Rebuilding Common Ground

If your car breaks down, traveling may become more difficult, but you don’t stop going to important places like work or school. Instead, you find alternate ways to get where you need to go and make repairing your car a top priority. If your stove stops working, you may have fewer options for healthy and inexpensive meals, but you don’t stop eating. Again, you turn to less optimal food choices until your stove can be fixed. Similarly, when a country is politically gridlocked, the first job of government is to ensure the continuance of basic services, but an immediate next step should be resolving the gridlock.

This is why, in addition to maintaining key government services, addressing the debilitating political gridlock that has gripped the U.S. in recent years is a top priority for the Benjamin Franklin Party. We do this by living the Benjamin Franklin Party’s values and leading with civility. In previous Poor Richard’s Blog posts, we’ve talked about civility and the Franklin Party’s values of Science, Justice, and Foresight, but how exactly do these things help resolve political gridlock?

The short answer is that they do so by expanding our shared political common ground. Common ground provides a path out of gridlock because it identifies the things we can agree on. Let’s take a look at the Franklin Party’s values and civility to see how they can rebuild our nation’s diminished common ground.

SCIENCE
Scientific evidence as a basis for good governance expands our political common ground because the testing of this evidence occurs in the most universal common ground of them all, objective reality. And the scientific method requires that all procedures and evidence, for or against a policy, be publicly available for anyone to review and verify. This public sharing of procedures and evidence is a crucial way science promotes common ground.

JUSTICE
Everyone wants to be treated fairly. People may wish for preferential treatment, but the very least anyone will settle for is to be treated the same as everyone else. This makes the principle of justice a common ground for us all. When we focus on justice, we are operating from solid common ground.

FORESIGHT
Foresight is common ground because the future is common ground. The future is a destination where all of us and our progeny will one day live. Considering the future impacts of our current actions is an exercise that benefits the common ground of this mutual destiny.

CIVILITY
Humans are reciprocal animals. If someone does something nice for us, we feel obligated to return the favor. Similarly, if someone wrongs us, we are apt to seek revenge. This reciprocity instinct is a common ground in human behavior that can be extended either negatively or positively. When extended negatively it leads to the shutdown of cooperation and the political gridlock we’ve been experiencing. By leading with civility, the Benjamin Franklin Party starts a positive cycle of reciprocity that creates a space where productive work can be accomplished. Even in cases where we agree to respectfully disagree, if the entire interaction is civil, no relationships are damaged, and the possibility of future cooperation is preserved.

Political gridlock is preventing us from moving beyond basic governance to the more complex important issues facing our country, such as climate change, housing affordability, and immigration. The quickest way to return to work on these vital topics is to rebuild our shared common ground. That is why rebuilding common ground is a top priority for the Benjamin Franklin Party and something our values and civility naturally support. Let’s rebuild our shared common ground in the U.S. for the common good of all Americans.

Yours in republic keeping,
James Carroll
BFPNC Chair