Newsletter #239— May 23, 2024

Update on the MPP Roles - Still Focusing on Actors (Last Segment)

by Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess

Power Balancers

For disputes that cannot be resolved through mutually beneficial agreement, there is a need for people and institutions with the responsibility to make hard, but fair, decisions about who wins and who loses and by how much in each specific case.  While many of the individuals who do this work are simply trying to perpetuate and take advantage of the gross inequities that exist within virtually all societal power structures, there are many individuals who are actively trying to promote and implement equitable ways of balancing power and making tough decisions. Our focus is on eight groups roles that we see as playing a critical role in massively parallel peace and democracy building. 

• Civic Skill Builders teach citizens about the advantages of democratic systems and how to use those systems to constructively handle the large number of difficult conflicts that inevitably occur in any modern society. Secondary schools used to act as civic skill builders (and can again), although far too many have eliminated their "civics" requirements because the curricula of such programs became highly contentious, and the simple, conflict-avoidant response was just to cut the courses.  But this has resulted in a generation or two that understands very little about what democracy is, how it works, why it is preferable to other (particularly autocratic) systems, and, most importantly, why it is so important that citizens to fulfill their civic responsibilities. In the absence of such civic education in the schools, a wide variety of NGOs are working to fill the void. Some, like Civic Spirit work to encourage and help K-12 schools reinstate civics content in ways that "enhance civic belonging, knowledge, and responsibility in their student and faculty communities." Others, such as the Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) aim at adult audiences.  This effort (which could easily be replicated by and for other constituencies) is to "inspire women of faith to be ambassadors of peace who transcend partisanship and courageously advocate for ethical government." They teach peacebuilding and conflict resolution skills, along with "civics" to better prepare their members to be active participants in their communities and effective campaigners for ethical government. Other examples include: the RAND Corporation's report on the current state of citizenship education, the American Enterprise Institute's Proposal for University-Level Civic Education, CivXNow's cross partisan coalition of 260 organizations focused on improving civic education, and even recently enacted legislation providing $23 million to improve civics education across the country. 
   
• Civic Reformers work to strengthen institutions in ways that promote wise and equitable problem-solving, while limiting incentives that lead to hyper-polarization and corruption. Excellent examples of such include both the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, and the Rebuild Congress Initiative, both mentioned earlier in the "democracy firster" section of Roles Part 1, which are trying to change the way Congress does business. As Representative William Timmons, Vice Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress explained in this video, "the objective of Congress is to engage in evidence-based policy making in a collaborative manner from a position of mutual respect.  We don't do that." But in its four year life span, the Select Committee issued over 200 recommendations about how Congress could be modified so as to better achieve that goal.  Not all have been passed, but over 100 have been fully or partially implemented.  Though the Select Committee was "sunsetted" in 2022, a new Subcommittee on Modernization, within the Committee on House Administration is continuing their work.  Other civic reformers include the Rank the Vote  effort to promote structural changes to our electoral system to make it less prone to favor extreme candidates and to more equitably represent moderate voters who are, in many ways, effectively disenfranchised under current rules.   Other efforts include the Constitution Center's effort to "restore the guardrails of democracy," calls to reform the Insurrection Act, Citizen Connect's efforts to find common ground on election reform, entitlement reform proposals, and the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers.
   
• Ethical Politicians are committed to serving all citizens with honest debate and a refusal to engage in hate mongering and other destructive tactics. Two prominent examples are Republican Spencer Cox, Governor of Utah (mentioned earlier with respect to the National Governor's Association's Disagree Better Initiative)" and his 2020 Democratic opponent, Chris Peterson.  During their campaign, Peterson and Cox made a political ad together, vowing to debate the issues without degrading each others' character. They also both promised to respect the outcome of the election. An article in The Hill observed that this ad at least temporarily changed voters' attitudes about the legitimacy of undemocratic practices and political violence, though sadly, those changes didn't last long. But an article in The Hill observed that "the ad served as an example of Utah’s characteristically civil political climate. The state’s politicians on both sides frequently lament the sharp and bitter tone of national political debates." Governor Cox's Disagree Better initiative is an attempt to get such attitudes and approaches adopted much more widely across the U.S.  Other efforts to hold political leaders to higher ethical standards include Lyceum Labs, which is dedicated to improving political leadership and reducing partisanship in the United States, the ethical principles being championed by the Mormon Women for Ethical Government, Rabbi Russel McAlmond's principles of "ethical individualism," and Tablet's effort to resist the declining tendency of people to recognize the responsibilities of citizenship.
   
