Paths to Rebuilding

Part III of the Series on How to Meet Political Crisis as an Opportunity for Transformation

Lori:

Hi, Donna, and thank you again for these conversations about how to meet political crisis as an opportunity for transformation. I’ve learned so much from you already about American political history, but, even more crucially, I am moved and inspired by your clear LOVE for American democracy – with all of its faults, in all of its messiness, with all of the baggage that our national history carries. So before we go into some of the difficult things ahead for our country, I want to ground us here: I feel in every word you speak your faith that American democracy can rise to this moment – and, as you said about past instances in which we have come through crisis – do things better as a result.

In this segment on “Paths to Rebuilding,” one of the things we have to look at is what is disintegrating, where our crises are shredding our social fabric. Last time, we ended with the problem of social polarization. But this polarization is concrete, has shape and form. If we want to think about what rebuilding means, we have to first look at the concrete realities of social fabric breakdown. One part of this that we talked about last week is the adversarial nature – hostile might be a better characterization – of the current political climate. So maybe we can start there, and then get to some of the most critical social issues facing our country right now?

Donna:

Let me put the adversarial nature of politics in concrete terms for you. Remember the 2021 Interview NPR’s Mara Liasson’s did with Republican strategist Grover Norquist? Expanding on his desire to cut government, Norquist said “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” (See minute 7:30 in the NPR interview). This view is certainly reflected in Project 2025 – there’s no doubt about that. So when we have a group of people controlling the national government who want to be able to drown government in the bathtub, and another group of people who believe that government should be a tool, as the Constitution says, for the public welfare, then how do we bridge that gap?

The only time in our nation’s history when that gap has been bridged was in the 1930s, and that required a global economic depression that in essence sidelined the Republican party and brought in a new group of people in the Democratic Party, with the ethic that the government had a responsibility to respond to the economic crisis. What we are seeing now is the government actually actively working to crash the entire economic system, so where will this bring us? With the current administration on track to drown government in the bathtub – and the support for this, for whatever their reasons, from the people who voted him into office – how can the Democrats’ counter that with the principle that government should serve the public welfare? I don’t see how to bridge that gap unless and until the entire system crashes so badly that those who are currently supporting the drowning of government finally see that, in fact, a functioning society needs good government.

Lori:

Ok, so here’s a question: this divide that feels unbridgeable, between wanting government small enough to drown it in a bathtub and wanting government to work for the public good - is this something that might become bridgeable in the scenario of political party realignment? I am thinking here about the fears, anxieties, insecurities that may be driving people in our specific historical moment. When we are reacting from fear, we are not seeing clearly either the full range of actions possible to us or the consequences of our actions. I’m reminding myself of this right now because, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum, I want to keep the ability to feel the humanity of those who see differently than us – that seems to me to be the first step in bridging any divide. And you spoke to this beautifully in our first conversation, when you said think about our first political memory – that our political beliefs are often inherited, and that our first memory of political awareness will tell us a lot about how our political identities have been formed. What our conversation makes me wonder, then, is: if, in the past, a specific party rose to the occasion of national crisis with a vision to bring the nation through crisis – I’m thinking here of your examples about the writing of the constitution, the civil war, and the Great Depression -- is it possible that, as the planetary crisis of climate change intensifies, we might see a realignment that brings together portions of both the Democratic and Republican parties that, together, forge a vision that speaks to the nation as well as to the world? In other words, if what feels now like unbridgeable gaps are unbridgeable because they are based on opposing ideologies . . .

Donna:

Okay, one thing that that I want to interject here is that partisanship is inherited. It's like religion. Most people don't think about it. We have a lot of studies about and data on political behavior, and one of the things we know from this is that most people are the same political party that their parents were. There was a wonderful study done in the 1970s by a group of political scientists who went into elementary schools and talked to children about what they knew about politics. And the two things that children as young as six years old knew was that the president was sort of like the father of the country; and, if their families were partisan and talked about politics in the house, the children already saw themselves as part of the party to which their parents belonged. Six year olds would say, “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Republican.” When I first came to graduate school, I replicated that study in my own research in an elementary school here in Gainesville and it was exactly the same. Now, when you ask a six year old what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican, then you clearly see how this is conditioned by the family. One of my favorite answers I ever got to this question was: “I don't know, but when the other guys come on the television, my daddy yells at it a lot, so they must not be good guys.” So the idea that somehow we're the good guys and they're the bad guys is in these kids' heads by the time they're six years old.

