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I sometimes hear progressives saying “It’s time for us to get angry; it worked for the Tea Party.” It also defines the Tea Party, and is among the reasons I oppose the Tea Party. I’m not saying that there’s never cause for anger; I’m saying that it should never be allowed to define us.
Instead, we should define ourselves first, and act in the world in service to that ideal, rather than allow ourselves to be defined by our frustrations, by some negative reaction to the world around us. Let others be the chest-thumping mindless apes. Someone has to strive to be the sentient beings, who lead the way toward something better.
What does it take to be sentient beings? A commitment, a desire, a discipline, an endless hunger to grow and aspire and invite and attract others to do the same. Let others thrive on their calls to arms; let’s instead engage in a call to minds. Let’s instead engage in a call to hearts. Let’s instead engage in a call to souls. We have called enough to our baser nature; it’s time to call to our nobler one.
This may be getting repetitive, and for that I apologize. I enjoy, more than anything, to tease out some hidden insight, some novel perspective, some aspect of the dance of nature around and through us that is not obvious, but is worthy of attention. But some things are less delicate, less unfamiliar, but no less worthy of attention for being mundane.
One such thing is our need to move, in as organized and passionate a manner as possible, in the direction of becoming advocates for a discipline that can be more effective, on multiple dimensions, than the sham of activism in which we are, in general, now engaged.
Some may recognize that this isn’t the first time I’ve referred to social institutional shams. I used the phrase “Kabuki Theater” not long ago to describe professional development workshops in public education, which are largely rituals of signifying a commitment to doing better rather than engaging in the actual discipline of doing better. But it is not a defect relegated only to ossified bureaucracies; it is a defect also found in our most passionate social institutional rites. No, the faces are not impassive in the shams of activism, but the results are as hollow.
WE ARE ABLE TO DO BETTER!!!! I can’t emphasize that enough, or often enough. We can do better. Just as for millenia humanity exercised the power of the mind through the haphazard accumulation of cultural belief systems, finally stumbling upon a methodology that unleashed its powers in phenomenal new ways; just as there was a time when trials by ordeal were all the rage, giving way to systems of law whose procedural discipline seems excessive to those who don’t realize what a triumph it really is; so too can we do better in every sphere of life, in every aspect of our endeavors.
The value of discipline, of methodology, of procedure, is not a new discovery; it has been a hallmark of spiritual and philosophical schools throughout history. The quest for nirvana may seem trite today, but it is no less compelling, no less authentic, than it was two and a half thousand years ago. It is, in essence, some shade of nirvana that we seek, some spiritual success realized through our own ability to tame our egos and realize our full potential in the process.
We do not necessarily have to sit in the lotus position and chant “om mani padme hum” to be, in essence, exercising a discipline that liberates the human spirit. We can, instead, escape the illusion of activism that is blindly invested in a superficial cycle, the endless trials by ordeal, of changing leadership and representation, and embrace in its place the realization of an activism that is more profound, more effective, and more compelling.
I have already sketched out what that discipline looks like (see, e.g., A Proposal, The Ultimate Political Challenge, The Voice Beyond Extremes, The Foundational Progressive Agenda, “A Theory of Justice”, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2, and “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few). But words are cheap, and acting on them is essential. To those who are already involved in this effort (e.g., “the coffee party”), let’s form bridges among our groups, form new groups, draw in new members, link to groups that are somewhat different in nature (e.g., Kiwanas,Rotary, church groups, HOAs, PTAs, park districts, school districts, everyone who is organized to do good works of any kind), trying to transcend rather than deepen the ideological divides, trying to create common ground rather than merely to smite enemies (and by doing so ensure that they remain enemies), building more hubs and spokes in expanding social networks all coalescing around the will to do better.
There are those who are quick to say that the opposition is not reasonable, and that trying to reason with them is the mistake that they are so angry about. And I say, the world is subtler than that. I do not argue that there is no place for hardball politics; I only argue that not every place is that place. I do not argue that there are not irrational and intransigent ideologues opposed to progress; I only argue that not everyone across the ideological divide is such a person. The real political battle has always been, and remains, the battle over the middle, over those who are not raging ideologues, over those who can be swayed. Such people are not swayed, but rather are repulsed, by raging ideology. While the Tea Party may seem to have been successful by trying to sway them with contorted faces and angry slogans, what they really did was to coalesce a base, and alienate the middle, at exactly the same time that many on the left thought that the smartest thing to do would be to alienate the middle as well, and thus lose the opportunity to be the only attractive political force left.
Obama won not because there was a huge mandate for expansive government, but rather because there was a huge mandate for hope and reason. Not everyone defines those virtues in the same way, and not everyone stayed on board as the policies themselves involved more government involvement than they were comfortable with. But hope and reason, not rage, are the truly attractive forces, the ones that attract not those who are already full of rage, but rather those who are not and don’t want to be.
So let’s recover that force, that momentum, that Obama unleashed in 2008. Let’s recover a commitment to hope and reason. Let’s agree to be slower to refute and quicker to consider; let’s agree to strive to find the words and attitude that resonate with those who can be swayed. Let’s agree to be reasonable, and humble, people of goodwill, working together to do the best we can. And let’s make that an attractive place to be. Real, and sustainable, progress depends on it.
Contact me, here or by other channels, if you’d like to be a part of an effort to organize along these lines. All reasonable people of goodwill have a responsibility to work as hard at turning this vision into a reality as others, all across the political spectrum, work at obstructing it.
