Author: RickNierenberg

One of most predictable, insidious and crippling impediments to genuine problem solving in the  negotiation between opposing parties or even groups with competing interests is the tendency for the extremes of both sides to hijack the agenda, and thereby start to redefine the terms of the discussion in such a manner that those in each camp who seek accommodation and solution, even though they may constitute the clear majority, are marginalized, made less relevant, prevented from compromise and reasonable solutions with shared wins disappear.
I heard the lecturer in a seminar  on negotiation tactics challenged that some problems defy a negotiated settlement, and the example posed was peace between the warring parties in the middle east. “The solution can only come” he answered, “when we realize that the moderates on both sides have more in common with each other than they do with the extremes of their own side”.
Imagine, for example that the moderates on each side of a territorial conflict are trying to work out together reasonable boundaries and rules of engagement by which they can move towards a shared common peace and prosperity. Each sides moderates are trying to weigh what the can give, what they must keep and how can they compromise. The extremes, however, on each side, however, believe that the other side has no right to any of the territory, and in fact has no right to exist. There are inevitably those within the extreme fringes of both camps who believe they have the right, duty and opportunity to intervene in the dialogue by, say, blowing up a restaurant, or by expelling families from a village. These extreme actions force the moderates further away from a common ground, force each side into an increasingly polarized and unreconcilable position, and tend to make any solution impossible. The agenda, one of finding a mutually beneficial compromise, gets hijacked to protecting oneself or maintaining order.
I don’t want to get side tracked into discussing it in detail but rather wish to point out as an example some of what has happened over the last two weeks in the USA concerning the issues of racial disparity in policing and how to find a meaningful solution to an issue which I believe most people recognize as a problem.
Any mass protest will draw some who find an opportunity to cause some mayhem. I believe most moderates both on the relatively right and the relatively left of the nation would have wanted to move through that towards confronting and solving some of the more pressing underlying problems.
The president took a far extreme position of insisting that so called law and order be maintained by the use of overwhelming force, invoking the militarization of the police and calling for the possibility of lethal force.
A more moderate and much larger segment responded with enormous peaceful marches and protests, and condemnation of the president by a very large and respected cohort of military and political leaders, even of his own party. It seemed that  the effort of the extreme to hijack the agenda away from the need to find meaningful progress in the relationship between police and population was not successful, had in fact backfired, and a large, general, perhaps actionable consensus seemed about to form that such progress was necessary and that until it came, there would be large but peaceful expressions of protest, including some as creative as renaming the site of the greatest police violence “Black Lives Matter” Plaza. I am sure the president loved that.
But then the extreme on the other side decided it was their turn to hijack the agenda. The city council of Minneapolis voted to disband the police.
Shall we imagine what would happen then? Lets say the thousands of police officers agreed, and simply laid down their badges,  (but not their guns!) and walked off the job. Maybe a couple of these dismissed officers now need to put food on the table. Where better to take it than from businesses, stores and the other citizens. They have the guns, they can do it. What are you going, call the police?
I am not going to go further with this train of thought, this argument, because this example in itself is not the point, the point I wish to make is that we must be on guard, no matter where we fall along a political spectrum, to guard against the inevitable tendency for the extremes, the fringes, to take over the conversation, and prevent a meaningful solution to the problem.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. The center must hold. We must find ways to seek common cause based on those values which we can discover we share.
The current site, the blogs and posts, is dedicated towards trying to find our common shared values and to arguing that we must come back as a nation to that shared center before we move forward.
In these pages I will try to derive what core American values are, and whether they are being pursued in the government we presently have.
So far there are three pages.
The next will take an historical episode in which the center could no hold, and look at some of the aspects and results of that time.

It is exaggeration, hyperbole and the cry of “the sky is falling” to say that these last few weeks have brought us to the brink of a new civil war. We are not in a new civil war.

It is not exaggeration to say, however that these few weeks have shown us that we could be heading towards one. The vast differences in the way whole swaths of the citizenry view current events, and more importantly, each other shows us, and shows the world that the divisions run so deep that civil war, I mean a real civil war, are no longer simply unimaginable. More seasoned observers have said as much.

Armed men calling themselves patriots occupy government buildings to protect what they call their rights, then threaten mayhem on others marching to protect the rights of others.

Our president not only threatens but uses active duty military to harm those engaged in their constitutional right of peaceable assembly, while some citizens on their own volition use deadly force against individuals in law enforcement.

Still the vast vast majority both of protestors and police, the vast vast majority I hope of those on moderate right and moderate left desperately want our nation to come together and succeed, survive and thrive.

But the extremes, the fringes of any movement tend to be able to hijack the agenda of the middle. If tens of thousands of police are concerned and compassionate professionals, a few dozen nation wide captured across a nation on video can brand the whole group an occupying force. If hundreds of thousands of citizens trying to find a way to peacefully but forcefully bring to a nations conscience the death of unarmed black men at the hands of that small group of police who abuse their power, well then a few hundred looters and arsonists can brand that movement as anarchists.

We must not let the extremes in our politics hijack the agenda of an entire nation, which is to make the lot of all improve, to survive and grow and thrive as a nation.

This blog is intended as a vehicle over the next few months to try to argue for us to search for and act on common ground a shared values.

I believe, and will try to articulate that in this particular election, our only hope as a nation, our hope to find common ground, will be to come home, come back, to the more sensible and centrist choice. In this case, this time, I will argue that the only sensible choice is the Democratic Party. Joe Biden is an experienced, sensible, and decent man, and could help bring us back in the direction if not all the way to the destination of being a unified nation.

