The Seattle Journal is a place for writing about pluralism — and how democratic societies hold together, fracture, or slide toward authoritarianism.
Much of the work here examines how societies drift toward or away from pluralism, often without recognizing the shift as it happens. Constitutional governance, civic norms, institutional incentives, and everyday political habits all play a role. Through essays on policy, culture, and public life, the Journal explores how pluralist systems weaken — and what it takes to rebuild a durable political center.
While most of the writing here is mine, the Seattle Journal is not intended to be a single-voice project. Guest writers will appear from time to time, especially when they add something thoughtful or unexpected to the pluralist themes explored here.
I’m the founding editor of The Seattle Journal. I’m also the developer of The Political Clock, a framework for understanding pluralism and authoritarianism, and the director of The Bipartisan Wing, a Washington State PAC focused on rebuilding the political center. A designer by trade, I’m winding down a forty-year career to concentrate more fully on this work. Recently, a two-year sabbatical gave me the space to build the spine of the idea – time to step away from client work, develop The Political Clock and The Bipartisan Wing, and prepare for what comes next.
I’ve lived in Seattle since 1979 and raised two sons here. My personal and professional life has been balanced with volunteer civic work, including community involvement, policy advocacy, and electoral politics – among them six runs for office and one failed city initiative.
Those experiences matter less as credentials than as education — the kind that comes with battle scars. They taught me how political systems actually behave, how good intentions run into real-world constraints, and how to recover, reload, and return to the work.
The Seattle Journal has been more than a decade in the making. This current phase — Season Two — is focused squarely on pluralism: how it weakens over time, how it can be defended, and how people with pluralist instincts might find one another again in real political life.
The goal of this project is not persuasion. It is clarity — about tradeoffs, consequences, and the difficult work of governing in a pluralist society. I appreciate readers who are willing to think alongside me. This is ongoing work, and I’m glad you’re here.
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