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Progress depends on the effectiveness of those who are working to contribute to it (in all spheres of life), and effectiveness depends on taking responsibility as well as delegating it. The error on the extreme right involves a refusal to delegate, and the error on the extreme left involves a refusal to do anything else.
As I’ve written before, the Tea Party/Libertarian philosophy is based on an ideology of “liberty” divorced from mutual responsibility (see, e.g., Liberty & Interdependence). But there are too many on the Left who make the opposite error: They consider the extent of their responsibility to be to get the right delegates elected to office (see, e.g., “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”, “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few, An Open Letter To Angry Progressives).
The former are continually disgruntled by their inability to divorce liberty from governance, and the latter are continually disgruntled by their inability to elect a government able to impose their will on others. These two dysfunctional extremes define political discourse in America, with the most vocal and active ideologues belonging to one camp or the other.
I’ve written about my frustration that too many meetings of “progressive” groups are dominated by those who invest all effort and hopes in control of government, eschewing the responsibilities both of working on the ground to effect non-governmental social change, and of working to liberate and implement the genius of the many (see, e.g., “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”, “Messaging” From The Heart of Many Rather Than The Mouth of Few, An Open Letter To Angry Progressives).
The genius of the many is the product not of individual false certainties, but of collective and methodologically disciplined efforts. It is not the reduction to ideological refrains, but the mobilization of cognitive efforts. It is something we continue to discover rather than already know, and it is much subtler and more liberating than the shackles ideologues of all stripes are so eager to impose on us.
We need a new voice, a new camp, and not a merely moderate one. As (New York Times conservative columnist and PBS News Hour analyst) David Brooks has often said, the weakness of moderates as a political movement is that they don’t have a coherent message such as those on the extremes. But there is a coherent message defined by the transcendence of these extremes, one that is merely awaiting a voice to be given it (as I believe President Obama had tried to in his book The Audacity of Hope, and in his 2008 presidential campaign).
In fact, “moderate” is, in some ways, the wrong name for it. It implies that there is a left-right spectrum on which all political thought falls, and that a voice comprised of some alternative synthesis of the ideologies at those extremes must fall somewhere between them. But that voice can be as passionate, as coherent, and as affirmative as the voices at the extremes.
I have already written extensively on what that voice should look and sound like (see. e.g., A Proposal, The Ultimate Political Challenge, What’s Right With America, A Positive Vision For Colorado, “A Theory of Justice”, “A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”). It is a positive one rather than a negative one, a hopeful one rather than an angry or fearful one; one committed to reason and justice and working together for mutual benefit. It is a voice which considers government an agent and a vehicle of free people, who are most liberated by the benefits and responsibilities of effective and informed self-governance.
I’m a “progressive,” in that I’m committed to participating in meeting our shared responsibility to address the challenges and problems that confront us as a people. But I do not presuppose the means to do so, or the optimal balance between government involvement and private sector unencumbrance. The most important principle that an effective progressive movement should be committed to is the principle that we must discipline ourselves, to as great an extent as we each are capable of, in service to liberating our collective genius, which is the true source of our individual liberty (see, e.g., Ideology v. Methodology, Liberty & Society).
We need a new movement whose message is that we are reasonable people of goodwill, wisely uncertain of how best to resolve the challenges that confront us, but dedicated both to developing the personal and intellectual disciplines which best liberate and mobilize the genius of the many to do so, working to disseminate effectively the fruits of those disciplines, and participating with as much commitment as we can muster in exercising our individual liberty through them in service to our collective and individual welfare (see, e.g., A Proposal, The Foundational Progressive Agenda, The Ultimate Political Challenge).
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Amidst all of this heavy discourse (and particularly in the wake of Grand Synthesis I), it’s nice to step back now and then and remember what it’s all in service to.
I’ve always walked my seven-year-old daughter to school and back home again, whenever my schedule has allowed. This year, I’ve been able to do both almost every day. We usually run into a group of six neighborhood kids (mostly second and third graders) at the park across which we walk to get to the elementary school. Together with my daughter, I dubbed them “the seven dwarfs,” which makes me, by default, Snow Whitehair. Sometimes we create running jokes together, such as singing our theme songs for both going to school (“Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to school we go. We learn all day and get no pay; hi-ho hi-ho hi-ho”) and returning home (“Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s home from school we go. We learn all day, and then we play, hi-ho hi-ho hi-ho”). They love to tell me about the things that are important to them, and I love to hear about it.
My daughter and I have an amazing relationship, full of laughter and stories and spontaneous games. When people talk about how difficult teenagers are (as a former high school teacher, I know both the degree to which this is true, and the degree to which it is highly variable, and more dependent on how adults handle it than some realize), I think about that relationship, and feel confident that, despite the inevitable challenges ahead, we have created a bond together that won’t simply be whisked away by the onslaught of adolescence. I worry about my daughter’s safety, but not about her future choices, because I already see in her a deep well of personal responsibility and goodwill to others that is only going to grow richer and deeper.
And that’s what this blog is really all about. Beneath the jargon and soaring rhetoric and complex analyses is a simple commitment to my daughter, and the other six dwarfs, and the other millions of children in the country and billions in the world. I’m less concerned about my welfare today than about theirs tomorrow, and less concerned about abstract values fluttering in the wind of patriotic rhetoric than about the human spirit that those values and that rhetoric are meant to serve, but often commit violence against instead.
