The first question in Sunday’s Democratic primary debate was: “President Obama came to office determined to swing for the fences on health care reform. Voters want to know how you would define your presidency? How would you think big? So complete this sentence: in my first 100 days in office, my top three priorities will be — fill in the blank.”
All three candidates answered as they had been encouraged to, by describing grand changes in society that would require legislation to accomplish. None mentioned that conservatives have almost a 100% chance of controlling the House, the judiciary, and most states.
I wouldn’t criticize their approach to answering the question. If they had stuck to politically realistic answers, they would have allowed the other party to narrow the scope of discussion and debate. Also, it was illuminating to understand the differences that emerged when the candidates discussed legislation. For instance, are the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank hard-won and fragile victories to be protected with strongly affirmative rhetoric (Clinton), or mere promissory notes demanding to be redeemed with better laws (Sanders)? Are almost all political dysfunctions traceable to campaign money (Sanders), or could skillful leadership within the current system improve things (Clinton)? Finally, it would have been defeatist for these candidates to offer realistic plans for their first 100 days. That would have undercut progressives’ efforts to win down-ballot races and would have converted a prediction into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In other words, it would have been bad leadership.
And yet, as someone deciding which candidate to choose, I am interested in what each candidate would actually do in office (as well as the more pressing question: Who has a better chance of beating the Republican nominee?). At least in the first two years, they would be able to do virtually none of the things they proposed in the debate. Any of them would veto assaults on the Affordable Care Act and negotiate a budget deal that retains most of the status quo. But some choices would confront them:
What unilateral foreign policy decisions to make. This is the area where Congress has–perhaps unfortunately–the least scope, although the national security apparatus has a great deal of say, and it’s not clear that the president really does decide. Dovish progressives have a hard choice in ’16, because Clinton has a hawkish record and Sanders has no experience managing the military and security agencies.
What legislation to propose to Congress first. Three options to send to the Hill are: 1) Widely popular but small-bore bills that can pass and establish a record of accomplishment. 2) Wedge issues: bills designed to catch the House Republicans between their constituents’ opinions and their party orthodoxy. Or 3) grand visions of alternative health or justice systems. These would fail but could possibly alter the terms of public debate. It’s a hard choice.
What executive orders to issue. Note that President Obama seems intent on using that authority to its full in his final year, and he may not leave a lot of attractive options for his successor.
Whom to nominate for a wide range of offices. Within many domains of policy, a Democrat has genuine choices. For instance, she or he could nominate an education reformer enamored of metrics, accountability, and competition (continuing the status quo) or switch to someone who prefers to give teachers autonomy and resources. There is plenty of room within the legislative framework of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to push in either direction. In the economic agencies, there is a choice between mollifying Wall Street and the markets or regulating them aggressively.
In making appointments, the president also gets to choose leaders with a range of personal profiles. Any Democratic president will look for racial and gender diversity, but how to weigh ideological, religious, generational, and regional diversity? Should most cabinet secretaries have extensive experience as CEOs of large bureaucracies so that they can run things smoothly, or should they be thinkers and advocates?
I enjoy the debate about long-term directions for progressive politics and the nation, but we should probably ask the candidates how they will resolve the decisions that they will actually face.
(Washington) InHacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters, Eitan Hersh shows that candidates and campaigns obtain their knowledge of us, the citizenry, by analyzing voter files. They don’t know the truth about us; they know what the voter files say about us.
That means that getting on the voting rolls is a source of power. Once you’re on, the political class becomes interested in you. They measure and model and predict your preferences and behaviors. Your vote may not make a marginal difference in the electoral outcome. After all, most elections are lopsided victories. But even if you are part of a large majority or a small minority, the candidates will pay attention to you if you’re in the voter files, and they won’t even see you if you aren’t.
This is an argument for registering and voting that may not be easy to convey, but it has the advantage of being right.
Don’t campaigns learn what the whole population thinks from polls? The answer is: sometimes. Polls are mainly conducted for high profile races. It’s a pop-culture myth (see “The Good Wife”) that ordinary candidates do any significant polling. Besides, we are in the midst of a data revolution in which companies, governments, and politicians are shifting away from random samples to datasets that track all of the relevant behavior–every purchase on Amazon, every Web search, or every vote. These datasets are far more powerful than surveys for predicting and influencing people. In particular, voting files are powerful because: (1) public policy requires the collection of more data on voters than is strictly necessary to run an election, (2) voter files can be merged with commercial records, and (3) analysis of such data is becoming both more sophisticated and more user-friendly. (I take all of this from Hersh.)
