Please See Part 1: Layers of Experience
Our level of experience shapes our understanding and expectations about politics. America is woefully prepared as an "Enlightened Public" and there is a need to address political literacy.
____________________________________________________________________________
Political Literacy, Pt 2:
Corporate Money, Consultants, and Progressive Politics:
How the Effect of Corporate Money can be diminished, if not neutralized.
The emphasis on Corporate Money as the prime problem in American politics almost always pre-empts a more complete, deeper analysis, which is badly needed. If progressives are going to succeed politically, there needs to be a clearer analysis of how we got where we are. Without that, getting the ball further downfield will be impossible.
As the Supreme Court might very well be about to make corporate money MORE prevalent, strategic thinking is needed.
To leap ahead, the question at the core of our thinking should be: Are we citizens or audience members? Are we smart enough to comprehend what is going on, or are we the dumb peasants that the elitists take us for? Are we actors, or helpless?
We should ask this ten times a day. We need to, in order to overcome the conditioning we receive as people who live in a Matrix projected by entertainment culture and the consumer economics that drives it.
We must refuse to take either the red or the blue pill and instead, work to become fully awakened and to sharpen our ability to ask the most penetrating questions and to refuse to accept superficial, easy explanations, and to be suspicious of those that seem to echo any pundits who operate on supposition rather than real experience and facts – including and maybe especially progressive pundits.
We have to realize that the real story is not given, as power is not. It must be ferreted out through developing a disciplined intellect and throwing off illusion.
This is no place for lazy minds or uneducated judgment. As we used to say in Texas politics, “progressives cannot afford to be stupid.”
Here’s the bumper sticker for the bathroom mirror:
Without proper analysis, strategic thinking can’t be well enough informed to work.
Forgetting this, was really the basic mistake tha Karl Rove, George Bush and the entire Republican paradigm staked their fortunes on, beginning back in the 1970s. Self projected delusion, is easy in politics. The Christian Right, however, went beyond that. I can reflect back on that because I went to a private University in Texas that had a strong contingent of New Right, Campus Crusade for Christ, Young Republicans.
These people believed that the public would not listen to the truth as they saw it, so they had to lie. They had to get power because they saw the nation as being led into the sort of error that would destroy us all as all of were led, sheeplike, by the siren song of Liberalism. That became basic to the Christian Right Wing approach to politics. Then they allied with oil and other special interests that could go with that, but for deeply cynical and soulless reasons. That led to a foundation built on sand, and we now see the results. They are moving deeper and deeper into demagoguery and base emotion. Fear of the future is nakedly prominent.
Democrats have an opportunity to become instead, analysis based and as practical as engineers in learning how to be effective – and more and more consistently effective.
While corporate money is indeed a landscape shaping force, there is a way to analyze how the system functions in a way that can offer daylight for those willing to go there.
One factor in both Republican and Democratic politics is that there is what one might call a consultant class. This arose with the availability of a new technology. Technology was expensive and this has, over time, shifted the base to large scale contributions. The lesson learned from this portends an important consideration for the future of progressive politics.
As the 1960s turned into the ‘70s, people in college back then were studying computer programming and at the same time becoming mobilized to become participants in the political environment around Vietnam War protest, anti-poverty activism, and the Civil Rights struggle as well as the inclusion of youth. The 18 year old vote was new. A lot of people in those years graduated with a sense of mission.
I became involved at the turn of the ‘70s into the ‘80s as this circumstance came into its own, in Austin, Texas. Many people who became progressive candidates had been to the University of Texas (which had 40,000 people at the Austin campus) during the previous decade. There were 20,000 people who formed the core of the progressive voting base, out of 80,000 voters in a total population of about half a million. During the peak period, we tended to win elections by margins between 60 and 85%. Stop and consider that for a second:
How does a fourth of the voting population manage to become a sizeable majority in an historically conservative community?
It happened that mini mainframe computers had become available, and were affordable as a business investment by the mid seventies. That was to become historically crucial.