When I see people defend the contributing factors to devastating violence and suffering with blithe disregard for the devastation and suffering itself, or react to news of violence with the hatred that only feeds it and increases it while simultaneously obstructing efforts to do what it takes to actually diminish it, I feel a deep, painful frustration that is visceral rather than academic, that is informed by the smiles and happy voices of “the six dwarfs” who accompany me and my daughter to and from school, that knows that the greatest tragedy of our existence is our own resistance to improving it, together.
I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even know all of the questions. There are legitimate areas of debate, and legitimate ranges of uncertainty about what works and what doesn’t, about unintended consequences and unidentified risks, about what degree of decentralization of decision-making, what balances along the spectrum of individual liberty through increasing levels and degrees of social coordination, best serve humanity, all things considered. But the degree to which we bury these legitimate debates beneath mountains of arbitrary assumptions, inflexible ideologies, unexamined platitudes, and truly abhorrent rationalizations for complacent indifference to the suffering of others, form together an on-going tragedy far more consequential than hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks, and all other natural and man-made disasters combined.
Whatever we believe, whichever way we lean ideologically, we need to strive first and foremost to all agree to be, to the best of our ability, reasonable people of goodwill doing the best we can in a complex and subtle world. That should be our mantra —everyone’s mantra– everyone who wants to have some basis for self-respect. We need to shed our false certainties, unbind ourselves from our imprisoning platitudes, liberate ourselves from the rhetoric of division and enmity, and strive, with full recognition of the difficult reality within which operate, to work toward an improved quality of life for all people, all things considered.
That shouldn’t be a controversial notion.
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Not long ago, I created a page describing A Proposal for a project that I consider the core dual mission of the progressive movement: 1) Mapping out the social institutional landscape, including all known public policy experiments here and elsewhere, all known suggestions, and all identifiable new ideas, evaluated on the basis of sound analysis applied to reliable data in service to human welfare, allowing for ranges of uncertainty and legitimate debates; and 2) working toward creating a national (and perhaps eventually international) system for communicating this universe of information, not only to those already inclined to make the best informed and best intentioned political choices, but also in ways that resonate with existing frames and narratives that are to varying degrees resistent to doing so.
From various angles, and somewhat haphazardly, I’ve been exploring the various dimensions and aspects of this mission on this blog, even before I clearly identified the mission itself. A crucial piece of the puzzle is the relationship between individual action and social change, a relationship which generally suffers from either oversimplification or underemphasis, or both. As I noted very recently, too many political activists believe that their only job is to get preferred candidates elected, and then are angry but unchastened when that inevitably proves insufficient (An Open Letter To Angry Progressives). The critical question for each of us, too often unasked, is what do we each need to do to best contribute to the realization of the progressive mission described above?
One starting point for addressing that question is consideration of The Variable Malleability of Reality, a careful recognition of how changeable each aspect of the social institional landscape is, and how to work through those interconnected threads of variable malleability in service to effecting widespread and profound positive change. The necessary attitude with which to address that systemic challenge is a combination of realism and idealism, or “Cynical Idealism,” knowing and acknowledging what is, in order to create what can be.
But another aspect of the question of the intersection of individual action and social change is a more personal one, an identification of just what exactly “personal responsibility” means in the context of social responsibility, or being an agent of positive social change. While no one has to be saint to be a sincere participant in our shared efforts to improve the world, the on-going commitment on the part of each of us to walk the walk as well as talk the talk is more vital than we often acknowledge.
In one series of posts, I explored this nexus between the personal and social aspects of the challenge, recognizing that those of us who want to dedicate ourselves to improving the world really do need to try to improve ourselves as well (The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2, The Ultimate Political Challenge). Referring back to the “Proposal,” the challenge of cultivating a gravitational pull to the progressive agenda, making it a more attractive force than its ultimately anti-social competitors in the political arena (Liberty Idolatry, Small Government Idolatry, Liberty & Interdependence), involves modeling the spirit of the movement, showing people that it not only is what we can aspire to together, but also what we can be individually.
An earlier, related set of posts explored the ways in which our individual foibles aggregate into political ineffectiveness and dysfunctionality (The Politics of Anger , The Foundational Progressive Agenda). Numerous other posts delineate how such foibles have matured into a new incarnation of populist anti-intellectualism, combined with extreme individualism, giving us the worst of both worlds in the form of “The Tea Party” (“Political Fundamentalism”, “Constitutional Idolatry”). Other posts continue to trace the historical continuity between this movement and its anti-progress, anti-intellectual predecessors (The Tea Party’s Mistaken Historical Analogy, Social Institutional Luddites).
Following a discussion of such ideological foibles in general (The Elusive Truth , The Hydra’s Heads, The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, Pro-Life Dogma v. Life-Affirming Sentiment), I identified the basic duality involved: Ideology v. Methodology. The two institutions most committed to a careful pursuit of truth, science and law, rely first and foremost on a methodology, on procedural reductions of the influence of bias and caprice. While we have a process in politics for resolving conflicts, we don’t have a process in place for reducing bias and caprice. This is a dimension of the challenge which requires concentrated attention, and which inspired the proposal mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.
Despite the anti-intellectual rejection of the notion (while, ironically, always claiming to represent the more rational position), no enterprise suffers from an improved methodology, and no effort to confront the challenges of the world suffers from the increased application of reason. Reason isn’t everything: Passion and imagination both are vital ingredients as well. But reason is crucial, and plays an integral role in any enterprise, including the enterprise of self-governance.
