This begins series of diaries I am wrestling with. When I say wrestling, I mean a serious deep reflection, calling out everything I know from every corner of memory and impression in an attempt to understand what is useful there. Then the problem is writing so that it is readable.
There are layers to political experience, as there are in any area of life.
Mine started, in 1981, because I felt I didn't have enough experience and I wanted to be able to go into an interview for a job as a reporter with a local daily newspaper with the confidence that I could lay something on the table. I got involved in a quixotic progressive campaign to elect a PhD engineer, who was also an electric utility activist and neighborhood group leader to the city council. Pretty soon I was designing campaign logo material, using my newspaper layout skills, drafting speeches and helping with TV and radio scripts. To make a long story short, we won - in a landslide - and life hasn't been the same since. I spent the next 20 years in a series of ever deeper involvements in community politics and leadership.
One of the things that made me think I really ought to try to dig deep and locate relevance wherever it lay hidden in the experiences I had, was reading through a bunch of high school civics exams recently, as a scorer. I read through about 12,000 short answers in essay form. I was very alarmed. Not only was the general level of English usage pretty bad overall, but these people were going to be voters in another year.
Many answers showed that some segment of the student population was getting more instruction on basic civics from right wing talk radio than from their teachers.
This resonated with a concern from long ago as I drafted words for a grassroots progressive coalition effort and then joined the volunteer door-to-door outreach. I became concerned that something we could call Political Literacy exists and across America, this is something lacking in the core curriculum for almost anyone graduating from high school and this is one of the things that handicaps us all.
Now, we are on a great communication resource that can provide a way to connect up America's distributed intelligence, to increase political literacy from a high school deficiency to a Grad School level of proficiency, and to achieve policy goals that can address America's real and pressing problems in the 21st century.
One way to consider breaking this down to digest it, is to consider layers of experience. So, as I look at where I have been, as a deep deliberation.
In looking at the way the Daily Kos discussion has developed since 2003, I think there is possibly a way that a general limitation in the potential of this site as a progressive movement building resource could be addressed.
It should be recognized that to detail one’s experience is to lay oneself open to being identified by the specifics, which could lead to arguments that cause the attempt to find useful meaning in it to be lost. Trust is a fundamental in honest communication and withholding important personal identity facts – and insights - is a way of guarding against the risks that come with trusting.
This causes a limitation in the depth of experience generally offered – which limits the potential of the entire effort. It also allows lying and disingenuous reasoning to be more prevalent than they would normally be, and allows fallacious and cynical thinking to rule through sheer verbal cleverness.
We’ve seen this in the larger body politick, especially during the Bush years, but harking back to Reagan and to Nixon. What is needed is nothing less than to seek to create a new paradigm for the future, rather than to learn now to think in the Nixonian mode.
I offer my own beginning:
We bring to volunteering for a campaign, some level of investment in the outcome and some amount of energy we are willing to put into that. In my case, my girlfriend at the time and I were willing to go flat out and put in 24/7 and go on short sleep for months, and to recover from sheer exhaustion.
That was one layer.
Then we helped move into the city council office and began a long process of becoming familiar with how the city council works and how the permanent administrative professional staff works and how the judicial system informs the whole process. We also learned hard lessons about opposition, and about the media. I learned the hard irony that too much knowledge disqualifies you from working a regular gig with a steady paycheck. One becomes fated to go down a different path.
An effort arose out of necessity, to build a progressive coalition. It was obvious, after several of our friends got elected to the council, that getting members on the council was not enough. We had to gain a majority, and one that would last long enough to persuade the oligarchy of big business interests to actually pay attention to the policies enacted by a progressive majority on the council. This proved tougher than one might have thought.
Another layer: Win the game and go to the next level.
The bureaucracy, given this circumstance, served two masters. The old master was the oligarchic interests that had run the show for many decades, and the new master was a generation apparently willing to put a lot of energy into steering things differently. Bureaucracy demurrs and responds but slowly to changes, since it tends to think that change is merely faddish and because professional administrators tend to look down on citizens as "amateurs." You find that elected office holders have to be careful and smart about developing relationships. People will tell you no more than exactly what you asked. If you don't know enough to put it the right way, you get the wrong information. An angry officeholder gets no help and becomes starved enough for knowledge that in the next election they will probably not get enough support to win re-election. The behind the scenes aspects are legion, since the media has no attention span for the practical details.
After working for several years in an effort to develop arguments and literature that could help popularize the coalition, I got the chance to try out for a job in political consulting. It was good money, on the level with, I would venture to guess, drug dealing, but without the risk of jail time or being killed. Other risks, perhaps.
I found that political consulting is a world most people are completely unaware of: Another layer.
This is based on talent. Someone who is gifted at coming up with TV commercials or direct mail literature that doesn't get thrown away might be able to win elections. Someone who can more or less be counted on can pretty much become a millionaire. Why don't people know about this? Mostly the people in this area don't like talking to people they don't have to because they aren't teachers. They avoid the clueless. They are excited by the challenge at the high end of the intellectual problem, where the money is incredible.