Don’t campaigns learn about the public by talking to people? They used to rely on skillful, experienced neighborhood-level volunteers to provide information about the electorate. That whole infrastructure has been hollowed out by money and technology. Of course, there are still volunteers. But they come forward to work on particular campaigns. Few have deep and accumulated knowledge of local voters. The best way to harvest what they learn during a campaign is to require them to upload their observations about specific citizens to the voter files. Meanwhile, the candidates spend their time talking to donors. The voter file is how the campaign learns who you are–which means that you should make sure you’re on it by voting.
Kenneth Vogel reported recently in Politico that “[Charles] Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month.” Vogel adds that the Koch network will spend more than twice what the RNC spent in 2012, that it has more staff and funding in some key states than the state’s Republican party has, and that it is the leading provider of voter data and political training/coaching on the right today, supplanting the GOP.
Vogel and some of his quoted sources emphasize that this network is unprecedented in US history, which seems true. I would add that it appears unique in the world. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project offers free data on the political systems of 173 countries. They ask so many questions about each country that the dataset includes 15 million data points. (I am one of many coders for the USA.) The V-Dem project asks about all kinds of ways in which political parties may be strong or weak; autonomous or co-opted; free, regulated or banned–but it doesn’t even pose questions about entities that perform the traditional functions of parties without being parties. That seems to be a novel contribution of the US since 2000.
The Koch network stands for an ideology and policies that I mostly disagree with, but that’s not the only reason to worry about this development–which could be replicated on the left. These are the main reasons:
A standard political party is at least somewhat accountable, representative, and deliberative. Here are the extensive Rules of the Republican Party, which are mostly about intra-party elections, offices, procedures, and powers. They create a system in which each grassroots Republican has an independent voice and influence. To be sure, some parties have boasted of their authoritarian internal structures, but they have never been important in the US. More common are parties that fail to live up to their claims of responsiveness. In fact, Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy” (1911) was about the rigid tendency of even social-democratic parties to become internal oligarchies. That is a real worry, but there are limits to it. In competitive systems, parties that present themselves as democratic yet act oligarchically lose members and elections. Party elites are disciplined by voters–imperfectly but inevitably. There is no such mechanism within the Koch brothers’ network. It is officially and thoroughly oligarchical. The 1,200 paid staffers work for the people who pay them, not for voters or members.
A party is also accountable to all the voters because it can obtain power and actually govern, and then the electorate can decide what they think of the results. But the Koch network doesn’t directly govern; it just influences some of the people who do. If the politicians they support turn out to be unpopular, the Koch network can pick new candidates for the next round. It cannot itself be voted out.
A standard political party must be transparent if it seeks to attract and retain members. That’s why the GOP has published rules, leaders, and a platform. I am fully aware of the secrecy in US politics, but secrecy is checked by the need to compete for public support. As far as I can tell, the Koch network doesn’t even have an official name, let alone a set of binding rules that an outsider can assess, let alone a public budget.
A standard political party includes both activists and interest groups and actual office-holders. The office-holders are responsible for performance in government and can’t just spout rhetoric. The activists, on the other hand, have some freedom to speak truth to power. The result is a healthy tension between aspirations and reality. But the Koch network is run by activists/interests groups who influence office-holders. It has no incentive to compromise or to support compromise.
Power within the Koch network is proportional to money and is extraordinarily unequal. Michels taught that all parties are inequitable, even those most passionately committed to equality. Still, parties need citizens to vote and volunteer, and the capacity to do so is pretty evenly distributed across the population. The Koch network is purely and simply driven by money.
Below is the Koch network as depicted by my friends at the Center for Responsive Politics. It does not belong in a civics textbook, although a realistic textbook today should probably include it.
(Washington, DC) Tisch College is advertising two positions:
A Program Administrator for the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, who will manage essential responsibilities associated with NSLVE including recruiting campuses to join the study, distributing data to campuses in the form of reports, and working to develop resources for all campuses to access through the website. The Program Administrator will also be responsible for supporting communications including but not limited to managing the process for the newsletter, updating the website, and collaborating with the team on other publications.
A Coordinator for our Voting Initiative: This individual will coordinate efforts to increase voter participation among Tufts students in the 2016 presidential election through initiatives supported by faculty and staff at all Tufts campuses. Responsibilities will include: working with student groups to sponsor forums on campaign issues of interest; implementing a plan for comprehensive voter registration opportunities; administering a fund for student-driven initiatives (etc.)
On the whole, I’m inclined to think that Donald Trump’s large lead in the Republican race is a passing phenomenon, similar to several candidates’ surges during 2011-12, and driven mostly by media attention and name-recognition at a time when most people are not yet following the campaign closely. In Die Hard III, which is 20 years old, Trump and Hillary Clinton are already two prominent references. The Donald has a level of celebrity that may give him disproportionate attention early in a multi-candidate campaign but that won’t win him the nomination.
However, there is an interesting substantive discussion of his candidacy. It’s not about whether he will win but rather whether he and his followers are like the right-wing parties in Europe. That constituency might outlast his presidential run.
