POLITICS WE DESERVE

We desperately need to reinvent the way we think and talk about problem-solving in America today

You don’t have to choose between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, or Jared Kushner and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or market capitalism and state socialism, or the far right and the far left, or Fox News and MSNBC.

While these are the dominant, incessant, compulsive polarities of modern public discourse, the demand and the tendency to choose are traps. You can take your hand off the nut (or nuts), loosen your grip, let them both drop. With a free hand, you can reach out and take hold of another way of doing things in the public arena: of thinking and acting and creating impact that rebuilds communities, saves and improves countless lives, and restores a sense of stability and forward motion in our country.

This other way of doing things is based on several important choices.

You can choose to acknowledge that you are mixed in your views — not a captive of one category or another — and that being mixed doesn’t disqualify you from a significant role in the public arena.

You can choose to be mobile and flexible — aligning with different sets of people on different issues at different times.

You can choose to be nonpartisan or much less partisan — not a hamster on the wheel of the endless series of election cycles.

And you can choose to be institutional — not just a data source for the market or ideological harvesters of your personal preferences.

What does it mean to be mixed in this day and age?

I remember a dinner nearly 25 years ago in lower Manhattan. I was working as an organizer with our independent non-partisan citizens groups at the time. Our work in East Brooklyn — particularly the effort to build thousands of new affordable homes on the empty and then-worthless acres of Brownsville and East New York — had attracted the attention and praise of people connected with the Manhattan Institute, the city’s famous conservative think tank.

One of its key people had invited me to dinner, with him and another person who wrote for the institute’s publication, City Journal. We met at a nice restaurant, settled in, and ordered drinks. We began discussing our housing effort — which emphasized ownership and equity for the AfricanAmerican and Hispanic buyers who were lining up by the thousands to purchase our homes.

Up to that moment, the conversation reflected the relationship — positive and balanced, as it proved to be again in recent years — but all that evaporated when I described our efforts to pass a livingwage bill in the New York City Council — patterned on the success of our Baltimore IAF affiliate, BUILD, in 1994. The mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, an avid supporter of our Nehemiah housing strategy, was an equally avid opponent of our living wage measure. So were my two incredulous dinner companions.

How could a group that showed so much common

sense on the housing front propose such a ridiculous policy — $12 an hour for workers who provided janitorial, food service and security services as contract workers with the city — in another arena?

My dinner partners weren’t talking; they were shouting. I listened for a minute, then whispered, “Stop yelling.” They did not. So I said, “Look, if you keep this up, I’m out of here.” They just got louder. So I stood up and walked out of the place. The male half of the twosome followed me out to the street and kept shouting as I hailed a cab and headed home.

It wasn’t just our approach to a living wage that upset them. It was the of approaches that confounded them. I think I understand why. It’s easy to dismiss your ideological opponents, whom you consider totally benighted and utterly lost. But it’s quite another matter when you disagree with someone who, in part, is aligned with your views. They aren’t just opponents; they are heretics.

In part because both extremes react so violently to those with mixed views, in part because being mixed demands a decision to join a single party or faction, in part because pollsters would have a difficult time measuring this stance, being mixed isn’t seen as desirable or popular these days. And yet, the people at Gallup continue to show that Americans are consistently varied in their views — 36% identifying as conservative; 35% independent; and 26% liberal

Iwould argue that the mixed category is far larger than just those who call themselves independent — including the more moderate segments of conservatives and liberals. Only the most ideologically fixed on the far right and far left are not, or claim not to be. The largest party in the U.S., in my view, is a shadow party, the mixed party.

How does this play out? For the past 40 years, I’ve worked in tough, often violence-ridden neighborhoods. The mostly African American and Hispanic leaders there always wanted peace and protection from the gangsters who often

controlled their streets and housing developments. They wanted professional policing — not the over-policing that peaked in the useless application of wholesale stop and frisk tactics and not the underpolicing that occurred when certain departments simply wrote off whole sections of our cities.

Is this position — demanding a police force that responds promptly to an urgent call, knows the community well enough to distinguish the small minority of violent criminals from the overwhelming majority of peace-seeking citizens, and is held accountable if officers abuse their power — a liberal or conservative view? It’s a sophisticated combination of both. It’s mixed.

In Baltimore, where the level of violence continues to plague the poorest residents, our organization for decades has tried to get the police department to stop the whipsaw of under-policing and over-policing. Recently, our leaders concluded that the department was so inept and thoroughly corrupt that it was beyond reform. So they have