Lori:

And that's exactly where I wanted to get to. This enemy-ally division is one of the most significant impediments to democratic functioning that I can see. It's not just that we hold different political beliefs or we have a different stance on this or any other issue. It is that this sense of “enemy” and “ally” is so deeply entrenched . . .

Donna:

Right. And the time we are living in is not making it easier to bridge that divide. This is a real struggle. For example: I can talk with anybody about specific policies and compromises that could achieve a mutually agreeable outcome. If somebody said to me, I want to sit down and talk to you about tariff policy, I could sit with a Republican and very, very easily have a dialogue. But how do we do this in a political climate where ideologies – often, what feels like reactionary ideologies that are aggressive, that target those who think differently as “enemies” who must be destroyed – turn every possible dialogue into a fight for dominance and control?

Some examples of this in Florida: People are banning books. Banning books means you’re shutting down the possibility of dialogue, refusing to engage with any idea that contradicts your ideology. It’s a way of erasing – of trying to wipe out, to kill, to literally destroy – the possibility of difference.

That kind of mentality creates hatred. We see that in things like deporting immigrants, in increasingly violent acts of racism, and in very regressive policies towards women and gender issues. The language that calls compassionate advocacy for women and people who have suffered discrimination because they are in the minority “woke” is a language of hatred. How do we engage with this? Where is the possibility for dialogue or for bridging differences?

And that is really what is at the heart of my worry: we are in a state that is imposing an ideological hatred so virulent that it is taking us backwards – undoing the important social and cultural progress we made with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement; undoing the human rights and worker’s rights that have helped to make America the great country that it is. And I can’t go back – WE can’t go back, the COUNTRY CANNOT GO BACK. Going backwards is not making America Great Again – going Backwards is making America – well, backward, when what we need is a vision for the future.

The future is multiethnic. The future requires that women are equally valued, that all humans have basic rights and freedoms. These are clear foundations for a functioning democracy, and we cannot go forward without achieving these democratic values. And do you know what really brought this home to me? Dylann Roof, in 2015, praying for an hour with members of the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, before he opened fire and killed 9 people. The pain of this, the terror of being in a cultural context in which white supremacist hatred against people of color, against women who do not fit a narrow ideal of Christian white womanhood, against human beings that do not fit into a heterosexual binary – the pain and the terror of this are overwhelming. And you have to ask: how did we get to this place where human rights and the core values of a democratic society have been so badly eroded that mass shootings such as these are a new norm?

And of course, we got this way in part because of the hatred that is more and more acceptable in public and political discourse – in our government offices, on television, in social media, on “news” that is a propaganda arm for these ideologies. We are spreading fear and hatred, and this is breeding terror – so, how are we going to bridge this divide? In fact, one of the most important things we can do right now is to counter this kind of fear and hatred, to stop it spreading. So how do we think of dialogue and bridging divides when we are in the very urgent, very critical, very real situation of fear and hatred ready to kill, and our priority has to be to protect people who are threatened by this and to stop the spread of this violence?

And I get that the people who commit these acts have their own trauma histories, too – that something along the way made them susceptible to neo-Nazi brainwashing, that something terrible in their life experiences cut off their ability to feel the common humanity in all of us. I do get this, but I also know that, when we are thinking about political parties and the role of government, our work is with systems and structures and not with the individual psychological trauma history that leads up to these kinds of violences.

