This talk by Ken Wilber on Integral Politics gets really good starting at about minute 16, when he starts talking about America’s 2-party system as a developmental problem. According to Wilber, we have 4 parties in America today, not just 2. There are the traditional Republicans, the neo-con capitalist Republicans, the moderate Democrats, and the liberal Democrats. So far, he says, Republicans have had more success in uniting their 2 major factions than the Democrats.

The colors he talks about refer to the theory of Spiral Dynamics, which puts forth the notion that human nature is not fixed, but develops over time as external conditions dictate. Blue or amber = traditional values (fundamentalist religion); orange = modernist values (money, power, science); green = postmodernist values (multiculturalism, anti-oppression, anti-corporate). The Republican factions are amber/blue and orange while the Democratic factions are orange and green.

The Democrats in particular have a problem because green hates orange—green is anti-capitalist and awfully critical of everything that came before it. And consequently, orange hates green in return. Wilber says this is the reason that Republicans keep winning elections.

He describes the major difference between left and right as where each thinks that human suffering comes from. The right tends to think that human suffering comes from within: a lack of work ethic, no values, no sense of responsibility. The left thinks that human suffering comes from society: oppression, lack of opportunity.

A truly integral politics has to learn to work with all the different value systems, but how? Tricky stuff. Wilber exhorts us to become more than merely Democrat or Republican, but instead to look for the “Third Way” that balances left with right, looking to both interior responsibility with external opportunity. Bill Clinton started looking for this “Third Way,” but that quest was ended with a cigar ...

There’s a slightly older and also very interesting Wilber talk on politics, and how Buddha was both a liberal and a conservative, after the jump. The second video goes into more depth on the splits in American politics.