The Boy Who Could Change the World (22 page)

But, starting in the 1970s, the rich staged a counterattack. They didn't like watching inequality—and their wealth—melt away. There was a resurgence in classical economics, Keynes was declared to have been debunked, and interest rates were raised drastically, throwing millions out of work. The economy tanked, inequality soared, and things have never been the same since. For a while people talked about levels of inequality that hadn't been seen since the 1920s. Then they talked about a recession the size of which hadn't been seen since the 1930s.

Once again, Keynes provides us with the instructions on how to get out of this mess. The question is whether we'll follow them.

Toward a Larger Left

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/04/toward-a-larger-left/

August 4, 2009

Age 22

Stanford, like many universities, maintains full employment for humanities professors by requiring new students to take their seminars. My heart burning with the pain of societal injustice, I chose the one on “Freedom, Equality, Difference.”

Most of the other students had no particular interest in the topic—they were just meeting the requirement. But a significant minority did: like me, they cared passionately about it. They were the conservatives, armed with endless citations on how affirmative action was undermining American meritocracy. The only other political attitude I noticed was a moderate centrism, the view espoused by the teacher, whose day job was studying just-war theory.

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn't simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn't even
understand
me. I remember us discussing a scene in
Invisible Man
where a factory worker brags he's so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn't just disagree—they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers?

This is the reproduction of American intellectual culture: a large number of vocal and articulate conservatives, a handful of mushy moderately liberal centrists, and an audience that doesn't much
care. (Completing the picture, the teacher later shouted me down for bringing up inconvenient facts during a discussion of Vietnam.)

It's a future that worries George Scialabba. He cares passionately about the humane left-wing tradition, but he's forced to watch it shrivel. As he observes, the conservatives receive prominent places in industry (including industry-funded think tanks), the centrists are quarantined in hyperspecialized programs at universities, and the real leftists can barely get a toehold. (
The Soviet Union fell
, seems to be the dominant position.
Why are you still here?
)

The question is what to do about it. George hails the few exceptions (Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn—names presumably picked to provoke) who have managed to eke out a niche exposing the falsehoods and bucking the consensus, getting pushed to the cultural margins for their trouble. Henry proposes a more technical version, where left-wing critics don't argue to the public (which in practice seems to mean the 20,000 readers of
Z Magazine
) but instead to elites, especially disciplinary experts, using a field's flaws against itself (à la Doug Henwood). And Michael seems to make the usual retort that such extremism never gets an audience, let alone an accomplishment—only incrementalism and realist accommodation to power will make a difference in people's lives (perhaps Ezra Klein could be
the poster boy
here).

This debate is not dispassionate. It's a muddy mix of trying to work out what to do with our lives and how to justify what we've already done. Personally, I adore Chomsky, Henwood, and Klein—I find both their writing and their personalities incredibly inspirational. And while I could quibble with their strategies, it's difficult for me to imagine, let alone desire, a world in which they did anything particularly different. But my own plans—forged in that Stanford classroom and (to my surprise) unshakable ever since—take a different tack.

A new media world is emerging. The mainstream media outlets that won't even bother to print Chomsky's response when they libel him are fading, while alternative media explodes. Alexander Cockburn publishes not one, but a dozen articles each day at
CounterPunch.org
. Amy Goodman has a daily television news show carried on over 700 stations. There's a whole Chomsky industry, which gets
at least a shelf even at suburban chain bookstores. Socialist-feminists like Barbara Ehrenreich write
New York Times
bestsellers. Hell, we even have a socialist U.S. senator now!

Then there's the whole new generation of political bloggers. Daily Kos, Atrios, and so on have a combined readership in the millions and are all consistently venomous toward the bulk of the Democratic Party and the media. Their work is broadcast nightly on major networks by Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow. (
The West Wing
even made Atrios a character.) Even Scialabba admits (although not in his book) that if he wants to spend time with like-minded friends, he heads to Crooked Timber.

But while this clearly has a salutary effect on mainstream political culture (witness Stephen Kinzer's transformation from Noam Chomsky's bête noire to
Amy Goodman's guest
), it hasn't exactly created an alternative culture of its own. Conservatives, centrists, liberals—they all repeat
their
fundamental premise:
We've got a pretty good system going here. Sure, there may be some trouble around the edges
(liberals think more, conservatives think less),
but, as McCain said, the fundamentals are still strong
. The lines are so well publicized that even college freshmen can repeat them down to the sound bite.

