Where politics can work in America: Our towns, USA
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.
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 Donald 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 adaptive coalitions and are rapidly deteriorating. You can find both on the coasts and in the interior — and you can find both in 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 today.
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 of the seven is in city government or is 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.”
As the breakfast wore on, I was reminded of 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.”