A Framework for Political Analysis provides a very sketchy look at one aspect of the analytical paradigm that I developed during my work as a sociologist. I’ll need to develop this more fully in future posts, with a more complete description of how to use the techniques of microeconomics; game theory; evolutionary learning theory; linguistics, semiotics, and epistemology; and network analysis (along with tools from complementary fields, such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive science and evolutionary ecology) to explore the social institutional landscape that is characterized by various combinations of hierarchies, markets, norms, and ideologies (along with the primal social institutional material of emotions). While not everyone, necessarily will want to get into the weeds of these esoteric academic methodologies, awareness of them, and allowance for their ability to produce insights beyond those produced by casual observation and precipitous ideological assumption, certainly has a place in our collective efforts to continue to improve the human condition.
Some of the fruits of that methodology indicate its value. As I described in The Politics of Consciousness, human history is, in the abstract, a story of interacting evolving memes, aggregating into paradigms, which gradually accumulate anomalies (in the cultural context in the form of doubts and discontents; in the scientific context, in the form of inconsistent observations), which eventually generate paradigm shifts. In a series of subsequent posts, I explored various aspects of this dynamic, and contemplated some of its implications for the future (Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix).
In Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, I explore the ways in which adaptations large and small ripple through the social institutional and technological landscape, triggering adaptations and modifications in both forward and backward linkages. In The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, I continue the focus on the role of technology (drawing heavily on Brian Arthur’s recent book, The Nature of Technology), exploring the cumulative dynamical architecture of purposively programmed phenomena carved into and growing in conjunction with the social institutional landscape. In Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, I outline and speculate upon the interplay of the title two defining elements of the social institutional and technological landscape. In The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), I take a more precise look at one particular thread in that evolving social institutional and technological landscape, something that this project would seek to do, over time (perhaps over generations), comprehensively, compiling an encyclopedic dynamical mapping of the entire social institutional landscape. In The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix, I delve into the complex ecology of the interface of natural, human, and technological systems. In Counterterrorism: A Model of Centralized Decentralization, Tuesday Briefs: The Anti-Empathy Movement & “Crowdfunding”, Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed, , and A Major Historical Threshold or A Tragically Missed Opportunity, I consider the role of modern communications and data processing technologies in continuing the process of unleashing “the genius of the many.” In Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, I describe this driving force of social institutional evolution.
I also posted on specific aspects of the social institutional landscape, more relevant to the challenge of forging the best public policy. Economics is, of course, a topic of primary concern, and one which we all need to become better educated about. To that end, I’ve posted on various aspects of economics, including how to contemplate the question of public spending, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic priorities (The Economic Debate We’re Not Having , The Real Deficit , The Restructuring of the American and Global Economy, The More Subtle & Salient Economic Danger We Currently Face ).
Similarly, I’ve explored other aspects of the social institutional landscape, including international relations (Lords and Serfs on the Global Manor: Foreign Aid as Noblesse Oblige , Problems Without Borders , “Democracy IN America,” But Not BY America, The Brutality of War is Relevant), environmental issues (Environmental Open Forum, Deforestation: Losing an Area the Size of England Every Year, What One Marine Bacteria Might Mean to the World, Back to the Future, Sort Of: Sod Houses & Environmentalism, Energy and the Environment), child and family issues (The Most Vulnerable Americans, The Vital Role of Child, Family, and Community Services, Community, Family, and Crime Prevention, Solving Rather Than Punishing Problems), educational issues (Real Education Reform , The Importance of Mentors), health care issues (Sound Mind, Sound Body, Sound Society; Sound Good?, Is It Wrong to Require People to Buy Health Insurance?), immigration issues (A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue), and social/moral issues (Pro-Life Dogma v. Life-Affirming Sentiment). Many other posts flesh out various other aspects of our social institutional landscape (Should Political Libel Be Legally Prohibited?, Predators, Prey, and Productive Praxis, Free Will, Determinism, Quantum Mechanics, & Personal & Social Responsibility, The Meaning of “Representation”, Why Fame Is Attractive, “Is Religion A Force For Good?” ).
Finally, as several of the above posts linked to indicate, I tried to apply this improved mapping of the social institutional landscape to issues of public policy. Some of the overarching statements of general attitude and policy include “A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”, A Positive Vision For Colorado, What’s Right With America, and “A Theory of Justice”.
This blog is a somewhat haphazard nascent contribution to the paradigm I describe in the first paragraph, and in A Proposal. The paradigm is comprised of sets of interrelated memes, covering a broad territory, and involving various branches of the human endeavor, including: 1) methodologies both of how we form our understandings, and of how we attempt to implement them as public policy; 2) the products of the former methodologies, in terms of mapping out our social political landscape and its underlying dynamics; and 3) the myriad challenges we each must confront as individuals to become most effective in contributing to the development of this paradigm, and of its expression in the form of improved public policy.
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I’m angry too.
I’m angry at those who try to obstruct improvement of the human condition, and at those who obstruct improvement of the human condition while trying to facilitate it. I’m angry at both those who lack any sense of responsibility to one another, and those who lack any sense of how to satisfy that responsibility to one another. I’m angry at those progressives among us who try to turn every meeting into a group therapy session, focused on how mad they are that their imperfect certainties of the world are not being adequately realized by the candidates that they supported. I’m angry at hubris, and inflexibility, and attempts to impose the noise and obstruction of false certainties on a system already clogged with noise and obstructions of all kinds. I’m angry at folly, littered liberally across the ideological spectrum.
