“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything- high and low, and, most especially, high- lives and dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.
“Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.” – Charles Krauthammer*
America is at a crossroads.
Our country has become so politically, socially, and culturally divided that politics and government have become paralyzed and dysfunctional, incapable of doing the people’s business at home and weakening our resolve to meet the political, economic, and strategic challenges that confront the United States throughout the world.
Look around the United States, from the the nation’s capital to the states, from the cities and suburbs to the small towns of rural America, it is clear that our politics and government, to varying degrees, no longer works.
From Congress and the White House, to state legislatures and governor’s mansions, to mayors, city councils, and local school boards, our politics has become so divided, so confrontational, so cynical, that the future of our representative democracy at home and our ability to meet our commitments abroad hangs in the balance.
It didn’t used to be this way and it doesn’t have to be this way in the future.
Politics From The Heartland, LLC (PFTH) is a nonpartisan and nonideological commentary, analysis, research and public policy advocacy platform dedicated to the mission “doing politics well” by challenging and fighting the barbarians who are storming the gates and threatening the walls of our democracy. PFTH works to return political power to the people by holding the professional career politicians, policy makers, and other members of the professional political class that supports them accountable, both while in office and at election time.
PFTH is dedicated to the mission “doing politics well” and returning politics and government to a position of trust and respect rather than scorn and cynicism, both at home and abroad.
PFTH works to hold politicians, government, and the professional political class accountable, no matter their ideology or partisan affiliation, by speaking truth to power. It is committed to cutting through the traditional commentary and analysis of the “groupthink” driven conventional “wisdom” that fosters like minded thinking, an unwillingness to be open to contrarian points of views or expertise, a lack of compromise and consensus, and the fostering of the “us versus them” mentality that is characteristic of today’s politics and approach to governing, policy making, and problem solving.
PFTH is dedicated to creating a mindset and movement that supports representative democracy through free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and support of the Constitution, while rejecting the extreme polarization and antidemocratic authoritarianism that has become so prevalent in our politics and government at all levels .
PFTH also believes that criticism for the sake of criticism is counterproductive in terms of meeting the challenges that face society. It is a moral failure to criticize without offering alternative ideas and approaches that might lead to compromise, consensus, and problem solving.
Because PFTH wants to be part of the solution, it supports and works with elected political leaders and government/policy decision makers in three areas of public policy:
- rural public education
- rural economic development.
*Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics, 2013, pp.3,4.
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