The Veepstakes and the Law of Three

In a recent Facebook exchange with Matthew Wright, I hopped on Matthew’s bandwagon, agreeing that a Kamala Harris/ Andy Beshear ticket was probably the Democrats’ strongest option and commenting that it might indeed carry powerful third force. Marty Schmidt queried me about where I saw third force in it. His insightful question has led me to further pondering on my initial “seat of the pants” response, and I will share that fuller response with you here. The occasion really invites our entire Wisdom Community to ponder the precipitous events of last week from a Wisdom perspective and consider how we might collectively help hold the space between now and November 5, regardless of our individual political perspectives.

I immediately thought of third force, of course, because the dramatic plot twist of Joe Biden’s sudden departure from the race seemed to have dropped unexpectedly out of left field, shaking up the playing field and infusing palpable new energy into the whole election. That’s signature third force; it’s what third force does—breaks up the impasse and gets things moving again in a whole new direction. While you can reconstruct in hindsight the chain of events leading up to it, the event itself feels like what Gebser calls a “mutation:” it emerges out of nowhere and instantly shifts everything.

In the new configuration in which the Democratic party now finds itself, Kamala Harris clearly holds the affirming force; i.e., the pushing or forward-motion principle. The five-star prosecutor finally set free to strut her stuff!! The momentum she has picked up in the past couple of days clearly speaks to the energy of the line of action she carries.

Andy Beshear looks to me like by far the best pick of the bunch to hold down the denying force—denying not in the sense of negative or oppositional, but in the sense of stabilizing and contextualizing, as a riverbank is for a river. He is the near perfect energetic counterbalance to Kamala’s powerful propulsive force. He is young, charismatic, male, of honorable family lineage, and importantly, a sincere and enlightened Christian who plays well with the evangelical community (and in so doing, incidentally, helps reclaim Christianity from its hijacking by MAGA forces.) He is like the Ariel to J.D. Vance's Caliban; just as forceful, just as dazzling, but on the side of conscience and compassion, not anger and retribution. Believe me, that ticket will sell! Provided they can work well together (which I think is almost a foregone conclusion), Harris and Beshear are well situated not only deliver but to MODEL a new/old way of resolving the “tension of opposites:” not through polarization, but through dynamic polarity.

Another way of framing the question— this time from the perspective of complexity theory—is that among the top running contenders for the vice president slot, Beshear appears to best satisfy the conditions for creating what's known as a negative feedback loop. Here again “negative” does not mean oppositional, but rather STABILIZING; it’s what allows the entire system to remain in homeostasis. Positive feedback loops, by contrast, accentuate affirming force only and this throws everything out of kilter (like cancer in a body, which creates accelerating, unbalanced growth in a single direction and thus winds up destroying its host.) Something of that sort would most likely happen if Harris were to select a running mate who in any way required an additional stretch from the already hard pressed American middle ground. She already carries two challenging markers to the traditional status quo: she is a woman, and she is black. In my heart of hearts I believe that the American electorate is ready to rise to this challenge. But if the Democratic party inends to win this election, it simply cannot risk adding another marker. This means, alas, that her running mate cannot be another woman (bye-bye, Gretchen Whitmer!) a religious or ethnic minority (which eliminates Shapiro, who is Jewish), or openly gay (farewell, Pete Buttigieg!) Youthfulness sends a powerful subliminal message across the generations. In all of the above Andy Beshear tics the boxes, nosing out Roy Cooper and Mark Kelly, his most closely-qualified competitors in this horse race (but hey, isn’t that what Kentuckians do?)

Sorry to be blunt here, but I am not talking fairness; I am talking electability. The Democrats’ biggest Achilles’ heel in recent decades has been that in their determination to hold the line on inclusivity, they wind up “preaching to the choir.” With their "holy denying" function disabled through kneejerk political correctness, they keep coming up with “positive-feedback-loop” slates that turn out to be unelectable.

But where is reconciling force in this triad?

Reconciling is Joe Biden. In the tried and proven alchemy of the Paschal Mystery, he has once again demonstrated that total self-surrender in obedience to a higher principle (love, mercy, good of the county, conscience), releases a pungent dose of that very quality into the atmosphere. On Sunday afternoon, July 21, Joe flipped the ball powerfully into a whole new court, a court suddenly suffused with conscience and nobility. That shakes up the entire election, calls the question on the Republican hooligan line-up, and sets a whole new "do" for the election race. A miniature but nonetheless holographic enactment of what Jesus did on the cross.

I elect to remain high-minded here, even at the risk of naivety. Sure, Joe was cornered; sure he did not want to. Neither did Jesus—“Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.” But in the end, they both got there—“Not my will, but thine be done”—and the infusion of resurrection energy was (and is) palpable. Something has risen from the dead. There is new life here, a whole new stirring of hope.

That gift is still in the air. Let's not squander it! In his self-sacrifice, Joe Biden called us back to the better angels of ourselves both individually and as a nation. Our task now is to stay there; to cherish this new “do” of conscious integrity he has liberated for us, and to keep it alive and growing throughout the remainder of the race and on into the future.