Democrat Alex Sink lost a special election in Florida’s 13th district Tuesday night by under 2%.
The media has numerous theories why she lost to David Jolly including:
• Last minute $2 million in spending for David Jolly from outside groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Crossroads, and American Action Network
• Sink’s position on the Affordable Care Act
• Low voter turnout for Democrats
• Florida gerrymandering
While there may be some truth to any or all of these, I believe most of them are symptoms of a much larger problem.
To explain this, however, I need to tell you about a conversation I’ve been testing out. Bear with me for a second. I promise I’ll come back to the congressional race.
The situation
In this conversation, usually held one on one, often at a bar, I start with the situation - what’s going on in our country?
I start here because at a certain level, everyone understands the situation. I’ve tried it so far with two conservatives, a liberal, a Tea Party member, and three independents. And yeah, I know. Not exactly a huge statistical sample but hear me out; I’ll talk about how it’s been done on a larger scale a bit later.
To start, I draw the following:
Here, I’ve made a graphic. But I usually just sketch it on a napkin without the bad clip art. The arrow symbolizes flow of power.
Then I talk about an example or two showing how this works. Here’s a few you can choose from:
• ALEC legislation in the states
• The financial bailout of 2008
• Insurance companies crafting health care legislation and the individual mandate
• The West Virginia chemical spill and Freedom Industries
• K Street lobbying
• The Citizens’ United decision
I’m sure you can think of more. Most people pick up on this pretty quickly and start to say something like “Yeah, so what do we do?”
Don’t rush to any recommendations yet. Ask for any feedback.
If the conversation starts to veer into some type of Republican/Democrat conversation, keep it focused on the situation. You may have to say something like “Let’s just focus on the situation right now. Forget politics.”
The point here is that just about everyone will agree that this is the situation. You may want to say something like: “Do we agree on the situation?”
If you’ve done nothing else, you both now agree on the situation.
Visions of the future
Now, let’s talk about how we might fix this. Again, to avoid any kind of Republican/Democrat fight, I’ll say: “Let’s start with the solution that no one is proposing.”
I draw a different picture.
In this one, people are at the top. I usually write “government of the people, by the people, for the people” next to people/government. You can also use the “We the people …” quote from the U.S. Constitution.
The important point is that government should be in the hands of the people. This is the way our country was designed to work and how it should work if it were functioning properly.
Equal representation. A system of checks and balances. A Bill of Rights to make sure a majority never votes away individual rights.
I then write 18/19th century next to corporations.
You may want to add that when our country was founded, mercantile trading companies such as the British East India Company existed but it wasn’t until the late 18th century that Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations (1776) that corporations transitioned from royal charters to private entities. In England, the Joint Stock Companies Act (1844) and the Limited Liability Act (1855) laid much of the groundwork for the modern day corporation.
The main point to get across though is that we, the people, established a framework for both government and corporations. Neither just arose naturally fully-formed from the earth. They are what we made them.
We, the people, established a government so that we could be as free as possible without infringing upon the freedom of others. We would govern ourselves through representatives, free from the tyranny of any sovereign or religion.
At the same time, there was a sense of the common good. Many of our early states actually chartered as commonwealths.
From the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Constitution:
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.
You can hear this echoed in the Constitution in the Preamble and the
general welfare clause:
The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
The purpose of government was to provide the infrastructure (rights, courts, resources, etc.) within which people could best pursue their goals.
How did we establish this freedom?
• Representative government: one person, one vote.
• Laws to be established for the common good.
• Everyone is equal under the law.
• Branches of government to provide checks and balances.
• A bill of rights to prevent tyranny of the majority.
You can add more or less as you see fit. This is just the structure I use. In reality, it’s more of a conversation. Gauge your audience. Does this make sense? Do you see things differently?
I believe most people will largely agree up to this point though you may get some pushback over the idea of the common good. The folks I talked with were pretty receptive though a couple tried to push me into the next sections, which compare and contrast the Democratic and Republican visions of the future.
Depending on your audience, you can switch up these sections. If I’m speaking with a liberal, I’ll usually start with the conservative vision and vice versa.
The Democratic vision of the future
With a few exceptions, Democrats don’t talk enough about vision. They typically focus on policy.
By default, therefore, their vision is the current situation with some new policies thrown in to make it slightly better. Point to the first napkin.
Examples of policy modifications include:
• An increase in the minimum wage
• The Affordable Care Act
• Immigration reform
There are several issues with talking about policy only but the biggest one is that people don't understand why you believe in certain policies.
The Conservative vision of the future
The Republican/Tea Party vision is smaller government. Draw a picture similar to the first with government reduced in size.
The issue with the Republican/Tea Party vision is similar. People are still an afterthought at the bottom.
Here, I’ve found it’s important to talk about scale. When people think about markets, they typically think about them as two individuals engaged in transactions on an equal footing.
Only this isn’t the case.
Corporations often have monopoly or near-government like power. They have exclusive patents. Or they work out agreements for mutual profit not to compete. Or they have managed to obtain exclusive access to a valuable resource like water or a critical component of the Internet backbone.
And, you have no representation within a corporation, no say in its direction other than whether you decide to buy its product or not. What I don’t think most people realize is the implication of saying our only votes should be with our money.
Venture capitalist Tom Perkins expresses the sentiment perfectly:
"But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?"
To visualize 1 million, a book with 5,000 dots on each page would be 200 pages long. Your vote would be 1 dot on 1 page.
The more money you have, the more influence you have. Isn’t this taking us a huge step backwards from equal representation?
