It’s time to talk about big solutions
By: Matt Harder
Tags: Democrats, Change, Republicans, Politics, Millennials

Yesterday was Sunday and I spent it in Fort Greene Park with a friend. It was a proper park session: we laid on blankets in the shade, amongst the diverse Brooklyn crowd, sipping beers, eating chips, and having deep conversation. The discussion was fun, rambling, exploratory. But a few hours in, we found ourselves in a disagreement. The topic at hand was how to properly fix the political system. When you add up all of the disastrous elements that the Baby Boomers are preparing to hand us off as they go on to other pastures, the prospects for the US are pretty grim — unpayable debt, international conflicts, loss of leadership, institutional decline- I could go on. But millennials are soon to take over the political reins and when we do we can expect things to be very different. And they need to be, we need to change things drastically if we’re going to get off of this current trend of economic, cultural and political suicide and get back toward sustainability. But how?

My friend’s idea was that the critical issue was the 2020 election. The number one priority for the US should be to get Donald Trump out of office. If not, “we might just bleed out and by 2024 there won’t be much left to revive” according to my friend. I disagreed. The Democrats are in the process of nominating Joe Biden, someone who is quite visible suffering from cognitive decline, and he hasn’t even gotten into the office. From all appearances, he would be lucky to survive four years of the most crushing stress a person can endure. Think of how it aged Presiden Obama. Does it feel like Biden has that kind of vitality to draw on? So how can you trust a party that would nominate him? Trump may be bad, and getting him out might be a good thing, but that’s not the same as putting actual faith in the Democratic Party to solve these major problems.

As we argued back and forth on this point I realized where our snag was. We both agreed that massive structural change was needed, we both agreed that the political parties have become little better than cartels who do corporate bidding to the enrichment of their members and are proven to be unresponsive to the average voter. But here is the difference between our two approaches, and I think many Americans face this tension right now. My friend is willing to put his trust in a party to get him a little farther down the road. In his mind if Biden could get us to 2024 in one piece we’ll be in better shape to fix things then.

But I disagree that four more years of “something else” is a great solution. At this point the political parties are structures which are designed to channel corporate and special interest priorities into our politics. They are not designed to listen to and respond to the population, as democracy is designed to be. So what is the point of putting your trust in a party to fix the system? It’s like committing to end organized crime, then being told you have to ally with the Yakuza or the Italian Mafia in order to do it. Just give them the power and money and they’ll take care of it for you. Or they won’t — they’ll just keep enriching their friends for four more years and take advantage of the revolving door, enriching themselves. And we’ll go deeper into debt, lose more confidence in our system, and surely encounter more social unrest, etc.

So we find ourselves in a tricky situation — the eternal, churning swamp of minutiae which is the excuse for why we can’t talk about real, structural change. Somehow there’s always something more urgent than fixing the biggest problems. Imagine the foundation of your house is sinking and will soon render it unlivable, but as a result your doors and windows keep breaking so the rain and dust can get in and damage your stuff. This is a real problem, but until you take care of the foundation the windows and doors will keep breaking, and you’ll just replace them over an over until your house is eventually condemned. The political system itself is the sinking foundation. It’s entirely dominated by unresponsive, out of touch parties that behave more like they work for industries than people, and we can see it in the nominees they allow us to choose from in the general election.

The problem with focusing on all this urgent minutiae is that it sucks the oxygen out of what should be the real conversation — structural change. It’s the excuse for why people who know we need real structural change don’t demand it as a pre-condition for their loyalty. It’s the excuse for why we’re always being told we have to support one of the cartels, we’re meant to stay in a headspace where this corporatist cartel is way better than that corporatist cartel.

The only structural change that the parties will allow to be spoken about is Socialism, because of its brand awareness and bizarre stickiness despite it’s historic and current failures. But in the end they weed it out because it falls afoul of their corporate sponsors (for now at least).

In the meantime, there are people trying to talk about deep, systemic change, but they are drowned out by the minutiae. Larry Lessig, a Harvard professor and political activist whose TED talks have garnered millions of views wrote a book on the topic called They Don’t Represent Us. But barely anyone read it — it’s currently got 11 reviews on Amazon. And no politicians seem to mention or champion it. Can’t say I wonder why.

On June 23rd a new book on the topic came out called The Politics Industry, where authors Gehl and Porter explain “How Political Innovation can Break Partisan Gridlock and save our Democracy.” The main thrust is that the political parties are functioning as they’re designed to — enriching their corporate sponsors and leaving the public out to dry. We fool ourselves into believing that parties are legislating on our behalf, but simultaneously we know it’s not true. We know the system is broken and we’re not being listened to. Hopefully Gehl and Porter can succeed where others have failed, and manage to get some traction on the issue.

So it seems we’re in kind of a catch 22 and we need to pull ourselves out of it. Most people know we need structural change, but are expecting the change to come from within the political parties, which it never will. In the meantime they satisfy themselves with minutiae. We need to withhold some of our attention from the parties that got us here and instead use it to seek out conversations on real change.

Political innovation and structural change is inevitable and will come whether we choose it for ourselves or are forced into it by our systems breaking so severely that they cease working altogether. The problem with waiting for the latter is that under such urgency we run a high risk of making enormous mistakes. So let’s start having conversations on structural change now so that we can be informed on the options, and start to demand it from our political representatives. After all, neither party has a good record of positive structural change. I don’t see why we should expect solutions to come from them now.

Note: If any of what I said resonated with you, consider following Represent Us which is an organization (who I’m not affiliated with) that focuses on trying to bring about real, structural change.