Off to Denver

Next Wednesday, I'm off to Denver for three days of training by Al Gore's group, Climate Reality.  I'm very much looking forward to the scientific and public policy aspects of the training, because I can put these things to good use.

I'm also looking forward to meeting my fellow trainees, especially the twenty or so with whom I share a Climate Reality mentor.  Since we've been encouraged to introduce ourselves and begin a conversation, it seems logical that we'll function as a group within the much larger mass of trainees.

Since, thus far, everyone seems to be from either Virginia or Nebraska, it also appears that there's some expectation that we'll continue to cooperate - at a state level - after our training.

All of this seems fine.

Two things, however, concern me.  First of all, the organizers have asked about our menu preferences for the lunches we'll be served during training.  There were two options:  Vegetarian and Vegan.

Now, my concern is not that I won't have meat for lunch.  At 65, I generally eat meat only once a day, and not more than four ounces or so then.  Besides, Denver is famous for its steakhouses, and we'll be getting out every day in time for dinner.

What concerns me is this:  If this organization, after many previous training sessions, assumes that all its trainees are either vegetarians or Vegans, that suggests that the demographic of Climate Reality is pretty far to the cultural left.

My second concern comes from the introductions my colleagues have shared with each other.

Now, please don't misunderstand.  I'm going to be training with some incredible people.  A former career attorney with the DoJ's Civil Rights Division.  A former state legislator.  A media company executive.  A career Foreign Service officer.  A career leader in an NGO which operates in a dangerous part of the world.  Several military veterans, including a combat veteran.  Several entrepreneurs.  Several teachers and academics.

I'm honored and humbled to be among such remarkable people.

What troubles me is that, when I read their ideas about how to get America moving toward a rational policy on anthropogenic global climate change - and with all due respect to Mr. Obama, we've yet to have one - I get the sense that nearly everyone in the group (besides myself and one other Virginian) tends to see this fight as lying along the left-right, liberal-conservative, Democratic-Republican "spectrum".

In other words, the good guys are the liberals and Democrats.  The bad guys are the conservatives and Republicans.

And if that's the way things are, right away we're back in the two-party trench warfare which has paralyzed our country since I cast my first presidential ballot, 'way back in the Vietnam-haunted Election of 1972.

If climate change must be won through two-party trench warfare, I really hope those newly-discovered exoplanets around Trappist-1 will support life.  And that someone invents a warp drive during the next few decades.

Because if we have to wait for one side or the other to win America's entrenched, and increasingly extreme, two-party war, the world's only remaining super-power will remain indefinitely on the sidelines in the global effort to respond to planetary warming.

And if America doesn't lead, the job probably won't get done.

For some years now, I've been writing - here and elsewhere - that the only rational solution to our national paralysis lies in creating an effective third party, representing the largest politically-homeless group in the country.

That group does not, as many believe, consist of the "undecided", the "moderates", or the "centrists".  Undecided people, congenital moderates, and those who don't like taking sides, seldom turn into effective political soldiers.

The group I'm interested in consists, for the most part, of people who once considered themselves Republicans - moderate, liberal or progressive Republicans.  Folks who were driven out of the GOP when their party was inundated by two groups of former Democrats: Southern segregationists and Southern and Midwestern evangelicals.

The Strom Thurmond folks and the Jerry Falwell folks.

The influx of these former Democrats, in response to the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and Roe v. Wade, effected a change in the very DNA of the Party of Lincoln, transforming it into a second, very conservative, Democratic Party.

Which proceeded to take power under President Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat.

Political scientists marvelled that so many "Reagan Democrats" had been persuaded to vote Republican.  In fact, the "Reagan Democrats" were smarter than the pol-sci types.  They saw through the labels, and realized that, in voting for Reagan, they were still voting for a version of the Democratic Party.

And the decent, public-spirited, patriotic folks who traced their political heritage back to Hamilton, Clay, Webster, Lincoln, and TR found themselves without a political home.

As one of those people, I'm often asked why I didn't just become a Democrat.  The answer is, I tried.  But it wouldn't take.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of interest groups - mostly demographic groups - each with its own agenda.  It always was - right back to the 1791 "northern tour" Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took to forge an alliance with George Clinton's New York's faction and similar groups in New England.

Things didn't change when Andy Jackson reformed the party as a coalition of slaveowners, expansionists, and northern bankers who didn't want to be regulated.  The Democrats have always been a coalition - as parties born in opposition tend to be.  And coalitions are usually long on log-rolling and short on principle.

The Old Republican Party was another matter.  From its founding - in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and in favor of free soil - it stood for something.  It stood for a vision of the national interest, the general welfare - what the Founders called the Commonwealth.

There are still a great many Americans who would rally to such a unifying vision today.  Many vote for Democrats.  Many more vote for Republicans.  But mainly, we homeless Old Republicans loathe both parties because they represent coalitions of special interests.  Both seem more interested in scoring political points than in governing the nation and moving it forward.

Which brings me back to where I started.

In the battle over climate change, the cause of saving the planet seems to have gotten identified with liberalism and, strangely, with the Democratic Party - which has done precious little about the problem, even when it was in power.

The cause of climate change deniers has, similarly, been embraced by the  Republicans.  And a lot of people who should - and probably do - know better, still vote Republican because they can't bring themselves to vote for Democrats.

Which is why a nation in which most people understand that climate change is real and serious can't form a majority to do something about it.

The only way to win this fight is to understand what Winston Churchill saw in World War I.  In trench warfare, nobody wins.  You need to break the deadlock - either by outflanking your enemy, or by bringing in a huge new source of soldiers - in WWI, the Yanks - to break the stalemate.

Now, whether you consider it a flanking attack or a new source of troops, a new party - essentially the left wing of the Old Republican party - would break the deadlock.  Such a party represents the best chance we have to end the trench warfare and swing America into its rightful place as leader of the global effort to save the planet.

When I get to Denver, I hope to find a few folks - at least - who aren't so locked into the two-party, left-right mentality that they're open to the third-party idea.

If I find a few such people, maybe we can get together for dinner after training one night and make a start.

Perhaps at a good steakhouse.