The Boy Who Could Change the World (15 page)

POLITICS

A
aron's politics are easiest to define, particularly in the context of his renown as a programmer and an Internet and information freedom activist, by what they were not: Aaron was decidedly not a cyber-utopian.

He did, of course, believe in the right of ready access to information (a pursuit that in some sense cost him his life), and he told me that he was a “free speech fundamentalist.” Yet Aaron's highest goal was to help build a society defined by social justice, and he understood that this would not automatically flow smoothly from the right, and the means, to know about political and corporate corruption.

No, transparency and paper rights wouldn't suffice. Aaron knew that to create a more just world, one must employ knowledge, civil liberties, and civil rights as tools in the hard work of organizing against entrenched power.

Justice, defined how, exactly? How, exactly, did he define justice? Though Aaron eschewed labels, his ideals seemed essentially libertarian socialist: he sought to minimize coercion (governmental, corporate, and economic) and maximize utility, while understanding the importance of equity and solidarity in achieving these ends. But he was willing to engage within the system to get there.

During the time I knew him well, he thought a lot about monetary policy, believing that in order to resolve the immediate economic downturn, and eventually achieve full employment by mobilizing people and capital in ways that improve lives, “the Fed should be printing money that we then give to poor people (or everyone if that's easier).” His final tweet, composed when yet another contentious fight over the debt limit loomed, urged the minting of a trillion-dollar coin to fund government operations.

These are the policy prescriptions of the post-Keynesian. But he wouldn't call himself one; rather, he told me, “I generally like
the post-Keynesians.” And when a friend announced that he self-identified as a socialist, Aaron replied, “Good—we need more of those.”

Though he worked hard to elect Democrats, even volunteering to assist the Democratic National Committee's tech team during the crunch before Election Day, he was an ideologue in pursuit of utility maximization rather than a partisan. He would have preferred a more pluralistic democracy that accurately mapped the varied political impulses of the American populace onto the Congress, and he was willing to ally with Republicans. He would be heartened by the increasing left-right solidarity we see in spaces such as the antiwar, civil libertarian, and criminal justice reform movements today.

Aaron strived to ensure that his efforts, no matter the cause, were as strategic as possible. He believed that one must dissect structures and learn how they tick, develop the tools, tactics, and strategies that are most likely to manipulate them for good, and organize people to implement those approaches.

His poignant deconstruction of the processes of running for office and legislating illuminates the incentives, sample biases, filters, and veto points that determine what does and doesn't get accomplished in Washington. His proposed solutions can be read as a retrospective blueprint for the workings of groups he co-founded, including Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and his thinking on these matters informed his friend Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC. Each of these organizations still bears the stamp of Aaron's ideals and is better for it, whether or not we always succeed at living up to those principles.

—David Segal

How Congress Works

Age 24

Given as a seminar at the Safra Center at Harvard University in the spring of 2011—Ed
.

A Note from Professor Rebecca Sandefur:

Aaron took my course on social stratification during the year he was at Stanford. Our conversations after class and in office hours centered on three themes that animate this essay: whether stable organization is necessary to accomplish complex tasks that benefit society, why people are so often quiescent in the face of acts and organization that go against their interests, and whether democratizing access to information can on its own spur their mobilization. Aaron's notes on this essay to his seminar colleagues ask for suggestions about style. If I were given the gift of speaking with him again, I would say: Keep it as it is, your own: supremely confident, unpretentiously brilliant, sincerely engaged. And thank you for this, and for everything
.

for Becky Sandefur

Part One: Elections

You'll probably never run for Congress. For starters, I bet you've never even considered it. Isn't running for Congress a job for celebrities, larger-than-life figures, people with big egos and an unquenchable thirst for power? But that's just the problem: the sort of people who want to run for office tend to be terrible officeholders. As Gore Vidal put it, “Any American who is prepared to run for
president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
^*
*

One theory of the ideal politician is of some kind of selfless public servant. Such a representative would fairly represent local interests, listening to their constituents and faithfully fighting for their views in the Capitol. They use their judgment and shared values to decide what's best for the people they represent.