The left has succeeded in making it sound hollow and unconvincing. Your average liberal blogger is happy to admit all the papers are full of lies, all the politicians are bland sellouts, and the government is run by lobbyists and corporate hacks. And (nothing new here) your average citizen is happy to agree (it takes a lot of education to be dumb enough to think otherwise). But where do you go from there? Elect Howard Dean?

The Popular Front is long dead, the labor unions have all but fizzled out, the New Left never had much of a plan (“We must name that system,” SDS cried. “We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it”; apparently they never got past naming) and barely even exists anymore. The term
socialism
has become so watered down that it polls roughly equal with capitalism among the under-30 set—apparently it now means anything to the left of austere neoliberalism (
except file sharing
, of course).

If there was ever a time for a new program, this would seem to be it. The economic crisis has shattered the Washington Consensus
more than a thousand Chomsky op-eds could, while the Internet has made it possible to organize people by the million. But the left can't seem to move beyond its reactive stance. If you want books that criticize the policies of the Bush administration, you can fill up a whole library. But if you want books on what to do instead, where do you go? The only left-of-center group seriously putting out policy proposals is
Third Way
. (
Sample recommendation
: “Moderniz[e] our intelligence force . . . [hold a p]ress conference highlighting the 20th anniversary of the creation of al Qaeda.”)

There
is
a coherent, alternative ideology on the left. Scialabba, summarizing Chomsky, even takes a stab at laying it out: “The fundamental purpose of American foreign policy has all along been to maintain a favorable investment climate . . . the American intelligentsia, though less harshly and clumsily regulated than its Soviet counterpart, has been no less effectively subordinated to the goals of the state.” (I would add only that the domestic economy is structured to make the majority of the population expendable servants of the rich.) Scialabba lays it out, but Chomsky (as far as I can find) never does.

I'll even go further and take a stab at describing Chomsky's solution: democracy. Media democracy, to prevent the population from being misled by deluded elites with big megaphones. Economic democracy, to promote a better mix and fairer distribution of societal goods and necessary evils. And political democracy, so that our military isn't led by murderous thugs into endless immoral engagements.

This philosophy is so different from the dominant consensus that it takes far more than two paragraphs to explain, let alone argue for. But who's even trying? Instead, the audience is forced to read a shelf of Chomsky and reverse-engineer the principles behind it.

This is better than nothing—it worked for me—but it obviously puts a hard limit on who can be persuaded. People without the time or the ability end up as the folks you see in liberal blog comments: people who know something is badly wrong, but aren't quite sure what it is or what to do about it.

In short, leftist intellectuals need to move from simply poking holes in the dominant consensus to clearly articulating their alternative and proposing a concrete method for promoting it (Chomsky, for
all his brilliance, seems to espouse a theory of change that doesn't go much beyond getting people at his book readings to join the local ISM chapter). I hope that more people will, because I sometimes fear that if they don't, there may not be many leftist intellectuals anymore.

Professional Politicians Beware!

http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5490

2008

Age 21

This essay first appeared in
Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age,
edited by Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, and Joshua Levy (Personal Democracy Press, 2008
).

“By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people.”

The government of a republic, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 39 (“Conformity of the Plan to Republican Principles,” 1788), must “be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.”

Looking at our government today—a House of professional politicians, a Senate filled with multimillionaires, a string of presidential family dynasties—it seems hard to maintain that our officials are in fact “derived from the great body of the society” and not “a favored class” merely posing as representatives of the people.

Unless politics is a tradition in your family, your odds of getting elected to federal office are slim. And unless you're a white male lawyer, you rarely get to vote for someone like yourself in a national race. Nor, in reality, do we have an opportunity to choose policy positions:
no major candidates support important proposals that most voters agree with, like single-payer health care.

Instead, national elections have been boiled down to simple binary choices, which advertising men and public relations teams reduce to pure emotions: Fear. (A bear prowls through the woods.) Hope. (The sun rises over a hill.) Vote Smith. Or maybe Jones. Nor does the major media elevate the level of debate. Instead of substantive discussions about policy proposals and their effects, they spend their time on horse-race coverage (who's raised the most money? Who's polling well in Ohio?) and petty scandals (how much did that haircut cost? Was someone somewhere offended by that remark?)

The result after all this dumbing down? In 2004, voters who said they chose a presidential candidate based on the candidate's agendas, ideas, platforms, or goals comprised a whopping 10% of the electorate. So it's not too surprising when political scientists find that voters' decisions can be explained by such random factors as whether they like red or blue, whether the economy is good or bad, or whether the current party has been in office for long or not.

Aside from the occasional telephone poll, the opinions of “the great body of the society” have been edited out of the picture. Way back in Federalist No. 10 (“The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection [Continued],” 1787), Madison put his finger on the reason. “However small the republic may be,” he noted, “the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few.” But similarly, “however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.”