• Civic Participants are the grassroots citizens who go beyond political hobbyism (the act of just reading the news and cheering for one's favorite political party) and the relatively simple acts of voting or making political contributions. They take advantage of the many opportunities that are available, especially at the local level, to actively participate in democratic governance. They serve on advisory committees, support and participate in public interest groups, testify at public hearings, and actively work within their communities to find solutions to common problems. These are the large numbers of people who take advantage of the kinds of opportunities crafted by the International Association Public Participation, the Environmental Protection Agency's public participation program, and the Federation for Innovation in Democracy's citizen assemblies.
   
• Network Builders bring those working to strengthen democracy into mutually supportive networks. One example is The Trust Network which was founded in October of 2020 to build a collaborative network of peacebuilders, social justice workers, and democracy workers — groups that are united in their desire to reduce political violence and create peaceful communities where all citizens feel safe and respected. A second example is the Bridge Alliance which was started in 2015 to bring together organizations and people working to create a "thriving, just, and healthy democratic republic." Their membership includes four categories of organizations: those working to bridge divides, those working on civic education and engagement, those working on elections and governance, and those working to strengthen and promote genuinely trustworthy sources of information. The National Association for Community Mediation (NAFCM) brings hundreds of community mediators and community mediation organizations together to pool knowledge and resources to help members resolve conflicts more effectively, Citizen Connect makes it easier for citizens to find and connect with civic organizations working to bridge divides and strengthen democracy. The Relationships Project is working to develop the infrastructure needed to support organizations built around strong relationships. And, finally, the Horizons Project helps peacebuilders and others trying to strengthen democracy in the U.S. to "weave together all our efforts for a just, inclusive and peaceful democracy. 
   
• Arbitrators and Adjudicators work with legal representatives of contending parties in both private and public settings to resolve disputes about what, exactly, the rule-of-law means in specific situations. Given the complexity of modern societies and legal systems, there are inevitable questions about what exactly the law says with respect to particular disputes. MPP depends upon adjudicators and arbitrators to assure that the applicable legal framework is fairly applied and that everybody enjoys the equal protection of the laws. While public confidence in the judicial system continues to decline alarmingly, it is still more trusted than executive and legislative branches of government. The good news is that there are major efforts to understand and address the sources of public distrust. Efforts to strengthen judicial institutions include a joint effort involving Supreme  Court Justices and state Governors to discuss strategies for overcoming the political division that underlies much of the public's distrust, the American Bar Association's effort to strengthen the justice system, and the Center for American Progress' proposals for strengthening the judiciary. Supporting efforts to improve the judiciary are groups like the American Arbitration Association and JAMS Mediation, Arbitration, and ADR Services which works to make sure that high-quality arbitration (and mediation in the case of JAMS) services continue to be available.
   
• Law Enforcement Officials at all levels are charged with preventing citizens from defying the law. Without the remedies that their efforts provide, our legal rights could easily be violated by anyone willing and able to resort to violence and intimidation. Law enforcement officials are, therefore, critical to the success of the broader MPP effort. Also critical is that they hold themselves strictly accountable to the same system of laws that they are charged with enforcing.  In fact, they need to go beyond the letter of the law in ways that make clear that they also stand behind the spirit of the law.  Cases in which law enforcement either violates, or appears to violate, the law constitute a big driver of public distrust and is a problem that needs to be vigorously addressed. Fortunately, there are a large number of efforts to do this. Police2Peace is a national nonprofit focused on bringing together representatives from the activist and police communities with the goal of healing relationships — work that is also done by the Community Relations Service.  There are also major efforts to better understand the sources of criminal behavior including mass shootings and neighborhoods with persistently high crime rates and inadequate law enforcement. Especially important are efforts to understand and find sensible ways of addressing the United States' extraordinarily high incarceration rates. Here, increased reliance on restorative approaches shows real promise as do efforts to limit punishment but increase the chances of getting caught (which are, in many jurisdictions, very very low).  There are even efforts to propose workable compromises on the contentious issue of gun control.
   
