 |
Our story...
By natural law a
“house divided” tends toward dis-integration. A political system
built on one part seeking to dominate the other part
lacks integrity, lacks health. Health is wholeness, balance, the
harmonious integration of all parts. This is as true of the health of
a political system, and therefore a nation, as it is of the health of
a body, a mind, or a spirit. Only within our wholeness – individually
or collectively – do we discover our inherent wisdom and talents, the
cure to our ills.
I arrived at this
simple insight through a deep personal crisis that began as my
political career ended. Over the period of a decade I had come to
know the divided political battlefield well. I had done everything
from working as an assistant to the Political Director on Bush-Quayle
’92 where I helped coordinate a national field campaign, to winning a
hard fought nomination for Congress that earned me the general
election support of my party’s leadership and a broad range of
conservative interest groups. Real politics, although few politicians
will admit it, is about one thing – power. The path to power is in
beating “the other.” I saw my role in politics as doing everything I
could to ensure my part(y) beat the other part(y). I found myself
quite willing to compromise my personal integrity to win.
After losing my
race in 1998 my life spun out of control. My wife left, I found
myself in a power struggle with my partners for control of my
business, and my sister who more or less raised me began a losing
battle with cancer. By 2001 I had walked away from or watched the
collapse of everything I had carefully built – my political career, my
business, home, marriage. I had lost my identity. I ended up living
alone in a mountain cabin in Floyd, Virginia, disillusioned,
powerless, rolling the essential questions of life over and over in my
mind: Who am I? Why am I here? The answers, even now, are unclear,
but during this time I experienced a shift from living my life as if
I knew who I was and why I was here, to living my life as more
of an inquiry into these questions. This inquiry took on the form of
a journey toward personal integrity, that is, reconciliation of the
various sides of myself.
With the help of my
new friend, Pat Spino – a respected member of the Floyd “alternative
community” – I had begun to reconcile my deep inner wounds. By early
2003 I was feeling more whole and ready to take up my old passion for
politics, but this time in a more balanced way. Pat had introduced me
to the other side, those I referred to as ”hippies” or “liberals.”
She had spent twenty-five years raising a family, serving as a
midwife, and nurturing close personal relationships in this tight knit
rural Virginia community. She modeled for me a willingness to treat
others as equals and to accept them as they are. In this community
people mutually supported and respected each other and honored
creative self-expression. These were new ways of being for me, but I
found these “liberal” values – freedom, creativity, openness, a
respect for the earth – not to clash with, but to compliment my old
“conservative” values – order, responsibility, discipline, and hard
work. They seemed to me to have a yin/yang relationship.
Pat and I founded
the Democracy in America Project (DIAP) in the spring of 2003. The
first step was an inquiry into the “state of our democracy.” We
decided to retrace the route of Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835 author of
Democracy in America. We sent out 50 interview requests and
got 11 experts and public figures from across the political spectrum
to talk to us on camera about the state of freedom, equality, unity,
and government by the people in post-9/11 America. We asked a
professional videographer, Terrel Broussard, to join us. We raised a
little money and set out in my jeep to interview Ralph Nader, author
Noam Chomsky, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, President of
the ACLU Nadine Strossen, President of the NEA Reg Weaver, Yale Law
Professor Bruce Ackerman, Chairman of the American Conservative Union
Dave Keene, former Reagan Political Director Lyn Nofziger, Ross Perot,
and UVa National Security Law Professor John Norton Moore among
others. The theme that emerged was: in a democracy it is up to “We
the People” to secure the values we all, left to right, hold dear.
The obvious
question became, “where were We the People?” The Democratic Party
wasn’t We the People. Nor was the Republican Party, nor the Greens,
or Libertarians. No part was We the People. We the People was
all of us, a unified whole that included, respected, and valued all
American points of view. The next obvious question for me was, “how
do you create We the People?” (I have never been one to sit back and
blame and complain that “somebody should do something!” I took this
realization personally, as though it were my personal responsibility
to help catalyze this non-existent entity into existence.)
In the fall of
2003, Pat and I traveled to Ashland, Oregon to document an “educated
experiment in democracy” organized by Jim Rough, author Society’s
Breakthrough and Tom Atlee, author The Tao of Democracy.
The experiment was to create a symbolic We the People from a small
group of randomly selected voters who met for two days in facilitated
dialogue and then presented a “declaration” of their will to a
community meeting. It was an amazing beginning, if for no other
reason that it pointed to the fact that dialogue and deliberation were
the soil out of which healthy democracy grows.
On Christmas Day
2003 after reading an inspiring article by Carolyn Lukensmeyer of
America Speaks, David Wick (a friend of Carolyn’s) Pat and I decided
to plan a three day national civic dialogue for later that year called
a We the People National Convention. A month later Pat and I traveled
to Juanita Brown’s house (founder, World Café – another friend of
David Wick’s) in the bay area for the launching of Lets Talk America (LTA),
a national effort to stimulate widespread community dialogue to help
“bridge the divide.” We decided LTA and DIAP had the same vision of
political reconciliation through dialogue, only different forms.
“First Conference
on Democracy in America”
As a necessary
first step toward creating a credible national civic dialogue that
included participants from the left, right and center, we needed
national advisors and hopefully the cooperation of national membership
organizations from across the spectrum to promote it to their
members. In June 2004 LTA and DIAP co-sponsored the first Conference
on Democracy in America, facilitated by Mark Gerzon (chief
facilitator, Congressional Bi-Partisan Retreats), hosted by the Fetzer
Institute at their beautiful Seasons retreat center. The event was a
ground breaking demonstration of cross spectrum dialogue among a small
group of national opinion leaders showing how "democratic" values and
"republican" values can indeed be balanced and integrated given a
respectful, trust-building process. The advisory board was formed and
a remarkable “Declaration for Dialogue” was signed, but in the end,
owing to it being an election year, an insufficient number of
membership organization leaders participated for it to be a real seed
event for the envisioned national civic dialogue. We put the national
civic dialogue plans on hold.
“Second Conference
on Democracy in America”
Following the
brutal election of 2004 I was contacted by Joan Blades, co-founder,
Moveon.org (who I had asked, but declined to attend the June event)
about helping to facilitate a dialogue “with some conservatives.” In
January of this year I went to the bay area and went for a walk in the
park with Joan to talk about what she had in mind and the format for
the dialogue. At that time, knowing she was a trained mediator
herself, I gave her a copy of Bill Ury’s book The Third Side
(Mark Gerzon introduced me to Bill during a previous trip to Boulder,
CO.) A month or so later she contacted me again saying she had read
the book and thought she wanted to help with a left-right membership
organization leadership conference.
That
May, Pat and I went to visit Joan again and I asked MoveOn to consider
co-sponsoring a Second Conference on Democracy in America. The next
week I went to Washington to meet with Dave Keene, Chairman of the
American Conservative Union (ACU) to ask him the same thing. Once I
got these two to agree my plan was to approach Grover Norquist,
President of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Dave,
Joan and I entered a two-month email dialogue about the purpose of
this next conference, issues of mutual concern to be addressed, and
ground rules. In August, Roberta Combs, President of the Christian
Coalition decided to co-sponsor the Second Conference along with
MoveOn.org. From there the conference organization became
easier.
Moving forward...
There are now plans
for issue based Third and Fourth Conferences on Democracy in America
in 2006, both among a trans-partisan set of national leaders. We
are also organizing a conference in spring 2006 called "Listening to
America: Catalyzing Trans-Partisan Citizen Engagement at Scale"
among 24 experts on large scale citizen engagement combined with a
trans-partisan group of leaders and membership directors of national
citizen networks.
|
