The Radical Middle

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Polarization is an inherent flaw in our current system of representative government, says Atlee, president of the Co-Intelligence Institute (www.co-intelligence.org)."Majority rule forces us to be adversarial. It doesn't matter if you're recommending clean air, you're a special interest." Debate is the standard model we use for political discussion, with an implied winner and loser. The deliberative processes he advocates, on the other hand, help participants to step into a different mind-set in which they tap into a cooperative sense of "we the people" and pool their individual smarts to produce collective insights. "This is what the framers of the Constitution intended Congress to be," Atlee says.

In his recent book The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All (Writer's Collective, 2003), Atlee breathlessly chronicles the explosion of new experiments in deliberative democracy taking place around the globe -- from citizen wisdom councils to consensus conferences to citizen juries to large-scale electronic town meetings -- all of which apply innovative techniques to achieve consensus through dialogue, not debate. "Sometimes quite ordinary people come up with brilliant solutions when they work together well," he says.

Virginia Sloan Defending the Constitution

In the early '90s, Ginny Sloan, then a Democratic staffer for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, was growing nervous about the future of habeas corpus, the constitutional right of people accused of crimes to due process. Members of Congress were proposing new laws to limit that right. So Sloan formed the bipartisan Emergency Committee to Save Habeas Corpus, including dozens of prominent constitutional scholars, members of Congress, and activists from many political viewpoints. The group succeeded in staving off further attacks on habeas corpus for at least three more years, until the right turn under Newt Gingrich -- and the Oklahoma City bombings -- put more stress on the principle. When the House leadership changed hands in 1994, Sloan left Capitol Hill and in 1997 formed the Constitution Project (www.constitutionproject.org), an organization that uses the same model to deal with all sorts of sticky constitutional issues and advocates caution in amending the Constitution. On questions like the death penalty, war powers, defendants' right to counsel, and the proper balance of liberty and security post-9/11, the project has convened blue-ribbon panels of experts of all political stripes who work together to devise consensus recommendations to help break the partisan logjams in Congress and our state houses. "There's a place for people to advocate on the extremes on any issue -- such as abolition of the death penalty -- and with my other hats I do that," says Sloan, a devout civil libertarian. "But there's also a place for people to work on reform. Otherwise, we never get anything done."

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