Tim Erickson has a vaguely depressing post on something happening Stateside called the American Citizens’ Summit. Personally, I would have thought that November 4th was the ultimate American Citizens’ Summit, but it seems not: this event is being held in February.
The event is all about transpartisanship, which apparently:
acknowledges the validity of truths across a range of political perspectives and seeks to synthesize them into an inclusive, pragmatic whole beyond typical political dualities. In practice, transpartisan solutions emerge out of a new kind of public conversation that moves beyond polarization by applying proven methods of facilitated dialogue, deliberation and conflict resolution.
This long blurb seems to English into “transpartisanship is about getting people to stop fighting and start agreeing”.
Now, I admire attempts to get beyond boring partisan wrangling, but I am strongly suspicious of intellectualising approaches that try, as this summit does, to “synthesize views into an inclusive, pragmatic whole”.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s rather patronising to suggest that if you frightful oafs would only stop SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER for a moment, we clevers could come up with a nice sensible compromise. I don’t think it’s necessarily evil that people who broadly agree with each other should form themselves into parties.
Second, in most big political debates an ultimate synthesis is unimportant, or at least less important than the debate itself. Discussion challenges positions and brings about better thought, as long as it’s between a sufficiently broad group of participants, but that doesn’t meant that everyone has to agree at the end. It is sufficient if opposing views are tested and moderated, in fact that’s probably preferable to the creation of unchallengeable syntheses. I prefer alternation of political parties to the dictatorship of reasonable people with flipcharts.
Third, and most important, there are plenty of big political issues that are not reducible to pragmatic things that everyone can compromise on – in fact, “things not reducible to pragmatic compromises” is a reasonable starting definition of “big political issues”. How, for example, would transpartisanship handle issues like the death penalty, or climate change? Is there some set of facts, or a mind map, that will convince Ian Paisley that maybe the Republicans are onto something?
Overall, I admire the idealism about democracy and rationalism, but democracy has to be a balance between popular passion and rationalism. Too far one way, and you have mob rule. Too far the other, and you have transpartisanship: the arrogant belief that clever people can facilitate a compromise to every tricky issue, without any of the mob’s passion or anger. It feels rather like the sixth-form debating society telling the first XV how to play rugby.
Coalescing people around centrist views is fine, but don’t kid yourself that centrism isn’t in itself a political – partisan – position.
[...] invested in the transpartisan movement, I’d like to take advantage of Anthony’s comments as an opportunity to develop my own thoughts on this [...]