Trump’s positions are not consistent with American conservative doctrine. He is fanatically anti-immigrant and lobs verbal grenades at various countries every day, but he also says, “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. … Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is.” Apparently, Trump would also raise taxes on unearned income.
The combination of grievances against foreign countries and immigrants plus enthusiasm for state intervention in the domestic economy is a position that tends to be called “populism” in Europe. I resist that terminology for the US because we have a very worthy political tradition officially known as Populism (on which Laura Grattan‘s forthcoming book is excellent). Another term could be “far-right.” As Mathew Yglesias writes, “several of [the European parties] have institutional roots in old fascist political movements.” That would indeed make them far-right. But, as Yglesias adds, “their current ideological positioning is generally much more complicated than that, and some of them have no such institutional roots.” They typically combine extreme positions against immigration with economic policies that would be left-of-center in the US. So perhaps the most accurate term is “economic nationalist.” It can then come in varieties that range from truly chauvinistic to plausibly mainstream.
Similar views make a popular combination in the US as well. As Lee Drutman shows, if you screen for people who favor expanding Social Security and decreasing immigration, you get 24% of the electorate. They may or may not be chauvinists, since their views on immigration could be moderate. But they are out of step with the Republican Party on Social Security and could accurately be called “economic nationalists.” Meanwhile, those who would expand Social Security and keep immigration at least at current levels constitute 26.5%. This second group is in sync with the Democratic Party’s leadership. The strong conservative position (trim or privatize Social Security and restrict immigration) draws just 2.4% of voters, one tenth as many.
Trump is aligned with the 24% who are economic nationalists. If we use Social Security and immigration as the two proxies for that view, then Trump’s constituency is comparable in size to liberals and much larger than conservatives. A third measure would be attitudes toward policing, on which Trump takes an aggressive position that may also be fairly popular (with similar people).
It’s common for a combination of views not to be represented in a two-party system. Antiabortion progressives, for instance, have nowhere to turn in presidential politics in the US. But economic nationalists represent a big enough bloc to possibly destabilize the political system. Antiabortion progressives are typically Democrats who are badly outvoted within their own party on that issue. Economic nationalists, in contrast, seem to be Republicans who represent a large force in their party but are at odds with its elites.
While Trump’s support (about 30% of Republican voters right now) may be boosted by his attention-grabbing style during the silly season of the campaign, it is conceivable that someone with similar views and a less rebarbative and risible style might actually perform better in the long term. Republican elites disagree with half of economic nationalism and will have to figure out how to keep it at bay even after Donald Trump no longer threatens the nomination.
The taped discussion between Hillary Clinton and Julius Jones of Black Lives Matter is a rich and fascinating document (full transcript here). Jones begins by telling HRC, “You and your family have been personally and politically responsible for policies that have caused … disasters in impoverished communities of color. … And so I just want to know how you feel about your role in that violence and how you plan to reverse it?”
HRC acknowledges the very bad consequences of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. But the two disagree about whether those policies were “extensions of white supremacist violence” (Jones) or else well-intentioned responses to the “very serious crime wave that was impacting primarily communities of color and poor people” and to the “very real concerns of people in the communities themselves” (HRC).
(NB It is possible that both interpretations are true, or at least partly so. For an interesting contemporaneous document on Black politicians and the 1994 Crime Bill, see this clipping, courtesy of the Brennan Center.)
Clinton repeatedly asks Jones for policy proposals, and Jones repeatedly presses Clinton for more explicit expressions of regret or changes of heart. The dialog ends with this exchange:
JONES: The piece that’s most important, and I stand here in your space, and I say this as respectfully as I can, but you don’t tell Black people what we need to do. And we won’t tell you all what you need to do.
HILLARY CLINTON: I’m not telling you—I’m just telling you to tell me.
[snip]
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, respectfully, if that is your position then I will talk only to White people about how we are going to deal with the very real problems—
QUESTION: That’s not what I mean. That’s not what I mean. But like what I’m saying is what you just said was a form of victim-blaming. Right you were saying that what the Black Lives Matter movement needs to do to change white hearts—
HILLARY CLINTON: Look I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate. …
One difference here is about mechanisms of change. Clinton acknowledges that there is value to the “the consciousness-raising, the advocacy, the passion, … of your movement,” but she believes that change always requires the passage of laws that reallocate rights and powers. Jones thinks that what Clinton believes and says to other White people about their own responsibility is a crucial element of change.
Another (related) difference is about the diagnosis of social problems. Clinton sees a set of interlocking causes for mass incarceration, including well-intentioned laws, economic factors, racism, etc. “You know, it’s not just an economic issue—although I grant that some of you will see it like that. But it’s more than that and I think there is a sense that, low level offenders, disparity treatment, we’ve got to do something about that. I think that a lot of the issues about housing and about job opportunities—’Ban The Box’—a lot of these things, let’s get an agenda that addresses as much of the problem as we can.”
