A Cult Is Not a Party
“It’s a cult,” Idaho grandmother Pam Hemphill told CNN, referring to the MAGA crowd that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. After spending two months in federal prison for her participation in the riot, she returned home and now admits that she had been “brainwashed.”
A Prejudice We Can’t Ignore
It is good that we are having important conversations about prejudices and implicit biases — racial, religious, sexual, linguistic, even educational. But we are missing one of the most important. If we don’t identify and address this prejudice, all the others are likely to get worse. The group being stereotyped, and sometimes denigrated, goes by a variety of names. Some of them sound neutral: “centrists,” “moderates,” “bi-partisans,” "trans-partisans." Other names are explicitly critical: “cowards,” “frauds,” “complicits," “wishy-washy.”
Why I Am Transpartisan
For me, transpartisan describes a meme, a field, a constituency, a dynamic, a movement, and even a philosophy. Like pragmatism – its homegrown, American predecessor from the late 19th to the early 20th century – transpartisan has emerged as an important political expression in the 21st century, recognizing differences agreeably while mostly focusing on our commonalities.
Don’t Cancel the Debates – Fix Them.
As a nation, we are all recovering from the disaster that was the first presidential ‘debate.’ Despite his best effort, moderator Chris Wallace was steamrolled by waves of insults, acrimony, and incomprehensible cross-talk. Now Facebook is filled with people calling on future debates to be canceled. We think the answer is to fix the debates, not to cancel them.