Introducing: Our Members Blog
BY Kevin J. Rogers
If there’s one distinguishing characteristic of our membership, it’s their relentless impulse to better understand our government, society and culture, and to share those understandings with their fellow citizens. It’s a hallmark of the Whig mentality: we approach issues first and foremost as opportunities for discovery, and we strive — as a community — to educate both ourselves and others.
In our view, helping citizens to learn from each other is central to the process of creating practical, actionable policy solutions. Talking with the general public is also central to promoting both the initiatives we develop and the fundamental principles we base them on. And finally, we are by nature committed to what we call the Great Conversation: the never-ending debate our Founders expected, and hoped, we would have.
For us, that conversation begins where our community hashes out its ideas under the auspices of the Institute: on our Forums. Our process starts there, where the membership can freely discuss various ideas, thoughts and proposals, usually in the five Policy Halls which form the foundation of our system: Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Military and Veterans Affairs, Economic Policy and Government Reform.
This is actually not what our Forums look like
We create additional categories within the Forums as needed — the two newest subject matters are Courts and Constitution and Political Theory — and that’s what we’ve done for our newest member benefit: the Members Blog.
Once someone has joined the Institute and created an account in the Forums, they can post their entry (or even their idea for one) to the Members Blog category for discussion and review. There are few ground rules, the process is open and collaborative, and while the overall purpose is policy-directed opinion pieces are warmly welcomed.
But while the Members Blog serves internally as a platform for our members to share their thinking in detail with their fellow Whigs, there’s more: we’ve also created this public-facing Members Blog tab on our website. Our intent is to provide our membership with a platform where they can share their views with a wider audience than the Institute membership alone. Our hope is the very act of ordinary Americans speaking to their fellow citizens on the issues of most concern to them will both enlarge our community and further our efforts to develop public policy from the grassroots up.
To be clear: Not everything submitted to the Forums will automatically go up on the website. We’ll select the best entries for posting based on their relevance, their relationship to other content we are publishing and how well they align with current public concerns. Other posts on the internal Members Blog will find their way into our newsletters or one (or more) of the other media projects we have in the works. And some will serve as the starting point for longer pieces as our collaborative process plays out.
But all of our member content will at the very least get a hearing on the Forums. There’s great value in that process alone: Our members can be sure whatever their views, they’ll get an honest review by our wider community, and they’ll get valuable feedback they can use to further refine their own thinking. And of course the very act of posting in the Forums contributes mightily to our in-house discussions, which in turn drive our policy development.
As we post new pieces here and to the Institute’s blog — and as we publish other projects — we’ll post notices to our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages. We hope you will follow us there. And if you haven’t already, we hope you will consider joining our community to work together with your fellow citizens in the spirit of patriotism and public service.
Kevin J. Rogers is the executive director of the Modern Whig Institute. He can be reached at director@modernwhig.org.
