At the center of the harshest rhetoric (from both sides) is one essential claim: Those Other People (on the other side) are dangerous. They cannot be trusted and they do not have America’s best interest at heart (and if they say they do, they’re basically lying).
Transpartisan Review
“We are the Bridge Alliance – a rising American tide of conservatives and liberals, centrists and moderates, business owners and workers, students and retired persons, diverse in age, color, faith and orientation…”
The year 2016 will be remembered as when our two political parties collapsed inward, dragged down by their worst instincts. This meltdown will create the opportunity for renewal in each party.
Seventy percent of voters say they think the country is going in the wrong direction. The numbers of voters registering as independents, declining to associate with either party, continues to increase and is now 42%, more than either Democrats or Republicans.
Reports agree: The Republican and Democratic conventions differed profoundly. Yet Transpartisan possibilities in both went unreported.
America has a representative government. Voters elect leaders who appoint civil servants, and they implement ‘public policy’. This works for much public business, but in areas involving social services—school reform, drug rehabilitation, criminal justice, race relations, poverty and even security policy, results fall far short of aspirations.
The Transpartisan Review Blog #3: The Transpartisan World of Subjects
By A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner The British vote to leave the European Union (EU) caught everyone by surprise—pundits, politicians and profiteers. Part of the confusion stems from analyzing the disaffection in terms of left and right. In the mainstream analysis, xenophobic racism explained why the far right wanted separation; therefore everyone else should have united around ‘remain’,…
By A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner As we noted in our introduction, The Transpartisan Review will concentrate on promoting new political ideas, ideas that bring people together who are now in conflict. Since the current debate focuses entirely on conflict, the approaches we explore will be hard to find in the current debate. Yet they are often essential…