solve the scalability problem, we must become active participants in our government.
This doesn’t mean becoming a traditional activist. In my political career I’ve worked on a range of issues—from immigration, to healthcare, to more recently effective government and transparency. There are two big lessons I’ve learned.
The first is that there’s a gigantic gap between the skills it takes to win an election and the skills it takes to govern a country. It turns out that electing people—the skills of people like David Axelrod and Karl Rove—are advanced, learned skills that require years of experience to get right.
The skills that it takes to persuade you to vote for someone are entirely different skills than the skills it takes to run a country. Managing the world’s largest budget, determining how the government can buy things, figuring out how to take and use public comments—from the soldier in the army to the head of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget—they’re all skills that are necessary for the management of our government, and they’re not political skills, they’re governmental ones.
Yet all of our activism pours into the former skill, and none to the latter. If we really want to fix our government, we’ve got to be participants in the way government works, not who it employs.
The second lesson I learned is that many of the nonprofits and advocacy groups are more interested in staying relevant than solving problems. The motives of many advocacy organizations are not to solve the issues they’re working on, but rather to continue to raise money and make payroll. As a result, these advocacy groups tend to focus on larger problems that can go unsolved for years.
While some of these organizations do important work—pushing the envelope to make the United States healthier, to make the environment cleaner and more sustainable, or to try and increase the effectiveness of education in the United States—there are smaller, non-partisan battles that could be won that could have long- standing benefits to the country.
Presuming that our government isn’t going anywhere, what can we do to make it better?
Since the “great experiment” started, America’s weakness, as de Tocqueville noted, was and still is the tyranny of the majority. My plea to you is to start sweating the small stuff at the expense of some of the big stuff. Washington isn’t the land of vast, radical changes, it’s a battleship waiting to be nudged in the right direction. Let the legions of information-obese fight on the front lines, and join me in nudging the small nuts and bolts that hold the ship together.
If you’re worried about federal spending and the budget, don’t concern yourself over the debt-ceiling debate. Work to change procurement laws so that government can get access to the same things the private sector has without paying an arm and a leg. We spend so much time figuring out what programs to spend money on, comparing their priorities to one another, and blanket cutting them when they’re deemed too luxurious. It’s the equivalent of trying to lose weight by cutting off your legs. Optimizing how government spends its money is at least as important as figuring out what our money gets spent on, and there are real, pragmatic solutions to getting there.
If you’re interested in making government more accountable, work on making it so that the government’s listening tools and policies are modernized. Many government agencies have legal teams that feel as though social media is an appropriate place for its communications team to publish press releases, but not an appropriate place to solicit real comments for regulations. It’s mainly because of identity issues: the government wants a physical address, and doesn’t trust that a social media profile is fraud-proof. I’d suggest that it’s just as easy to lie about your address as it is a social media profile.
Today, the feedback you give an agency through a website like Facebook or Twitter stops at the new media team inside the agency, and never gets involved in the regulatory process. If the Department of Energy is to publish press releases and invite people to interact with its communications department, it also needs to be able to legally take feedback for the regulations it proposes. It’s a simple, nonpartisan problem that could be fixed with a few hundred people demanding that the government use the Internet to be real, active participants with us.
If you’re worried about Congress being manipulated by money, the United States House of Representatives started filing their campaign contributions electronically a decade ago, yet the United States Senate refuses to do so. Year after year a bill is proposed, and one way or another it ends up suffocating and dying by the end of the session. This results in a half-million dollar expense to the taxpayer as the Federal Election Commission takes nearly three months to type in, from the various campaigns’ paper reports, every campaign contribution that every Senate campaign receives. And as a result, we cannot see how a member of the United States Senate is being influenced by money until long after the time when the relevance of that information has passed.
If you’re worried about prisons and civil rights, or making America innovative again, take note of the fact that our laws are generally distributed and archived by for-profit corporations, making it so that even access to the laws that we must follow are behind paywalls. Federally funded scientific research also sits in archives only available to those that agree to pay twice (once with their tax dollars, once for the access) for it.
These are small, solvable problems that don’t require millions of dollars or people to fix: they require thousands of focused, smart people to push the right levers inside of the government.
We can also improve our government without waiting on government to act. Organizations like PopVox.com, for instance, make it easier for people to translate what they want their representative to do into the language our representatives speak. There’s a whole world of technology out there waiting to be used to help members listen to their constituents, and it’s likely—now that much of our discussions about politics are public— that we don’t need government to act: we can build tools that listen to what people are already saying, make that information public, and question our elected officials when they’re voting against their constituencies.
At the local level, there are thousands of opportunities and willing participants on the side of government. SeeClickFix.com, for instance, builds tools that integrate with various cities’ request hotlines so when a citizen spots a problem—say a pothole—they can easily report it back to the government. And more importantly, if they spot something they or a group of people can fix themselves—like picking up litter in a park—they can use the site to organize people to help pick up the litter.
These are just examples of what I’d like to believe Governor Dean meant when he said, “You have the power.” We mustn’t rely on our government alone to solve our problems for us. We have the ability to do it for our neighbors, our communities, and our country as a whole.
Every issue—healthcare, the environment, immigration, even defense—has hundreds of small, nonpolitical, operational problems waiting for a solution, and fixing these small things can have a huge impact compared to combatting a vague foreverwar on issues built to perpetuate the system of donor dollars, consultants, and lobbyists.
The trick is the information diet: filtering out the nonsense meant to get us charged up on issues that will take years to solve, and becoming educated and smart about our government. If we want our government to change, we have to start taking responsibility for not just electing new people, or passing big policies, but sweating the small stuff too.
Political Infoveganism
The rule at most dinner parties is that there are three things you don’t discuss: sports, religion, and politics. I can understand the first two—no sporting event is useful without an intense rivalry, one that’s built intentionally to cross the wall of logic and rational behavior and into something more akin to faux-tribal loyalties. And religion is a deeply personal belief that’s usually nonpliable. It’s likely too difficult to get a Muslim and a Christian to agree on the stature of Jesus Christ or Muhammed.
Politics are different. The greatest political ideas have come from the constant search for synthesis and pragmatism, and the foundation of democracy is constant public participation. Policy is something we should talk about at the dinner table; it’s vital to our civic health that we do. Democracy cannot survive without the synthesis of ideas from its citizens.
Yet the reason we don’t is because we risk relationships when we do. It is because of the fear of the Uncle Warren situation: that the conversation will devolve from ideas to attacks, name-calling, and finally to division. It’s not worth the risk. Bringing up politics always ends up with alienation.