But such a man can only exist in a world devoid of conflict. If there are no deep policy disputes, then legislating is easy. But in most modern American communities, this is pure fancy. There are rich and poor, corporations and unions, left and right. Their demands are serious—and typically irreconcilable. No representative can faithfully represent their common interests because on the biggest questions of public concern there simply is no common interest.

As a result, the notion of “a national interest” is inevitably hijacked by the dominant group in society. Reagan, for example, claimed his opponents represented the special interests: women, poor people, workers, young people, old people, ethnic minorities—in short, most of the population. (“This confusion allows Reagan to treat the exploited as exploiters by contrasting the people with the ‘special interests.'”)
^†
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As a result, the people who claim to be simply representing their district end up playing something like the role Domhoff ascribes to the town newspaper:

            
Competing [business] interests often regard newspaper executives as general community leaders, as ombudsmen and arbiters of internal bickering, and at times, as enlightened third parties who can restrain the short-term profiteers in the interest of a more stable, long-term, and properly planned growth. The newspaper becomes the reformist influence, the “voice of the community,” restraining
the competing subunits, especially the small-scale arriviste “fast-buck artists” among them.
^*
*

The “rational choice” interpretation of this character explains this by treating the representative as a sly and cynical operator. Instead of fighting for a shared objective, the “rational” politician is driven by incentives. He does not vote the way he thinks is best for his constituents, but simply the way he thinks is most likely to get him reelected. If there's something he believes is right, but is unpopular, he will drop it. Given a difficult decision, he'll conduct a poll. And as his electorate changes, so do his views. He'll tack to an extreme for the primary, then back to center for the general election.

The rational choice politician is an easy fellow to corrupt. If a special interest can help him win reelection, he'll work for the benefit of that interest. But even beyond such blatant corruption, his whole view of his constituency is warped by his quest for victory. He doesn't care about the people who live in his district, he cares merely about the ones that vote. And in the U.S., that means the wealthy: in a typical election, about 35% of the poorest quintile turns out; that number is 71% for the richest quintile.
^†
†

Those numbers are even more exaggerated when you look at other forms of voter engagement. It's obviously the wealthy who make the biggest campaign contributions, but they also are the ones who write letters to the editor and volunteer their time to political campaigns. As a result, any “rational” politician is going to skew their opinions toward the wealthy.

And this in fact is what we see. Bartels found a regression coefficient of 4.15 when measuring a member of Congress's responsiveness to the views of their wealthiest constituents; compare this to a score of -0.11 for the poorest. As Bartels summarizes: “Senators' roll call votes were quite responsive to the ideological views of their middle-and high-income
constituents. In contrast, the views of low-income constituents had
no
discernable impact on the voting behavior of their senators.”
^*
*

But just as focusing obsessively on profit-making turns out to be a poor way to make a profit, focusing obsessively on vote-getting turns out to be a poor way to get votes. Voters don't like a “flip-flopper.” Voters want a representative with strong beliefs that won't waver, even in the face their own opposing views. Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) had a record of “controversial” votes, like opposing Bush's invasion of Iraq or Clinton's welfare reform. But even when they disagreed, his constituents appreciated these stands. As his campaign manager recounts: “In countless conversations with Minnesota voters, Wellstone heard comments like: ‘I don't always agree with you, but I like it that I know where you stand.'”
^†
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And thus the third type of politician: the ideologue. A person with strong beliefs who sees elected office as a way to enact their beliefs into law for the greater good. They fight for ends and not for means. If their district opposes their decision, it is irrelevant except insofar as it will prevent them from getting reelected and thus pushing through more policies (that their constituents might also oppose).

Ideologues are constrained by the other two factors. Even as ideologues, most are hesitant to make decisions that go strongly against the interests of their district. And they often make “rational” compromises to get the support that will allow them to continue to serve.