I’m angry at those who believe that progressive activism should consist entirely of trying to impose one’s own will on government, and not at all of trying to inform the will that is being imposed. I’m angry at those who believe that if they are convinced that something must be, then making it so must be good. I’m angry at those who think a straight line is the best path to all destinations, even if the destination cannot be reached by it.
I’m angry at those whose self-indulgent and unproductive anger drives productive people away, dominating discourse and derailing progress. I’m angry at those progressives who are essentially the same as Tea Partiers, only filling in the blanks of the same Mad-lib differently; who are political fundamentalists of another shade, characterized by the same attitude, adamant and inflexible, impermeable to new information, content to be absolutely certain of inevitably imperfect understandings. I’m angry at those who respond to the intentional obstruction of progress with the unintentional obstruction of progress, forming an implicit alliance with those they purport to oppose. I’m angry with those who adhere to and reinforce the cycle of blindly ideological opposition rather than striving to transcend it, as would serve an authentic progressive movement.
I’m angry at those who think that unproductive bitching is the epitome of political activism, and that attempts to plan and execute efforts to actually affect the political and ideological landscape are distractions from their “substantive work.” I’m angry at people who combine working to get favored candidates elected with anger that those candidates consistently disappoint them, or anger that fellow progressives made other choices, while doing nothing to assist those candidates in their efforts to persuade constituents who are not in agreement. I’m angry with people who think elections are the breadth and depth of politics, and that all challenges are met by winning them, though even they constantly observe that the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.
I’m angry with people who completely ignore the importance of creating a context which facilitates what we want our elected officials to do. I’m angry with people who don’t understand that getting progressives elected and re-elected is just the most superficial layer of the political challenge we face, and that unless we address the layers beneath it, we will be both less successful at achieving that superficial layer, and less successful at making such success, when it comes, conducive to the ends we had in mind when pursuing it.
I’m angry at those who don’t understand that electoral politics is just the beginning of the challenge; that the rest involves more, not less, responsibility on our part. And the tragedy is that too few people undertake that more essential responsibility.
I’m angry at people who take pride in a passionate commitment to change things for the better that is being squandered in ways which are more emotionally gratifying than effective, and, if anything, actually contribute more to ensuring that things won’t change for the better than that they will. I’m angry when these people speak for the progressive movement, attempt to ostracize and disinvite those who aren’t like them in order better to wallow with fellow travelers in an ecstasy of complete ineffectiveness.
But I’m not angry about the possibilities that lie beyond their fortifications, that can attract larger numbers of more able souls. I’m not angry, but rather am hopeful, that there are many who are silent, put-off, disgusted, and alienated by the combination of arrogance, ignorance, anger, and intransigence that characterizes many of the most vocal lay participants, of all ideological stripes, in our political process. I’m hopeful that a different kind of progressive movement, a more pragmatic but more robust and effective progressive movement, can attract the vast silent majority, who strive to be reasonable people of goodwill, and seek only a sign directing them to where reason and goodwill reside.
I’m hopeful that those of us so inclined will be able to find and create venues in which tackling the real challenges we face, that are ours to tackle, is considered the proper focus of our efforts rather than a distraction from them. I’m hopeful that there are those who want to work with some degree of humility to do our part, on the ground, to improve the quality of life in this state, nation, and world, both by affecting government, and by affecting the context within which it operates.
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Most probably recall from a childhood brimming with patriotic American History classes and their echo throughout the culture that the battle cry of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation!” Until 1763, however, a mere 13 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when the French and Indian War ended and the erstwhile loyal British subjects in the American colonies discovered that the British policy of “Salutary Neglect” (giving the colonies the support of the British Empire, but not asking much in return, in order to give them a chance to grow strong and prosperous) was about to come to an end, those same colonists viewed representation in parliament in much the same way that the rest of the British did: It was not really geographically based (though it formally was). Every Member of Parliament represented every British citizen.
The Americans themselves had a more geographically based, direct system of representation, and so were beginning to develop a conceptualization which diverged from the British one. But the question of “representation” has remained a trickier and subtler one than our easy rhetoric has ever quite acknowledged. Who ever really “represents” me, other than myself, and to what extent, with what fidelity? Does my neighbor who is my ideological, religious, moral, and philosophical opposite represent me better than the person two thousand miles away who thinks very similarly to me? Do we really want a system based on representation of regional interests in our Federal government, but representation of competing points of view being a more ad hoc matter? Does geography matter as much as it once did? These are all questions we need to examine.
The first question is the expression of the agency problem: When an agent represents a principal, the degree to which he or she does so faithfully depends on a variety of factors, including how well the interests of the agent are aligned to those of the principal. “Democracy” is one such mechanism: You don’t act in what the majority of your constituents consider to be their interests, and they vote you out in the next election. Markets are another, to some extent for some purposes so efficient that they eliminate the agency problem altogether: My agents who make goods on my (and others’) behalf do so because I will pay for those goods on the market. They are not actually my agents, though they function as though they were (as though I hired them to perform a service on my behalf).
But the problem is more difficult when the principal is a multitude, the choices presented to them for agent severely constrained, and only about half having actually selected the agent who in fact becomes the agent of that multitude as a whole. Combine that with the exaggerated expectations of those who supported the selection of that particular agent, and the exaggerated enmity of those who didn’t, and you have a very tricky agency problem indeed.