In partial contrast, Jones sees one root cause to the problem, and it involves the hearts of white people (which Clinton has said you can’t change). Jones says, “Until someone takes that message and speaks that truth to White people in this country so that we can actually take on anti-Blackness as a founding problem in this country, I don’t believe that there is going to be a solution.”
My thoughts, for what they’re worth:
First, if it is ever helpful to ask any candidate about her values and priorities, then it is appropriate to probe Hillary Clinton’s “heart” on questions about race. I tend to think that we rely too much on psychological evaluations of candidates. Our impressions are almost always inaccurate, because our relationships with politicians are mediated; and they have less scope for choice than we assume. But this is a huge issue on which President Hillary Clinton might have quite a bit of scope for choice. She also has a problematic record. It is helpful to know what she deeply thinks now. That is information a citizen can use in deciding how and whether to vote.
But I have doubts about a general strategy of trying to get people to acknowledge their privileges. (This is more about the White voters to whom HRC would talk about white supremacy than about her own opinions.) “Privilege” means an unjustifiable advantage. Telling people they have a privilege may easily remind them of an advantage that they will want to protect. Cases are rare indeed when large numbers of people have acknowledged privileges and then dropped them. One example was August 4, 1789, when representatives of the French aristocracy stayed up all night voting to repeal the various privileges of the nobility. It was a glorious night but it did not end well.
The last paragraph may seem cynical, but I am optimistic about other paths to change that do not involve getting privileged people to acknowledge their privileges. The oppressed can gain leverage (economic or political) and negotiate change. Or a majority can be persuaded that change is in their interests as well. For instance, middle class white people may be persuaded that mass incarceration is unnecessarily expensive. In the transcript, HRC says, “That’s what I’m trying to put together in a way that I can explain and I can sell it. Because in politics, if you can’t explain it and you can’t sell it, it stays on its shelf.” I don’t know if she has in mind arguments about cost, but they would exemplify arguments that she could “sell.”
I am generally committed to a critique of root-cause analysis. (See Roberto Unger against root causes and this post on the idea of root causes in education.) I believe that problems typically involve multiple causes and complex feedback loops; and sometimes you can make the most substantial and lasting difference by attacking an apparently superficial element of a system. That said, the Black Lives Matter campaign is making a strong argument that racism, if not the one root cause of a wide range of problems, is at least necessarily involved in any solution.
Finally, I do not agree with Clinton that you can’t–or shouldn’t–“change hearts.” In the 2008 primaries, she and Senator Obama had an important debate about the role of bottom-up social movements in reforming society by changing values and perceptions. Clinton tended to disparage their impact, arguing, for instance, that the main impact of the Civil Rights Movement came from politicians’ passing the Civil Rights Acts. I think Obama was right to emphasize the deep changes in values and everyday behavior that arose from the social movement. (See Wilentz v. Ganz on the Obama social movement and the Clinton/Obama spat.)
However, a national political leader is well placed to pass laws but poorly placed to lead a social movement, as I think we have observed during President Obama’s period in the White House. So it could be that HRC is correct about the role she should be playing, even if she is wrong to downplay social movements that change hearts.
I departed from the prepared text a fair amount in order to address the audience of civic innovators who had gathered in Austin. By the time I spoke, I knew more about their projects. These are the prepared remarks:
A presidential election cycle is a great civic ritual. Even though only about 60% of adults vote—when we’re lucky—a national campaign still touches most Americans in one way or another. It challenges us to consider fundamental issues. And it connects us to our political heritage, for many of the greatest moments in our political history have been presidential elections.
As the 2016 cycle heats up, what should we expect from this great national civic experience? What do we have a right to expect from the election?
I would say …
The campaign must engage all Americans, without respect to wealth, social status, age, race, gender, disability, and political and religious opinions.
It must give all Americans equal weight and importance, honoring the fundamental principle of one person/one vote. It must make our leaders accountable to the people as equals.
The campaign must provoke a serious conversation about the most fundamental issues facing us as a country.
It must enlist our higher instincts. It is absolutely fine for citizens to retain their diverse political ideologies and their various and conflicting interests. But we must all be reminded of the more generous and idealistic aspects of our own views and interests—or what Lincoln called, after the fateful campaign of 1860, “the better angels of our nature.”
During a national political campaign, Americans must have respectful interactions with fellow citizens who hold different views from their own. The goal is not consensus but mutual understanding and an awareness that we are all legitimate participants in one great political debate.
Some of our interactions must be personal, in the sense that we get to know one another and can actually reply to each others’ ideas—whether online or face-to-face. In other words, it’s not enough to relate to politicians and other celebrities by following what they say. We must also relate to one another.
