Reuniting America | Transpartisan Political Communication

Transpartisan Alliance

Envisioning a Movement-of-Movements

By late 2007, after seven transpartisan leadership retreats that brought more than145 top leaders of grassroots groups together, I didn’t seem to be getting closer to the dream of convening the Transpartisan National Convention that had originally set me on this path in the first place. I felt I was getting sucked back in to the old game.

Convening national leaders wasn’t leading to changing the game. Ultimately leaders can be controlled and kept on the reservation by their own tribes. Reuniting citizens at the local level, however, and creating the chance for them to have uncontrolled conversation, that would be a game-changer. So I once again decided to re-organize.

A few years ago I read a book by Howard Zinn called the People’s History of the United States. It’s not the type of book I’d have read in the ’90s, but in it he describes the populist movements of the nineteenth century. I was particularly struck by the parallel between the conditions that arose in America in the decades following the Civil War and the conditions that are arising today.

After the Civil War corporate-state power was consolidating—particularly railroad, oil, steel, media, and banking interests aligning with government insiders. During the middle of the Civil War when the nation was distracted by battles that were taking thousands of lives a day (in a similar way as we are now distracted by a global and, increasingly, domestic “war on terror”[1]), ten percent of the land mass of America, for example, was given by Act of Congress to seven railroad companies. After the war ended, people began to wake up. They wanted the land back, but the only resort was to buy it back.[2]

In 1886 corporations began claiming personhood under the new Fourteenth Amendment (intended to give citizenship to former slaves, not corporations). This was done through a “headnote” written by court clerk Bancroft Davis (a former railroad president!) to Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific. Until then, only natural persons were protected by the Bill of Rights. Corporations were controlled by the government and required to act in the public interest or risk having their charters revoked.

With personhood and with the chartering of the national and state governments themselves as corporations—i.e., the United States of America is a corporation residing in the District of Columbia—the corporate-government alliance was strengthened. This and similar abuses angered enough people over the next decades that average people began to organize themselves to create a grassroots network-of-networks to counterbalance this power. It was called the National Alliance.

On market day each week farmers and average folks began meeting in Grange halls to talk about how to politically empower themselves. This practice spread across the country until there was a Grange hall in most every community.

Inspired by a particular meeting format that started in Chautauqua, New York, people brought their families to spend the whole day enjoying lectures, classes, and entertainment. This informal National Alliance provided a check and balance to the power of the “robber barons.” (It eventually evolved into the women’s suffrage movement and the labor movement.)

Finally confident and courageous enough to begin to publicly call for a modern movement-of-movements of this type, I symbolically launched the Transpartisan Alliance on July 4, 2008.

Each year for the past few years I have ritually climbed Mt. Shasta on July 4^th to place my “intentions” for the next year at the summit (something I learned from the alternative community in Floyd, which mixed and matched many spiritual traditions). This year my intention was that this seed of an idea—i.e., a transpartisan movement-of-movements—serve to catalyze the transformation of the political culture in America. The modern alliance I had in mind was to be grounded in the web of relationships and bridge-building experience gained at the Reuniting America retreats of 2004 to 2007.

Its first big task was to find a way to organize my long-dreamed-of Transpartisan National Convention. By this time, however, I had decided on a more accessible name for the event, the American Citizens’ Summit. This new name was inspired by a friend, Barbara Marx Hubbard, who had helped organized a series of Soviet/American Citizen Summits in the 1980s that used citizen diplomacy to help end the U.S./Soviet cold war. It seemed to me that was exactly what we needed to help end the liberal/conservative, insider/outsider cold war.

I knew it would be challenging to convene such a summit without foundation or philanthropic funding, but with the emotional and financial support of my then-wife Jobie, we took a huge leap and set a date for the event. (In the end we lost over sixty thousand dollars, which led to my second divorce—another painful, transformative personal journey.)

The First American Citizens’ Summit took place at the Sheraton in Denver, Colorado, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday bicentennial in February 2009. The theme: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” a prophetic admonition Lincoln had made in 1858, three years before the cold war between the north and south turned hot.

The summit was attended by about a hundred leaders and interested citizens from many of the organizations who had participated in the previous Reuniting America events. [3] It wasn’t the quantity I had in mind, but I was heartened by the quality of the commitment from the people who attended. We took five days and dove deep into the spirit of America.

We didn’t shy away from conflict. We looked at our wounds, our disappointments, and our betrayals. Then we focused on our possibilities: What if we could all work together? What are the practical tools and skills we need to effectively bridge divides? What is the true promise and potential of democracy in America?

We used wireless keypad voting again to survey everyone’s top values and found where we converged and diverged. We allowed people to spontaneously create their own breakout sessions on topics that mattered to them. We announced an interim “National Sunshine Cabinet” capable of shining light on national decisions.

The gathering alternated between heavy and light—we even had a comedy night with Swami Beyondananda. It was intense and the energy was high. We ended with a moving benediction from Navajo Nation Elder, Edmund Ciccarello, reminding us that the highest expression of this work was to unite all the tribes and nations of America.

As a result of the summit a core team was formed and a number of strategic planning meetings were held.[4] In the fall of 2009, on a shoestring budget, we began planting seeds in Portland, Seattle, Fresno, and south Florida by organizing transpartisan town halls and house parties to see where there was interest in this new approach to political organizing.

Our seeds took deepest root in Seattle, Washington.  Several people who had attended the introductory meetings were inspired by the possibility and need for such a group. [5]   Franca Baroni, a “conscious lawyer” with deep heart wisdom, seemed to feel the call the clearest.[6]  She organized the others and took immediate action, attending meet-ups from groups on all sides, inviting them to come to a transpartisan meet-up to get to know the other tribes.

This group has met twice a month for over a year and has produced its first, quarterly Transpartisan Chautauqua Town Hall. It now consists of an eclectic mix of serious citizens as well as the leaders of five political parties and leaders of green-leaning groups like Transition Seattle and libertarian-leaning groups like Campaign for Liberty as well as an informal connection with the Countywide Community Forums[7], a network of a couple thousand “Citizen Councilors” (officially sanctioned by statute to provide policy input to King County decision makers.)

We have experimented with a wide variety of facilitation methods and have documented our strategic brainstorms[8] with the intention of inspiring others to follow in our footsteps. “Early adopters” from all sides seem to be committed to a handful of related topics: local solutions, community resiliency, transparency and accountability, communication and trust building processes, as well as alternative approaches to political action.