Lori:

Ok, right – I see that. And we will come back to this point about what it is that the political parties can do to create possibilities to bridge political divides that feel unbridgeable. But can I pause here for just a moment, on this point: there is a history, something that led up to violences that the political system is then charged with addressing. My first book, The Wars We Inherit: Military Life, Gender Violence, and Memory was actually about this – about how the many forms of violence that we do see as problems that we want to solve actually emerge out of the cultural and structural violences that we take for granted as normal. In my own life, for example, when I was able to understand that the violences I lived as a child were the violences that my parents had lived, then I was able to see my father as a human being, not just as a perpetrator. So I do want to say that, yes, there is what feels like a paradox when I say, on the hand, that we do have a responsibility to stop harm, if at all possible, in the moment that it is being done. We must do this – we must. Otherwise, we are complicit bystanders to harm. At the same, in this increasingly enemy/ally political climate, where the “other” is turned into “enemy” and not human – not like us – I also think that restoring the social fabric pushes us to see the humanity even in those we think of as perpetrators. But I also understand – and know from my own experience! – that to say “the one who harmed you is human, too” can make us feel like the harm that has been done to us is being denied, excused, condoned, trivialized. It can feel like taking the side of the perpetrator and betraying the one who has been harmed. So I just want to emphasize that, when I say we have to recover our ability to see the “other” as human, like us, that I am not saying that we should passively watch bad things happen and not hold people accountable.

Donna:

Okay, so I understand what you're saying. And I understand perfectly well that all of these things come out of people's pasts. At the same time, going back to the point about what political systems can do, what those of us working within party structures can do: we have to know where we can put our energy that can do the most good, and that can mitigate against the harm that others inflict on their fellow human beings.

You know, I was raised under segregation, and my father was the son of South Georgia tenant farmers. He was certainly not a liberal where race was concerned. But the sight of racists carrying Nazi flags in America . . . ? My father was the most decorated World War II veteran in the Southeastern United States, and if he had been alive to see this he would not have been able to live with it – not at all. And I have to tell you that watching everything that I worked for as a feminist be undone has not made me happy. It's not made me happy at all. I have already spent all my time and energy working with two generations to open hearts and minds to feel minorities, women, the working class, the disenfranchised, as fully human and deserving of respect, and to see everything I have worked for these last 45 years coming undone is infuriating to me. Having grown up under segregation, having been an adult female before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, having given my life for the advancement of democracy and the good of our country, I have not got time, now, for the people who want to take us backwards. I cannot put my energy into the three white men that chased Ahmed Aubrey into an empty house and shot him. I hope they get some help. Lord knows, I do hope they and all those who are suffering from their own histories of violence do get some help, and get some help before they commit these kinds of violences. But I can’t put my energy there – that is the past, these are the abuses that we have worked so hard for so many decades to bring to an end. I can’t go back there, and our country can’t to back there, and I need to put my energy into the political sphere that can help us go forward, into the future, not backward, into the past.

And I do understand that in America in the second quarter of the 21^st century, many, many people are afraid and unable to see a future – for a lot of reasons. Technology is changing jobs, climate change is changing everything. The American dream of upward social mobility is not a reality for the many, many people who made their living in jobs that are changing, who have not been able to get the education that a technology-based culture requires. Many of these people can feel that they are not going anywhere – or worse, that by the measures that Americans generally value, they are a failure. I feel empathy for this – I want the social programs and support that will help them, and every American, live a life of dignity, value, worth, with respect – and with medical care, education, public services. But what I cannot do is be OK with looking for a scapegoat, with finding somebody – also suffering, also oppressed, also doing everything in their power to live a life of dignity, meaning, and worth – to blame for things that are not their fault. You can empathize. You can empathize, and work for social, economic, and political supports that can help. But then the real question for me is what comes after? Can you get people to understand that making student loans and low-cost public education available helps them? Can you get them to use the resources and support that will make a difference in their lives?

And, after empathy, when the people who are benefitting most from the public services that were designed to help them become the ones leading the charge to dismantle government, where do you go from here? These are practical matters, and painfully visible when we break down the demographics of Donald Trump’s base. Why would you support Trump? How is anything that is coming out of this presidency actually helping the people who, feeling disenfranchised and downtrodden, helped to bring him to power?