Citizens must see ways of acting on their political values that go beyond casting a ballot in November, important as that is. If, for instance, you are moved by the problem of climate change or concerned about moral decline, the campaign should inspire you to reduce carbon or to restore traditional values by working with neighbors and peers. The act of voting should be just one of the political efforts that you undertake as a result of the election.
Finally, a diverse set of new actors must see openings to enter political life, whether as campaign volunteers and staffers, independent activists, or reporters, artists, and bloggers. Presidential elections are entry points for new generations of activists and leaders.
I have described a national election in rather glowing terms, but we all know that the reality falls far short.
In fact, many of my friends and colleagues who do civic work at the local level and in nonprofit settings don’t want to have anything to do with national elections. An esteemed colleague who works mostly with adolescents in an urban context recently remarked, “I have never seen anything big that’s good.” I suspect that the programs she admires are ones where human beings voluntarily relate to each other as individuals. They know the other participants’ names and interests. They can act and see the consequences of their actions. The problems that arise in these settings are problems of relationships—individuals being selfish or prejudiced or antagonistic. And so the solutions involve improving the relationships by talking and listening.
In contrast, a national election is impersonal and detached. It’s about millions of people. It’s about casting a secret ballot for a person you will never meet. The consequences of your individual vote are tiny. And the election is not really voluntary because it will yield a new president and a new Congress who will govern us—whether we like it or not.
If you see politics as impersonal—as a matter of mass voting by secret ballot—then I would recommend that you pay some attention to the settings where fellow citizens do come together to talk and work voluntarily. That is the relational bedrock of American democracy, and it is in weak shape. We need more of it. You should help support dialogues and deliberations, community organizing efforts, civic education in schools, community service programs, civic journalism, and new media. The movement to expand these programs is what I call “civic renewal.” It is important.
But if all you do is to create opportunities for voluntary interactions among people who know each other personally (or who can get to know each other), then I would press you to think also about the mass scale. It is not enough for us to build online communities and face-to-face discussions or service opportunities for a small proportion of the population. Decisions of enormous importance are being made every day by national governments and massive corporations. Even if you are not interested in them, they are interested in you. We must work at that level too. Otherwise, our efforts are just cute and nice; they are not real politics.
At the mass scale, politics is no longer relational. It’s not about getting to know people personally and influencing their ideas and values. It’s about leverage—causing other people to act from afar. A vote, for instance, is a small act of leverage. So is a strike or lawsuit.
Some people are busy at the grassroots level engaging with their fellow citizens, discussing issues, developing relationships, and working on important issues and problems. They are quietly rebuilding our civil society. The question is: Where can those good citizens obtain large-scale leverage in a nation of 300 million that has very rigid institutions? One possible answer is: during a national presidential campaign.
In fact, when the 2008 presidential election was first heating up, many of my colleagues saw openings to bring civic renewal into national politics.
First of all, both parties had competitive primary elections that year, so lots of the presidential campaigns were startups. They were eager to incorporate newcomers as volunteers or even as paid staffers and eager to experiment with new tools and methods. There were openings for newcomers to enter politics through the campaigns. Many of today’s younger civic activists cut their teeth working for a 2008 presidential candidate.
Second, because most of the campaigns were long shots to begin with, they were willing to try risky strategies that empowered their grassroots volunteers. They allowed robust discussions on their websites and let their volunteers develop strategies and methods that would work in their own communities.
Third, several of the campaigns offered genuine ideas about civic renewal. John McCain advocated a dramatic expansion of civilian national service, joining Senator Obama in New York on the auspicious and politically precious day of September 11 to call for tripling the size of AmeriCorps. That was a policy to enhance civic participation in America, and it was part of a larger message that also connected to Senator McCain’s service in uniform.
It is widely forgotten now, but John Edwards was committed to a national citizens’ deliberation on important policy ideas that would generate official federal legislation. That was a different kind of policy proposal—and also quite promising.
Finally, Barack Obama spoke about the citizen’s role in politics with more depth and commitment than any presidential candidate since Bobby Kennedy in 1968. That is my judgment, anyway, and I have written about it in some detail. Senator Obama made civic renewal a signature campaign theme. He developed various appropriate policy proposals, from transparency in government to expanded national service.
But perhaps more impressively, his campaign embodied his message of civic engagement in the way it organized itself. Grassroots volunteers were no longer asked to reach certain numbers of voters with scripted messages. Instead, they were trained to form relationships with people in their communities and to develop their fellow citizens’ leadership skills. They were given the power to create their own messages and were held accountable for the number of true relationships they built. This was a great example of a mix of relational politics and mass politics, and it carried Obama all the way to the White House.
Is the 2016 election another source of leverage, another opening for improving American democracy?
