Editing New World Alliance (section)

=== Describing the Alliance's politics  ===

[[File:JGordonMeltonCover.png|thumb |upright=0.7 |right |alt=Kindly looking older man with white hair and goatee. | Academic [[J. Gordon Melton]] said the Alliance attempted to combine left- and right-wing perspectives.]]

Many attempts have been made to describe the Alliance's approach to transformational politics.  Cultural critic Annie Gottlieb interviewed an Alliance member who said its goal was "to embody a new holistic vision of politics in America."<ref name=Gottlieb>Annie Gottlieb, ''Do You Believe in Magic?: Bringing the Sixties Back Home'', Simon & Schuster, 1987, p.&nbsp;153 (quoting Marc Sarkady). {{ISBN|978-0-671-66050-5}}.  Note that the pagination in the Times Books / Random House edition of this book is different.</ref>  Futurists Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps said the Alliance was attempting to introduce values into politics that had traditionally been outside it.<ref name=Lipnack>Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, ''Networking: The First Report and Directory'', Doubleday, 1982, pp.&nbsp;107–08. {{ISBN|978-0-385-18121-1}}.</ref>  British Green activist [[Sara Parkin]] named some of those values, including "healing," "rediscovery," and "spirituality."<ref name=Parkin />  Scholar [[J. Gordon Melton]] and his colleagues focused on the Alliance's commitment to combining supposed opposites – left and right, personal and political.<ref name=Melton>J. Gordon Melton, Jerome Clark, and Aidan A. Kelly, ''New Age Encyclopedia'', Gale Research, Inc., 1990, p.&nbsp;324.  ISSN 1047-2746.  ISSN retrieved April 1, 2016.</ref>  Citing the ancient Greek concept of [[Paideia]], Alliance chair Bob Olson told an interviewer that the Alliance wanted to build a society where every institution was geared to developing people's abilities and potentials.<ref name=Olson />

Political theorists [[Corinne McLaughlin]] and Gordon Davidson identified what they felt was a defining passage in one Alliance document:
<blockquote>Politics is the way we live our lives. It is not just running for office.  It is the way we treat each other, as individuals, as groups, as government.  It is the way we treat our environment.  It is the way we treat ourselves.<ref>McLaughlin, ''Spiritual'', p.&nbsp;70 (quoting a New World Alliance document).</ref></blockquote>

Arthur Stein, a political scientist at [[University of Rhode Island]], pointed to another passage in an Alliance document:
<blockquote>The NWA seeks to break away from the old quarrels of "left against right" and help create a new consensus based on our heartfelt needs.  It emphasizes personal growth – and nurturing others – rather than indiscriminate material growth.  It advocates "human scale" institutions that function with human consideration and social responsibilities.  It draws on the social movements of the recent past for new values like ecological responsibility, self-realization and planetary cooperation and sharing.  It draws on our conservative heritage for values such as personal responsibility, self-reliance, thrift, neighborliness and community.  It draws from the liberal traditions a commitment to human and civil rights, economic equity and social justice.  We call this synthesis "New World" politics.<ref>Stein, ''Seeds'', p.&nbsp;135 (quoting a New World Alliance document).</ref></blockquote>

Author [[Kirkpatrick Sale]] observed that the Alliance's newsletter boiled its definition of transformational politics down to a phrase – "the reconceptualization of politics along human growth, decentralist, and world order lines."<ref name=Sale>Kirkpatrick Sale, "Kirkpatrick Sale's Letter from America", ''[[Resurgence & Ecologist|Resurgence]]'' magazine, vol. 89, November–December 1981, p.&nbsp;6.</ref>  "As sorry a mouthful of rhetoric as that is," Sale concluded, "that's roughly what this 'transformational' idea is all about."<ref name=Sale />{{refn|In an anthology from 1998, in an attempt to delineate the transformational politics concept, [[Auburn University]] political scientist Christa Slaton listed nine authors: [[Fritjof Capra]] (for ''The Tao of Physics'' and ''The Turning Point''), [[Marilyn Ferguson]] (for ''The Aquarian Conspiracy''), [[Betty Friedan]] (''The Feminine Mystique''), [[Hazel Henderson]] (''The Politics of the Solar Age''), [[John Naisbitt]] (''Megatrends''), [[Mark Satin]] (''New Age Politics''), [[E. F. Schumacher]] (''Small Is Beautiful''), and [[Alvin Toffler|Alvin and Heidi Toffler]] (''Future Shock'' and ''The Third Wave'').<ref>Christa Daryl Slaton, "An Overview of the Emerging Political Paradigm: A Web of Transformational Theories," in Woolpert et al., eds., ''Transformational'', cited above, p.&nbsp;11.</ref>|group=nb}}