This is where GOTV comes from as we know it today. Essentially, the old grass roots methods from the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s were automated through a category sorting system.
The old precinct organizer’s shoebox with its recipe card file became a database.
Voter rolls from the election administration officials could now be cross tabbed with phone numbers and addresses and some census tract data. Thus, direct mail targeted to approximately the right set of voters, with phone banking and polling could support the development of TV commercials, as well as deployment of volunteers on phone banks and out in precincts with walk lists. It became a system. A package. Contracting.
People hanging around a campaign office spending the day grousing about how bad things were could be directed, instead to constructive strategy fulfillment. Here is a list of phone numbers, with result ovals by them to fill in and turn back in to get fed in to the computer for a new sort, then called again. Here is a list generated by that process, and some literature. Go door to door to these addresses in these precincts.
On the eve of an election, in the midst of this development, I delivered some E-Day sound truck tapes that I had produced. As I handed the tapes to him, Peck Young, a larger than life brilliant computer nerd with a “fox eating yellow jackets” smirky smile, who as far as I know personally invented the business of winning elections, looked very tired and haggard. He reflected that the outcome of the election depended on his firm the next day and the thought was sobering. For a moment. The next night I remember as a huge celebration for a sweeping victory for the entire progressive candidate slate, an important moment in the city’s 150 year history, as I reflect back on it. It only took about fifteen years to get to that point, and winning the next several election cycles, so that in the 1990s the entire council including the Mayor turned "Green" in the environmentally progressive sense.
My point is that one should reflect on how the politics of today was defined by people whose inspiration was during college days over 40 years ago.
Project that ahead. What does that mean for the next 40 years?
For one thing, there are lessons to be learned and applied by people willing to go beyond grousing about what is wrong and become disciplined enough to become a factor over the course of the coming years. One lesson: There is a short term, and a long term. Winning an election creates an opportunity, a responsibility and the necessity to embrace long term thinking.
The rise of a new technology is now informing a generation who have just graduated from college, or who are just now entering college.
The data processing graduates of the 1970s, established the discipline of categorical thinking to inform political strategy and the use of databases, along with automating the grass roots system.
The problem that arose is that, as the integration of systems from database handling to producing TV commercials became a package that required ever more professional specialization, grassroots organizing, by default, faded and atrophied to become a lost art, while money became a more prominent necessity to support the system.
Interestingly, I worked with people like Peck Young, but at the same time I was aware of Karl Rove, working in the same part of town. Rove was from roughly the same cohort of college graduates. Technology is neither progressive or conservative. It is best to not forget that the competition has the same toolbox.
As the automated GOTV system became, like the health care system, more and more expensive, corporate money came to be something far more than just a crucial factor. This was used strategically by people like Karl Rove and this upped the ante such that the oil interests and corporate interests could be nearly dominant.
But, the way that money can be somewhat neutralized as The Prime Factor was seen in the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election cycles. The ease of contributing from one’s desktop led to individual contributions becoming a greater factor relative to corporate giving.
What needs to happen next is that the internet needs to become more capable of being a way of connecting the distributed intelligence of the activist progressive population into a strategic deliberation that obviates anonymous “Wizards of Oz” as the default intellectual leadership of the whole political system.
This is the point of proper analysis. The system can in fact, be moved, and the effect of coporate money diminished.
Currently, most people don’t even know who political consultants are and have no real idea of what they do. These “experts” can make over a million dollars during a campaign season, even on local or statewide campaigning (when you take an ad buy to a TV station, usually there is something like a 15% cut, kind of a commission for bringing the money in the door.) These people won’t waste time talking to anyone they don’t have to, so they mostly talk to other consultants or candidates. That creates a system that is essentially disconnected to the larger progressive field.
It may take a decade or so to build on what the consultants have built over the past 40 or so years as a foundation, and to take the system to a new level.
But with skillful, penetrating analysis and a commitment to using the best discipline any of us are capable of, there is every reason to expect that a more progressive politics is possible in America.