While I don’t mean to disparage the hard work of committed Democrats heading into the November elections, liberals need to face squarely the reality that campaigning and canvassing aren’t enough to save this country. We need a radically new, far more powerful solution than politics as usual. I understand what needs to be done, but I need funding to continue writing and research.
The way I’m currently spending my time is indicative of the predicament of democracy. I am presently in the process of interviewing for an organizing job with the Wisconsin Democrats that I don’t want and won’t, by temperament, be very good at. The alternative is a lucrative-but-soulless corporate career with an industry-leading local company that I am virtually guaranteed to get a job with if I apply, since I have industry experience and a fool-proof way to get my foot in the door.
The job with WisDems would involve leading part of the effort in my county to “get out the vote,” in other words, to find inventive ways to scrounge up enough new voters for the Dems to win in November. It’s politics as usual. Generation after generation we do this type of grassroots activism, and progressives have been losing since well before I was born.
I’m so frustrated with politics at this point I’m about to walk away from it.
The job I really want doesn’t exist; I’d have to invent it. There are several ways to go about it. My preferred method would be to earn the formal credentials first—a double PhD, for which I’d have to go into roughly two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars of law school and other student debt at UW-Madison. I’d be going back to school for the second time, this time to remake the Wisconsin Idea as the civic mission of the UW system, since that system has failed to keep the Wisconsin Idea alive. Although, I’d be very busy, spearheading a movement to overhaul universities while getting two PhDs, the process would be expedited for me because I already did most of my homework in advance.
The fact that hardly anyone knows what the Wisconsin Idea is demonstrates the problem with democracy: we simply don’t know how to do it. The staffing of democracy is left up to volunteers—or fascist right-wing insurgents, as so happens, and the institutions of democracy have been left partly formed, unfinished and under-theorized. At the moment, nobody seems to know better than I do how to remake the Wisconsin Idea into an operating system for democracy powerful enough to save the US Constitution, maybe. I’d like to prove it, but I need time to write, and, for that, I need money.
Just getting this far has put me into debt, through years of pain and misery, and my quest to design a superior democratic system now threatens my alternative career prospects. My patience is wearing thin. I’m about to say, To hell with democracy, I’m looking out for myself now.
In order to keep making progress as a political and legal thinker, I’d have to either raise money to pay down my debts and go back to school, or I’d have to work as a paid employee or consultant with an independent organization like Daily Kos. Such is the pathetic predicament of democracy in America that it is left up to rogue professionals or academics like myself, willing to risk our careers for a greater good most Americans frankly can’t be bothered to care about, and volunteers, phone-banking and knocking on doors for a Democratic Party that won’t have enough power to reward their efforts.
The fate of the US Constitution itself probably hangs in the balance of the coming November elections, while mainstream Americans remain clueless and apathetic. Whether or not Democrats can win in key swing states like Wisconsin largely depends on the work of mostly unpaid volunteers, and whether or not Democrats win in November will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
Given that the US Constitution has failed in its core function, the separation of powers, volunteers are now literally the last defense of democracy in America. In 2024 we may have a dictatorship.
Getting more voters to the polls not only works for the left, however, it also works for the right, as the Trump years have proved. When left and right both get out the vote simultaneously, their votes cancel each other out. The parliamentary solution to this conundrum is to force compromise within parliament between groups that would otherwise never work together. The US Constitution has never done this well even in the best of times. The historical progressive solutions to this problem, like unions and public education, have also failed utterly in the US.
Markos Moulitsas himself wrote about the poverty of progressivism in his 2006 book Crashing the Gate. Rich rightwingers lavishly fund propaganda and political war machines, whereas rich liberals won’t fund serious left-wing thinking and the rest of liberals are mostly careerists who donate to specific causes, but not to the creation of a democratic operating system as such. Most liberals don’t comprehend why democracy needs an operating system in the first place; hence, their neglect of the Wisconsin Idea.
Liberal cluelessness is how we ended up with a university system that has failed democracy while producing all of the dysfunctional tendencies of our state and federal governments, including appalling administrative bloat, Ivy League excellent sheep, bad educational outcomes, sky-high tuition, misaligned financial incentives, blatant corruption, an adjunct migrant labor force, and a careerist faculty that largely allowed democracy to fail. Liberals can’t blame most of these problems on the right; we did it ourselves. Rightwingers love pointing out how universities are overwhelmingly dominated by liberals.
When Democrats have to go around spoon-feeding basic political knowledge to voters, it makes that knowledge look like a partisan agenda. Basic democracy ends up looking more biased than it is.
Full liberal democracy actually is biased toward the left, however, which is why the radical right is openly against liberal democracy. They hate the modern world and they know what they are doing. With that in mind, much of what’s happening in political campaigning and canvassing is that Democratic activists are trying to empower voters for self-government, whereas rightwingers are trying to destroy government. The radical right in particular wants a corrupted and inferior form of democracy that now has a name—illiberal democracy.
The situation today is that about sixty percent of the public needs to cooperate to save democracy from the other forty percent that wants to destroy it. The cooperation of the sixty percent needs to take place through a democratic operating system that is legitimately nonpartisan and specifically designed for the purpose. Democratic Party campaigners and canvassers can’t—and shouldn’t—try to do this alone. That’s where the Wisconsin Idea comes in.
Progressives will continue to lose until we can raise the overall level of democratic awareness and engagement in the country. While progressives can’t get everything we want, the basic civics of liberal democracy must not continue to be perceived as a partisan agenda. We need a new institutional solution, furthermore, not more of the over-theorized, dead-end academic conversation about “deliberative democracy.”
How, then, can we turn a rudimentary progressive operating system for democracy, the Wisconsin Idea, into a legitimately nonpartisan system, with rigorous standpoint diversity, that spans most of the political spectrum and yet still manages to improve democracy?
I think I know the answer. The question is now, who will pay me to keep writing?