(crossposted at Attack of the Machine Elves)
P. J. O'Rourke is not someone I find myself agreeing with too often, although I must admit that when he’s on his game, he’s one of the few genuinely funny conservatives out there. However, one point of agreement we do share is his observation that there are three branches of government: money, television, and bullshit.
O’Rourke first made this observation in his 1991 book Parliament of Whores, which was written during the presidency of George Bush the Elder; but his words would unintentionally foreshadow the 1992 election cycle, which produced sizeable Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a new Democratic President: a young, well-educated, articulate, charismatic, and empathetic leader, elected on a platform of hope, change, and a positive vision for the future, who promised to put the country back on course in the middle of tough economic times. Many of us on the left had great expectations of this new President and his fellow Democrats, expectations that would be dashed to pieces against the jagged reality of a political system that was oriented towards protecting the interests of concentrated wealth. In retrospect, of course, we should have known better than to get our hopes up: the man in whom we had invested them was a product of the very same political realities that ultimately conspired to destroy the promise so many of us saw in him, as were the elected Democrats whose help he would need in fulfilling that promise.
As true as O’Rourke’s observation was in the days after Bill Clinton’s election, it is perhaps even more so today. Some among us who remembered all too well the deflated expectations of the 1990’s wisely cautioned against investing too much hope in the promise that Barack Obama represented, but to no avail. I was one of those who experienced the Clinton era as a young voter, and should have remembered the pain associated with those deflated expectations well enough to be more cautious this time around; but for whatever reason, I failed to do so. Perhaps it was because the Bush years were such an unmitigated disaster that I let my guard down. On some level, of course, I realized that Obama was just another politician despite his strengths. But I also saw potential in the hope that a former community organizer inspired among so many Americans, especially among younger voters, and I saw the possibility of that hope serving as a firm foundation upon which a progressive movement for the future could be built. I allowed myself to believe that, even if Obama turned out to be just another politician, the groundswell of support that made his unlikely election possible would be sufficient to keep him pointed in the right direction. And like so many, I saw the symbolic importance of this country electing its first African-American President, a man with a mixed racial background and a diverse array of life experiences.
As it turns out, hope is still not enough to change the fact that, like Clinton and his cast of supporters a decade earlier, Obama and his fellow Democratic leaders are products of a fundamentally flawed political status quo. What’s worse, the hope inspired by Obama this time around has produced a significant base of support for his administration and its policy decisions that is unwavering and unquestioning in its devotion, and is thus an enabling factor for his less desirable tendencies. What inspires this devotion is a matter of debate even among those of us who acknowledge its existence. It could be credibly argued that many of Obama’s most loyal supporters are people who have invested so much emotionally in the idea of his virtue and the hope that he would be a successful leader that the prospect of acknowledging his shortcomings would necessarily be daunting. However, it could also be observed that many of his most devoted supporters are political novices who are drawn to him because of his celebrity status, and are thus not motivated by his policy priorities so much as they are by the idea of what he represents. And, of course, it could just be that there are a lot of people out there who, for their own reasons, agree very strongly with the way he’s doing things.
Whatever the case, this core of support for Obama is a significant impediment for far too many on the left to recognizing hard truths that we all, for the continued political viability of the progressive movement and the future of this country, must be willing to acknowledge. We must face the fact that the American political system is fundamentally oriented toward serving the will and interests of a wealthy elite at the expense of the nation as a whole, and that if not corrected, the deficiencies in this system will lead this nation inexorably towards ruin. We must face the fact that the Democratic Party in its current format is too weak, too dysfunctional, and too invested in the perpetuation of the status quo to produce the kind of change we need in order to avoid the disaster that we are headed toward. Finally, we must face the fact that in order to bring about meaningful change, we who are both aware of the scope of the problem and willing to do the work necessary to address it will need to seek a new political paradigm in which to operate.
In the current paradigm, we have operated under the assumption that the American political system is and will always be a duopoly headed by the Republican and Democratic Parties. We have told ourselves that the Democratic Party is the only political option we have available to us, and that while we might be able to nominate better Democrats, we ultimately have no choice but to support and vote for whoever the party nominates, even if that nominee is nothing more than the lesser of two evils – and in some cases, even if that nominee is the greater of two evils, because we’ve also convinced ourselves that electing bad Democrats serves the organizational goals of the Democratic Party and thus serves our political interests. We have mocked those who share many of our beliefs but who nonetheless have made the principled decision to give their votes to minor-party candidates and independents more closely aligned with those beliefs, accusing these individuals of dividing the vote on the left and thus facilitating the election of Republicans. We have told ourselves that while it might be great to see true political reform take place in this country, it would be quicker and easier to simply make the structural shortcomings in our current political regime work to our advantage: to raise more money, to buy more time on television, to utter more bullshit. We have done all this, and what it has produced for us over the last 40 years can be measured in the utter failure of our current Democratic President and his Democratic majorities in Congress to produce anything more than microscopic increments of positive change that are at best tenuous and woefully insufficient to reverse the steady decline of this country.
