The source of our problem with political dialog has its roots in our information diets. Frequently, mainstream national political news is worthless—at best it glosses over the issues that governments are trying to deal with, and at worst represents sensationalized opinion. From Dylan Ratigan to Bill O’Reilly to Wolf Blitzer, paid political operatives and pundits gloss over the facts in order to keep you watching. As someone who has worked inside D.C.’s machinery for a decade, I have learned that the media class around the United States Federal Government and national news has little interest in providing you with the public service of informing you. They are interested in selling advertisements.
Our political information diets are the worst of them all—they’re misinformed, they offer little to no knowledge about the actual procedures of Washington, and deliver to us the news we want to hear, not the news we should hear. As a result, we grow more attached to the teams of our choosing—the reds vs. the blues, rather than finding the great synthesis of ideas.
Political news does us no good unless it is potentially actionable via our votes or our activism. To make sense of politics, we need to delve underneath what our news outlets are telling us and into the data that makes politics tick. Thanks to the work of organizations like the Center for Responsive Politics, the Participatory Politics Foundation, and my former employer the Sunlight Foundation, we can start having a direct relationship with what’s really happening in the White House and on Capitol Hill.
A healthy information diet always starts locally—and your political information should be no different. The goings-on of your state representatives and city and county governments, along with your school boards and other local government offices are the best, healthiest forms of content for political news, and should be consumed over the national or global news.
OpenGovernment.org, a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, is attempting to build user-friendly websites that allow you to see every vote cast on every bill by every elected state representative and senator in every state. It’s a huge undertaking, and if you’re in one of the states they’re covering, then you can take advantage of a great user interface and user-focused thought that goes into the project.
At the local level, the National Institute for Money in State Politics tracks non-federal races: your governors and state representatives. With its website followthemoney.org, you can type in the name of a politician and see who is funding his campaign. At the federal level, the Center for Responsive Politics’ opensecrets.org does the same thing.
At the federal level, OpenCongress.org, also a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, gives you unprecedented access to what’s going on in the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Just like OpenGovernment.org, you can find your politicians, look up their votes on bills, and even contact them to tell them how you feel about issues.
To see what influences our politicians, it’s good to take a look at the industries and donors giving to their campaigns. While the connection between money and politics isn’t direct and uniform, money at the very least buys access, and at its worst buys votes. In either case, it is good to take a look at what kinds of people you’re associating with by supporting a particular candidate or campaign.
On television, C-SPAN does a better service of covering the news than FOX, MSNBC, or the major networks. It provides an advertisement and analysis free way for you to see what’s going on and to see what candidates are saying directly.
For activists, it may seem nice to subscribe to political emails too, to get the latest on the campaigns and issues that you support, but most of the time, these too quickly turn into advertisements. Sign up to get updates from Newt Gingrich, for instance, through HumanEvents.com, and you’ll soon start getting emails asking you to buy gold, advertisments for books to read, and recommendations on penny stocks.
Finally, to keep your inbox from filling up with political advertisements, avoid signing petitions and signing up for regular campaign updates. As a cofounder of one of the larger firms on the left responsible for the drafting of these petitions and the software that runs it, I can assure you that the online petitions that you sign are not meant, primarily, to cause change. They’re meant to get your email address so that you can later be bombarded by emails asking for money.
Instead, keep your voice your own, and if there’s an issue that you care about, bypass the middlemen and speak directly to your representative through the official means given to you—via house.gov, senate.gov, or whitehouse.gov. Or if you want to be truly effective, meet with your representatives in person. Call their offices, ask to speak to their schedulers, and get yourself a meeting.
With business news, paying attention to your local businesses, reading the public filings of companies from the SEC is likely to give you more benefit than listening to Jim Cramer smash things on CNBC.
In sports, developing a mastery of the statistics we use to measure the performance of our athletes may provide you with more insight and more pleasure for the game than listening to the washed up pundits and armchair quarterbacks tell you what they think. And certainly watching the games themselves is far more important to understanding the game than listening to the pundits prattle on about it.
It turns out the more local your sports diet, the more rewarding it can be too. Although watching a local high school baseball game doesn’t often give us the athletic showmanship of professional sports, it trades that for being able to watch kids play for the sport of the game, rather than for the money.
The same can be said for any major section of your newspaper, or any topic you’re interested in. The pattern here is simple: seek to get information directly from sources, and when the information requires you to act, interact directly with those sources. An over-reliance on third party sources for information and action reduces your ability to know the truth about what’s happening, and dilutes your ability to cause change.
The thing that’s made what Alexis de Tocqueville called “The Great American Experiment,” as on page 135, work is our ability to be pragmatic. Unfortunately, the economics of our information production, and what we’re willing to consume, is destroying our very ability to be pragmatic—to look to solve solvable problems. We get caught up in big debates, and brush off the boring stuff for the wonks to deal with.
Going on a healthy information diet restores our ability to be pragmatic. Let’s take our country back, not from the right or from the left, but from the crazy partisanship of both sides. Let’s give it to the stewards that have made the country so great, the pragmatists—the ones who want to create a more perfect union. A country with measurable results and demonstrably good outcomes.
Without stealing too much from President Obama, I’d like to suggest that we are the wonks we’ve been waiting for.
Appendix A. A Special Note: Dear Programmer
“It circulates intelligence of a commercial, political, intellectual, and private nature, with incredible speed and regularity. It thus administers, in a very high degree, to the comfort, the interests, and the necessities of persons, in every rank and station of life. It brings the most distant places and persons, as it were, in contact with each other; and thus softens the anxieties, increases the enjoyments, and cheers the solitude of millions of hearts.”
Six thousand years ago, there was a professional class of people that had a better relationship with information than everybody else. The professional scribe, armed with the ability to read and write, had a better ability to figure out the world than anybody else. Scribes became more than just stenographers for the courtrooms of power; they explored the sciences, becoming mathematicians, scientists, architects, and physicians. For millennia, the scribe wasn’t just a professional class, it was the backbone of civilization.
Through the development of the printing press, and a global push for basic literacy, the scribe class became obsolete. Knowing how to read and write wasn’t a trade secret for a professional class—it was a necessary asset
