resources build into a society patterns of unnecessary waste and degradation. Top quality educational resources build into a society the capacity for vibrant, rapid, innovative adaptation to changes in an evolving landscape. With the 21st century more likely to be defined by an evolving global political and economic landscape, nothing is of more paramount concern than the quality of education available to every last person living within a given geographical area.

Nothing will define a nation’s ability to compete in international markets more directly or comprehensively than the level of educational opportunity enjoyed by its people.

The age of complex informational problem-solving

We are entering an age that is no longer about building industrial capacity or penetrating beyond new frontiers in terms of geographical or spatial exploration. Technology is advanced enough that many new technologies can be mapped out intelligently long before they are within the realm of the practical.

We are entering an age in which the ability of an individual, a company, a region or a nation, to solve problems rapidly, efficiently and with little resulting negative feedback, will be the decisive factor in determining success or failure, prosperity or ruin. Borrowing problem-solving capacity from another society is not like borrowing industrial capacity; there is no way to export the cost while importing the benefit.

If the United States is to prosper in the 21st century as it did during the 20th, if it is to lead on the global stage in a credible way, it has to maintain its ability to be the most credible, open and constructive resource for problem-solving, and that means it must have the best quality human capital, the most talent, the most informed, creative and forward-thinking population.

Pres. Obama instituted one of his boldest and least well-known reforms in 2009, when he replaced the expensive, slow and bank-run system of student financial aid with a more direct system of loans from the government to students, with incentives for repayment, lower interest rates, better access to top-flight institutions, and long-term incentives to make use of one’s talents in ways that benefit the wider economy and the nation.

That student financial aid reform must be a building block, with new initiatives at the state and national levels both to foster not test-score improvements, but genuine improvements in educational quality, critical thinking, creative reasoning and intellectual skills that infuse the landscape of scientific and commercial innovation with real potential for designing and riding the wave of the new economy of this century.

We are falling behind, even in our policy aims

But we are not doing all that we should to promote top-quality, world-leading education. In too man ways, public officials are either looting education budgets to fund unaffordable tax giveaways or imposing counterproductive bureaucratic regimes designed to punish teachers and telegraph student training for test-taking, effectively gutting our educational system’s ability for providing the challenges, the resources and the personal commitment to excellence that we know produce the best outcomes.

As the New York Times reports, a new study from the Center for American Progress and the Center for the Next Generation—’The Competition that Really Matters‘—finds:

Half of U.S. children get no early childhood education, and we have no national strategy to increase enrollment.
More than a quarter of U.S. children have a chronic health condition, such as obesity or asthma, threatening their capacity to learn.
More than 22 percent of U.S. children lived in poverty in 2010, up from about 17 percent in 2007.
More than half of U.S. postsecondary students drop out without receiving a degree.

Meanwhile, China is investing heavily in education, planning to build the largest, most holy educated, most skilled workforce in world history. By 2020, China’s current policy trajectory aims to:

Enroll 40 million children in preschool, a 50 percent increase from today.
Provide 70 percent of children in China with three years of preschool.
Graduate 95 percent of Chinese youths through nine years of compulsory education (that’s 165 million students, more than the U.S. labor force).
Ensure that no child drops out of school for financial reasons.
More than double enrollment in higher education.

Taking it to the local, getting involved

The people of New York City have choices. We are at a moment of reckoning. We can choose to spend money to help transnational corporations pad their quarterly reports or we can choose to fund the world-leading infrastructure for education, innovation, citizenship, transport and public safety we all believe we deserve.

If you want to have a good idea of whether your kids’ school is focused on educating your children for global citizenship and intellectual mastery or simply training them as bureaucracy-reinforcing test-takers, find out how the administrators think about the city’s regime of high-stakes testing.

If your school’s administrators are obsessed with bumping test scores, or frame all discussion of student progress in terms of numbers and data, they are likely applying their own intellectual capacity to harnessing your kids’ intelligence for test-score improvement. These regimes carry with them a powerful psychological reorganization of reality, and whole school systems can find their better knowledge about educational excellence cast aside in favor of dangerous fictions and short-term thinking.