Geographic representation is never precise; it covers a region, and may favor some within that region more than others. Any other form of factional representation suffers the same defect: Subdivisions within the faction are not represented, and so some level of aggregation must be selected. It is not fundamentally different from having national-level representatives only, since, in all cases, a constituency of some delimited size is represented by individuals selected to represent it. And support for representatives of a state or district may come from outside that state or district, so that the interests of the representative are not aligned strictly to the interests of the region represented, nor to the country as a whole.
The primary purpose of the federal government is to solve national level collective action problems, but the combination of any system of factional representation (whether geographic, ideological, or sectoral) with pressures in the political process to focus on short time horizons creates an institutional obstacle to doing so effectively. The question is whether factional interests can be better represented in a way which serves real factional long-term interests by representing their position in bargaining over national level action, rather than undermining their real long-term interests by devolving into a competition over spoils.
Most of those who vigorously oppose a candidate do not consider that candidate, should he or she win the election, to be their representative. And many of those who most vigorously support a candidate do not consider that candidate to be their representative either, should the candidate win the election and fail to fulfil all of the often impossible demands of those who supported him or her in the election. That leaves only some few among the moderate and the indifferent, along with the recipients of political favors, who end up feeling that their representative represents their interests.
Traditionally, we have sought to peg representation to geographic locale, with competing polarized ideologies simply being a winner-take-all luck of the draw. But we decry some of the more dysfunctional aspects of geographic representation, which drives representatives to try to “bring home the pork,” to divert as large a portion of federal revenues to their constituents, creating a distributional competition which often undermines the efficiency of federal government to act in the overall national interest. The handful of residents in rural Alaska are glad to get the influx of federal money involved in building “a bridge to nowhere,” but few elsewhere believe it is the best investment of their shared resources.
One much discussed incarnation of this problem comes in the form of “earmarks,” by which Congressional representatives (including senators, who represent individual states) stick bills which divert funds to their districts into other bills which may be completely unrelated. The Colorado Constitution prohibits this practice in our state legislature (and includes other anti-pork provisions, such as a line-item veto for the Governor, and a prohibition against “log-rolling,” or vote trading among representatives), but it is rampant in Congress.
The Denver Post reported that Senator Udall, once again, has declared his opposition to airmarks, and also that he has indulged in them in the past (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/11/15/udall-calls-for-an-end-to-earmarks/18617/). The latter fact is a function of a collective action problem rather than of hypocrisy: Opposition to earmarks does not imply that it is rational for a representative to unilateral refuse to utilize them. Giving the president the line-item veto, however, raises separation of powers issues (giving the president too large a hand in legislation), and has already been ruled unconstitutional.
There are alternatives to geographic representation, such as proportional representation, in which candidates in nationwide or expanded regional elections receive seats by political party, according to how many votes their party receives. Alternatively, seats in nationwide or expanded regional elections can be given to several of the top vote getters, so that parties can run more than one candidate if they think they are particularly strong in the region, and smaller parties can get a seat if they have enough support, even if far less than candidates from larger parties have.
Some revolutions have foundered on the assumption of class representation, relying on the notion that those who were historically or nominally members of a particular class will represent the interests of that class once in power. Unfortunately, once they obtain power, they become members of the ruling class, and tend to represent the interests of the ruling class most faithfully, rather than of the class to which they nominally belonged.
However we deal with the challenge of ensuring that our representatives represent our interests, we will always have two interrelated challenges to address: 1) Making sure that our agents acts in our (the principal’s) interests, and 2) Enabling them to do so effectively. Those populists, scattered across the political ideological spectrum, who focus almost exclusively on the first challenge, and aspire to micromanage the way in which our representatives perform their job, undermine our ability to address the second challenge, by removing any ability to mobilize specialized training, experience, skill, knowledge, and expertise in the act of governance. It is “arm-chair quarterbacking” by those who sincerely believe that they are as good a quarterback as anyone else. But governance is an information intensive activity, requiring some knowledge of law and economics, as well as a variety of relevant familiarity with technological and natural systems implicated in public policy decisions. We need to combine accountability with professionalism.
Understanding the complexity of the challenge of “representation” is a first step toward addressing it systematically and rationally. In the end, the real goal is to mobilize our collective genius in service to humanity, so that our interests are systemically represented by the processes of government, whether or not any individual agent within that government represents our particular regional or ideological interests. Within the framework we have created, we should focus on that goal: Activating and channeling our collective genius in service to human welfare, all things considered. Everything else is merely a means to that end.
There is much emphasis on the Left on the failure of our leaders to control the message, but this emphasis conveniently deflects the responsibility that each of us has, oversimplifies and “arm-chair quarterbacks” the far more complex challenges faced by those of our party representing us in government, and reduces “messaging” to sloganeering, assuming that we should become Tea-Party-esque, hawking a progressive message in the same way that Tea Partiers hawk a regressive one. But as I posted in The Ultimate Political Challenge, there is more to progressive messaging than pithy slogans and official spokespeople; there is, instead, the ultimate importance of each of us making the most eloquent and heartfelt appeals we can, to anyone and everyone who is not yet on board that we can, to move the center of gravity to whatever extent that we can.
