Most Americans agree that our political system is broken, and that our political debates do not adequately serve us as an electorate. While there are countless criticisms of the debates from every angle, and lots of energy fighting and begging for various improvements, we at Open the Debates are tired of begging.
As architect, inventor, and all-around visionary Buckminster Fuller said,
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
While we will continue our fight against exclusionary political debates, this year we are undertaking a strategic pivot in Bucky’s direction. Instead, we are asking the question “what if we just organized our own debates that truly served the needs of We, the People?”
We are excited to announce Elevate the Debate, a strategic collaboration with Free and Equal Elections Foundation, to innovate the vital conversations that help us select our elected representatives.
We are also excited to announce our first Open Presidential Debate of the 2020 election is happening right in the heart of the primary process, March 4th in Chicago.
Our twin goals are to:
- shift our political discourse toward constructive, respectful, solution-oriented debate, and
- create a platform to showcase effective and principled approaches to healthy self-government and truly representative democracy.
Our vision is to generate a meaningful cross-partisan dialogue and debate that can serve as a prototype to help reshape the national political conversation. We want to build innovative, informative, and inclusive debates that are relevant to voters’ lives, reflective of their concerns, and designed to help bridge divides, hash out policy differences, and solve the big challenges we face.
As we wrote in The Fulcrum, “We desperately need to inject new ideas, new voices, new formats and new approaches into our lifeless debate process. Instead of relinquishing control of our political debates to the two parties along with self-appointed gatekeepers like the Commission on Presidential Debates and the TV networks, we should be asserting our rights to construct a people-powered process that serves our collective needs as a free nation.
It’s time to build the model that can make the Commission on Presidential Debates obsolete. It’s time for We the People to start acting like we can shape the most important forums for informing ourselves as an electorate, because we can. And we will.
Of course, we need YOUR help to do this. We need you to step up and volunteer your voice, your ideas, your time, and your dollars. Thank you.
About Free & Equal Elections Foundation
The Free & Equal Elections Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization with a mission to open the electoral process through education and collaborative action.
About Open the Debates
Open the Debates is a 501c3 project of Mediators Foundation working to open up the political debates of our nation to all ballot-qualified candidates, at every level of government.