Where American Politics Can Still Work: From the Bottom Up

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 4, 2018 at 6:52:16 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Where American Politics Can Still Work: From the Bottom Up
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Where American Politics Can Still Work: From the Bottom Up
> Civic coalitions are succeeding at revitalizing old towns where governmental efforts have failed.
> By Thomas L. Friedman
> Jul 3 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/opinion/community-revitalization-lancaster.html>
>
> LANCASTER, Pa. — Last week I wrote about why political parties across the industrial world are fracturing from the 
> top down. Today I’m writing about the political units that are working. On this Fourth of July, if you want to be an 
> optimist about America, stand on your head. The country looks so much better from the bottom up.
>
> I know — the current cliché is that we’re a country divided by two coasts, two coasts that are supposedly 
> diversifying, pluralizing, modernizing and globalizing, while in flyover America everyone is high on opioids, 
> cheering for President Trump and waiting for 1950 to return. That’s totally wrong.
>
> Our country is actually a checkerboard of cities and communities — some that are forming what I call “complex 
> adaptive coalitions” and are thriving from the bottom up, and others that can’t build such adaptive coalitions and 
> are rapidly deteriorating. You can find both on the coasts and both in the interior — and you can find both in just 
> one little corner of south-central Pennsylvania.
>
> I was invited in April to give a paid book talk here in Lancaster, and I was so blown away by the societal innovation 
> the town’s leaders had employed to rebuild their once-struggling city and county that I decided to return with my 
> reporter’s notebook and interview them.
>
> My original host was the Hourglass, a foundation founded by community leaders in Lancaster County in 1997, when the 
> city of Lancaster was a crime-ridden ghost town at night where people were afraid to venture and when the county’s 
> dominant industrial employer, Armstrong World Industries, was withering.
>
> Some of the leading citizens decided that “time was running out” — hence “Hourglass” — and that no cavalry was coming 
> to save them — not from the state’s capital or the nation’s capital. They realized that the only way they could 
> replace Armstrong and re-energize the downtown was not with another dominant company, but by throwing partisan 
> politics out the window and forming a complex adaptive coalition in which business leaders, educators, 
> philanthropists, social innovators and the local government would work together to unleash entrepreneurship and forge 
> whatever compromises were necessary to fix the city.
>
> Pretty much the exact opposite of what’s happening in Washington, D.C., today.
>
> For my 2016, “Thank You for Being Late,” I profiled the complex adaptive coalition — called the Itasca Project — that 
> had emerged to re-energize my hometown, Minneapolis. I’ve since seen such coalitions popping up all over the world — 
> from Knoxville, Tenn., to Sheridan, Wyo.; from Broward County, Fla., to Birmingham, Ala.; and from Mexicali, Mexico, 
> to the Western Galilee in Israel.
>
> One of the most successful is Hourglass, which defined its mission as being a “trusted source for information, 
> innovative ideas and insights that will help stakeholders, elected officials and voters make more informed and 
> enlightened decisions” to advance the community. In these dark days of our national politics, these emerging 
> coalitions are a real source of optimism for me.
>
> At 7:30 Friday morning in early June, the Hourglass leaders in Lancaster were all sitting around the kitchen table at 
> Art Mann Sr.’s house, as they do every Friday. The seven men and women representing different Lancaster societal and 
> business interests were discussing the region’s shortage of clean water, because of farm runoff, fertilizer and salt 
> on the streets.
>
> None is in city government or an elected politician; they’re just respected volunteer community activists who will 
> make a recommendation, based on research, to the city or county to get a problem fixed and help galvanize resources 
> to do it. They all know one another’s party affiliation, but they’ve checked them at Mann’s front door.
>
> “The key to it all is trust,” Mann explained to me. “Politically we are all different, and our experiences are 
> different. You can only get progress where there is trust. People trust that we are not in it for personal agendas 
> and not partisan agendas.  We will often host elected officials, and they will throw out ideas and we will give them 
> feedback. And they are not worried it will go out of this room.”
>
> As the breakfast wore on, I was reminded of the business philosopher Dov Seidman’s dictum that “trust is the only 
> legal performance-enhancing drug.” And I recalled Israeli societal innovator Gidi Grinstein’s dictum that what is 
> saving so many communities today is “leadership without authority — so many people stepping up to lead beyond their 
> formal authority.”
>
> Mann, a Republican local metals manufacturer who began his civic life running for the school board, was one of the 
> original conveners of Hourglass — after looking around Lancaster in the early 1990s and seeing a county that was 
> hemorrhaging jobs and a city that was dying and wholly unprepared for the 21st century.
>
> “My family has been here since 1740 and was always interested in public service,” Mann told me. “We could see that in 
> the late ’90s that the county was going to hell if we didn’t do something. People thought the city was unsafe. If we 
> let the city die, it would affect the whole county.”
>
> Greater Lancaster is a microcosm of America. The city has a population of 60,000, about 40 percent of whom are white, 
> 40 percent Latino — mostly Puerto Ricans whose parents came decades ago to process chickens. About 15 percent are 
> African-Americans, and the rest are a rainbow of Asians and immigrants and refugees from as far afield as 
> Afghanistan, Nepal, Iraq and Syria. The city, though, is ringed by largely white suburbs — and beyond them a 
> countryside dominated by Amish and Mennonite farmers and crafts people. The county’s total population is about 
> 600,000.
>
> [snip]
>
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> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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