Category: deliberative politics
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David Mathews on Deliberative Democratic Politics
David Mathews, longtime president and CEO of the Kettering Foundation, was interviewed recently by AL.com. In a brief passage, he gives perhaps the best and most concentrated description of deliberative democratic politics I have seen. For those who have heard Dr. Mathews describe various aspects of democracy — its origins, how it can be seen…
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The Gymnasia
Imagine you walk into a gymnasium. Different people doing different things all over. There are all sorts of stations: weightlifting areas, cardio machines, fitness rooms. There is a yoga room and a room for a spin class. There is a basketball court. Too, there are all sorts of people all throughout the gym. They’re each…
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Conditions vs Topics vs Issues in Deliberative Politics
Politics runs on issues, which are questions about what should be done. Deliberative politics runs on issues that are widely seen as shared and critical. Yet, in public discourse, conditions, topics, and issues are often conflated. Conditions are societal: norms or pathologies in how individuals or groups behave. Example: a state of division, or divisiveness, is…
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Getting Past Polarities: “How Should We Reopen?”
This recent Thomas Edsall piece got me thinking, and reflecting on what we have seen emerging over the question that might roughly be phrased as: How should we reopen society? This is a question that turns on things that are held deeply valuable. It is not suited to a binary approach. Most news articles do portray…
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Covid-19: More Than Two Sides to the Reopening Question
On the really thorny questions that we face in public life, there are usually more than just two sides, yet the way we talk about them assumes an us-vs-them division that gets in the way of clear talk. Writing in late April, 2020, the question for many states and cities is: How should we reopen,…
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A Personal Mission of Agency
Each year-end I look back and reflect. I look at all areas of my life: family, professional, personal, spiritual, physical, financial. Across all of the major areas of my life, this has been a pivotal year of conceptual progress for me. I developed great clarity on my personal mission. And three ideas that began to…
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Finding Tension
One of the things that gets in the way of making sound collective judgments is that, too often, we avoid facing the tensions inherent in the problems we share. When we sit down to talk about what to do about some community problem, we avoid tensions and indeed we actively seek to remove them when…
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Shared Problems and Public Deliberation
I recently began thinking about different ways to convey the nature of problems that are suited to public deliberation, and I had an insight that I could draw a picture of those two different dimensions. I scrawled this down on a scrap of paper, but more recently I’ve tried to make it clearer. This is…
Brad Rourke 