There have a been a couple great posts this week about the real story of the past election, and how it’s not getting any media coverage. One quote in particular summed it up:
Any Democratic candidate would and will find themselves facing a long running campaign that’s been systematically stacking the deck for decades.
This piece won’t analyze this stacking of the deck. By and large, people have a decent understanding about what this stacking of the deck looks like.
The important question is: How do we change the system we have—given the system we have?
We often talk about change. When we talk about change what we tend to talk about is: what solutions are best?
This is the scientific approach to change. The idea in science is that science is always expanding outward as we add to existing knowledge, and that the best idea is the idea that is the most provable and has the most preponderance of evidence behind it.
This piece will take a different approach because our current problem isn’t a lack of ideas. We know the problems. We’ve done the research. We have plenty of solutions.
The problem, as stated in that article quite brilliantly, is that the deck has been stacked against good solutions and in favor of corporate special interests who tend to profit tremendously from their size, market power, and government influence.
The problem is: We can’t get any of our better solutions translated into action and legislation.
I was in a big discussion today about climate change. Someone asked the question: How do we get Republicans to care about climate change? I said, “Take the oil money out of politics.” Everyone thought this was a great idea. They wanted to know how. I said, here’s a few ideas:
- Publicly finance elections
- Public matching funds
- Restrictions on individual donations
- Vouchers for citizens to use to help finance candidates
- Greater transparency laws and restrictions on “dark” money
This wasn’t really their question though. Their question was much smarter than that. Their question was, “How do we do any of this, given our current system that favors money in politics?”
This is perhaps the most interesting question right now. I’m not sure of all the answers, but wanted to outline a few thoughts that any solution is going to have to have. Think of this as a framework, or rather a series of challenges we may have to overcome.
1. Our system is a winner-take-all political system
Let’s be very specific here: Our political system is a winner-take-all system. It is not parliamentarian.
If you don’t win, you lose. The side that wins a given race has representation. The side that loses doesn’t.
What this means is that we basically have a two-party system: a party in power in a given race, and a challenger. If there are two challengers, they likely split the vote.
We can agree all day that the system would be better if it weren’t winner-take-all. But it’s not. And we have to figure out how to change the system given the system we have.
What this means is that the best ideas so far involve taking over the Democratic Party. This doesn’t mean that third parties can’t and don’t do good things, like push new ideas to the forefront and put pressure on the two existing parties. The problem is that if they push too far, they split the vote and help the other party win.
We can agree this is wrong and discuss better alternatives. It is, however, the system we have. If we want to change it, we have to understand it.
2. How movements become legislation
Many of us remember the Schoolhouse Rock song I’m Just a Bill.
Unfortunately, this tends to be our understanding of politics in America. We know that legislation has to be passed by Congress in order to become law.
What they don’t teach us is that politicians don’t typically determine legislation: they react to public outcry. Generally speaking, policy change follows political change follows social change:
Social change → political change → policy change
If we have the view that policy change starts with politicians, we lose. Politicians tend to do one thing and one thing only—they get elected in some environment.
Or, if we have the view that social change is all we need, we lose. Activism has to translate into political change and political power.
What I like to say is that we need both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. We need both activists and politicians who can get elected.
Again, we tend not to like this situation. We tend to like people who “speak the truth.” We tend to like our activists and hate our politicians.
When we try to say we need one or the other, we lose.
3. A narrative about the media
This is necessary because we have to understand the current that we’re swimming against. This is how the deck has been stacked against liberals and progressives for decades.
We can blame Russia all we want for the past election, but Russia didn’t create the AM radio station pundits blasting corporate special interest propaganda 24/7. Russia didn’t repeal the Fairness Doctrine.
Russia only recognized what was going on and helped drive the wedge deeper.
The idea that we have a “liberal” media is absurd. If we had a liberal media, we’d understand how corrupt our country has become.
What we have instead is a for-profit media. And for-profit media is struggling to make a profit due to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of traditional revenue streams like classified advertising. So for-profit media is turning to new business models like propaganda and entertainment.
As I’ve written before:
If the media were "liberal," it would serve the public interest and shine a light on issues like the ones above.
More people would also have a better understanding of global warming, peak oil, population growth, political lobbying, government's role in a functioning economy, how much we spend on the military, and countless other issues.
What you’re more likely to see in the media, however, are stories designed to get you to buy their paper, or watch their show, or listen to their radio station. If it bleeds, it leads. This is why the media is concerned with scandal, celebrities, gossip, and fear.
If anything, our news consists of paid advertisements and outlets too scared of offending anyone to publish much of substance. Investigative journalism is also expensive; entertainment is cheap.
Corporate media fails to help us understand what’s going on in our lives. Instead, it advertises to us. It sells us on whatever the people writing the checks want to sell us on.
4. Communication channels
Understanding the role of corporate media leads to the need for better communication channels.
When the media favors investigative media and truth, it helps us. All too often this isn’t the case, however. The media distracts and divides.
