democratic communities

Aristotle, and the Stoic thinkers as well, refer to civic friendship, and this offers a clue about how to think about the common good. The adage “friends have all things in common” may refer to a community of material property (as in “the commons”), but more fundamentally it refers to the experience of inhabiting a common lifeworld, and the mutual... See more

Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. On a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to

... See more

Something extraordinary can happen when we come together to study, think, and talk about urgent problems— attending collectively in a way that changes the very ground of possibility.

Liberality proposed a different way of relating across disagreement and division. It built toward liberalism’s great insight, what Edmund Fawcett, in his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” calls liberalism’s first guiding idea: “Conflict of interests and beliefs was, to the liberal mind, inescapable. If tamed and turned to competition in a... See more

the fundamental question of how to build power in a world of real, grounded clashes among your constituents. It happens through creating strong relationships of mutual respect between groups that might often have strong differences. And where those divisions are sufficiently deep that they might tear the coalition apart, it is often better to... See more

The first time we spoke, Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez brought up a term from motorcycling. Democrats, she said, had grown so obsessed with the threat of fascism that for them, it had become an “obstacle fixation” — an intense focus that causes you to end up running right into the thing you’re afraid of hitting. “You do not save democracy by running... See more