A certain kind of curriculum distortion tends to follow—specifically: the kind that downplays arts, cognitive complexity, advanced reasoning, precise language usage and creativity, focusing instead on how to solve the specific kind of math or reading-comprehension problems found on standardized tests.

If your school’s administrators talk a lot about math and science as skill areas for future growth, but emphasize active learning of art, music, precise language usage, cognitive complexity, advanced reasoning and even physical education, as vital for the healthy development of the individual mind, then they are likely focusing on producing the best outcome for your kids.

Here too, a certain kind of curriculum enhancement tends to follow—specifically: emphasizing students’ ability to experience a wide range of intellectual, physical and psycho-synthetic challenges, so their ability to synthesize the substance of their experience into one fabric of imaginative practical capacity (talent) is expanded and fortified for future application.

Recommendations

Ask for more programs, with richer content, creative practice and physical experience, for your kids.
Ask administrators to do what they are supposed to do—succeed by making themselves, and the regime of administrative labor, invisible. Their work should be so effective that everyone else is empowered, without even noticing the achievement, to do what they do and to excel.
Talk to educators, parents, community leaders, and elected officials about what will actually work to achieve the ultimate goal of top-quality education: making students into fully intellectually self-reliant full-functioning citizens of a vibrant democracy.
Make sure arbitrary qualifiers—like impersonal data, test-score tracking, budget itemization and administrative paperwork requirements—are not interfering with genuine instruction and learning.
Look for opportunities to supplement your kids’ school-hours education, then to bring those kind of activities into the school building or school yard.
In your community and across the local apparatus of policy-making, work to build interest in a full-spectrum empowerment paradigm: an education that builds intellectual, civic and professional value for the whole character and ability of each student.

– – –

Please join the HotSpring Network’s discussion on Education Policy Priorities, and share yours…
A solutions-oriented response to this article will be published in the December 2012 edition of the HotSpring Quarterly
This article was published November 25, 2012, at FreeClearNYC.com
A shorter version of this article first appeared July 9, 2011, at TheHotSpring.net

Posted by Joseph Robertson

The Sandy Chronicle: Our Humanity Matters

Here’s the thing: Superstorm Sandy was water, wind and motion; it was convergence; it was what happens when climate systems come together and collaborate to make the unbelievable happen. The hybrid superstorm altered the entire calculus of local and national government across a region. Our priorities were altered, and many lives will never be the same. The frailty, the vanity, the ephemeral nature of our built environment, came into stark contrast.

There are important ways in which Sandy makes us see what we might not otherwise have noticed:

In New York City, for instance, it is now clear that gas stations can sell more gas during a crisis of this magnitude, if they have gas-powered generators to back up their electricity supply.
The value of maintenance—especially with respect to 1) transport infrastructure, 2) electric grid infrastructure, 3) mobile communications redundancy, 4) building service supply infrastructure (heat, hot water, electric)—cannot be overestimated.
Preparedness Matters.
Electrified water not only starts fires and can consume neighborhoods; it kills on contact.
As the Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus always already knew: there are certain factors involved in our experience over which we have little to no control; knowing which are which can be a matter of life and death.
Tunnels can and will flood; tunnels can and should be sealed in case of flood emergency.
Building the electric transport future means we need to build more resilient electric power delivery systems, with more layers of redundancy, more localized generation, more flexible power sourcing.
It turns out people want to help people and will do so when motivated—by Mother Nature, by the needs of others, by conscience and by the example of others.

We find that people are the ones who labor to help people. While the natural order puts fragile human lives on the line, and ideologically motivated or materially focused politicians quibble over process and pet peeves and secret deals, ordinary people come to the rescue of ordinary people.

One of the greatest stories of the Superstorm Sandy saga has been the volunteer work. Specifically:

Occupy Sandy has arisen as a new operation for the original Occupy Wall Street media outlets, which have been used to not only locate and share information about hotspots of serious need, but also to organize spontaneous pools of volunteers.
Volunteers from the Gulf Coast have come with supplies, expertise and open hearts, telling anyone who will listen that they recall the eagerness and aplomb with which volunteers from the northeast rushed to the Gulf to help after Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill; even members of Congress have vowed to reinforce that grassroots inter-regional partnership among citizens and communities.
People taking interest in their communities are helping to inform the city, state and federal governments, along with utilities and emergency workers, where to go and what to do to maximize or optimize their impact on disaster relief.

