Ed. note: This is Part 1 of a series that Nicole has written for Resilience.org. You can find Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
A few weeks apart last summer, I found myself in two very different rooms.
At a MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) gathering, farmers and health advocates spoke of freedom, sovereignty, regeneration, and food as medicine. At a public health and food policy conference, scientists presented data on chronic disease and the need for stronger federal nutrition standards. Both gatherings were filled with intelligence and care, yet few in one room would feel at home in the other.
Food has always been political. It shapes who grows what, who eats, and whose labor sustains the rest. What’s new is how even shared concerns about nourishment and care are being recoded through partisan identity. Policies once considered progressive, such as healthy school meals, limits on junk food, and support for local farmers, are now dismissed as conservative when framed as “real food” or “bodily sovereignty.” Meanwhile, movements invoking regeneration, freedom, and health could easily overlap with progressive goals, yet find themselves estranged by language and ideology.
How did nourishment, the most universal expression of care, become another proxy war in our culture battles? And what happens to our collective capacity for change when the very act of feeding one another is sorted by political tribe?
These questions have shaped what I now call post-partisan pathways: ways of working for the health of our bodies, communities, and democracy that move beyond left-right divides while staying rooted in moral courage and power analysis.
What Post-Partisan Practice Really Means
Our political system isn’t just divided; it’s structurally unable to hold the complexity of this moment. Binary choices flatten nuance and obscure more than they reveal. Organizing only within ideological camps often accepts terrain chosen by the very forces we hope to challenge. While we fight each other, power consolidates elsewhere. And yet, the answer isn’t to simply “come together.” Differences are real and sometimes irreconcilable. The challenge is to relate across those differences without reproducing the same extractive logic we oppose.
Post-partisan practice is a discipline of discernment. It asks:
- Where can coalitions form across difference to confront shared harms such as corporate capture or institutional failure?
- How can people collaborate on tangible problems without demanding full worldview alignment?
- When does bridge-building expand collective power, and when does it dilute or legitimize harm?
- How do we stay grounded in this watershed, this school, this community instead of fighting abstract ideological wars?
- Can relationships become strong enough to hold disagreement while still allowing collaboration?
The work is not about agreement; it’s about strategy—analyzing power carefully, organizing intelligently, and creating new conditions for cooperation. It recognizes multiple ways of knowing, from scientific research to lived and ancestral experience, and builds for long-term transformation rather than the next election cycle. It moves at the pace of relationship, not reaction—the pace required to grow power sturdy enough to shift the ground beneath our systems.
Conflict as Generative Field
My background in peacebuilding taught me to see conflict differently. John Paul Lederach, a mentor in that field, reminds us that lasting change doesn’t come from defeating enemies but from transforming relationships. He describes moral imagination as the ability to stay rooted in present pain while sensing possibilities that don’t yet exist. Post-partisan practice carries that same spirit. It doesn’t erase difference; it creates containers where difference becomes fertile, where the energy of conflict can be composted into understanding and shared action.
I see this potential in the widening rift between the MAHA movement and the public-health community. Their disagreements are real—about evidence, institutional trust, bodily autonomy, and collective responsibility. Yet while they prepare to battle each other, pharmaceutical and food-industry profits rise, chronic disease remains widespread, and communities stay disempowered. Post-partisan practice doesn’t ask these groups to agree or even to debate their deepest beliefs. It asks a simpler, more strategic question: Where could collaboration increase our shared power to challenge the forces harming us all?
Pharmaceutical and food industry accountability. Regulatory independence. Community control over local health decisions. Transparent, independent research.
You can work with someone on corporate capture while opposing their stance on vaccines. You can collaborate on local food systems while disagreeing about federal nutrition policy. This isn’t about harmony; it’s about power and discernment. Who benefits when MAHA and public-health advocates exhaust themselves fighting each other instead of organizing together against systems that serve neither? That question—Who benefits?—is where post-partisan practice begins.
Polarization is not a failure of communication; it’s a business model. Media platforms, political actors, and algorithms profit from outrage. Simplification sells; nuance doesn’t. The system doesn’t need everyone polarized, only enough of us distracted. While we argue over ideology, concentrated power deepens its hold. Binary thinking offers comfort from certainty, identity, and clear enemies. Mainstream media rewards it, institutions depend on it, and our nervous systems default to it under stress. Yet that comfort is costly. While we debate whether to trust institutions or defend autonomy, children grow sicker, ecosystems unravel, and corporate power tightens its grip.
Post-partisan practice repositions conflict, helping us discern which battles are worth our energy and who we can stand beside, even in disagreement. Sometimes that means opposition; sometimes, unlikely alliance. Always it means asking: Who benefits from how this is structured, and what would it take to shift that balance of power?
Grounding in Place
Abstractions keep us doom scrolling; places bring us back to what’s real.
Is our river clean?
Will our soil nourish future generations?
Are our children healthy?
These questions transcend party lines because they are grounded in lived experience. A polluted or depleted aquifer doesn’t care about voting records. When we ground political conversation in the material conditions of where we live, our foodsheds, and watersheds, the abstractions lose their grip. We begin to talk about what our bodies, land, and communities actually need. This is where bioregional organizing becomes essential for democracy itself. I saw this possibility unfold at the Local Food Summit I co-hosted in Northwest Indiana in 2015. One hundred participants from seven counties—rural farmers, urban food-justice activists, educators, and health professionals—spent a day in dialogue. Farmers spoke about market volatility and land costs; urban organizers described food insecurity and lack of access. The contexts were different, but the challenges were shared: economic pressure, disconnection from land, and corporate consolidation squeezing both producers and consumers. By day’s end, the group called for creating a regional food council to work across differences in service to the whole. There was a shift in the room; not because conflict vanished, but because it became useful. People began to see each other not as political symbols, but as neighbors facing linked problems.
Practicing the Work
To cultivate this kind of engagement, a few simple practices help:
- The Power Question: Before entering any debate, ask: Who benefits from the way this conflict is framed? What am I not seeing while focused here?
- The Coalition Test: When you meet someone with very different views, ask: Is there one issue where working together would increase our collective power to challenge shared harms?
- The Place-Based Reframe: When a debate feels impossible, bring it home: What is actually happening here, in this community?
- The Long-Game Orientation: Post-partisan work is not about quick wins. It’s about relationships and structures that can sustain change over time.
The rooms I’ve been in, including MAHA meetings, public health conferences, and local food summits, are full of people who care deeply, even when they see different things. The tragedy isn’t their disagreement; it’s their separation. What might happen if we created different rooms? Not to erase difference or seek false unity, but to ground in place, encounter one another outside algorithmic mediation, and organize around what we actually need. The work ahead is to nurture what lies beneath polarization—the relational soil of democracy. To rebuild trust one relationship at a time, and to organize around watersheds and foodsheds rather than party lines.
The bioregion, the land and water that sustain us, may be where democracy is remade. Here, health becomes visible as relationship among bodies, land, and community. Post-partisan practice is not compromise; it’s a strategy for shared survival. Perhaps the path through this civilizational turning begins with a simpler question: What does this place need, and who else shares that need?