The political party system cannot force people to choose for their own best interests. It can’t force people to use the services – mental health, job training, education – that will help them. What the political party system can do is to run government, and design and support the government agencies that can help the people for whom the future feels bleak. Political parties can recruit candidates for public office that understand these issues and take the job of developing policy and practices that help the people and the nation.

Here is a concrete example of what political parties can do: gun violence. That’s a very concrete thing. In 1994, The Democratic Party introduced a ban on assault weapons; 10 years later, the Republican party in control of government refused to renew the ban – congress let the ban expire, and we now have more mass shootings in a year than we have days in a year. Now, this is collective trauma, and one thing that the political parties can do is to put an automatic weapons ban back in place. Political parties cannot do anything for the individual experience of trauma, but we can recruit candidates who will work on the laws, policies, and programs that make our nation and its people better. For me as a voter, I don't vote based on my party talking (or not) about trauma. I vote because my party takes all the demands from all the groups that make up the Democratic coalition and turns them into a package that government can work on. This is a very concrete thing.

And another thing we have seen with these every-day mass shootings is that the shooters tend to share two common features: 1) guns are a part of their daily lives; and 2) they've been radicalized by fringe extremist websites. So if we want to deal with the collective trauma of mass violence, the political parties’ role in that is to understand how it is passed on and repeated, and to develop the programs and policies that can get to the root of the problem. An example here is DEI. You frequently talk about slavery as a collective trauma in the American national psyche. OK, well, how can political parties deal with that? We are not the ones who sit down with individuals in a therapeutic way – this is not what political parties do. But the Democratic Party did create policy and programs to get to the root of the racism that still rips our nation apart: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has been one of the country’s most important tools for understanding and working to dismantle racism in the United States.

The difficulty is that, now, along with the ban on assault weapons being dropped, the current administration is eradicating DEI initiatives – again, taking the country backward. You know, I tell people one of the reasons I'm a Democrat is that my life as a human female person was made possible by the Democratic Party. And here’s a concrete example: when I was a graduate student at the University of South Florida and applied for a teaching assistantship, the chairman of my department said: “We know you're the best student, but actually we think of housewives in higher education as dilettantes and I am giving this job to a man who needs the money.” I looked across the desk at him and said: “Let me say two sentences. One, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is law. And two, my husband is an attorney.” And that's how I became the first female teaching assistant ever at the University of South Florida.

So neither I nor the political parties can do anything about the emotional and psychological effects of racism or sexism that’s been induced by generations of trauma. But political parties can – and I can support them in this - pass laws that help to transform the structures and practices perpetuating racism and sexism. That’s concrete, and this is the future.

Lori:

Ok, great – right. And this brings us back to the potential for a new party forming with mainstream Democrats and moderate Republicans . . .

Donna:

Well, let me say here that, in Washington, women in the House and the Senate used to be able to work across partisan lines on what are now called women and children's things. To some degree this is perhaps still occurring, but much less so since the leadership of the Republican Party has been handed over to the Tea Party People. Some of the most extreme – Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example – do not want to work across the aisle with their Democratic counterparts on anything.

Lori:

Ok, right – I know there are extremely polarizing personalities and positions. But this surely cannot be everybody. Liz Cheney, for example . . . ?

Donna:

Liz Cheney's gone now. They've run her out of the Republican Party.

Lori:

But is there anybody else? Surely there are many people now waking up to the terrible destruction these polarizing forces are wreaking, and to the grave consequences of this destruction nationally and globally?

Donna:

Right now in Washington, the Republican Party is either in the Tea Party people camp, or they are too cowed by the power of the Extremist faction to stand up to it.

Lori:

And of course, we know this is how dictatorships rise.

Donna:

That’s exactly right. The Tao says when countries fall into chaos, patriotism is born.

Lori:

So, two of the ways this political moment can unfold, then: 1) The Republican Party continues as it is going, there is no effective correction either from within the party or from the Democratic Party. That road feels very dystopian to me. As I say this, though, I have to recognize that there are many people – and I know some of these people – who really believe that this road is the road to their promised-land future. 2) A group of people rises to the occasion and finds the common ground that can speak to the critical issues of our time, with a vision that can meet climate change and the energy crises looming, and all of this in the age of AI Superintelligence when our very understanding of what it means to be human is evolving.