The state of New York is now asking for a $30 billion supplemental spending package to help New York City and Long Island recover from the disaster and “harden” the built environment against extreme weather events. Something is happening to the climate, and it is threatening to undermine the normal functioning of civilization as we have known it. Public authorities are waking up, and citizens are demanding government that works.

New Jersey’s governor even talks about raising taxes to pay for disaster relief and future preparedness.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Today’s Republican Party Cannot Save Itself

The national strategic and organizing structure of the Republican Party cannot save itself. It has become functionally obsolete. The strategy adopted two generations ago—whereby the Republican Party essentially bet everything on the perceived reliability and uniformity of the white male vote—is no longer a serious strategy, no matter how cynical your point of view. The party needs a dramatic infusion of new ideas, more moderate thinkers and genuinely centrist strategy.

A combination of demographic shifts and Republican radicalism has allowed the Democratic Party to hold both the far left and the broad center of the American political spectrum. There are a number of Democratic members of the House and the Senate who are more conservative than many Reagan-era Republicans. A sclerotic adherence to ideological dogma, in many cases without any foundation in the historical or economic record, has led GOP leadership to disavow even those Democrats who could help make a more moderate GOP relevant.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

About State-level Healthcare Reform Benefits

If your state is run by one of those Republican governors who is still refusing to participate in any way in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s state-level health insurance exchanges, here’s what you need to know: not participating makes the implementation more expensive, not less; not participating surrenders state control to the federal government, not the other way around. If your governor is refusing to participate in the creation of your state’s health insurance exchange, your governor is sabotaging your state’s sovereignty in service of a pointless ideological tantrum.

And that matters, to you, whether you know it or not.

Some states will have real market reform, and the state-level authorities will be actively involved in that reform, representing their constituents and steering the process of reform in a way that is most affordable, and helpful, given the lay of the land and the unique circumstances people face in communities across that state. This cannot be said of those states where ideologically captive governors abdicate their responsibility and invite the federal government to do all of the heavy lifting.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Future Voting: Free, Fair, Efficient

We need to admit two things about elections: first, they need to be 100% citizen-centered; second, citizens need to go the extra mile whenever necessary to make elections work. The first point is about legitimacy; the second is about making sure we can have it, given the imperfection of all systems known to date. Every since the year 2000, in the United States, there has been evidence that our voting systems are not 100% secure, efficient and legitimate.

The third thing we need to say about elections is that they really do decide, to some degree, the future. All elections are future elections, and all elections should live up to that responsibility. We can build a better system, if we prioritize:

100% accuracy in capturing votes
voter-verified redundancy (a paper trail)
inviolable ballot security
100% voter access to vote
rapid, reliably error-free count

Posted by Joseph Robertson

Two-party System: Envelope Pushed to Limit?

New coalitions are needed, to do the work we need done.

It is time to take a hard look in the mirror once again. Our democracy is an indirect democracy, so much so that we don’t even vote directly for our preferred candidates for president and vice president; we vote for the slate of “electors” who will in turn cast votes for them. In 2000, we saw the tremendous flaws inherent in this process and how it was originally designed to ensure “the mob” would not rule. The Senate was originally not chosen by the people at all. The mechanism for removing corrupt or ideologically biased Supreme Court justices is virtually non-existent, though it does, in theory, exist.

We can, through the House of Representatives, have more or less “direct” access to our elected representatives, and at lower levels of government, citizen involvement is not only eminently possible, and fairly commonplace, but urgently necessary. As Pres. Obama said on election night, this year: “America has never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on.”

