Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Make Democrats into We the People Party?

Adam Werbach wrote an email and blog posting about "Theses on the Failure of the Democratic Party"

"The failure of the Democratic Party to connect
with America's desire for fulfillment is political
death.... The progressive vision... must match
fundamentalism's power without replicating its
authoritarianism." -- from "Theses on the Failure
of the Democratic Party"


My suggestion: If you're looking for a truly new vision of politics, Adam, try this:

The Democratic Party COULD be the party of democracy -- which is, by definition, rule by ordinary people.

it COULD be the party in which any and all Americans get well informed, figure out what they collectively want, and then go about getting it together.

It would be political party of creative dialogue and deliberation -- and then effective action based on the resulting collective wisdom. It would not be a party of static issues, PR candidates and fixed positions that block creativity and real participation.

It would specialize in building the capacity for people of diverse views to creatively solve shared problems and pursue shared dreams together. It would strive for ways to include and integrate an ever-wider range of perspectives -- not through compromise, but through fellowship and insight -- to thereby release an authentic, inclusive Voice and Will of "We the People" at last.

It would abandon labels like liberal and conservative, and left and right, as barriers to really seeing each other, hearing each other, and working well together.

All this is possible. Much of the know-how to make it real already exists (see, for example, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation website http://www.thataway.org ). The primary element that's missing is to have some leaders LEAP from an adversarial frame of reference to an inclusive frame of reference, and to envision what a politics of inclusion -- a politics of the whole -- a politics of We the People, the whole People -- would actually look like.

See also my book, THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY; USING CO-INTELLIGENCE TO CREATE A WORLD THAT WORKS FOR ALL http://www.taoofdemocracy.com .