And on the common ground bit – I keep thinking, as we are talking, that fear is our common ground. I’m thinking especially here about the extent to which our current political crisis is fueled by people who feel disenfranchised, who have lost a sense of hope and feel that things are out of control – and how much this feeling gives rise to the need to blame somebody, to find a scapegoat, in-tandem with looking for a strong man to save the day, which generally includes some form of punishment of the scapegoat and a performance of power.

So if I put myself in the position for a moment of somebody who wants to just shut the doors, close everything out, stop – just STOP all of the movement of people, trade, ideas – then I can feel at the heart of this fear and overwhelm. Like it’s too much, too fast, not manageable, just stop everything. And that is an instinctive response, a defensive response against overwhelm. So I do get that, I can feel that. At the same time, the pervasive fear in which so many of us are now plunged – fear for jobs, fear of being deported, fear of being targets of violence – makes us put up a defensive circle as well. We anticipate where the threat is coming from, have to guard ourselves against it, and this makes it harder and harder to find friends in places that we see as sources of the threat.

So if we step back and take a critical distance, so that we are not judging if a fear is valid or not, not assessing it as more or less important based on how it ranks on a hierarchy of fear, but rather simply acknowledge and honor: people are afraid . . . if we can do this, is there any possibility that our fear might be the common ground on which we meet, and from this common ground find our ability to bridge divides and work collaboratively for a shared future in which we all can thrive?

Donna:

You know, I'm always talking about books, but one of the books that changed my life was reading Eric Fromm's Escape from Freedom. I am a person that always thinks that liberty is a great thing. The ability to make your own life, the ability to choose what you're going to do, to exercise what you call agency and autonomy . . . these things are critical to me. But Fromm indicates in his book that freedom is terrifying for many people. And their response to being afraid is to look for someone who will save them. Now, Fromm wrote Escape from Freedom because he wanted to argue that it wasn't just the Germans who could follow a Hitler. The attraction to the strong man, which as we have seen is so often the cult leader that feeds on fear, is a human thing. So this is a conundrum for democracy, right? Because on the one hand our political sphere does have an element of what you might think of as two opposite poles, what we call “radical” extremes. On one pole is the energy of change, and this often comes from young people, but it also comes from individuals and groups that understand what is coming; they see the future, they’re done with the past and moving ahead of their time into the future in a way that is scary to many people. On the other pole is the reactionary force that says: NO! STOP!! For example, you were talking about how this moment mirrors the 1920s in terms of stopping immigration and imposing tariffs, both of which are withdraw and circle the wagon responses to fear. So ok, acknowledging that the people in these positions are overwhelmed, we still have to ask: what is the epicenter of this fear? John Meacham, in his book The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels, gives us a way to understand this fear as about what it means to be an American.

Now, there are a million ramifications to this, but if we keep our focus on what we have been discussing about America from its founding and through the history of the democratic republic, and then you expand that and ask: “What does it mean to be an American?” – then you see something profound that is the true common ground of the democracy emerging for the future. So what does it mean to be an American? We’re all different races, we’re all different colors, we’re all different religions. So what makes us American?

What it means to be an American is that you subscribe to a particular set of political values that are embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the American Constitution That's it. That's what it means to be an American. I was able to really explore this concept in a class I designed for Santa Fe College, The Idea of America; when you really dive into the creation of the United States of America, you see that America is nothing but an idea, and it's an idea founded on political values. That's what defines us as a nation. These political values remain the foundation for democracy in the future, and you find them in the Declaration of Independence. I wish the Declaration of Independence were legally enforceable - it is such a wonderful statement of what the people thought they were doing in 1776, and that statement speaks across generations to this historical moment as well.