Self government is not easy; indeed, it is “hard and frustrating”, and “necessary”, if we are to have anything like a just society with a legitimate form of civilian rule. Democracy is not for the faint of heart, but it is for all of us. And, when we look in the mirror, in the year 2012, we can see that the two-party duopoly does not adequately express the aspirations, concerns, demands and creative collaborative potential of the American people. All too often, the choice between the parties seems to be a choice to counter the vices and inadequacies of the party that has been governing. Instead of the aspirational politics exemplified by the unique phenomenon of Obama’s two campaigns, we normally have something like the most reductive form of a constructive experiment in the peaceful transition of power.

In 2006, Democrats swept to power amid revelations of rampant corruption in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In 2008, a relative newcomer to the United States Senate, Barack Obama built a campaign of more than 13 million supporters and participants, an online network bigger than either party itself, secured record numbers of donations from record numbers of “small donors”, amounting to a record overall campaign warchest. The national passion for this de facto third party challenger to the inertia of the duopoly won him nearly 70 million votes, far more than any candidate in US history.

The response from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was to organize every action any member of his caucus would take, for the next four years, around the singular purpose of “destroying the Obama presidency”. (One might argue McConnell and his gang of pirates—the meaning of “filibuster” refers to 17th- and 18th-century piracy in the Mediterranean—have now forfeited all credibility, having sworn themselves to the sabotage of the American experience, for the sole purpose of getting rid of the most widely supported US president in history, but no one seems to be making that case, at the moment.)

In 2010, a billionaire-funded “astroturf” movement calling itself “the Tea Party” made an attempt to take over the Republican party, posing as populists but with an agenda to hand control of the party irreversibly to big business interests. Low voter turnout and a surge of populist fervor on the right, swept the Republicans back to power in the House of Representatives. The result has been “divided government” of a kind that is not only sclerotic and vitriolic, but unbelievably counterproductive and corrosive to American democracy.

Bipartisanship has been cast by Republicans as a betrayal on a par with treason, and campaign literature has consistently shown a reluctance to move toward any less emotionally unstable conceptualization of democracy. Hysteria and propaganda have replaced constructive problem-solving as first-order priorities for too many of our public officials. Part of the reason for that is the very real and warranted fear that the other side will, inevitably, regain power, at some point. Coalition-building is not rewarded as much as it should be in an open democracy.

On election night, this year, Republican strategists, from moderates through to fiscal and even social conservatives, spoke surprisingly openly about the party’s existential peril, going forward. If the Republican party wants to remain “a national party”, said Steve Schmidt, top adviser to the McCain campaign in 2008, it will need to diversify. The Romney campaign should be, he and others argued, the last Republican campaign that bets the farm on thinly veiled white supremacist language and the language of patriarchy and opposition to the rights of women and immigrants.

As the Republican party’s market appeal shrinks, necessarily, and the vote of young people, women and minority groups, expands, the party has two choices: moderate the extremist discourse that has been dominating the party’s national agenda or be relegated to the right-wing fringe. So far, the party has held off this inevitable reckoning with a hysterical cry against “socialist” domination of the American political system—and by socialist, they mean Democratic.

But that will only work for so long. The Democratic party is not a socialist party, and its way of creating, funding, maintaining and improving social service systems is decidedly more democratic and grassroots-focused than any European socialist system. The system of social services we have was largely created by the Democratic party, and so a moderate Democratic party—which is what we have—now sits astride the political center, more genuinely conservative on many issues than the Republican radicals calling for “2nd Amendment options” against the system we as a nation have established by way of democratic process.

As the Republican party shifts more and more to the right, the Democratic party is freed to take over more and more of the political center, and it has done so. The United States Senate and the House of Representatives both include Democratic members that are more conservative than most Republican presidents of the 20th century, even some more conservative than George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. And of course there are real liberals, unapologetically committed to the social agenda of human liberation and civil rights.

The Democratic party is positioned to own the system for a generation, if the other half of the duopoly falters. And it has faltered. In 2012, the Republican party was unable to muster even a single credible presidential candidate. Mitt Romney was never trusted by the American people, and his naming of Paul Ryan to the ticket was a weak-kneed attempt to appear serious on a single issue, where his party has been unable to propose any constructive solutions.

