Perhaps it began with NBC, or was it ABC or CBS, that we first were presented with the visual on the floor of “election central” of states turning red or blue, as electoral college victories were awarded to each presidential candidate. It was actually a progression that began taking hold in 1976, advancing in popularity each year.
What was really advancing was the progression of the division of people into subsets which were more and more manipulated into opposing camps. These camps were increasingly associated not with parties, but with narrowing classification, which were then, cleverly attributed to the parties. These classifications became driving forces for enclosing people into ideological subsets.
What began as a media fad has been transformed to become an ever increasing methodology for a range of ideologies (political, religion, racial, gender), framing and advancing their cause.
Moving Forward to Inclusive and Effective Modes of Governing
There are people who tend toward historic modes of government regimes. As “We The People” seek a path to a pluralistic, inclusive, democratic society, we cut against some historic tendencies in the expression of human nature and political structures.
The Electoral College served the transition from the modes of Europe and the aspiration of a new democracy. That was 244 years ago, at a time when there were numerous givens, on both “sides” to be incorporated into constituting, with a constitution, the transition that worked for that specific day/week/month/year.
How many moments in time have we seen the insurgents from one place on the spectrum or another, challenge the statutes which became the Constitution? Somewhere along the way, from somewhere among the full spectrum, came myriads of voices blocked together as women, blacks, immigrants, gays.
Another early caricature was the idea that a person was in one classification-subgroup. There is a current shift driven by the underlying and profound change in that “founding” concept. As is so common with underlying concepts and specific statutes, the struggle progresses—resistance, then advocacy, then collective conscience, then changes. Including the modes of the struggle.
Underlying all of this in our increasingly pluralistic, inclusive, democratic society, is the platform of Constituent Engagement. As is now so apparent, from Some to All—or in other words to SpectrumEngagement.