The result is that the population grows while the number of representatives stays fixed, leaving each politician to represent more and more people. The first Congress had a House of 65 members representing 40,000 voters and three million citizens (they had a whopping 1.3% voter turnout back then). That's a representative for around every 600 voters or 46,000 citizens (the size of the average baseball stadium). A baseball stadium may be a bit of an unruly mob, but it's not unimaginably large.

Today, by contrast, we have 435 representatives and 300 million
citizens—one for roughly every 700,000 citizens. There isn't a stadium in the world big enough to hold that many people. It's a number more akin to a television audience (it's about how many people tune in to watch Keith Olbermann each night).

Which is exactly what the modern constituency has become: the TV audience following along at home. Even if you wanted to, you can't have a real conversation with a TV audience. It is too big to convey a sense of what each individual is thinking. Instead of a group to represent, it's a mob to be managed.

I agree with Madison that there is roughly a right size for a group of representatives “on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects.”

But what Madison missed is that there is no similar limit on the number of such groups. To take a technological analogy, the Internet is, at bottom, an enormous collection of wires. Yet nobody would ever think of it this way. Instead, we group the wires into chips and the chips into computers and the computers into networks and the networks into the Internet. And people only deal with things at each level: when the computer breaks, we can't identify which wire failed; we take the whole thing into the shop.

One of the most compelling visions for rebooting democracy adopts this system of abstraction for politics. Parpolity, developed by the political scientist Stephen Shalom, would build a legislature out of a hierarchical series of nested councils. Agreeing with Madison, he says each council should be small enough that everyone can engage in face-to-face discussion but large enough that there is a diversity of opinion and the number of councils is minimized. He estimates the right size is 25 to 50 people.

So, to begin with, let us imagine a council of you and your 40 closest neighbors—perhaps the other people in your apartment building or on your block. You get together every so often to discuss the issues that concern you and your neighborhood. And you may vote to set policy for the area which the council covers.

But your council has another function: it selects one of its own to send as a representative to the next council up. There the process repeats itself: the representative from your block and its 40 closest neighbors meet every so often to discuss the political issues that concern the area. And, of course, your representative reports back to the group, gets your recommendations on difficult questions, and takes suggestions for issues to raise at the next area council meeting.

By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people. But—and this is the truly clever bit—at the area council the whole process repeats itself. Just as each block council nominates a representative to the area council, each area council nominates a representative to the city council, and each city council to the state council, each state council to the national council, and so on.

Shalom discusses a number of further details—provisions for voting, recalls, and delegation—but it's the idea of nesting that's key. Under such a system, there are only four representatives who stand between you and the people setting national policy, each of whom is forced to account to their constituents in regular, small face-to-face meetings. Politicians in such a system could not be elected through empty appeals to mass emotions. Instead, they would have to sit down, face-to-face, with a council of their peers and persuade them that they are best suited to represent their interests and positions.

There is something rather old-fashioned about this notion of sitting down with one's fellow citizens and rationally discussing the issues of the day. But there is also something exciting and new about it. In the same way that blogs have given everyone a chance to be a publisher, Wikipedia lets everyone be an encyclopedia author, and YouTube lets anyone be a television producer, Parpolity would let everyone be a politician.

The Internet has shown us that the pool of people with talent far outnumbers the few with the background, connections, and wealth to get to a place in society where they can practice their talents professionally. (It also shows us that many people with those connections aren't particularly talented.)

The democratic power of the net means you don't need connections to succeed. In a world where kids can be television stars just
by finding a video camera and an Internet connection, citizens may begin to wonder why getting into politics is so much harder.

For many years, politicians had a ready excuse: politics was a difficult job, which required carefully weighing and evaluating evidence and making difficult decisions. Only a select few could be trusted to perform it; the vast majority of the population was woefully underqualified.

And perhaps in the era of a cozy relationship between politicians and the press, this illusion could be sustained. But as netroots activists and blogs push our national conversation ever closer to the real world, this excuse is becoming laughable. After all, these men and women of supposedly sober judgment voted overwhelmingly for disasters like the Iraq War. “No one could have ever predicted this,” TV's talking heads all insist. No one, that is, except the great body of society, whose insistence that Iraq did not pose a threat and that an occupation would be long and brutal went ignored.

New online tools for interaction and collaboration have let people come together across space and time to build amazing things. As the Internet breaks down the last justifications for a professional class of politicians, it also builds up the tools for replacing them. For the most part, their efforts have so far been focused on education and entertainment, but it's only a matter of time before they turn to politics. And when they do, professional politicians beware!