State of the World Forum
NEW POLITICAL COMPASS PROJECT
A STRATEGY TO DEVELOP A PUBLIC EDUCATION CAMPAIGN TO MOBILIZE A NEW CONSTITUENCY IN AMERICAN AND GLOBAL POLITICS
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Executive Summary
New research data just released by Dr. Paul Ray shows that politics in the United States is no longer along a horizontal left/right divide. There is now a much more complex political landscape shaped by the emergence of what Dr. Ray calls the “Political North,” which is shifting the political center of gravity in a progressive direction. A significant majority of Americans now express liberal or progressive values (53%).
The survey also shows that 70%-80% of the American public as a whole support strong action to deal with the global climate crisis. This crisis is now seen to be a full-blown planetary emergency, even though it is slow burning compared to economic recession issues, or the price of oil. The public wants decisive action on global warming now from both business and government, and people are prepared to engage with the issue themselves.
This polling indicates that creating an alliance between progressive values and green politics could be a winning strategy for this election. The single most decisive move that would create such an alliance would be to dramatically broaden public awareness and support of Al Gore’s July 17th challenge for the United States to source all its electricity by renewable energy in ten years. This challenge fits with the public’s deep and growing concern with global warming.
Such a move would not only be good politics, if adopted it would ignite an economic boom in energy production, redirect the country away from war, and create millions of green jobs. Whichever presidential candidate adopts this strategy will dramatically enhance his chances to win this election and potentially ignite a new era of global politics.
It is to help build this strategic coalition of people and ideas that State of the World Forum has partnered with a coalition of groups to implement a sustained public education campaign around the release of these new findings and to generate support for a Global Call to Action around Gore’s proposal The campaign is designed to activate the emerging population of “New Progressives” who are so fundamentally changing the political landscape and to educate influence leaders across a range of disciplines that the paradigm for culture and politics is fundamentally shifting in ways that make it possible for dramatic and decisive action on current global ecological challenges.
This public education campaign builds on extensive work and fundraising already completed by Dr. Paul Ray through his Institute for the Study of the Emerging Wisdom Culture at Wisdom University, which has conducted the study, is developing a global network of countries doing similar studies, and is supporting the 2009 State of the World Forum in Washington designed to activate and mobilize a new constituency in American and global politics.
1. Public Education Campaign
The strategy, as we see it, needs to be in three parts:
1) We need support to mount a mass education of influence leaders in the media, politics, finance, business, academia and entertainment, as well as the American public at large, that there is in fact a new progressive force in American politics that CAN WIN ELECTIONS. The Cultural Creatives have now reached critical mass so we must organize accordingly. We are no longer on the margins. We now constitute the emerging center of gravity for politics, values and culture. We therefore must educate everyone we know, including the candidates and political operatives currently in action, that a new voter constituency has emerged.
2) We need to seed the internet and mainstream media with a similar but adjusted campaign. We need to create a mass viral communication that is reverberating all over the web designed to get the word out about the Cultural Creatives, the Political North, and about the power that they now collectively wield.
3) We need to connect globally with our partnerships. The potential is not just in the US, but in partnership with other groups doing which have conducted studies on the Cultural Creatives in Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Holland and Hungary, with one in Sri Lanka being started, the first non G8 country. Because the challenge is global, our thinking and our strategy must be global as well and from the very beginning.
Polling from all the other countries shows that, like the United States, roughly one third of the public in all the countries share progressive values. Our strategy is thus designed to catalyze a global network that, because it is already backed by one third of the public, gives us a significant advantage to previous campaigns such as the land mines, third world debt and various human rights issues. We do not have to create a constituency. It is already there. What we have to do is energize it.
Our intention is to build two simultaneous tracks:
Track One: Building a Team:
We have assembled a core team of people who are seasoned and dynamic connectors and conveners, who know various fields and can gain access to and engage key opinion leaders and change agents. These include:
• Celia Alario, media strategist, consultant and trainer;
• Jim Garrison, President, State of the World Forum and Wisdom University;
• James Hanusa, civil society outreach and consultant, event producer;
• Lora O’Connor, cross-sector strategist and producer;
• Andy Orgel, media professional with extensive contacts in mainstream media;
• Paul Ray, sociologist conducting the research on the Cultural Creatives and the New Political Compass;
• Margaret Schaub, media professional and consultant;
• Benjamin Schick, President, Media One;
• Joel Silberman, media consultant and trainer.
This group has expertise in:
• Presenting information to the global media in all its dimensions;
• Training people to speak effectively to the media and publicly about this campaign;
• Shaping grassroots campaigns;
• Serving neworks that would want to use the research findings and join the campaign;
• Developing strategic alliances and new constituencies.
Others will be retained as we develop the campaign.
Track Two - Engaging key clusters of thought leaders in various sectors:
The key components of our plan include:
• Providing information to clusters of key opinion leaders and influencers in various sectors who will apply the findings to their campaign, outreach and messaging in the short term;
• Using existing events or gatherings to disseminate Paul’s data (examples: Netroots Nation to reach bloggers, Aspen Ideas Festival for policy makers and high leverage leaders in all sectors, Annual Gathering of Society for Environmental Journalists to reach environmental reporters, etc.);
• Using events during and around the Democratic Convention in Denver August 25-28 (strictly non-partisan opportunities exist for reaching into all media outlets and leaders in most identified sectors via presentations, press releases and meetings onsite);
• Designing convenings and conference calls with decision makers and influencers in sectors we wish to inform/influence;
• Developing creative feedback opportunities to offer back to us innovative ways to leverage the findings into shifts in communications and activities on various campaigns;
• Working with organizations that will document how they integrate the data so we can develop case studies and metrics about how this data has created wins in the coming months- for integration into film, book, conference, etc. and additional outreach as the public education effort unfolds;
2. The Central Themes of the Public Education Campaign:
The central themes of all these inter-related initiatives are:
1. The crisis of global warming is now urgent requiring immediate attention. It is not something 10- 20 years into the future. The crisis is here, now. This is especially true for a ‘now’ that includes the reaction time of countries to mobilize and gear up to face major crises. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, puts the matter forcefully: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Other scientists have made numerous similar statements that affirm this sentiment ranging from Lester Brown to James Hansen and Al Gore.