And you have to remember that America is the first nation ever to have been formed with diversity at the core of its national identity. Seymour Martin Lipset, a great political sociologist, wrote a book analyzing this; when I read The First New Nation: The United States in Comparative and Historical Perspective, I had one of those “Oh-my-God, why didn’t I think of that?” moments. Lipset documents and analyzes an obvious thing that we are in general blind to: from the beginning, diversity was a part of the founding of America. Before America, the idea of “nation” was based on a group of people who live on the same territory, who speak the same language, who look generally alike, and hopefully who all have the same religion, otherwise the country will be at war with itself for forever. That’s pretty much what the nation state meant before the founding of America. So, America was the first country to be founded with diversity. The Native Americans were already here. The Europeans came in short order. Slave traders brought the Africans. And somehow, we all have to find the way to live together. So America is an experiment in making a nation out of a totally diverse population. Much of what we see in the fear-stop-go-back-response that is leading the country today is the illusion that “America” has always been the land of the white European, run by white European males, and that this is the way it is supposed to be. But America has never been that – never.

Lori:

I love these moments when your reverence for the founding fathers shines through!

Donna:

Well, that’s because there's nothing else but them, really. And you can meditate on this question about what it means to be an American until our next conversation, but I think that at the core of the American identity really is just this: the shared political values that led to the formation of a nation based on freedom and democracy for all. It's the only thing that unites a population that is different in every other way. And you have to remember that, when the United States was founded, every other country in the world was an autocracy. Every other government had a King or some form of sovereign that was above the people and the nation. America’s gift to the world is popular government. No Kings, no government that is above the people and the law – that’s it. This is America.

Lori:

And the irony, of course, is that it's the popular vote that brought Donald Trump back into office, where he is now shredding the basic tenets of democracy and rule of law . . .

Donna:

That's why the founders created the electoral college, because they suspected that that would happen.

Lori:

. . . But could not anticipate that the electoral college itself could be compromised by a power-obsessed leader bent on overturning the vote and retaining power . . . Which brings me to another question: Do you think democracy itself is in an evolutionary process?

Donna:

As I said before, what we actually have is a democratic republic. And what democracy really means under these circumstances is that everybody has a voice -- you know, power to the people. I don't think you can have a pure, direct democracy except in very, very small units. And you want to remember that another unique thing about the United States of America is that we have worked to create a republic in a huge and very diverse country. That's another historical first! And the founders understood that a democracy following the whims of a tyrannical majority could be just as autocratic, just as unjust, as any country at the mercy of a King. Their biggest fear was tyranny, and tyranny comes in many forms. They knew that autocracy was tyranny. But they also talked about this thing they called the tyranny of the majority.

Our founding fathers did not embrace democracy; they embraced popular government and popular sovereignty, and those are different from democracy. We can talk about that more next time, and maybe the place to start for this is with one of the things that caused me to become a political theorist. At one point, reading all of the great political theorists – John Stuart Mill, for example, and Marx – I realized that all political theories are predicated on a view of human nature. And one of the reasons why I will never be a cheerleader for anything but democracy is the view of human nature that underlies democracy as an ideology. And this gets us to something I say and that you often quote: If you believe in democracy, then you believe that people can learn from their mistakes. If you believe this, then you believe that the nature of being human is to be in a continual process of learning and growing. Now, maybe some people don’t share this view of human nature, but I believe this question – do we believe in the human capacity to learn and to grow – is exponentially more urgent now than it ever has been in the past. I believe in the better angels of the human, and I believe in democracy.

Lori:

So if you could wave a magic wand and within the larger umbrella of good government lay out the framework for political party realignment, what would that look like?

Donna:

Oh, well, I am not a wand waver. But let me just say that, in my reading of American history, we only come to something like a party realignment when the system crashes. When, for example, the Great Depression came and desperate people voted for a leader who responded to the crisis, and had the support to make sweeping changes that brought the country through crisis. When desperate people wake up and realize that something has to change – because, for example, we don’t want to kill another 620,000 people as we did in the civil war, or we don’t want a quarter of the workforce in dire poverty – then we find our conscience and realize that we have to do this differently. Americans are not fond of reforms. Historically, they like to just keep trucking along as if nothing were going on – until the moment that the system crashes.