At the local MoveOn.org meeting I attended last night, that was in many ways discouraging to me due to the focus by some (who were vocal enough to seem to express the mood of the group to me) on office-holders rather than on us as a people, on griping rather than on identifying positive things we ourselves can do, and on trying to impose political “purity” on elected officials rather than making any allowance for the combination of expertise and pragmatic commitment necessary to advance progressive policies in the halls of government (see “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”), the issue that many identified is “messaging.”
We’ve all heard it repeatedly: We let the Tea Party right define the message, and did not counter it effectively with our own. But it wasn’t just their slogans, or their way of couching their propaganda, that was effective; it was also their ability to resonate with the frames and narratives in people’s minds. And it was the fact that each and every adherent took responsibility for that message, conveyed it themselves, shouted it from the rooftops. Messages from the heart and from the many can be messages of hope or fear, of love or hate, of realistic aspiration or of clinging to fictions, but their power comes from the combination of passion and contagion. The Tea Party did not wait for their preferred candidates to shout the message; each and every one of them shouted it themselves. And that’s exactly what we have to do, with a message that expands rather than contracts the human spirit and its positive effects on the world.
That’s part of what my previous, and largely overlooked post on The Ultimate Political Challenge was really all about; “messaging” as emotional and cognitive appeal, but emotional and cognitive appeal to our better angels, such as MLK and Gandhi and Obama in 2008 were able to do, rather than to our basest and darkest aspects, such as Hitler and Joseph McCarthy and Glenn Beck and too many others have been able to do.
It’s not only the challenge of “messaging,” as so many rightly identify, but messaging of the former rather than latter variety. And it’s not only about demanding that inspirational messaging from our elected officials (as so many focus on), but also demanding it from ourselves, reaching for it, engaging in it, contributing to its formation in what would be the ultimate contribution to grass-roots progressivism.
Not everyone has to be an MLK or a Gandhi or an Obama to contribute to this, and complaining that this or that elected official isn’t an inspiring enough speaker or didn’t do enough to control the message doesn’t contribute to it at all (just the opposite, really). Posting comments and diaries on SquareState, responding to injunctions to get out and vote in the days before the election, by insisting that the lack of inspiring leaders on the left is why the rank and file on the left are so uninspired, is the opposite as well.
Rather than complain about a lack that each of us is partially responsible for, we should each step up and do what we can to meet out responsibility. It is first and foremost the responsibility of each of us to inspire ourselves if no one else is inspiring us, and to inspire whoever and however many around us that we are able to.
We need to focus less on our at best partially-informed gripes about Democratic office holders who are dealing with the complex challenges of maneuvering within the political arena, and more on creating a context which improves their hand and their position in those complex negotiations and strategic interactions.
We need to focus less on holding others responsible, and more on holding ourselves responsible. We need to focus less on our anger (which is what motivates and informs the messages we oppose) and more on our hope and goodwill. We need to focus less on hubris and more on humility, less on trying to direct remote others and more on trying to move those around us by creating something attractive to move toward.
We need, each of us, to step up to the plate in positive and constructive ways. We need to stop using our scapegoats in Congress as excuses for our own failures to persuade those around us, who are not already persuaded, that there is a better path into the future than Tea Party extreme individualism and social irresponsibility.
Hope, like anger, crests on a sea of millions of people contributing to it in small ways. Our message depends not just on pithy slogans and official voices, but also on all of our voices, and how we use them. What I saw at the MoveOn.org meeting, at least among the two most vocal participants in my break-out group, is the opposite of what we need to do to turn this country around again, not because of any defects in their preferred public policies, but because of the defects in their understanding of what they can best do to realize them.
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I just returned from my first ever local MoveOn.org meeting, and may well be the only person among the 25 or so in attendance who does not feel energized and encouraged by the experience. Quite the contrary, I feel enervated and discouraged by it, reminded of the sheer magnitude of the challenge that reasonable people of goodwill face, because the enemy is within as much as without, with the obstacles to progress residing as much among those who are advocates of progress as among those who are not.
The fundamental problem that I have identified as being characteristic of the Tea Party is, alas, also characteristic of its counterpart on the left, and that problem is fundamentalism itself. More than the particular substance of the inflexible reductionist certainties, it is the fact of inflexible reductionist certainties, the angry belief that those elected officials who are not following the fundamentalists’ own infallible wisdom about all matters of policy and politics are the only thing preventing us from achieving the dream. It is so familiar, echoed throughout the pages of history in movements that have almost always ushered in increased suffering rather than increased welfare. Real progress has not ensued, and will not ensue, from such reductionist fanaticism, but rather only from responsible attempts to hammer out the nuts and bolts of a workable system, and doing so in heated but compromising negotiations among thoughtful people divided by many significant basic disagreements, but united by recognition that no one faction can impose its will on all matters.
The fundamentalists at all ideological extremes, on the other hand, are united in their commitment to refuse to acknowledge one another’s inevitable role in the formation of public policy, and to insist only that their own view would prevail, if only those who they struggled to elect were as intransigent and oversimplistic as they themselves are.
Political fundamentalists, from all ideological locations, share certain traits:
1) They reduce the world to “good guys” and “bad guys,” with the former being those who believe what they believe and are as intransigent and unsubtle in their pursuit of it, and the latter being both their counterparts at other ideological extremes and those who fail to be fundamentalists at all.
2) They have a simplistic reductionist understanding of political and economic reality, that they not only adhere to doggedly, but which they never pause to doubt, completely submerged in an unexamined assumption of cognitive infallibility.
