United States of America — Green PartyCandidate for President

I am a graduate of Northwestern University(1962), Northwestern University Law School (1965), and the Ph. D. program in political science at Indiana University (1972). I have been a member of the academy, teaching political science, for a half century, most of that time in the Political Science Department at the University of South Carolina. I have lectured throughout the world, meeting with such figures as Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and other significant political actors. I was a visiting professor at Bei Da (the University of Peking) in 1994 and 1997. I am the author of nine single-authored, non-edited books on American government, constitutional law, and political theory. 

In 1980, I took Leave Without Pay and entered the South Carolina Democratic Senatorial primary, opposing Ernest "Fritz" Hollings. I recommended that the 1987 bicentennial of the Constitution be used as a time for reflection and recommendations regarding our 18th century constitutional order. My campaign was covered in The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and other journals and led to the formation of The Committee on Constitutional System, co-chaired by former counsel to the president Lloyd Cutler, former Eisenhower and Kennedy cabinet member C. Douglas Dillon, and Senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS). Prominent members included Jim Sundquist at Brookings, James MacGregor Burns from Williams College, former Senator Bill Fulbright, and soon-to-be president of Stanford University Gerhard Casper, with whom I still communicate. In 1984, I entered the New Hampshire and other selected primaries, holding twenty-two forums at schools like M.I.T., with Lester Thurow on the panel, and other universities for the purpose of raising awareness of America's gridlocked government. CCS submitted its proposals for constitutional and sub-constitutional changes to the president and the congressional leadership in 1987. Neither the Republican nor Democratic parties responded to our report. In 1992, I entered the South Carolina presidential primary and lectured at schools from Haverford College outside Philadelphia to The Thomas Jefferson Society at UVA. In the year 2000, I entered the South Carolina presidential caucuses and engaged in civil disobedience by not complying with F. E. C. regulations. That campaign was covered by Molly Ivins in her syndicated column, Business Week, and other journals. The F. E. C. chose not to prosecute me.

I joined the Green Party in 2006, largely because of the Clinton-inspired abandonment of the middle class and the poor, along with the mass incarcerations and the increasing influence of foreign governments in America's politics. I am patriotic, being a veteran myself. My father fought the Nazis and was made and an Officer in the Order of the British Empire by His Majesty George VI, R. I., and my great grandfather was shot in 1864 defending the Union. I am active in the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. I am active in progressive groups in South Carolina as well as the Green Party. I picket weekly with Women in Black and I am a member of tSouth Carolina Progressive Network, an organization made up of civil rights, labor, feminist, LGBT, anti-war, environmental, and similar groups. I am on the National Committee of the Green Party and have served on both the Finance and Fund-raising Committees. I am on the Steering Committee of the South Carolina Green Party. I recently won the South Carolina Green presidential caucus, sending five pledged delegates to the national convention in Houston, August 4-7. I am the only other nationally recognized presidential candidate besides Jill Stein. I support Jill but entered the Green Party presidential contest to discuss the need for constitutional and sub-constitutional structural changes to our government, as well as to discuss an original political philosophy that I have developed over the last half century. 

My original political philosophy is based upon psychology rather than economics or any other objective variable such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or the like. My masters thesis, written in the 1960's, compared the personalities of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, using variables from The Authoritarian Personality, the classic work on the relationship of psychological variables to political ideology. My doctoral dissertation completed the authoritarian model by testing to see if the authoritarian traits described in the above work, when inverted, correlated on the other side of the ideological spectrum, thus permitting the development of a full-range political philosophy based upon subjective variables. I predicted that psychological correlates would become increasingly significant in determining political ideology. Indeed, the year 2000 was the first in which regular attendance at some form of religious service bypassed income as an indicator of voting preference. My dissertation, The Anti-Authoritarian Personality, was published in 1977 as No. 21 in the Hans Eysenck, Pergamon Press series on Experimental Psychology, Oxford, and sold throughout the world. It is referenced in WIKI under "Authoritarian Personality," Footnote 6.

I turned next to cognitive variables by "reading through" the German Idealists Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel as I studied their respective preferences for analytic (apples and apples) or synthetic (apples and oranges) relationships. Kant, of an analytic mind, labelled the equation 5 + 7 = 12 as synthetic because there were two integers on one side of the equation and one on the other. Hegel, of a synthetic mind, argued that the equation was analytic because all the integers were numbers. In a New York University Press publication entitled Relativism and the Natural Left (1984), I traced the development of the fission-fusion pattern in intellectual history in which the rationalist and skeptical schools, that included both the analytic and synthetic forms, transformed themselves into a single cognitive range that stretched from preferences for the analytic form to preferences for the snythetic form. Over time, I developed an original political philosophy and demonstrated the imbalances of cognitive forms in the American political system in a work entitled The Bias of Temperament in American Politics (2014). In short, my political theory reflects the Kantian notion of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy. The observer imposes meaning, and to understand ideology one must understand the cognitive preferences of the observer. I suggest in Bias that the American political system, along with its underpinnings in Abrahamic religious faiths as well as the English common law, strongly favors the analytic over the synthetic form. My political philosophy believes in the primacy of the Classical Dialectic over the Material Dialectic, the reintegration of psychology with philosophy after the experimental turn at the beginning of the twentieth century (Wundt), and the eventual reconciliation of the physiology of the brain, psychology, and ideology. We must recognize, and rebalance, the underlying cognitive as well as affective (authoritarian-to-anti-authoritarian) biases in the American political system. In short, I am of the psychological, or what I have sometimes labelled the natural, left, I having an abstract, essentially theoretical, mind. I see patterns. I prefer holistic analyses. I find the American political system to be largely based on arms-length, contractually-formed relationships, lobbyists requesting specific benefits from legislators and regulators, in return for political support, for example. Objective variables are still of considerable importance, of course, but I predict that the psychology of how individuals observe objective variables is supplanting ideologies based solely on the objective variables themselves. Again, I am of the psychological, or natural, left.