I found myself working, for a while, for a political consultant who was really a genius, a Mozart of the TV commercial realm, who was so astute, a roomful of political geniuses were always impressed. Thus, I learned that this layer of experience exists. Like it or not, it has to be recognized as existing and considered.
One time, I wrote a brochure for a candidate that I realized, as we finalized the material, appreciated that I knew the community well enough to know what would play, but cared nothing really for whether people thought this represented his true position on the issues or not. This gave me pause. I could easily help to get elected, someone who actually was willing to tell the voters what they wanted to hear from a standpoint of perfect cynicism. This was one of several reasons for quitting. Many would have kept on getting the good money out of it and diminished their ability for honest feeling in the bargain.
In fact, this is precisely what governs much of the character of politics for both parties. People who run for office are good at policy but generally are not talented at writing or media production, let alone how to put the whole orchestration together. They aren't running to change the paradigm, but to get to a position in which they can deal with the issues they consider important. The ability to win puts consultants in a hugely important position. Even better, from the standpoint of those who can maintain such positions, is that no one knows what they do, except candidates for office. Even those people are not generally aware of how much of the balance of intellectual power is being given over to the gurus of winning at politics.
Another layer of experience: enduring when you didn't know you had it in you.
Being hurt. Hurt bad. Really bad. How many kinds of bad can there be?
A woman I loved very deeply, who I had been living with for ten years, suddenly demanded that I move out. Pretty quickly, she would up getting married to - not just any guy - but a lobbyist. Not just any lobbyist, but a guy at the center of a real estate scandal that brought down a really great progressive council member that many of us had worked our hearts out for.
This was a "no good deed goes unpunished" result of working tirelessly for causes that were essentially pitted against money. I wound up driving a cab, spending a lot of time listening to country music and writing poetry.
But I also managed to keep up with civic involvement, and this pulled me forward. I became immersed in municipal telecom policy at a time when it was beginning to get very interesting.
Beyond campaigning: A layer mostly beyond visible appearance.
Gradually I began to act as a community leader. I went to lots and lots of meetings. I was involved in a crisis situation in the public spotlight. I became involved with most of the elected leaders, the attorneys responsible for various jurisdictions, and even went before a Grand Jury to explain a policy arrived at through negotiations involving lots of people.
There is a layer of political experience involving the courts, lawyers, and the sort of real responsibility that can keep you up all night feeling, if not a sort of terror, then a lot of anxiety about what the right thing to do is when it might actually count.
When you round a corner to go into a meeting and run smack into a reporter with a microphone in your face and a camera running and what you say will lead the evening news and have a real impact on people, you realize that public service can require the sort of courage that is the closest thing in civic life to being on a battlefield. Political Courage becomes something more than a turn of phrase.
Beyond success: The unknown country.
Then there are people who have succeeded as well as it is possible to succeed in politics, who retire from years of effort who then wonder in private if anything they did really was worth it, since no one seems to understand what it was. Was it all just an elaborate effort at building sand castles?
That is a layer of experience that comes with a question about what you can tell people who are just now entering the system, perhaps having won one election campaign, or maybe two. Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or is it just the loss of conceit, a loss of purpose inherent in having too much experience to actually explain to the uninitiated? Is there wisdom - or just a decline into the grave?
What is the substance of history? Is it hubris to even dare to ask? Is there political wisdom?
I know a woman who is in her nineties and is still active and sharp and a mentor for several generations of activists and elected officials. She campaigned for Lyndon Johnson for Congress, inspired by his progressivism and then fought against him as he brought the original oil interests into politics. She has been a major factor in a number of ways, and deserves credit for creating a basis for national alternative energy policy.
My observation is that such long term activists are not in it for specific gains; so much effort gets so much reward. Instead, it is a committed life and a concept of what a citizen is. A sense of community that sustains life over a long lifetime and for several generations.
That is a layer of experience that ultimately informs all the others, even when our selfish ego doesn't allow admitting it.
These are all layers to consider.
I call the overarching paradigm, political literacy. There is a lot about reality and the way it works that is not taught in school. It isn't reflected in the media because most writers tend to not be the sort of people who commit their hearts and souls to anything beyond their intellectual conception of it, and so don't understand a committed life and can't observe it.
Oddly, as a Republic based on the concept of an Enlightened Citizenry, We The People are politically illiterate and ignorant about what goes on right in front of us. Our own ignorance and vulnerability is our greatest issue.
To me this is where the rubber meets the road in gaining traction towards the future. Becoming aware enough, and disciplined enough in the attempt to truly become aware, that we can insist on the future we can envision in specific terms.
Any reflections? Serious questions? Deeper truths or insights? Experience anecdotes?
To start with, here is a survey on levels of political experience. On this blog, how experienced are we?
Future topics?
I'm thinking about how lying and underhanded negative tactics became so prevalent during the Bush years and how progressives can establish a long term trend that creates a different debate arena. How to neutralize the effect of money. That sort of thing. I'm thinking there should be a minimum of three more of these diaries in the series...