In order to bring about meaningful change, we must be willing to abandon our current political paradigm and replace it with a new one better suited to our needs. We must first accept the fact that, while we should still work toward whatever incremental policy gains we can achieve, we will need to bring about fundamental structural reforms in the American political system before meaningful change can take place that will be enough to avert this country from disaster. We must accept the fact that the Democratic Party and its leadership has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and that we can therefore not depend on the party as an institution to be a vehicle for the political reforms we seek. We must be willing to abandon our reflexive support for Democratic candidates as the lesser of two evils, and instead be willing to support and vote for political candidates regardless of political affiliation who will commit themselves to specific reforms that will lay the groundwork for a truly representative political system. We must be willing to abandon the idea of America as a two-party democracy, and work instead toward a robust multiparty system that will inspire greater enthusiasm and participation among voters and make it possible to enact progressive legislation and policies that will produce meaningful positive results. And to the extent that we are not able to realize the change we seek within the context of electoral politics, we must be willing to augment our electoral activities with direct action, like those who came before us did so effectively. We need to come up with creative ways to disrupt the political and economic machines that drive the status quo, and to create interference in the right-wing echo tunnel that does so much to keep these machines lubricated. Those who came before us used strikes, and marches, and sit-ins, and boycotts. Going forward, we will need to utilize these and other tactics from the past that will still work today, tinkering with them as needed, but we will also need to find and employ new tactics that are effective in our current political and cultural context.
There are those who will dismiss the idea of prioritizing political reform with the observation that it will require so much effort and dedication to achieve, and take so long to pull off, that our efforts are better directed toward seeking incremental change within the current political paradigm. To those people, I say that any incremental changes we manage to achieve will always be tenuous and subject to reversal by those who oppose real reform. We’re on a sinking ship right now, and we won’t be able to bail the water out of it fast enough with the tools that the political status quo provides. Before meaningful change can take place in this country, we have to build a firm foundation for it to rest upon, and political reform is that foundation. Others will dismiss us by arguing that by enabling the formation of minor parties, we will be laying the groundwork for division on the left and one-party rule by the Republicans. To these people, I would simply point out that in a truly representative multiparty system, there will be divisions on both sides of the political spectrum, and these divisions may very well work to our advantage. Just as there are fault lines on our side dividing progressives from triangulating corporatists, there are also fault lines on the right dividing paleoconservatives, neoconservatives, and libertarians.
And to those who balk at the suggestion that we support pro-reform candidates regardless of their party affiliation, let me say first of all that I understand the hesitation many of you would feel about voting for a candidate who supports political reform, but who otherwise opposes key progressive policy priorities. I don’t expect any of you to vote for a pro-reform candidate who opposes, say, a woman’s right to choose, or GLBT rights. Each of us has our own formula for determining what candidates are politically acceptable to us, and if a pro-reform candidate doesn’t otherwise measure up to the standards you apply in deciding who to vote for, then you shouldn’t feel compelled to vote for that candidate – the push for political reform is not a suicide pact. Rather, what I’m proposing is that we discard the idea of unconditional allegiance to the Democratic Party and its institutional priorities, and open ourselves to a wider range of potential candidates. If you’re in the voting booth, and you’re faced with the choice between a pro-reform Republican who also happens to be a hardcore Christianist and an anti-reform progressive Democrat, and those are the only two choices you have, I wouldn’t blame you if you still voted for the Democrat – I know I would. But if you’re faced with the choice between a moderate Republican who supports reform and a moderate Democrat who opposes reform, with all else being equal, you should vote for the pro-reform Republican. And if you’re forced to choose among a typical Republican and typical Democrat, both of whom oppose reform, and a third-party progressive who supports reform, don’t allow misplaced pragmatism to cause you to vote for the Democrat just because you think the third-party candidate has no chance of winning. Minor parties may not have had a lot of electoral success throughout the history of this country, but the political pressure they can create by drawing votes from Republican and Democratic candidates has at times played a key role in shaping the dialogue and thus advancing reform. By nudging the Overton window in the direction of meaningful political change, we hasten the day when candidates who aren’t members of the Big Two parties have a viable chance of winning elections.