• Empowerment Leaders are, perhaps, the most important of the power balancers. Their focus is on highlighting and correcting the society's most egregious power inequities and the unfairness that results from those inequities. Their focus is not on "getting even" (or instituting a system of reverse discrimination that allows the previously disempowered to enjoy the privileges of social dominance). Rather, they want to build a system that more equitably balances power in ways that all citizens will see as offering a path to a society that is fair for all. They build upon the long tradition of nonviolent civil resistance made famous by Gandhi, King, and Mandela. They embrace their commitment to nonviolence, their demands that ongoing instances of injustice be properly addressed (King's "the fierce urgency of now"), and their appeals for democracy to live up to the true meaning of its egalitarian ideals.
    
  Empowerment leaders seek to level the playing field in ways which, going forward, provide equality of opportunity while, the same time, providing assistance to victims of past discrimination and disadvantage. This is an approach that is much less widely used in today's hyper-polarized political environment, where those on the left and the right have so dehumanized one another that it is hard for anyone to imagine fighting for a future in which the other side would like to live. The result is an endless series of us-versus them confrontations in which neither side ever achieves any sort of stable victory. While there are instances in which King's  empowerment strategy is being advocated, taught, and used (see for instance, The King Center, Pace e Bene, the Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training, and On Earth Peace such efforts and programs tend to be overwhelmed by those taking a more aggressive approach.

Defenders 

All the roles listed so far (included here and the three earlier roles posts) are focused on the many citizens that are making good-faith efforts to help democracies overcome the many challenges associated with self-governance in an era of enormous societal scale, complexity, and diversity. We call our last group of roles "Defenders" because they are focused on defending these good-faith efforts from attacks by the many groups who seek to profit by inflaming tensions and undermining democratic institutions. These "bad-faith actors" include "profiteers "who have found ways to monetize political conflict for personal benefit, advocacy groups that go beyond appeals for fair treatment and want to dominate and suppress their political rivals, "alienated nihilists" who hate the system and want to destroy it, and authoritarian geopolitical rivals who seek to weaken and attack Western democracies.  Those fighting against these bad-faith actors fall into six broad subcategories: 

• Collective Defenders are alliances of nations (or other social groups) who feel that the best way to defend themselves from attack by unscrupulous foreign (or domestic) rivals is by agreeing to pool their resources to build a common defense. They further agree to come to one another's aid in the event of an actual attack. This is the classic role of a military alliance like NATO which regards an attack on any alliance member as an attack on all members of the alliance — an attack to which members are committed to respond. While most commonly used to deter international aggression, the same basic principle can apply to any group that feels that its members might be subject to unfair attack.  For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education provides a kind of collective defense for those whose academic freedom or freedom of speech are being violated.
   
• Ethical Advocates fight back against the tendency of many advocacy groups to pursue victory to the point where they are not leaving the space in society for those with opposing views. They help us understand when our obligations to the larger society should take precedence over efforts to advance our individual and group interests   The "Disagree Better" campaign mentioned above is one example. Another example are the conciliators who work for the U.S. Department of Justice's Community Relations Service. The CRS was created as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to help communities deal with the civil rights controversies that were expected to emerge during (and after) the implementation of that Act.  While their primary activity was, and continues to be, conciliation (what we would call "mediation") between people of color and the power structure (and now also gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and disability conflicts), they do this work with the goal of  promoting social justice and fairness. This means that, while they were (and continue to be) powerful advocates for minorities, they also hold themselves to high ethical standards that enable them to work effectively with and be trusted by the white power structure. By treating all parties fairly, they are frequently able to resolve  the immediate dispute, in ways that lay the groundwork for structural changes that would prevent repeat incidents. We have written a lot more about their efforts in the first, and soon-to-be-coming second edition of the Civil Rights Oral History Project. 
   
• Corruption Fighters  focus on strengthening conflict of interest protections and preventing public business from being exploited for private gain by unscrupulous individuals.  Examples include Sarah Chayes who wrote Thieves of the State which documents the magnitude of the corruption problem.   the U.S. Agency for International Development's Anti-Corruption Policy, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)'s Anti-Corruption and Integrity Hub, and Transparency.org. Also working in this area is the Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute and the Hudson Institute's Kleptocracy Substack newsletter. Others are trying to help us understand the ways in which a leader like President Trump could elevate corrupt, machine politics to the national level or the larger relationship between corruption and national security. There also are encouraging stories such as this one about how a global effort to crack down on corruption was successfully negotiated.
   
