Some of you may have heard that I am taking some time off, traveling through Europe and walking the Camino again.
And like the last few times I’ve come to walk the Camino, one of the things people I meet are most curious about is the political climate in the United States.
This time, though, the conversations feel a little different.
Several people have responded to what is happening in the U.S. by saying something I didn’t expect:
“Thank you.”
Thank you, they explain, for helping us see what could happen here if we don’t pay attention. If we allow ourselves to be pulled farther and farther apart by political and economic interests.
Of course, people have very different ideas about what should be done.
One Australian I met suggested that Australia is better off because voting is compulsory. Everyone is required to vote. A Frenchman sitting next to us agreed and said he wished Europe would institute compulsory voting as well.
I’m not so sure.
Compulsory voting seems to me to be only as good as the information people have, and perhaps as good as their ability to think through that information with others.
A few days later, I met a French gentleman who has spent years exploring a different question: How can ordinary citizens have more meaningful influence over the decisions governments make?
He actually sought me out on the Camino because he heard that I was from Oregon. He knew about Oregon’s referendum process, which allows citizens to collect signatures and put measures directly on the ballot.
I told him that Oregon has also experimented with another democratic process: bringing together groups of ordinary citizens who are selected to broadly represent the community, giving them time and information to study an issue, and asking them to deliberate together before making recommendations.
That was very close to the work he had been doing.
What I found especially interesting was that he had not simply chosen one model and decided it was the answer. He had brought together people who favored direct democracy—giving citizens greater power to initiate and vote on issues themselves—and people who favored deliberative democracy, in which representative groups of citizens study issues together.
He listened to both sides.
And his own thinking changed.
He began asking whether the strengths of the two approaches could somehow be combined.
As he described his work, I found myself thinking about something even more basic.
No matter what democratic structure we create—referendums, citizens assemblies, elected representatives, compulsory voting—at some point ordinary people with different experiences, interests, values and beliefs have to figure out how to live and make decisions together.
The structures matter.
Voting matters.
Good information matters.
But so does our ability to listen. To ask questions. To remain curious. To disagree. And to keep talking when we don’t see things the same way.
That part felt very familiar.
Eventually our conversation turned to the difficulty of sustaining this kind of work.
He has struggled to find funding for his experiments in citizen participation and wanted to know how Crossing Party Lines had managed to keep going.
The truth is, I told him, we face much the same challenge.
Crossing Party Lines exists because people want it to exist.
It exists because members, volunteers, moderators, donors and friends have been willing to give what they can—sometimes money, sometimes time, sometimes simply their presence in a conversation—to keep creating places where people who disagree can still meet one another with curiosity.
So from a trail in France, I found myself thinking about all of you.
And I wanted to say:
Thank you.
The work we do—and your part in it—is vitally important.
And the world is watching.