We need both communication channels where liberals and progressives can organize and define the stories that will shape the present movements and movements to come.
This is one of the reasons that the work done by DailyKos and others is so important. It’s working toward these platforms of the future.
5. Values: A way to recognize allies and better candidates
The strategy of the opposition is divide and conquer. If we don’t recognize that our fight is shared and if we can’t recognize allies, we lose.
This is why it’s so important to have ways to recognize allies.
In academia, we ally ourselves around ideas. Unfortunately for liberals, this tends to translate over into the political world. We like to talk about policies and fight about policies. While these fights are important, they can divide us.
The way I look for allies is by looking at the values people hold. I look for people who value:
- Equality
- Freedom (for people, not “markets”)
- Democracy
- Mutual responsibility
Remember, the main problem we have isn’t finding solutions. We tend to have lots of solutions. It’s getting any of them passed. So I look for people who not only have an understanding of what better looks like, but also want to move the chains forward.
If we think back 40 years to when the conservative movement started, it started with values plus a simple, easy to pass along piece of advice for voting: Vote for the most conservative candidate who can win.
Once again, we see here an understanding of our political system. The guidance isn’t to vote for the most conservative candidate. The candidate has to be able to win. If we don’t win, remember, we have nothing.
Knowing our values can help us determine liberal candidates from more conservative ones.
6. A direction: Democracy
The direction conservatives have adopted used to be laissez-faire capitalism. During the last election, Donald Trump recognized the frustration with this direction and shifted the direction to American nationalism (though I still believe laissez-faire is the largely unstated path conservatives want to follow).
Laissez-faire isn’t a good direction for 99 percent of the country. It’s the philosophy of the wealthy.
A better direction for democracy:
- Checks and balances
- The public good
- Power should come from the people
- Less corrupt (instead of “smaller” and more corrupt government)
- No one is above the law
- Laws should be moral and just and fair
- The Constitution protects individual rights
- Capitalism works best when it works within constraints and incentives designed to ensure it works for everyone (not just owners)
What’s important here is not necessarily getting caught up in saying any one way of doing these things is better than another, but suggesting that working towards these things in any way is better.
In general, we’d be better off with more democracy and less rule by our wealthiest: More checks and balances, less authoritarianism.
7. An openness to allies
In the academic world, what we tend to learn is how to deconstruct power. We learn how to identify injustice and systemic oppression.
In many ways this is a good thing. We want to be able to recognize what’s wrong. But it can also divide us. We can see enemies instead of allies.
What tends to drive people is their identity. People will fight with you if they see you as someone who recognizes who they are.
Conservatives tell us, “We hate identity politics.” Yet their base is a white nationalist movement. They’re telling us not to fight the identity battle, yet the very thing they’ve been fighting since Nixon is the identity battle.
So we should fight the identity fight.
What this may take on our side is lots of representation from different groups, and people from within these groups who can speak multiple identity languages: people who understand the fights of the marginalized, and people who can work to bring us together to fight together.
The opposition will try to pit us against each other. What we’ll have to do is find ways to come together and not divide ourselves.
I can only speak from personal experience here. When I’ve been attacked as a “white male” what I tend to do is 1.) listen, 2.) demonstrate an understanding of what the other person is experiencing, and 3.) show that I’m an ally. I’ve found this works 95 to 99 percent of the time.
I also try to support others in their fights. Sometimes this requires me stepping back and letting others lead, or acknowledging things I could learn.
8. Distributed leadership
In general, corporate special interest groups rely heavily on one strategy: divide and conquer. They do this through the media. We win when more people participate and when we unite around common goals and values.
Toward this end, we’re going to need a movement, a distributive strategy that takes advantage of our strength in numbers.
Any single leader that we have is going to be attacked and demonized by corporate media. The way to defeat this is to not unite around a leader but to unite around shared values and concerns and to create lots of leaders.
9. Funding
Most don’t like to talk about money. But if we’re going to win elections, we need to—even if it’s not in the traditional sense.
We need to be thinking about ways to do more with less, and about ways to win without taking corporate donations. However, we also may need to acknowledge the reality that it takes money to win elections and think about where certain money might be better than other money.
A couple examples:
- We may want to support small businesses and craft strategies around small businesses and their concerns.
- We might find that money from some verticals is less corrupting than others—for example, money from technology companies.
- We may want to think about supporting politicians as well as asking things of them.
And we should be thinking about how to support activism, activists, and politicians through our purchasing options. A great successful example here is Credo Mobile.
Again, most of us tend to want money out of politics. Our current reality, however, is one in which money tends to play a big role.
End
A couple posts this past week got me thinking about my favorite topic: Change. In particular, I wanted to ask a question I haven’t heard phrased this way before: How do we change the system we have, give the system we have?
I say “phrased this way” because typically when we talk about change we talk about what better ideas look like. Our problem lately isn’t a lack of good ideas. It’s that we’re swimming upstream against turning any of these ideas into legislation.
The nine points presented here were a few thoughts on how to change the system we have, given the system we have.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (also available as an ebook).