• Fourth Estaters actively work to defend and strengthen the ability and inclination of media to provide the public with accurate and understandable information about the problems facing society, available options for addressing those problems, and, the things that their political leaders are actually doing (or not doing) to solve those problems. Their goal is to encourage the media to better support democracy by promoting content that is constructive, rather than inflammatory and inaccurate. Examples include Ad Fontes Media, AllSides Media, and the Solutions Journalism Network  (also listed earlier under communication thinkers). Beyond this, there is FIRE's effort to defend free speech, Greg Lukianoff's efforts to promote a culture of free speech, and the Heterodox Academy's  effort to promote viewpoint diversity. There are also those helping us think through the problem of self-censorship and the paradox of having to tolerate intolerance in the name of free speech.
   
• Integrators focus on reaching out to those who feel alienated from and left behind by the larger society — people who have lost so much hope that they are falling victim to the various diseases of despair.  Especially worrying are those who have crossed the line into genuine nihilism where they are so resentful of the larger society that they want to do all they can attack and destroy it. (This, for example, is what drives many of the perpetrators of our ongoing epidemic of mass shootings). One integrator is blues musician Daryl Davis.  Davis, who is Black, has, over the course of 30 years, befriended members of the KKK, and has convinced 200 of them reject white supremacy and leave the Klan. Other examples are the many efforts to provide assistance to the homeless and the left behind. Some schools have programs to try to identify at-risk students and reach out to them to try to get them better integrated into the school community in healthy ways.  There remains a critical need to go beyond emergency assistance for left-behind and at-risk individuals and find ways to better integrate them into society and give them a stake in society's success.
   
• Geopolitical Defenders have the biggest and the most difficult job —  defending democracy from geopolitical rivals who seek to undermine and destabilize Western democracies and who, if the opportunity arises, may engage in covert and sometimes overt acts of aggression. These defenders need to protect us at a time when rapidly advancing military technologies are radically altering the global balance of military power adding new vulnerabilities to the long-standing risks associated with conventional and nuclear conflict. Media technologies and AI also are posing a complex array of ever-expanding threats. 

  While geopolitical defenders certainly employ the collective defense strategies outlined above, their work is much, much broader than that. In addition to defending against conventional "kinetic" threats, they are charged with protecting democracies from hybrid or gray zone warfare tactics including efforts to use today's open, high-tech information systems to inflame tensions and undermine public support for democratic institutions.  Examples of people working in these roles include, obviously, the military services, defense contractors, strategic think tanks, as well as the many critics of the "military industrial complex." These critics help us understand why the United States goes to war, how endless wars start, why military interventions often fail, and mistakes the US has made in past wars. They help build support for appropriate defensive and deterrence measures by highlighting the dangers of isolationism, the capabilities of our adversaries, the consequences of letting tensions rise into a some new kind of 21st-century war involving some combination of conventional, cyber, or, worse, a nuclear war. More hopefully, they illuminate and encourage us to take advantage of opportunities for reducing risks, through negotiation of arms control agreements and utilizing social media wisely. In short, they defend us so that we can work in all of the other MPP areas to build a better society. 

Putting the Roles All Together

Our point in listing all these roles is to make more visible the astonishing number of things that people are already doing in the United States and around the world to help limit hyper-polarization and related threats to peace and democracy. What we find so encouraging about this inventory (which still highlights only a tiny fraction of ongoing projects) is the scope of the movement that it reveals and the fact that there are so many ways in which even more people can become involved. MPP is not some unrealistic a pie-in-the-sky plan for quickly and easily solving our many problems.  It is a description of the massive (and invariably messy) process through which societies improve and solve problems.  We hope that these four posts provide something of an antidote to the now widespread sense of hopelessness. The system is responding in ways that will, if enough of us join the effort, take us through this period of difficulty. What we cannot do is give up, and assume all is lost, or that we can't do anything to influence events. If we do that then, our worries become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Let's reject that option and get to work!

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