Meeting Mercatus

I’m going to be weaving two different but equally important themes throughout this week’s post so I should get them both out in the open at the outset.

First, I spent the second half of last week at the Mercatus Center’s annual Pluralism Summit which was a remarkable event that opened a lot of unexpected political “doors” for me to walk through.

Second, I learned a lot about myself, especially the importance of living up to the beliefs I talk about (often loudly) in public but don’t always have to actually live out in real life. This week I had to. And made me realize that I will always have to.

Mercatus

For readers who don’t know Mercatus, it is generally thought of as the country’s leading libertarian-leaning think tank and is located at George Mason University. In fact, it shares the Vernon Smith building at GMU with the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Peace and Conflict Studies where I serve as a visiting scholar.

Realistically speaking, the two mostly share a parking garage and an elevator.  That’s it.

I did not get invited to the summit because I reached out to someone I met in the elevator. My path was far more circuitous and typical of the way I’ve built my career.

I’ve always been on the left. Very much so. To the point that my PhD thesis and first book were on a political party that was to the left of the French Communists in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I chose the topic because I thought we on the American left could learn something from the PSU.

Oddly, though, it opened my eyes to libertarian ideas in a very round about way since the party supported a version of socialism that was as democratic and decentralized as possible because it relied both on worker ownership and markets. Its thinkers and some of the Yugoslav leaders they worked with knew their Hayek. Even if they didn’t share his love of private ownership, they thought that markets (albeit socialist markets) could solve a lot of problems. Twenty years later, I translated Bernard Chavance’s The Reform of Communist Economic Systems into English which briefly brought me back to the world of market socialism. Still, I was a long way from Mercatus-land.

But the real connection came through Sam Staley who is now head of the DeVoe Moore Center at Florida State, another libertarian leaning think tank. I had taught Sam in the 1980s when he was already a libertarian and I was still enamored with the memory of the PSU which was then on its political death bed. I always valued his friendship and learned a lot from him over the years. We always wanted to find ways of work together, but hadn’t been able to do so until June when, of all things, I met a friend of his in, of all places, Rondine, in Italy.

By that time, I had begun working with David Sloan Wilson and ProSocial in part because of his fascination with Elinor Ostrom’s core design principles for dealing with shared resources that had won her the Nobel prize in economics fifteen years ago. As I argued in earlier posts, her work and David’s are a terrific vehicle to use in expanding peacebuilding’s impact.

So, I found myself at Rondine for its annual graduation party and festival where I met Patrick Oetting who is on the staff of the Libertarian leaning Rising Tides Foundation which (surprisingly to me) was funding some of Rondine’s work. So, on a 10K walk the second morning we were there, I asked him what his team thought of Ostrom. He said most libertarians he knew loved it. I asked him if he knew Sam. He did. Next question, would that be true of Sam? He said that Sam likes Ostrom’s work a lot and so did the folks at Mercatus.

Even before we got back to Washington, I reached out to Sam and invited him to the workshop I held two weeks ago. He, then, got me invited to the Mercatus workshop.

The Pluralism Summit

I still had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was even more perplexed when I saw that the list of keynote speakers that included three of the people I have the most respect for in the peacebuilding world.

Daryl Davis is a black pianist who specializes in convincing Klan members to leave the Klan. I had met Daryl at my wife’s ex-husband’s seventieth birthday party, though I only learned about his Klan work a couple of years later. Now, he was part of a new group, ProHuman, that looked really promising.

Amanda Ripley is the author of High Conflict which is the best book on conflict resolution in the last forty years. Maybe ever.

Joe Bubman and I have been friends for a decade, and I had served as a sounding board when he decided to create what is now Urban/Rural Action which is one of the few peacebuilding groups that has built enduring grass roots hubs.

None of this meshed with my stereotypes of either libertarianism or Mercatus which mostly makes my news stream when people complain about the funding it receives from the Koch brothers and their networks.\

So, I walked in to an event at which I only knew Sam and those three others and having next to no idea what to expect. I actually got there early because my wife needed our one car and was working in the lobby when Abby Ferguson of Unify America saw my nametag, introduced herself, and said that she didn’t know anyone either.

The Summit Itself

Within minutes, Abby and I got separated because we were assigned to different randomly chosen icebreaker groups. We were both blown away by what happened, first in the icebreaker and for the rest of the summit.

To be honest, I was a little surprised that a bunch of libertarians (stereotypes, stereotypes, stereotypes) would use icebreakers (which I normally don’t like) to open an un-conference (which I normally like A LOT).

Randomly (it truly was random), I ended up in an icebreaker group with Ben Klutsey, who recently became Mercatus’ executive director after having run the Pluralism Lab. One of the icebreaker questions was about our favorite pieces of clothing, and I mentioned my Peace Is A Verb t-shirt and that I hadn’t worn in only because I didn’t know if it fit Mercatus’ definition of business casual. (And that it was in the laundry). Ben beamed. Then, in response to another question, I suggested that I had thought of bringing my grandson along because he was intellectually precocious and had met Daryl Davis (whom Ben was about to interview) at said biological grandfather’s birthday when Kiril was four. Ben beamed again. He might have even thought about hugging me.

Then came the conference.

I have spent my whole adult life working with—and enjoying working with—people I disagree with, I never experienced anything like what happened in the next two days.

I knew going in that many conservatives use the term pluralism as part of their critiques of what is happening on American campuses and in our polarized society in general.