Note, that may not always be true and perhaps not in every election, but this time it is.

Over the next few months I will try to discover and articulate what I believe are our shared values, our truths, our common ground.

I hope the reader will participate and share.

I have been sitting down to try to seek, understand, list and express what seem to me to be our core American values. I know I am not alone in feeling real fear and foreboding that our great nation, this great experiment in democracy, liberty and justice is precarious, that it is in danger.

America, we must come home.

We must find common ground. Remember our shared values. Reconnect with some unity of purpose.

Yes, I know. These are cliches. Shibboleths. Everyone says them. “All men are created equal”. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. “To form a more perfect Union”. These words once possessed near religious meaning. The were enough to create a nation. But what do they mean now? Too often empty expressions. Catch slogans. Blah blahs.

I have tried to discover, for myself, what do I believe are our common values. What binds us together as a people, a culture, a nation, an idea. If in fact, anything does. If we articulate what are our values, those ideals and principles we all really share, then maybe we can determine if we are being true to them, and if not, how might we be.

I started by listing for myself as many of what I believed were truly core American values as I could. Then I looked through my somewhat chaotic list of values several times, trying to find common threads, to group them, to make coherent what looked almost random.

I found that, in broad strokes, our American values, for me, fall into seven basic categories and principles.

1) We value a general respect for fairness.
Not that everybody’s lot be equal, but that the system is fair for everyone.
That the rules are developed in a manner which we can see and understand.
That the rules are applied evenly.
That everyone has the opportunity to make of themselves as much as their ability and effort can take them.
That we give each other a fair shake.
That each of us is expected to play by the rules.

2) We value a rule of law which is consistent, impartial, evenly distributed and upheld.

That the law for one person is the same as the law for another.
That justice is separate from politics, that leaders don’t use the judicial arm of the state to enforce their political purposes.
That there is a consistent and agreed upon set of constructs, principles and norms which govern every person fairly and impartially.
That every man and woman has “their day in court”.
That the courts are fair and honest.
That justice is, as they call it, “blind”.

3) We value a reliability, trustworthiness, dependability of our respect for tradition, our adherence to precedent, and to principle.

That our word is our bond, and that we are as ‘good as our word’, both at home and abroad.
That when we give our word, that when we make an agreement we can be expected to keep it.
We respect that value in individuals, calling it by names like integrity, and we value it as a nation.
We expect that our allies can count on us.
We expect that we will keep up our end of a bargain, that we will hold fast, not blindly, but whenever we can, to our end of the bargain to our word, to our principles, to our ideals, our norms and traditions.

4) We value truth, and honesty.
And also intellectual honesty. We don’t like it when politicians, scientists, public servants, the press, or anyone bends, slants or compromises facts, and the truth to fit their own private opinions and agendas.
We may not all agree on what is true, but we value the honest pursuit of truth.
We value a free exchange of ideas in a fair, open and available intellectual public square.

5) We value respect for the dignity and the rights of individuals.
Ideally of all individuals. Of all races, colors, genders, creeds, nationalities, it is in our DNA to do so.
We believe that individuals have intrinsic worth as human beings. Well meaning Americans may differ on whether that dignity and intrinsic worth of an individual automatically guarantees them, say, entrance to the country, for example, or government assistance – and those are fair policy disagreements to have, but as Americans we value individual rights and dignity. That includes those rights enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, of course, such as the right to peaceable assembly and a free press, but it also means a respect for certain traditional norms and standards. Although some may tolerate it to achieve other goals, I can’t really believe that taunts, slurs, insults, and ridicule are not what Americans wish to emulate in leaders.

6) We value in general a certain decency, a certain dignity, a decorum, standards, civility.
A certain willingness to respectfully listen to one another.
We may for a time decry “political correctness”, but we don’t really value in the long run public servants or leaders who speak like street toughs and ‘hooligans’, who are ill mannered, ill tempered, crude.

7) We value the ideal of progress, opportunity, a chance to succeed.
We cherish that each individual have a chance to have that mythical American Dream.
We value the ideal that each generation leaves the nation better than they found it.
We value the belief that we continue to improve and that the lives our our children will be filled with more opportunities and a better world than we had.
We value the notion that humanity can get better. We may not believe it, but we value it.

Of course there are so more things we value, our lives and our families and our safety, security, shelter, and the like, but those are common to all mankind. And I am sure there are values which I have either left out or expressed differently than others would have them, but the categories of values expressed above capture, I hope, a good deal of what it means to be an American.

And, America, we have to come home. Come home to American values. Come home to ourselves. To who we really are.

Now, I don’t wish to be too coy, or devious, or to make out as if this is part of mystery novel with an unexpected ending. This is at heart the beginning of a political statement, a series of political statements. The thesis of these statements will be that in the coming election the only way to come home and to honor our values as Americans is to vote democratic.

Note please, note well that I am not claiming that this will always be the case. There could well arise in future elections candidates who are conservatives, republicans for whom one could vote and still be upholding in every respect those values we cherish as Americans.

But not this time.

In future writings, and very soon I hope, I intend to show specifically why, based on these above stated values and on the actions of the current president and administration, to come home, to be America again, means to reject Donald Trump.

For the moment, and this is The Moment, I would respectfully beg the reader to consider these values, to ask if these are really fairly called American values, and if so, to ask how well they are being represented in the current administration and the environment they have created.

Then we well talk again soon.