So how should we proceed? Well, that’s a question best answered collectively by those of us who choose to take up the cause of political reform, but I do have in mind the broad outline of a possible path toward reform. First and foremost, I believe that we should place priority on seeking two elements of reform that will go a long way toward facilitating the rest of what we hope to achieve: ballot access reform, to make it easier and fairer for minor parties and independent candidates to both get on the ballot and stay on the ballot in successive elections; and fusion balloting, to make it easier for voters who have grown accustomed to having to choose between two monolithic parties to transition over to a multiparty system. We should work toward enacting whatever legislation we can at the federal level to achieve these goals, in order to ensure that reform is applied consistently and within a shorter time frame; but to the extent that we are not able to achieve these goals at the national level, we should work together and coordinate our efforts in order to achieve them at the state level.
Having achieved the two primary goals of meaningful ballot access reform and fusion ticketing, we can then begin to pursue a broader agenda of political reform. I believe this broader agenda should incorporate many, preferably most (or all), of the following objectives:
- Instant runoff voting, in order to make it easier for voters to support minor party and independent candidates without feeling that they’ve wasted their vote in doing so.
- A none-of-the-above option, to keep voters engaged by giving them a reason to vote in races involving candidates who are running unopposed.
- Open debates, to ensure that minor party and independent candidates are given a seat at the table and allowed to play a meaningful role in the dialogue.
- Campaign finance and lobbying reform, including public financing of campaigns at the federal, state, and local level, in order to reduce the corrupting power of concentrated wealth in our political system and level the playing field between the Big Two parties and the minor parties. The threshold for participation in public financing should be set low enough to allow minor parties and independent candidates to take full advantage thereof.
- A federally administered voter registration system with automatic registration, in order to increase voter participation, minimize the use of the registration process as a means of voter suppression and other forms of fraud, make the process more efficient and accurate, and minimize the need for provisional ballots thereby facilitating election administration. A federal registration system should be structured to address the problem of caging as a means of voter suppression.
- Laws and regulations to make it easier for people to exercise their right to vote by enacting reforms to remove work as an obstacle to participation and reduce the likelihood of long lines at polling places. Possible options include making election day a national holiday, requiring extended polling hours, mandating multi-day elections, and holding elections on weekends instead of Tuesdays.
- Increased election administration at the federal level, to ensure uniformity and counter institutionalized voter suppression at the state and local level.
- Elimination of laws that disenfranchise ex-felons who have completed their sentences and have been released from prison.
- Restoring confidence in the electoral process by making it more transparent and less prone to fraud, including efforts to maximize the number of votes counted and ensure that they are being counted accurately. This should include requirements that all voting methods including electronic voting produce voter-verifiable paper ballots, as well as needed reforms to ensure that the votes of active duty military personnel are counted and that their votes are not subject to coercion or other forms of fraud.
- Increasing political literacy and leveling the playing field of public political discourse by instituting media fairness laws and regulations to require news organizations to report the news fairly and truthfully, by taking steps to address media consolidation, and by strengthening the informational tools available to voters.
- Reforming the party nominating process to make it more democratic and less costly by requiring primaries in all contests, shortening the length of the nominating process with regional super-primaries or a national primary, and getting rid of unelected delegates such as superdelegates.
- Reforming the electoral college system to make it more representative of the will of the people by requiring proportional allocation of electoral votes, eliminating the electors and directly allocating electoral votes to the party's nominees, adding members to the House of Representatives in order to make the EC more representative of the popular vote, and by giving electoral votes to territories.
- Allocation of voting members in the House of Representatives and the Senate to the District of Columbia and the territories, in order to increase their participation in the lawmaking process.
- Instituting term limits in order to undermine the overwhelming electoral advantages conferred by incumbency and facilitate the rotation of new leaders with new ideas into the American political system.
- Democratizing the Senate by eliminating the filibuster and instituting proportional representation for election of senators.
- Reforming the Census to address its underrepresentation of urban residents and overrepresentation of rural residents by requiring that jailed criminals be counted as residents of the area they’re from and not the area where they’re incarcerated.
Over the days and weeks ahead, I plan to discuss at greater length the need for political reform in this country, and to further elaborate on the ideas I listed above as well as other proposals to reform and revitalize the moribund American political system. For the most part, these aren’t new ideas: most of them have been around in some form or another for years, if not decades. What I hope to contribute is an understanding of the urgency for reform, and at least a little bit of forward momentum in making that reform happen. Whether you agree or disagree with me, want to berate me a little, or just feel like sharing a few macros, I’ll be posting actively on this and other topics at my blog, and will also continue posting here as well.