Lori:

I get that this is how change has always emerged in the past, and I do not disagree that people keep doing what they have been doing until it is simply not possible to continue in the old ways. That is an unfortunate truth of profound change – we are pushed to it because our old forms can no longer work. But I am hoping that, with the growing numbers of people around the world who see what is coming for the future, that we may be able to evolve at least some of what life on our planet needs in the future before we bring ourselves even closer to the cusp of our self-extinction than we already have. I’ve been studying deep systems transformation with Otto Scharmer’s team at the Presencing Institute and the MITx u.labs, and one of his central points is that, in the era of climate change, our survival as a species on this planet demands a shift from an egocentric to an ecosystemic consciousness. That is, we have to move from a paradigm of competition to one of collaboration, and this paradigm shift also requires that we move from isolation to integration. We need regenerative social systems – regenerative economies, regenerative agriculture, regenerative medicine – in short, a radical global shift to a regenerative paradigm. How can we achieve this paradigm shift in the United States, with a two-party system that has become so adversarial that we are splitting apart at the seams? That is withdrawing from and lashing out at our international partners? How can this need for a paradigm shift inform potential political party re alignments? So I guess what this question really gets to for me is: is it possible for these changes to emerge – an evolutionary shift, a paradigm shift, and evolution in consciousness – before the train wrecks? Or at least, before it wrecks so completely that we cannot recover?

Donna:

Sometimes, after the train wrecks, we go forward and do much better. I wish all human beings were kind and gracious and gentle and rational. I do wish this, but, as this is not the case, I do not know what we do about those who, right now, are prepared to victimize so many. When the people who voted this administration in lose their social security checks, then they'll realize that these came from the government. When our veterans lose their benefits, then they’ll realize that these came from the government. When the fear and hatred that are being spread – in political speech, on social media, in our government – so badly destroy the social and political sphere that we cannot function, then we’ll realize that good government requires civil discourse. I do not know how to make people see the awful end of this road we are right now traveling, but I do have faith that, when the American people reach the end of this road and see how awful it is, they will wake up – hungry and desperate, for sure, in a collapsed economy – and realize that they need good government. When they wake up, I am perfectly happy to feed them, to take their children back into public schools. I’m perfectly glad to help them with their everyday lives, because this is what good government does. A government of the people, by the people, for the people, takes care of its people! All of its people – without regard to color, gender identity, race, religion, or political party affiliation.

So – how to prevent the train wrecking? I do not know how to do that. But I do know how to keep working, day by day, moment by moment, for the good of the people and the country, and I do believe that, when the train wrecks, there are many, many good people who are ready to bring us into the future, and that it is possible that we go forward and do much better.

Lori:

Donna Waller – I cannot put into words how much I love you and how I take heart and inspiration from your practical magic – which is how I think of your ability to be in the moment watching a train on its way to wrecking, knowing the difference between what you can do and what you cannot do, and then rolling up your sleeves and quietly – with love, with joy, with faith in this country and the democracy that you love - getting to work.

So when we come back next time, we’ll pick up on the future of democracy, and I am especially interested in talking more with you about the hope that comes through local government.

Donna:

Yes, local governments is special. And one of the things people should be in defense of is their local governments. Because that's where we have real possibilities of bridging the political polarizations that are so destructive right now. This is where you can bring people together and find common ground. Here in Gainesville, there are people who are doing this sort of bridging all the time. Things are possible with local governments that are not possible at the national level.

Lori:

But, actually . . . if we could expand this out in concentric circles – one local government to another, then expanded to the state level, then from state to state . . .

Donna:

Oh, yes it is possible that change could bubble up from the bottom. It could bubble up from the bottom.

Lori:

Ok, great then – and here is where we’ll pick up next time, leaning into the future of democracy. We have walked a winding road in these discussions thinking about how to meet political crisis as an opportunity for transformation, and I am deeply grateful for your willingness to walk this road with me! We’ll wrap this segment up next week, but you have given us a scaffolding for thinking about big things in concrete ways.