My youngest granddaughter (Shai) was born on November 24, 2025, just two weeks before my 80th birthday.  Reflecting on what it meant to reach that age, I found myself calculating that Shai will be 80 in 2105.  Her sisters, Yael and Ora, will then be 82 and 84.  What kind of a world will they then be turning over to their own grandchildren?  The answer turns substantially on how effectively they and their generation have been able to shape that world.  And that depends in turn on how healthy a democracy the girls will have inherited from us.

These and similar considerations have led a bipartisan group of seven Montana political veterans to launch a new nonprofit called Beyond Party – Montana First.

Central to our mission is the work of passing to our children and grandchildren all the wisdom we can still muster that might enable them to meet the challenges that they will face in their lifetimes.   Having spent our adult lives in public service, it is not surprising that we all agree that a healthy, self-determining democracy, leavened by a republican regard for the common good, must occupy a central place in their civic toolbox.

Those of us who originally conceived the idea of Beyond Party – Montana First are all over 70, and we are fully aware that our job now consists primarily of passing forward the torch of time-tested democratic and republican principles.  We started by recruiting one Millennial to the board.  We’ll continue to diversify the board in that and other ways, but that’s only one dimension of the work of torch-passing.

Here at the outset of an even-numbered year, we are well aware that elections will dominate the coming months, and that partisanship will become more intense as the year progresses.  Having all run in partisan elections ourselves, and having held leadership positions within our respective parties (up to a national party chairmanship), we are neither positioned nor inclined to minimize the democratic value of parties or of their partisan supporters.  But our combined centuries of public service have also convinced us that there are dimensions of human well-being that are beyond the reach of partisanship or party loyalty.

One way to think about this is to see parties as a life-form that has evolved naturally out of the conditions of modern life.  This partisan life-form is DNA-driven to do two things simultaneously: to advance a loose cluster of policy goals, and to gain and hold enough political power to achieve at least some of those goals.  That is why parties exist.

Depending on your own priorities, you are likely to find yourself aligning most of the time with one or another of those parties.  It makes ironclad sense for you to support the candidates of that party.  There are some human aspirations, though (and some human problems) that the life-forms of parties are not well-suited to address.  In those cases, the dynamics of partisanship morph into something very much like quicksand, from which the parties on their own initiative cannot extract themselves.  (Think of the dynamics of the recent shutdown of the national government or think of the downward spiral of partisan efforts to change the rules of reapportionment.)  In such cases, something beyond the partisan dynamic – some effective  appeal to the common good – must be mobilized to rescue the floundering partisans.

Metaphors like that of quicksand never cover the entire landscape, but consider a couple more.  An internal combustion engine consumes far more gasoline than motor oil, but you would be worse than foolish to ignore the oil. If, like me, you spent most of your adolescent summers driving a tractor on an eastern Montana farm, you know that you only brought out the grease gun every few hours, but you’d damned well better not forget that squirt or two of machinery-protecting grease. Or, if you’re more familiar with stock portfolios than with summer fallowing, call to mind the indispensable role of hedge investments to guard against unavoidable long/short vicissitudes in any sizeable portfolio.

Beyond Party – Montana First is an effort to build that machinery-lubricating, investment-hedging, quicksand-rescuing  capacity into the infrastructure of Montana’s politics. The extra ingredient we propose to add to the system is something truly beyond party and beyond anything that any party can provide– namely, the capacity to listen carefully to opposing and even unwelcome points of view in an honest effort to solve hard problems or to realize promising opportunities that no amount of ideological purity can ever accomplish.

Wherever we find that capacity, in either party, we will encourage and support it in the name of putting Montana first.  As a 501(c)(4) organization, we will get involved in both primary and general elections on a selective basis, especially where our support could help elect or re-elect candidates whose principled defense of republican principles has put them at risk of retribution by their own party.

You’re welcome to join us in this work.  You can learn more, and contribute your own ideas and support, by visiting our website at www.beyondpartymtfirst.org.

___________________

Daniel Kemmis is the board president of Beyond Party – Montana First.  A former Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives and Mayor of Missoula, he is the author of Citizens Uniting to Restore Our Democracy.