Building a Caring Democracy

We are excited to share with you articles in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies issue on Caring Democracy. Riane Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Studies and founder of the Caring Economy Campaign, is the Guest Editor for the Winter 2017 issue.

Articles include

“Building a Caring Democracy: Four Cornerstones” and “Roadmap to a Caring Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism” by Riane Eisler,” Getting Back on Track to Being Human”, by Darcia Narvaez, “Core Support for the New Economy”, by Neva Goodman, “Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and Duties: From Domination to Partnership” by Lester R. Kurtz, “The Original Partnership Societies: Evolved Propensities for Equality, Prosociality, and Peace”, by Douglas P. Fry and Genevive Souillac, and The Possibility of a Pluralist Commonwealth Evolutionary Reconstruction Toward a Caring and Just Political Economy” by Gar Alperovitz. Community Voices features Caring Economy Advocate Sharon Sund’s “The Path Forward” and “Case Study: “Care” as a Political Winner” by Meredith Loomis Quinlan.
pubs.lib.umn.edu/ijps

We invite you to read Riane Eisler’s call to action – Building an Integrated Progressive Agenda: The Post-Election Crisis and Its Opportunities

This comprehensive document is a deeper look and detailed outline of new thinking required to understand Domination/Partnership social systems in the current political environment, the four cornerstones of partnership, and a call to action.

THE INTEGRATED PROGRESSIVE POLITICAL AGENDA
Download the new document

This document includes updated charts containing:

• Core Configurations of Domination Systems and Partnership Systems
• Key elements of the Domination and the Partnership Political Agendas
• Suggestions for reclaiming emotionally charged words such as family and values.

 

Riane Eisler: The 2016 election laid bare the urgent need for an integrated progressive agenda. Our challenge is to prevent cyclical regressions that cause so much suffering and hold us back from building a more equitable and caring world. Meeting this challenge is a long-term project based on an in-depth analysis of what lies behind the 2016 election results.

Progressives will respond in the Trump era with an array of campaigns aimed at combatting the loss of hard-won gains. However, existing assumptions and institutions are proving incapable of effectively dealing with massive socio-economic and technological shifts, and Trump was able to exploit people’s fears and insecurities. We have been here before, as people vote for easy answers from a dominating figure who promises to make their country great again. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, people are understandably focused on the policy threats. But we must not be just reactive. To be proactive, we must first take a deep look at what underlies the impulse of many people to turn to strong-man leaders in times of economic and social upheavals.

A Deeper Look

Economic insecurities, false news, hacking, and voter suppression were important factors in the 2016 election. But the question is why these led so many voters to elect a man who incited scapegoating of immigrants and other minorities, who bragged about his sexual assaults, and debased women? Why did so many Americans vote for someone who painted women as disgusting and untrustworthy, as in his call to lock her up? Was that really about the emails or was it about punishing a female candidate for aspiring to powers rightfully belonging to men, as indicated by Trump’s announcement of a possible cabinet post for General Petraeus who, unlike Hillary, actually breached email security? What led so many people to elect a man who claimed that he alone had the answers, condoned violence at his rallies, and presented himself as a strong-man savior?

To answer these questions, we need new thinking, and new thinking requires new social categories that go beyond the traditional religious vs. secular, right vs. left, capitalist vs. socialist, or Eastern vs. Western. Societies in these conventional categories all fail to take into account findings from psychology and neuroscience showing that what children experience and observe impacts how their brains develop hence their beliefs and actions, including how they vote.

New Thinking: The Domination/Partnership Social Systems

Analysis of society through the lenses of the domination system and the partnership system reveals connections that are invisible through the lenses of the common right vs. left categories. These new categories show how society constructs childhood and gender relations – the relations children first experience and observe – as integral to what people consider normal, possible, and moral in all relations, from intimate to international.

Be they secular like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union or religious like Eastern and Western fundamentalist, regressive societies — characterized by political and economic domination, injustice and violence advance their political agenda on the foundation of domination, injustice, and even violence in gender and parent/child relations. They recognize that the four cornerstones for either partnership or domination systems are 1) family/childhood relations, 2) gender relations, 3) economics, and 4) language/narratives about human nature and human possibilities.

For most progressives, however, parent-child and gender relations are peripheral. While progressives understand the importance of economics, they do not recognize the importance of the distribution of resources within families or how undervaluing caring work undermines progressive principles. All too often they buy into the old stories about a flawed human nature where rankings of domination are just the way things are.

Our job is to make progressives aware that regressive politics and economics are only the top of a domination pyramid, and unless we leave behind traditions of domination in the gender and parent-child relations that are cornerstones of the pyramid, domination, political, and economics will keep rebuilding themselves on these foundations in different forms.

The Unified Regressive Agenda vs. the Fragmented Progressive Agenda

Regimes like the Nazis or religious fundamentalists like ISIS have a unified social/political agenda that promotes strongman rule in both the family and the state. For them, subordinating women and anything considered feminine, such as caregiving or nonviolence, is naturally or divinely ordained. They promote controlling children through corporal punishment, so that children learn, before their brains are fully formed, that disobeying orders, no matter how unjust, is very painful.