The famous quote tossed around by conservatives and attributed to Alexander Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Jefferson, or some other early founder is:
"A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury."
However, it looks like what’s actually happened is that corporations figured out they have much more leverage to purchase gifts. (Quick note: forget that there really isn't an origin to this quote. That's a pointless liberal/conservative battle. The more important point is that this is a widely held belief you're trying to change.)
This is why we’ve seen deregulation, consolidation, reduced choice, regulations written by industry, offshoring, union busting, and the defunding of government regulatory agencies. This why we’ve seen the shifting of the tax burden onto individuals, the death of net neutrality, federal bailouts, new anti-voter laws, and consolidation of monopolies.
The question I will often ask is: Isn’t smaller government really just an argument used to increase corporate power? Like the picture illustrates?
I don’t care so much about the size of government so much as the role of government. It should be by and for the people. It should serve the common good. It should operate to create fair markets, to ensure competition, and to make sure corporations behave ethically and for mutual benefit.
I care that we have sufficient government to make sure these things happen and a government willing to do them.
This is why I believe we need to rethink where we are and where we want to be. I don’t want a vision of our country where we shrink our government until it’s completely ineffective and corporations can “drown it in a bathtub”. And I don’t want a vision of our country that looks like poll-driven, marginal improvements.
If we want real change, we’re going to need something different. The people I spoke with seemed to get it.
Back to Alex Sink
I believe Alex Sink lost because her opponent had a stronger vision. Now this isn’t Sink’s fault alone. A vision should be created at the national level. Right now, the Democratic Party is more of a party of policies, rather than a visionary party.
Candidates typically advocate for marginal changes within the existing structure. Sink is just the most recent example. But this is why it’s often hard to get excited about Democratic candidates.
We’re told Democratic turnout was low. I’m not surprised. If you look at the issues Sink advocates for, it looks like she either a) buys into the Republican vision of smaller government, or b) is largely ok with the status quo.
Where have I heard this before?
For example, she supported the Bowles-Simpson plan to cut social security. As one of my friends posted:
“Alex Sink was a corporate Democrat who supported the Simpson-Bowles Commission on ‘entitlement reform’ and was then shocked that Republicans attacked her for ‘wanting to cut Social Security.’ Lots of seniors in that district, and that must have been potent.”
Yes, this is confusing. People don’t know where she stands. She supports the ACA
and cuts to social security. What’s the vision? How is supporting healthcare through government somehow better and why should we be cutting social security? What does she value?
If you want voters to get excited and turn out, speak about values and vision. At times, different people do well and succeed, but the overall party seems lacking and often even contradictory.
We’re told Sink lost because of her position on the Affordable Care Act. If people had a stronger vision of our country as a commonwealth, acting in the interests of the common good, it would be easier for people to understand the Affordable Care Act.
We’re told Sink lost because of a last minute flood of money from outside sources. Last minute advertising is much more effective for Republicans because they’ve established a vision. All they have to do is claim that they understand America’s values and highlight how Sink’s views don’t fit in.
As George Lakoff writes in Whose Freedom? The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea:
“When the facts don’t fit the frame, the frame stays and the facts are ignored.”
Why? Because the frame is our deepest held values and beliefs.
Conservatives are fighting the fight at this level. They’re fighting to shape values and beliefs. Liberals are talking about policies or getting into disputes about facts. Do liberals have values? Absolutely. Are we talking about them enough? From what I’ve seen, no.
If we don’t communicate at the values and beliefs level, we face articulating policies into a vacuum of vision. Or worse, articulating policies into a well of strong opposing beliefs. In this well, if policies don’t fit the frame, they sound strange and unnatural.
Dick Wirthlin, President Reagan’s chief political strategist said that the greatest thing Reagan ever taught him was: “Persuade through reason, motivate through emotion.”
What Reagan meant by this was that if you want to move people to action, you need to speak to their beliefs. If Democrats want people to show up at the polls, they’re going to need to talk about something other than policies.
Do you think conservatives wake up every morning and say to themselves: “I’m going to go f*ck up the world”? Of course not. They simply believe in the idea that unregulated markets, not representational Democracy, lead to a greater good.
Now I don’t believe in their vision because I’ve only seen it benefit a very small group of people. However, it’s undeniable that they have a vision. It’s not so clear with liberals.
It’s so bad, in fact, that the Democratic National Committee was considering making these magnets:
Because at least Democrats aren’t Republicans.
Is it any wonder people aren’t excited?
As another Facebook commenter said about Alex Sink:
“I hope Florida Dems are done with her and the likes of her. Need to nominate something other than GOP-lite, because if people want GOPs they'll just vote for the GOP!”
What this person means is that Sink's policy recommendations don't match the beliefs and values that Democrats hold but are not talking about enough. Many of them, in fact, match the GOP vision.
Me personally, I think we need to go further than focusing on individual candidates. I think we need a vision
Does it have to be the vision I laid out?
No. I outlined a conversation for demonstration purposes to make the argument that we should be fighting at a vision level. I sincerely hope the Democratic Party could do better. Especially if they were to take the $2 million or so they spent on Sink and spend it on something useful.
I just wanted to show that if you win people over at the vision level, explaining policy becomes so much simpler. For example, fighting for universal health care is much easier when people believe in a common good, instead of believing that selfishness will somehow magically lead to a common good.
If you win the vision, policies naturally follow.
And unfortunately, if we don’t even talk about a vision, the default is the same old, same old, and the alternative is the corporate vision of smaller government.
If we ever want real change, we’re going to have to start with and then make the case again and again, for a better vision, a vision of a reborn Democracy.