On the day after the election, November 9, 2016, some people will be happy. A candidate whom they admire will be the incoming president of the United States. I understand and appreciate their enthusiasm and do not want to rain on their parade. They will have worked for a cause and won it, fair and square.
Still, I think most of us will reflect back on the 2016 election and say: “That was a … [let me think of a word I can use at a polite forum at UT Austin] … that was a …. disaster!” Measured by all of the criteria that I mentioned when I began this talk, the campaign will look like an almost absurd failure, a travesty.
Will all Americans be engaged and will they count equally? Absolutely not, in an election cycle expected to cost $5 billion. A few individuals will personally contribute amounts in the hundreds of millions, and they will certainly count for more than you and me. Candidates are openly boasting of their success in lining up big donors right now, during what is openly called the “money primary.”
Also, the campaign battleground will be small, limited to swing voters in swing states and the very few competitive congressional districts. In vast states like Texas, voters will not be seen to matter much at all.
Will new people bring new ideas and energies into politics? Not, I fear, through the presidential campaigns, because the leading candidates on both sides are the opposite of startups. They are extremely experienced professional operations with little room for newcomers.
And while the innovations of the 2008 campaign involved empowering volunteers to develop their own messages and strategies, the main innovations since then have involved the use of Big Data to hone and test messages sent from campaign HQ to citizens. The whole point of these methods is to affect individuals in reliable and predictable ways—not to hear their views or empower them to act. The value of algorithms and data is rising; the role of volunteers is increasingly trivial.
Will we see a great conversation about the fundamental issues facing the country? I am sorry to say that also seems highly unlikely. In every modern campaign, so many factors direct the conversation into trivialities and distractions, not to mention fear-mongering and outright lies.
And this year, there is an additional reason to be skeptical about the national conversation. Realistically, a Democratic president will not be able to accomplish a domestic policy agenda in her or his first term, because Congress is almost certain to be controlled by Republicans. The most she or he can actually accomplish is to veto Republican legislation and negotiate the annual budget to the status quo. That means that the Democratic candidates must talk about what they would do if elected knowing that they actually cannot do very much at all. All the rhetoric from one side of the campaign will be basically false, which is not good for the discussion.
Republicans can be more genuinely ambitious but it remains to be seen whether any of them will put forward a serious platform.
Incidentally, the same situation applied in the 2012 election, which struck me as one of the least edifying dialogues in modern times. The televised debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney were dominated by each man’s saying: “You propose X,” and his opponent saying, “No I don’t.” They never got to argue about what they did support. The whole conversation was incredibly confusing and misleading.
Will the 2016 campaign touch the better angels of our nature and call us to work together on important problems in our own communities? I hope so, but again I am not terribly optimistic. Much of the $5 billion that will be spent in this cycle will be used to frighten and distract, not to inspire and empower.
Politicians always over-promise what they can deliver and try to persuade us that they will solve our problems for us. That is always a disempowering message. It will be worse than usual this time because few Americans really believe that national leaders can achieve anything significant, given the frozen political situation in DC. So the candidates will relentlessly exaggerate their own potential and thereby minimize the role of ordinary citizens.
I was asked to inspire you; that was my explicit charge for today. So far, I am doing a miserable job. I am painting a very depressing picture of the months ahead.
But I actually do intend an inspirational message. Imagine that it is November 9, 2016, the day after the national election. The official campaign, as waged by professional politicians and covered by the mass media, is just as I have predicted: a civic nightmare. But imagine that Americans do not wake up on the day after the vote and remark, “What a disaster!” Instead, imagine that they say, “This is the year that we the people reclaimed our political system. Yes, the candidates ran multi-billion-dollar campaigns using scripted, misleading messages to influence a few swing voters and demobilize their opponents through fear. But that is not the main story of the 2016 election. Despite the behavior of the candidates and their enablers among the donor class and the mass media, this election actually was a great discussion of fundamental issues. It actually did reach most Americans and it did inspire us not only to vote but to act in other ways to improve the world. We learned about each other and gained a measure of respect for our fellow citizens who disagree. We saw at least the dim outlines of true solutions emerge. We saw a role for ourselves in achieving those solutions. We still expect relatively little from Congress in the next months, but we expect a great deal from ourselves as a people. We are ready to step up to our responsibilities as a great self-governing nation.”
Why would that happen? In all seriousness, it would happen because of your work. It would happen because you have labored and innovated and collaborated. You have built apps and websites where citizens can genuinely discuss important issues with people who disagree. You have covered news in ways that bring out the real issues and engages diverse voices. You have empowered even the most disempowered Americans with tools and ideas and skills that reconnect them to politics and civic life.
None of you can accomplish that alone. The budget of each organization represented in this room is a tiny fraction of the weekly spending of one of the presidential campaigns that will be flooding the airwaves with fear and misinformation. But we can accomplish a great deal together and with the many willing allies who are not here with us today.