Not only do ideologues want to run for office more than most people, there are groups dedicated toward helping and encouraging them. For example, Progressive Majority looks for young progressive activists in key states, trains them, finds a race for them, and helps them run and win. Perhaps you start off just running the school board, but if you succeed and learn the craft, they help you move up to higher office.

But there's not much of an apparatus for encouraging selfless public servants to run for office. And they're precisely the type least
likely to run. As normal people they have normal ambitions and a normal level of interest in politics, they don't burn with the desire to make the laws for their countrymen.

When communities were smaller and more homogenous, they could be pushed into the job. Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. (Lyndon Johnson's father) was just such a representative. A well-liked lawyer in town, he had repeatedly gone above and beyond the call of duty to help his friends and neighbors. He was encouraged to run for the Democratic nomination and won the vote unanimously.
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*
But that was 1905. It's hard to imagine many towns with enough of a functioning social system to make a collective decision like that, and even if they do exist, they're surely too small to make up a whole congressional district.

The first Congress had one representative for every 600 voters. If we imagine only half of them voted in the primary, and only half of those in the Democratic primary, you're left with 150 voters—the number Dunbar famously proposed as the number of people one can maintain stable social relationships with.
^†
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You could imagine Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr. personally knowing each one of the voters who unanimously elected him.

Today we have one representative for every 208,000 voters. Even if we again assume only a quarter will vote in the primary, that's still 50,000 people. Just to have a three-minute conversation with each of them would be a year's worth of work—and that's assuming that they were all lined up to talk to you, with no downtime in between conversations.

So instead of talking with voters, you talk at them: through TV ads and postal mailers and signs along the street. And all those things cost money. Instead of finding your friends and neighbors electing you to run, you throw fund-raisers for the wealthy and try to prove to them you have the right stuff.

Just as with candidates, we can imagine three different types of
wealthy people involved in politics: the self-described public servant, who wants to support candidates that will actually help out the community; the cynical operator, who gives money to those who give him profitable laws in return; and the ideologue, who supports the candidates who believe in the same strong values they do.

But just as the candidates are drawn mostly from the ranks of the self-aggrandizing and ambitious, the campaign donors are drawn from the wealthy. Even our selfless public servant donor spends most of his time at the cocktail parties of the fellow rich. He may care about the poor beggars on the street, but it's difficult to imagine he spends much time talking to them and considering their views. No, instead he supports sensible, moderate candidates who care about things like reducing the deficit and the other things he's read about in the
New York Times
. (“We're facing a fiscal crisis!” he insists, while millions are out of work, on the street.)

Similarly, the wealthy ideologue may fancy herself an activist, but she is not the sort of activist who chains herself to power plants and sleeps in abandoned buildings. No, she is an activist because she goes to fund-raisers for noble causes and serves on the board of worthy organizations. Like the “public servant,” even when her heart is in the right place it's only natural that she'll do a better job representing herself and the others like her. Protecting abortion may be a litmus test for her, but ending homelessness rarely is.

All types of donors see themselves, quite genuinely, as playing a role. They do not lavish money on anyone who wants to run for office because they have some deep beliefs in democracy per se. Instead, they support the candidates they agree with and snub the ones they don't. This seems to them entirely natural—indeed, the opposite would seem bizarre. Would you give money to every shop that opens just because you support capitalism?

But just as the businesses that don't receive patronage go out of business, the candidates that don't flatter the wealthy don't raise enough money to run a serious campaign. Perhaps you persuade the “public servants” that you're the sober-minded serious type who can do this district some good. Or maybe you convince the local business executives that in exchange for their checks and those of their subordinates, they'll get a representative who will earmark money
to support their local business and loosen the insane regulations that hamper their growth (but perhaps not the ones hampering their competitors). Or maybe you convince the ideologue that you, too, care passionately about abortion and will be a strong voice in Congress to make sure that right is never weakened. And if you're really good, you'll do all three.