2. What is as hopeful as the gravity of the crisis is the growing global influence of the Cultural Creatives who now constitute fully one third of the public in the United States, Europe and Japan. The implications of this emerging cultural group are as profound as the consequences of global warming are imminent. They are having a profound influence in the marketplace and form the core of the new voter constituency in politics Dr. Ray calls the Political North. When one adds to this the fact that 70-80% of the U.S. public now see the climate crisis as very serious and want decisive action, one has an overwhelming majority of the public engaged with and prepared to deal seriously with global warming.
3. The enabling technologies and big idea approaches we need to solve our crises are also already here. We are not in a crisis without a solution. The solutions have been around for some time and most are either ready to be applied or in late stages of development. They are not being recognized because: a) it is not in the short-term interest of today’s ‘sunset’ industries and financial institutions to ‘see’ them; and b) there is no society-wide vision that supports seeing them as parts of a larger solution. While there are no magic bullets of single solutions to our crisis, a network of complementary approaches is already arising. Taken together they can solve our global challenges, especially if the new voter constituency represented by the cultural creatives demands in a sustained and focused way that the crisis be addressed and the enabling technologies be implemented.
In effect, we have both an emerging carrier population of progressive values and the technologies to solve our challenges, each in very distinct areas of society but both occurring simultaneously. Bringing these aspects together and synergizing the trends they represent is an essential part of the over-all strategy we seek to implement.
Dr. Ray has been studying the values and lifestyles of Americans for several decades and is credited with the identification of the “Cultural Creatives” -- a group that only began to emerge in world culture fifty years ago but which now number over fifty million adults in the United States, substantially outnumbering social and financial conservatives. It is the influence of the this wave of cultural creativity in the realm of politics that has generated the Political North.
For more information on his work, click here.
When the Cultural Creatives first began to emerge in the 1960s, they counted for less than 3% of the American public. At that time, roughly half of the adult population were “Traditionalists “ – people whose values were derived from a person or event in the past; and the other half were “Modernists” – people who embraced the scientific method and human reason to determine their values. By 1999, the number of Cultural Creatives in the US had risen to 26% of the adult U.S. population (roughly 50 million). During this time, the Traditionalists had fallen from 50% to 24%, and the Moderns had remained roughly the same at 50%. Cultural Creatives have been slowly growing at about 1-2% a year for five decades.
Dr. Ray’s new study shows that by 2008 the Cultural Creatives have moved up to roughly 30% of the American adult population. In a survey completed in the spring of 2006 in Italy, Cultural Creatives constituted 35% of the Italian population, and most of Western Europe looks comparable, yielding estimations of eighty to ninety million Cultural Creatives throughout Europe. A study released in early 2008 in Japan indicates that 35% of the public there are Cultural Creatives.
In addition to politics, the power of the Cultural Creatives is already being felt in the marketplace. In 1999, building on Paul Ray's data, the Gaiam Corporation established LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), an association of companies focused on health and fitness, the environment, personal development, sustainable living, and social justice. LOHAS companies practice "responsible capitalism" by providing goods and services using economic and environmentally sustainable business practices. LOHAS consumers are primarily Cultural Creatives and are interested in products covering a range of market sectors and sub-sectors, including: Green building supplies, socially responsible investing and "green stocks", alternative healthcare, organic clothing and food, personal development media, yoga and other fitness products, and eco-tourism. See the following link for more information: http://www.lohas.com/about.htm
In 2006 LOHAS companies earned $230 billion in the United States and over $500 billion worldwide. The market has been growing by about 10% - 15% per year since 2000. Every indication is that this market and this buying power will only increase in the future.
What makes this phenomenon doubly significant is that new research shows that this value system is embraced by the Millennium Generation, those young people aged fifteen to twenty five. While fifty years ago, the generation of the sixties experienced what sociologists called a “generation gap” with their elders, the children of the Baby Boomers seem to agree with their parents on many basic values. If further research bears this tentative conclusion out, this means that the Cultural Creative phenomenon is not only growing among adults worldwide but is being embraced by many of their children. It is both cross cultural and cross generational.
This data has the potential to positively affect how we will shape the future because as an emerging force in society, Political North, if mobilized, could wield enormous social, moral and political influence. They are the Americans who can create the most possibilities for constructive change during the next decade and are the part of the population most capable of exerting a positive social and political influence. This is equally true for their counterparts in Europe and Japan.
4. Summary
The central fact about the new constituency from a political perspective is that, like the Cultural Creatives as a whole, the Political North is a population and not yet a group. It is comprised of individuals who hold progressive values, but 5 out of 6 of them don’t identify with the Left or liberalism, or with the Right or conservatism, and yet they are not mobilized into a coherent political force independent of those groups and the political parties they dominate. The Political North represents the largest single values group in the country but they have virtually no presence in the current political dialogue or debate. It is to remedy this that this entire campaign is directed.
The key questions, therefore, are: how can we identify, mobilize, and turn this emerging cultural group into an effective moral, economic and political presence? What are the possibilities of linking cultural creatives globally? How do we focus social and political attention on the innovations already here that could solve our problems? These and other questions will be explored as we develop our national public education campaign.
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