We need to find new ways to set common goals and collaborate effectively in our communities, holding ourselves accountable for common outcomes.
In Bolivia this month, Pope Francis reflected on the global impasse among political elites that is putting not just the US but the whole earth in danger. He said, “People and their movements are called to cry out, to mobilize and to demand – peacefully, but firmly – that appropriate and urgently-needed measures be taken.” He concluded his Bolivia speech by saying, “the future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize.”
These are great and timely words. We are unlikely to hear them from our most powerful politicians, but we can make them the inspiration for our own efforts. This is the year that we can take back American politics. It is up to us.
(Winston-Salem) Last weekend, #BlackLivesMatter activists disrupted a forum with Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders at Netroots Nation. An objection to Gov. O’Malley was that he oversaw the State of Maryland while it incarcerated many thousands of young Black people. That was a pretty standard case of holding a leader accountable for his performance, and the governor’s response was terrible.
The critique of Sen. Sanders was more interesting, and I would love to see a real dialogue between the activists and Sanders–rather than what sounds like a dismissive response on his part. Without wanting to stereotype any individual, I would propose that Sanders and #Blacklivesmatter represent two wings of the American left that are genuinely different and that need more conversation. (See also “Why doesn’t Bernie Sanders talk about race” and “#BernieSoBlack: Why progressives are fighting about Bernie Sanders and race,” both in Vox.)
Consider two simplified ideological positions. One can be called classical social democracy. It holds that the root cause of social injustice is the economic and political power of capital, referring to the companies and individuals who control large economic investments. They represent a small slice of the population. The Occupy Movement asserted that the economic oppressors were 1% of Americans; and while that claim rested on some recent data about wealth distributions in the US, it has always been the case that capitalists are outnumbered by something like 99-to-1.
The classical democratic socialist view is that other problems follow from the power of concentrated capital. For instance, as I have argued, a situation like police violence in Ferguson, MO can be interpreted as a result of massive deindustrialization (the loss of hundreds of thousands of unionized blue-collar jobs in that region), which rendered young men without college degrees very economically weak, which has enabled violent abuse. So—argues the classical democratic socialist—it should be everyone’s priority to reduce the economic and political power of big capital. That means financial reform, antitrust, tax reform, and campaign finance reform to get capital out of politics.
When my colleague Andrew Prokop profiled Sanders last year, he pointed out astutely that Sanders’s career has been ‘laser-focused on checking the power of the wealthy above all else.’ Sanders believes in racial equality, sure, but he believes it will only come as the result of economic equality. To him, focusing on racial issues first is merely treating the symptom, not the disease.
Meanwhile, the political strategy of classic democratic socialists is to build very broad solidarity. Ninety-nine percent of us are not big capitalists, so we are in basically the same boat and should not allow ourselves to be divided. For instance, police officers are blue-collar or lower-income white-collar unionized state employees who need to be brought into the same coalition with unemployed youth.
The second view—I struggle to name it fairly—takes seriously many other sources of power, privilege, and domination. According to this view, we are not divided between the 99% and the 1%, but into a rainbow of racial/ethnic groups, genders, sexual identities, etc. Oppression is manifold and complex, and often “intersectional” in the sense that race, gender, sexual orientation, and class can overlap. Although it may be valuable to reform capital markets, that is neither sufficient nor the central concern. Power must be confronted directly in all of its forms and settings.
I suspect that neither Senator Sanders nor the #Blacklivesmatter activists at Netroots Nation would want to be placed simply in one of those two boxes. Every serious person develops more complex views in the course of struggling with difficult realities. But these are two general tendencies and they do explain, for instance, why the demographics of an #Occupy gathering or a Bernie Sanders rally are so different from the demographics of a #Blacklivesmatter protest.
For my part: I am not a democratic socialist, for two reasons. First, I am somewhat more enthusiastic about markets, individual economic liberties, and pluralism than a classical (statist) socialist would be. Secondly, I am somewhat persuaded by the second position summarized above and do not believe that concentrated capital is our only problem.
But I do worry a lot about concentrated, unregulated capital and doubt that much can be accomplished on other fronts if we don’t address that. I observe that concerns about race, gender, and sexual orientation have produced scattered victories over the past 30 years, not only in national politics (e.g., marriage equality) but also within institutions like corporations and universities. Meanwhile, the traditional democratic socialist agenda has been in steady retreat for the same 30 years, sometimes verging on a disorganized rout. National and global policies are more neoliberal and less economically egalitarian than at any time since the 1920s.
