New World Alliance
Explanations have touched on history (the U.S. was not ready), culture (the Alliance was too counter-cultural), process (the commitment to near-unanimous consensus decision-making was too onerous), leadership (the people on the Governing Council did not have the personalities or skills to build a mass organization), transformational political assumptions and behaviors (said to be inappropriate, self-defeating, or cult-like), and more.
[nb 1] Following the dissolution of the organization, many former Governing Council members and other founders of the Alliance – many near the beginning of their careers[6] – took transformational ideas into a variety of organizational settings, including the early U.S. Green Party movement and the multinational corporate world.
Cultural critic Annie Gottlieb interviewed an Alliance member who said its goal was "to embody a new holistic vision of politics in America.
"[22] Scholar J. Gordon Melton and his colleagues focused on the Alliance's commitment to combining supposed opposites – left and right, personal and political.
[29]Arthur Stein, a political scientist at University of Rhode Island, pointed to another passage in an Alliance document: The NWA seeks to break away from the old quarrels of "left against right" and help create a new consensus based on our heartfelt needs.
Eighty-nine of them volunteered to stand for the GC, and the first 39 GCers were chosen by a variety of means: 40% by mail ballot, 30% by lottery, 20% by Satin (who'd met the questionnaire-answerers during his bus tour), and 10% by four women.
"[36] In 1980, the 39 GC members included Jim Benson, Clement Bezold, Lex Hixon, Miller Hudson, John McClaughry, Corinne McLaughlin, Kirkpatrick Sale, Mark Satin, Eric Utne, Robert Buxbaum of the Office of the New York City Council President, Jeff Cox of the Rodale Institute, Leonard Duhl of UC Berkeley, Bethe Hagens of Governors State University, Miller Hudson of the Colorado legislature, Donald Keys of the World Federalists, James Ogilvy of SRI International, Bob Olson of the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress, James Turner of The Chemical Feast, Gail Whitty of the NOW-Detroit board of directors, Malon Wilkus of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, and Rarihokwats, founder of Akwesasne Notes newspaper from the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne.
Belden Paulson, a political scientist at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, says that in the early years the Alliance had "a kind of missionary zeal" to establish local chapters across the U.S.
"[38] It also reports that Alliance chapters and projects claimed to use "short periods of silence [in order] to draw on our intuition in making decisions and solving conflicts.
It is an attempt to go beyond the polarity of left-against-right by integrating the highest values in our nation's conservative and liberal heritage with the learning that has taken place in recent social movements.
[6] A Transformation Platform: The Dialogue Begins discussed crime and justice, economics, science and technology, health, the environment, global affairs, and more.
It includes commentary and dissenting opinion, and it asks readers to criticize it and help improve it, so that over the years ahead it can serve as a focus for thousands of people to cooperate in thinking through the changes we need to make.
[40]These were day-long or weekend experiences designed to make participants more deeply aware of the political process and their own potential for using it to heal society.
[6] According to a letter Paulson quotes from one of the intentional-community residents, there was great tension at the consultation between pragmatists and visionaries – until the last day, when "it all came together, starting with the politicians who, one by one, spoke of how this opened whole new horizons for them.
[2] It boasted nine founding sponsors – Ernest Callenbach, Willis Harman, Hazel Henderson, Karl Hess, Patricia Mische (co-author of Toward a Human World Order[43]), Jeremy Rifkin, James Robertson, Carl Rogers, and John Vasconcellos.
[2] The newsletter's annual "Transformational Book Award" was voted upon by 70 hand-picked academics and think tank staffers from across the U.S.[31] The Alliance restructured itself in 1982.
For example, New Realities, a glossy transformation-oriented magazine, devoted a 3,000-word article to the organizing effort,[1] and futurist Hazel Henderson pointed her readers beyond the U.S. Citizens Party to the "more visionary" movement incorporating as the New World Alliance.
Speaking on a panel with two Alliance GC members at an Association for Humanistic Psychology conference in 1982, political scientist Walter Truett Anderson rejected the concept of transformation.
For example, in her book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, attorney Constance Cumbey warned that New Age ideas were being "synergistically enhanced by the parallel operation of networking organizations such as New World Alliance.
Behaviors associated with the sandbox of political impotency include: pronouncement of actual or imminent success, confusion of goals and results, an acritical stance, hubris, an incapacitating dialect, pseudo holism, egalitarian blinders, and self-centeredness.
[52][nb 7] Later that decade Satin referred to his former colleagues as "beautiful losers,"[54] and even in the 2000s he was writing about what he saw as the Alliance's "ineptness" and its failure to understand and seize the moment.
[24] A more systemic critique by a GC member was Michael Marien's essay "The Transformation as Sandbox Syndrome," published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology in 1983.
[50] His targets in the essay include mistaking lofty goals for political significance, loving-kindness for effective action, and good intentions for actual results.
[57] Toward the end of its existence, Alliance chair Bob Olson wrote – in a spirit of acceptance rather than blame – that the GC did not have the "personalities and skills" to create the kind of dynamic mass-membership organization that had originally been envisioned.
For example, GC members Corinne McLaughlin and Stephen Woolpert helped develop the Ecological and Transformational Politics Section (section #26) of the American Political Science Association,[25][59] Leonard Duhl helped initiate the Healthy Cities program at the World Health Organization,[64] and Alanna Hartzok co-founded the Earth Rights Institute.
James Ogilvy co-founded the Global Business Network to introduce futures thinking and scenario planning to multinational corporations.
[71] Marc Sarkady became a global management consultant explicitly committed to "organizational transformation" and "visionary leadership";[72] one of his earliest challenges was trying to build teamwork among General Motors executives.
[73] Malon Wilkus, an intentional community activist while on the GC,[33] eventually became head of American Capital Strategies and won praise in a book devoted to "creative inside reformers.
"[74] Richard B. Perl founded an international investment company helping Japanese investors do environmentally friendly real estate development in the U.S.[75] He also partnered with a French chocolate manufacturer.
[nb 12] These addressed a variety of traditional and emerging subjects, including intentional communities,[83] the future of work and health,[84] bioregionalism,[85] the interconnectedness of global issues,[86] small-scale participatory democracy,[70] social entrepreneurship,[87] sustainable cities,[88] environmental technologies,[89] radical centrism,[90] land rights,[91] transpartisanship,[92] and spiritual politics.
