Hello everyone,
From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.
And that leads to the last of Mother Nature’s killer apps that we need to consciously translate into politics in the age of accelerations. We need an entrepreneurial mind-set, a willingness to approach politics and problem-solving with an utterly hybrid, heterodox, and nondogmatic mixing and matching of ideas, without regard to traditional left-right catechisms—letting all kinds of ideas coevolve, just as plants and animals coevolve in nature.
Unfortunately, as noted above, that is not the mind-set of our two parties in America today. For now their mind-set is to double down on their old ideas—tax cuts, deregulation, and opposition to immigration for Republicans; and more social welfare, more support for teachers’ unions, more regulation, more identity politics, and more redistribution from a very slow-growing pie for Democrats. For reasons of identity and fund-raising these two parties cannot let ideas that are best paired together actually be paired together; and for legacy reasons they cannot take out that blank sheet of white paper and think wholly anew about innovating around the great accelerations. We can do better—and not by splitting the difference between the two parties we have, but by rising above both and going beyond both, until they crack up and reconstitute themselves entirely around the challenges of facing three climate changes at once, and using Mother Nature as a mentor.
13. split the difference
a. to settle a dispute by effecting a compromise in which both sides give way to the same extent
b. to divide a remainder equally
I’m wondering what splitting/not splitting the difference between the two parties we have implies in this particular context. Voting/not voting for some third party while ignoring these two?
Thank you.