The Republican campaign flailed back and forth, desperately, from extremist Randian anti-Christian feudalism to pro-plutocracy to arbitrarily applied Christian fundamentalism, to grasping at straws on taxes, social policy, immigration, jobs and the environment. The Republican party campaign apparatus became a lie factory, spending over a billion dollars on absurd claims, not supported by facts, and which did not produce in the minds of voters even one clear, coherent message about actual policy planning.

Nate Silver was right to put the odds of Obama’s re-election as over 70%, then over 80%, and eventually over 90%, as it became clear that voters did not like Romney, did not trust Romney, did not support eliminating Medicare—virtually the only policy plan publicly stated by the campaign—, and did not believe they would ever know enough about Romney in order to believe he was on their side. Even Republicans consistently shared such feelings with pollsters and the press.

So, this week the political press is awash in talk about Obama’s great “coalition”, bringing together minority groups, social interest groups, the traditional Democratic “base” and even “smart money”—the kind of affluent political thinkers who understand they actually do better in a more equitable economy, led by a Democratic president, than they do in a laissez-faire economy where consumers are poorer and poorer over time. But what coalition exists to rival that new center-left? At present: none.

But for some time, it has been evident that there is a natural, if awkward, affinity between the Green Party and the Libertarian Party and the grassroots movements they aspire to represent. Both favor genuine liberation of the individual in civil rights and jurisprudence; both favor a ground-up democracy, not a top-down democracy; both favor participatory consensus-building over party committee rule. Both have a genuine appeal to make to middle class voters, on the potential of crafting policies that will humanize government, build quality of life for communities and rationalize our politics.

As the shift away from the old Republican way continues, the Republican party will have one crucial decision to make that will affect us all: will it moderate its discourse, open its doors to newcomers, embrace constructive pragmatic problem solving and socially viable 21st century individual and community liberation, or will it continue to move to the extremist fringe? If it comes back to the world the rest of us inhabit, the two party system might go on for some time.

If it does not, a Green-Libertarian grassroots alliance will be poised to assimilate the most intelligent and constructive voices from the Occupy movement, even the Tea Party grassroots, and certainly from committed independents, and might have enough appeal, over the next few election cycles, to become the 2nd party nationally by 2020. The rise of Barack Obama illustrated perfectly how a true insurgent, more focused on letting the voices of his supporters emerge from the background noise, can rapidly replace the old guard, when democracy comes to its truer expression.

Look now for opportunities to bridge the divide between Libertarians and Greens. Look now for opportunities to build grassroots coalitions that will influence or replace out-of-date partisans, starting at the local level. Look for opportunities like the Senate campaign of Bill Barron, in Utah—a principled independent running to restore genuine thinking about life at the human scale to our discussion about environment, energy, economics and industry. Look for ways to find your voice within the fabric of our “hard and frustrating, but necessary” democratic process for making public policy and law.

2012 is not a “mandate” for divided government; it is a reminder that we need a more thoughtful political system, where creative collaborative problem-solving is the norm, not the critically endangered species. The new era of constructive coalition-building starts now.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

New Jersey Special Voting Process Irregularities

After telling the people of New Jersey they would be able to vote in today’s election, in spite of severe impacts from hurricane Sandy, Gov. Chris Christie’s administration appears not to have taken adequate measures to support the new voting options promised. There are reports of downed servers blocking email applications for mail-in ballots, while county clerks responsible for responding appear not to be making needed information available to voters.

Ever suspicious of am arch-rival’s intentions, some progressives appear yo believe Gov. Christie intended the email ballot request process to be a trap, designed to disenfranchise voters, since New Jersey law in non-emergency situations forbids voting at polling stations once the request for a mail-on ballot has been sent.

My own personal experience supports anecdotal reports of blocked or overloaded processing at the county level. A request, with completed application, sent to the Monmouth County Clerk’s office has received no response at all… not even an automated email response to let me know the application had been received. Only one phone number associated with the County yielded a human voice. The kind woman knew nothing about what would happen, but had been told to give out two numbers which are not even in service—or, which are in service, but so overloaded, no one can get through and they automatically disconnect.

Posted by Joseph Robertson

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