Younger people on the left typically have a lot to say about issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. They have diagnoses, solutions, heroes, and movements they can join. But most struggle for comparable ideas about reforming the global political economy, if they think about that at all. Despite the terrible injustices that motivate movements like #Blacklivesmatter, there is some sense of momentum toward policy changes, such as sentencing reform. We see nothing comparable when it comes to global capital markets. Thus I am glad to see the voices of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren resonating with at least some Americans.
I wish Sanders had taken the #Blacklivesmatter protesters seriously, because they deserve that, and the progressive movement needs their support to win. Yet I’d prefer that Sanders stuck to his position in a respectful debate, so that his side of the argument would convey. He is not going to be president; his contribution may be to put a different diagnosis and solutions on the table. The last thing I’d do is to silence #Blacklivesmatter protesters, but I wish that they and the Senator could have a substantive debate, in which both sides laid out some of these genuine points of disagreement.
(Winston-Salem, NC) Recent events involving The Donald strike me as powerfully reminiscent of an unpleasant schoolyard. Wanting to be popular and the leader of the cool clique, he picks on the most marginal group–in real life, Mexican immigrants. The other would-be leaders don’t necessarily like his bullying, and they worry that everyone may get in trouble for it, but they see that the abuse is popular among the bystanders, so they keep their objections to a low mutter. As for the bystanders, they are looking for a bad boy who will make trouble for the teachers and the school. Plus a lot of them dislike the marginal kids in the first place, or they want to differentiate themselves from them.
Then the bully, who is stupid as well as mean, makes a mistake. Instead of just picking on the weakest kids in the schoolyard, he says something utterly offensive about one of the cool kids. In real life, The Donald insults a Republican senator, war hero, former presidential nominee of the party, and son of an admiral. Now all the other would-be alpha dogs see an opening. This is not cool. They can criticize him. And once the mood has shifted, they can start throwing all kinds of other objections at the bully. They still won’t say anything in defense of the weak and the marginalized, but they can start questioning the bully’s claims to be cool. In a schoolyard, they would ridicule his clothing or musical tastes. In real life, they can all start saying that Trump isn’t a conservative because he has been pro-choice, has donated to the Clintons, etc. And whoever does the best job taking down the bully has the best chance of replacing him. That is the phase that has now begun.
Peter Beinart quotes an estimate that $5 billion may be raised from private donors for the 2016 election, much of it coming from extremely rich individuals who are able to keep relatively low profiles. Some of these donors may personally give amounts in the hundreds of millions. Here is a case for forcing them onto the public stage.
On one hand, there is no doubt that their money conveys power. You can’t make a serious run at the White House without raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Barack Obama did comparatively well at raising small contributions, yet (according to our good friends at the Center for Responsive Politics), 68% of his support–almost half a billion dollars–came from “large individual donors” in 2012.
On the other hand, the only true power is the vote, which is distributed to adult citizens equally (leaving aside felony disenfranchisement and a few other exceptions). Billions are spent to persuade voters how to use their power. But voters have the ability not to be persuaded, and they have–collectively–far more persuasive power over their fellow citizens than all the big donors and professional campaigns in America.
So campaign money is both a massive force and a kind of phantom, theoretically susceptible to being ignored and therefore becoming irrelevant.
Of course, there is something romantic and bootless about that latter point. It’s like saying that HIV has no real power because we could all just stop having unprotected sex and the virus would go extinct. Its power is very real because human behavior is predictably imperfect.
Likewise, we could imagine, per Habermas, that the only power becomes the power of the stronger argument. But real people (including me) will miss valid arguments unless they are loudly and repeatedly delivered, and we will accept invalid arguments that are effectively transmitted. Since expensive political communications are generally untrustworthy, it would be better if everyone ignored them all and decided how to vote based on personal discussions and reflections and high-quality news media. But as long as they are pervasive, they will matter.
The question, then, is how to break the spell of money. Beinart has a suggestion. He observes, “Right now, while presidential candidates experience proctological scrutiny from the press, mega-donors experience relatively little. As a result, they wield enormous power over government policy without facing the public glare that, in a democracy, those with great political power should have to endure.” His proposal: the news media should put the mega-donors under close scrutiny, reporting all their statements and positions and financial interests. Then a candidate who takes money from Billionaire X would gain power to communicate but also become associated with the embarrassing personal opinions and interests of the said Billionaire.
This is not a direct strategy for getting people to ignore what money buys. It actually makes money more central (while perhaps discouraging candidates from taking funds from some sources). The reporting that Beinart recommends will encourage ad hominem arguments, i.e., not “You are wrong because your premise is mistaken” but “You are wrong because you took money from a guy who said offensive things.” But once you are using large amounts of money to purchase influence over voters, your motives and goals do become relevant. If campaign spending is “speech,” then a donor is a speaker in the public sphere who can be held to account. And Beinart’s proposed strategy could be a disruptive move that, while it does not create an ideal political conversation, breaks the spell of the current one.