I often found myself disagreeing with part of what I had read in that “space.” I do think students at all levels should learn about critical race theory (despite the turgid prose with which it is written) and other themes raised by the DEI community. At the same time, I was also concerned about the fact that some of ways that material is used in academic and corporate settings actually divides us farther. In fact, at our own PeaceCon two weeks earlier I had gotten more than a bit pissed off when a contemporary of mine argued that making Jewish students feel safe on campuses was less important than calling out the Israeli government for its policies since October 7. While I can’t stand what the Netanyahu government has done, I’m not willing to sacrifice my own core values that revolve around calling in the people I disagree with, not deepening divisions, seeking constructive solutions, and said so. I was delighted that most people attending our session agreed with me. Put simply, it’s our job as peacebuilders to make it easier—not harder—for people of good will to find solutions. Finger pointing—especially when your actions have no meaningful impact—doesn’t get you there.

But I didn’t know how the folks Mercatus had invited would respond if we had a deep discussion about what pluralism, free speech, and the like meant while addressing the deeply divisive issues facing our country.

I was delighted.

When they talked about creating spaces for diversity of opinion, they really meant it. Sure, they were concerned about the leftward tilt in mainstream higher education. And for good reason. All students should feel secure on American campuses. All Americans should feel free to engage in political discourse as long as they don’t threaten each other or cross the line into hate speech.

In fact, we spent a lot of time looking at the way their Pluralism Lab actually runs programs on campuses and in the community which did not differ in any meaningful way from other programs I know, including those I’ve been a part of at Oberlin, which could hardly be accused of being a Mercatus-friendly college! You can see that by watching the trailer for their documentary, Undivide Us (which  features Ben Klutsey).

It wasn’t just the work on campuses. The folks from Mercatus and the related Institute for Humane Studies walk the talk.

Their commitment to pluralism and heterodoxy is genuine. So, too, is their concern about the dangerous path our country is on. Far from being dogmatic libertarians, they are genuinely open to the kind of norms that would sustain markets that had the capacity to solve issues like climate change or migration that neither the traditional left nor the traditional right have answers for.

But most importantly, I was welcome with opened arms. Ben’s first beaming smiles turned into a flurry of hugs forty eight hours later.

And it wasn’t just Ben. Everyone of the hundred or so people I met listened to what I had to say. And to Daryl and Amanda and Joe who weren’t part of the traditional Mercatus world—whatever that is.

In fact, I felt exactly the same way I did when PeaceCon ended two weeks ago. I had just spent a few days with my people.

Except that this time, I didn’t know that they were “my people” when I entered the sliding doors of the Falls Church Marriott on Wednesday.

Living What I Say I Believe In

I’ve left what might be the most important lesson from my time with Mercatus until the second half of this post because it might not resonate with everyone reading it as much as the experience of working with Mercatus itself.

The summit also turned out to be the best “lab” experience I’ve had in putting into practice something I have professed for more than half a century but am still learning how to actually do.

I have spent my whole career working with and learning from people I disagree with. At Oberlin, it was with fellow students and faculty members who disagreed with our efforts to keep military recruiters off campus—some of whom remain close friends to this day. I take pride in my ability to work with students who are more conservative than I am, which includes just about everyone who ever set foot in my classrooms. As a peacebuilder, I have spent a lot of time working with the military and with Evangelical Christians.

But Mercatus was a challenge. I’m not an economist. I don’t usually agree with the likes of Hayek. Like most people on the left, the fact that Mercatus has been funded by networks like the Charles Koch Foundation raised at least one of my eyebrows.

But I do know the cost of buying into stereotypes and had a new opportunity to come to grips with that in my own life.

In the case of the Koch network, I knew that at least Charles’s branch of it has supported causes I believe in (as well as those that I don’t). More importantly, if I truly believe in calling in the people I disagree with, it’s up to me that when the opportunity presents itself to explore issues with them, it is my obligation to take the first step in creating and building a relationship.

And I do know that not all people I disagree with are the equivalents of fire-breathing-narcissistic-dragons, whom I know how to avoid. I already knew from Sam and others that Mercatus folks weren’t like that. Again, given my commitment to things like the Rotary Four-Way Test, it is my obligation to take the first step in creating and building a relationship.

And I do know from Sam and the (literally) thousands of students I’ve worked with over the years that it a) is not my job to try to convince them that I’m right, b) people have to convince themselves, and c) changing one’s mind takes time. Once again, it is my obligation to take the first step in creating and building a relationship.

I could repeat examples from last week that led to “it is my obligation to take the first step in creating and building a relationship” again and again, but I’d simply be beating the same not-so-dead horse.

My own views have changed a lot over the years, but I am still at least a few standard deviations to the left of center. At the same time, I also know that we can only make major dents in the issues that I care about if we build the broadest possible coalitions around social change—hence the jargon term I harp on a lot, the importance of superordinate goals.

Hence my obligation to both turn toward the people I disagree with (as Chad Ford so intriguingly put it), understand where they are doming from, and take the first steps toward building those coalitions.

We are all, after all, going to have to keep sharing this country and this planet,

Whoever wins.

It’s going to take a lot of work.

I also know that I’m old and don’t have that much time left.

Hence my obligation.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I frankly don’t know at least when it comes to anything specific.

I don’t agree with the folks at Mercatus on everything. Far from it. Especially in the other parts of their work.

But the Pluralism initiative is right up my alley and the work we are doing on US domestic peacebuilding. So, I’ll be talking to Liz Hume, the Alliance for Peacebuilding’s executive director this week.

And it is time to narrow the chasm between the fifth and the other floors of the Vernon Smith Building at GMU.

All I know is that I will have started those discussions by the time this post is published.

So, stay tuned.

WHAT’S NEXT—My first Rotary district conference.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.