The New Political Compass, by Paul H. Ray
Contact: paulhray@aol.com, 707-933-1820
Download the article, “The New Political Compass” at www.culturalcreatives.org
An enormous new constituency is emerging in politics. And conventional politicians are ignoring it. Why? 1. They don't fit the old formulas. 2. What they want is outside the box of Washington politics. My research shows that the emerging values of this time support people-power in politics, not money-power. Values are our most important priorities in life, and some important new ones have been added to our culture in the last 40 years. Once you ask people about their values and all the political issues they actually care about, you see more than just left vs. right. You see a second political dimension that shows where the new opportunities are.
To mobilize them, we need to recapture some soul in politics—not dry, old analyses. It must feel juicy, with the importance and excitement of the same new social movements that gave rise to that second dimension in politics. And we'll also need a new, less corporate-dominated media, that covers the real stuff, so we can communicate with them.
The origins of this change are in the political culture that underlies election politics. In fact it's from our massive social learning from 20 kinds of movements over the last 40 years:
- Civil Rights, Social Justice and Minority Rights
- Peace (1960 to 1990, and its return today)
- Feminism, and Women's perspectives coming into public life for the first time
- Environmental, becoming Ecology over Economy/Limits to Growth
- Planetary: Anti-Globalization, Hunger,
- Personal growth & New spirituality
- Alternative Health Care
Organic Food & ‘Natural Everything'
- Anti-Corporate
There's a 40-80% Overlap in Broad Constituencies of any pair of social movements, because a typical Cultural Creative identifies with positions of half a dozen movements. All movement constituencies now share similar values and worldview, those of the Cultural Creatives, and all reframe the particular issues in the same ways.
Conventional wisdom says the following survey measures are all left vs. right, but in fact they are two independent dimensions, at right angles to each other:
1. Liberals vs. Social Conservatives (Call it West and East, rather than Left or Right)
- Self-identify as Liberal or Conservative
- Religious Right: con or pro
- Civil Liberties: pro-con
- Don't self-identify as “traditional,” or do
2. New Progressives vs. Business Conservatives (Call it Political North and South)
- Ecological Sustainability: pro or con
- National Health Care: pro or con
- Big Business: con or pro
- Limits to Growth: pro or con
- Feminism: pro or con
- Identify much less with either Left or Right
- Planetary more than nationalistic interests
- Ecological sustainability, not sentimental environmentalism, resource management
- Feminism rather than heroic models
- Personal growth over personal ambition
- Condemn corrupt, globalizing mega-corporations
- Get big corporate money out of politics
- Protect a positive future for our children
Both Left and Right can call the Political North's issues the issues of the Left, but 83% of these “New Progressives” don't identify with the Left. We need a new way of speaking to them, and about them. “New Progressives” might not be a name they'd agree with.
Demographics of Political North, The New Progressives
- 36%=70 Million Adult Americans
- 56% Female
- More in Northeast, Upper Midwest, Pacific Coast, fewest in Mountain States
- 15% people of color
- 9% Hispanic
- Same as National distribution on Age, Income, Education, Occupation
Important Political Facts: Among Likely Voters, Political North is:
- 45% of Likely Voters = 55 Million Voters
- 56% of all Swing Voters (and Swing Voters are 53% of Political North)
- 17% self-identify as Liberal vs. 33% as Conservative,
The rest self-identify as 39% ‘Center', 10% ‘Beyond Left-Right'
- 37% Democrat vs. 29% Republican, 27% Independent, 3% 3rd Party
A low marginal cost to mobilizing them:
- Volunteer more often and more hours,
- Give more money to good causes,
- Want to get actively involved
- Involved in more New Social Movement constituencies, and believe their worldviews
- Care more about changing the culture
- Want politics to deal more with the real emerging problems threatening our future
This shows Unmet Political Demand
- Their most important issues are all ‘outside the box' to Washington politics
- None of their big issues were in the last 4 national election campaigns
- This is the equivalent of political market failure. Politics abhores a vacuum even more than Nature does.
Lincoln's first political party was Whig. Remember the Whigs? Parties can die.
What Media Should Know About Political North, the “New Progressives”
They're unimpressed with the conventional politicians:
-
Inauthentic,
psychologically primitive:
Too much blaming, shaming, posturing, hatred/conflict-driven, violence imagery - Bereft of innovative, or win-win ideas
- Macho, not women-friendly, emotionally undeveloped, spiritually empty
- Nationalistic rather than planet-oriented
They don't like Left or Right political meetings or political literature, and complain it's all:
- Crummy group dynamics, factionalism
- Vicious infighting and power struggles
- Doctrinaire positions and rhetoric
- Self-justifying, psychologically naïve, projecting one's evil onto the other side and denigrating others
- Old rhetoric no one believes any more
- Not interested in rebuilding community
- Left's favorite solutions look ineffectual, and the Right's look harmful
The campaign process doesn't work either (see Patterson, The Vanishing Voter):
- No real way for citizens to get involved in professionally run campaigns: it's by and for professionals only, with a poor use of volunteers
- Campaign seasons go on too long—too tedious to pay continuing attention
- Negativity of news coverage cuts voter turnout—personalities and horse races—fail to cover issues important to voters
- Money-driven strategies
- Big-money-power corrupts all politics
- People-power is nowhere
Political North's big hot buttons:
- 80% fear their children or grandchildren will grow up in a worse world than they did. There's deep anxiety over the next 20-30 years.
- Don't believe politicians will address the key issues of our longer-term future.
- Do believe that Big Business is usually the main problem— AND that we're all implicated.
What they want: Big themes
- Good hard news political coverage by the media
- More psychological maturity in politics
- More psychological maturity in the media
- Real innovations for ecological sustainability
- Better education for all the children
- Better health care; cleaner food, air and water; less risk of environmental illness
- Get big corporate money out of politics
- Beyond moralizing and economic payoffs, to serve their new social and lifestyle concerns
- New rules of the game, and better players