By contrast, progressives have had a fragmented agenda, lacking an understanding of the foundational importance of gender and childrearing. So embedded is this blindness that progressives ignore not only the historical and cross-cultural evidence, they even ignore the statistical evidence.

For example, the Center for Partnership Studies’ pioneering statistical research report, Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, shows that the status of women is a powerful predictor of a nation’s general quality of life. Subsequent Gender Gap Reports by the World Economic Forum show that nations like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, which have the lowest gender gaps and invest heavily in good early childhood and parenting education, are highly economically competitive as well as equitable nations.

In sum, because progressives have lacked an integrated social/political agenda, they have not focused on building a solid foundation for a partnership system. Instead, they have left the foundation for domination systems in place, and it is on this foundation that domination economics and politics keep rebuilding themselves. It is on this foundation that Trump was elected.

First Steps toward an Integrated progressive agenda

Making the Invisible Visible

The first step toward an integrated progressive agenda is making visible the obstacles that make it so hard to see how injustice, repression, and violence in gender and parent-child relations are connected to injustice, repression, and violence in politics and economics.

Investigating why so many people were susceptible to Hitler’s messages of hate, scapegoating, and oppression, studies have shown that growing up in authoritarian families where the normative ideal was male dominance and children were harshly punished, is typical of highly prejudiced people who admire strong leaders.[1]

Other studies have shown that people growing up in authoritarian, male-dominated, punitive families tend to vote for hard punitive policies, such as funding for weapons and building prisons while voting against soft or caring policies, which they associate with the feminine.[2]

These kinds of findings indicate that families that are highly punitive and male-dominated tend to make people vulnerable to denial, which extends to other areas, such as the denial of climate change and human rights violations in families and countries. This denial also leads to deflection of fear and pain into scapegoating and the election of strongman demagogues. The domination system keeps women “in their place” and distorts political choices by privileging hard or masculine policies over soft or feminine ones. Moreover, the ranking of males over females is a template children internalize for other in-group vs. out-group thinking be it of different races, religions, or sexual orientations.

Gender and Values

Another important connection we must make visible is that a rise in the status of women is accompanied by a rise in the value of traits and activities generally associated with women. We see this in more partnership-oriented U.S. subcultures, where fathers are today doing the women’s work of feeding and diapering babies. And we see it in nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where half of the national legislators are women, and caring for people is a priority.

These more partnership-oriented nations have: 1) more egalitarianism in both family and state; 2) more gender equity; and 3) less abuse and violence. Societies oriented to the domination side of the social scale have: 1) strongman rule in both family and state; 2) ranking of men and masculinity over women and femininity; 3) abuse and violence to maintain rankings of domination – man over man, man over woman, or man over nature.

Economic Policies

As detailed in The Real Wealth of Nations, neither capitalism nor socialism can meet our unprecedented economic, social, and environmental challenges. This is not only because both came from early industrial times and we are now in the post-industrial era; it is also because both came from times when the West was still more heavily weighted to the domination side of the social scale.

Neither Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) nor Karl Marx considered the indispensable work of caring for people and caring for our environment productive work. This has had terrible consequences for women, who still do most of the care work for free in households and for low pay in the market – a major factor in the disproportionate poverty of women, (and their families), worldwide. It has also had terrible consequences for us all since devaluing the work of caring has led to economic policies guided by the uncaring, hard values that are our legacy from more rigid domination times when caring for people, starting in early childhood, and for nature, was deemed only reproductive work – a label still perpetuated in economic schools today

Today, when automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence have already replaced millions of jobs, and it is predicted that job loss will escalate exponentially, and when caring for nature is a matter of species survival, we must redefine what is, and is not productive work. This is our crisis and our opportunity.

The Center for Partnership Study’s Caring Economy Campaign was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. Our work shows that policies that reward care work – like paid parental and sick leave, high quality, well-paid early childhood education, and caregiver tax credits – are essential, not only in human terms but in purely financial ones if we are to have the high-quality human capital needed for our post-industrial age.

As our Caring Economy Campaign makes visible the economic benefits of the partnership system, it also exposes how the domination system is totally maladaptive economically in our age of rapidly changing technologies

Call to Action

The shock of this election has yielded an outpouring of pleas from progressives asking, What can we do now?

We recommend immediate steps in our memo, What Can We Do Right Now? and you will hear some on-the-ground use of support for caring for children and the elderly in homes that, in a district that heavily voted for Trump, elected a progressive state legislator who ran on a platform promising to support this work.

But we must do the long-term work, and I urge the progressive community to work from a systemic perspective and develop, disseminate, and implement an integrated progressive agenda.

Many of Trump’s promises cannot be delivered. Let us be ready for the even more disheartened and angry citizen, with the alternative of a blueprint for a caring democracy and economy. Let us demonstrate that democracy works when we have a partnership system.

[1] Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswick, E., Levinson, D., & Nevitt Stanford, R. (1964). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: John Wiley & Sons. [2] Milburn, M. & Conrad, S. (1996). The Politics of Denial. Cambridge: MIT Press.