A few posts ago, I mentioned my friend Terry, and promised I would say more soon. Terry and I have been friends since we were in seventh grade, and she has a long and enthralling resume that mostly revolves around progressive politics and social entrepreneurship. Right now she’s running a consulting firm from Sierra Vista AZ, called Islay Consulting, that is doing work for the Governor of Arizona and the Gates Foundation and some other people.
I had drinks with Terry, her husband Brian, and a bunch of their buddies last night–all new folks whom I’d not met before.
Interestingly, I spent some time talking to Kelly Young, who is the Executive Director of 21st Century Democrats (they train campaigners and send them out to support progressive candidates; did a lot of work with Paul Wellstone). So, Kelly was saying that in the wake of the 2004 election that they’re pulling back for a serious regrouping–something called The Principles Project. In effect they are on the mission to invent a soul for the Democratic Party. Some of this thinking is being spurred by a book that I’ve not yet read called The Soul of Money, by Lynne Twist. The gist of the argument seems to be that we’d be better off if we learned to live in a paradigm of sufficiency, rather than one of scarcity–some of us DO have enough, and we would have a better relationship to the world and one another if we could recognize that. The supporters of this shift are betting that launching a progressive campaign in American politics on this basis, rather than the laundry list of issue-stances that currently parade as the Democratic identity, might actually result in a cohesive movement.
At anyrate, this sounds appealingly like a preferential option for the poor, and a communitarian ethic. I’m intrigued and I want to know more, ’cause lets face it — we’re a long way from Jefferson’s self-sufficient yeoman farmers. We have some obligations to one another–as Linda Kerber points out in No Constitutional Right to be Ladies, as citizens, we have rights and responsibilities, and we must all have the freedom and obligation to experience them. This inevitably leads to some notion that we have obligations to each other. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get behind a politics that called for a just distribution of resources and respect for the rights and obligations of citizenship? What’s the use of zealously pursuing the single issues, if we’ve got no conceptual framework that structures those struggles?
Okay, rant over.