3) They are angry with anyone who either opposes the substance of their beliefs, or doubts the efficacy of their political strategy of simply insisting that their agenda can be achieved by refusing to vote for or support candidates of their own party who have ever shown any willingness to compromise with their ideological opposites, or have ever shown any willingness to work within the constraints of the system in which they find themselves.
It is time for people to realize that we live in a complex and subtle world, that there are a range of beliefs and interests, many of which I find atrocious but which I know I can’t simply wish away, with which we must negotiate. It’s time to start a movement of reasonable people of goodwill, with enough humility not to try to micromanage every move every elected official ever makes, but rather seeks out those who are also reasonable people of goodwill, but are more expert in the areas most relevant to public policy, and let them do their job.
Distressed family members, when a loved one is rolled into surgery, try to follow the doctors and nurses into the operating room. Understandably, they want to be directly involved in the attempt to save their loved one’s life. But they are told that if they want their loved one to get the best care, they have to let the surgeon’s do their job without the obstructions and distractions that their presence will impose.
Government is in some ways similar: We want to be in the operating room, ensuring that the professionals we’ve hired to do the job are doing it right. But we aren’t all equally equipped to perform that operation, or to direct how it should be performed, as popular as the delusion to the contrary may be. When the professionals involved are the ones that we supported and voted for, then we need to defer to them to some extent. It’s hard to do, and hard to balance against the very real need to also hold them accountable, but those activists most passionately involved in the political process are also most inclined to err on the side of micromanagement rather than on the side of too little vigilance. We need to recognize that, and make an effort to rectify it.
The real progressive movement, the one that holds some promise of being effective, is not the one comprised of stridently uncompromising blind ideologues on the left, ready to do battle with both their counterparts on the right and the moderates that stand between them, but rather the one comprised of people who know that it is indeed a complex and subtle world, that those complexities require of our agents in the political arena more finesse than angry idealogues want to impose on them, and that creating pressures to abandon that finesse results in a reduction of our ability to achieve real progress.
The more salient challenge progressives currently face isn’t getting our Democratic office holders to do our bidding, but rather to get ourselves to allow and enable them to do it effectively.
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On This Week With Christiane Amanpour today (http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-madeleine-albright-sen-lindsey-graham-sen/story?id=12143913&page=4), at the end of the program Christiana reported on a British Member of Parliament who was removed from office by court order because he (or his campaign staff) had lied about his opponent during the campaign, the first time an election has been nullified in the UK in 99 years (see also: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/8131286/It-is-right-to-protect-democracy-from-Phil-Woolass-lies.html).
The law under which Phil Woolas had been removed from office after winning the election (by a mere 103 votes) was the Representation of the People Act, under which Woolas’ opponent sued. The argument in Great Britain, naturally enough, is between the importance of avoiding any chilling of political free speech (and transfer of power from the people to the courts), versus the importance of creating and maintaining a reliable, productive, informative debate between candidates competing for elected office. It is not a trivial debate, and it should not be decided with a knee-jerk commitment to any a priori assumption. Both sides represent legitimate and significant values to be considered.
One of the simultaneous strengths and weaknesses of the American legal and political system is the quasi-sacred status accorded to our foundational document, the United States Constitution. It is a strength because it creates a bulwark in defense of rule of law, making any capricious acts of power outside the bounds of our legal structure just that much more difficult to realize. It is a weakness because it binds us to a very insightful but inevitably imprecise, imperfect, and increasingly archaic 223 year old legal document. While there are legal means for amending it, the reality is that it is exceedingly difficult to amend, and that the heightened quasi-sacred status of the Bill of Rights renders those ten amendments completely untouchable as a practical reality.
Most Americans would argue, instantly and passionately, that that is unequivocally a very good thing. While there are very good and persuasive arguments to support that conclusion, it is undeniably also affected by lifetimes of nationalistic indoctrination, starting practically in infancy, with the public school diet of the Pledge of Allegiance, military and patriot ballads, and American History still generally taught with all of the stirring patriotic mythology and imagery ladled thickly throughout. How many Americans, for instance, know that the Boston Tea Party was a response to a lowering of taxes on British tea, offending only the tea smugglers’ interests? How many know that among the grievances that the colonists cited against the British was the British commitment to protecting the civil rights of the Indians living in the newly conquered Ohio Valley, and of the French colonists in newly conquered Canada? Reality is more nuanced than the mythologies with which we displace it.
So let’s bracket off our patriotic certainties, and instead examine the topic with dispassionate reason. Is the long-term public interest better served by defending an absolute hands-off policy regarding political campaign messaging, leaving it up to voters to punish discovered dishonesty as they see fit, or is it better served by prohibiting outright deception, enforced with penalties serious enough to give the prohibition teeth? If the latter, should such prohibitions include overturning the choice of the electorate? Should the electorate be included in such a decision?
First of all, we should recognize that limits on free speech already exist. In any context other than a political campaign, a person whose reputation is publicly impugned by an intentional falsehood can sue under libel and slander laws. The question isn’t whether extending that legal protection into the political sphere violates an inviolable absolute right to free speech, but rather whether it violates some core principle of that right that does not exist outside of the political sphere. It is certainly true that in Free Speech jurisprudence, political speech is recognized as being the most protected kind of speech, since the first amendment was particularly intended to protect political speech.
Second of all, we need to examine honestly the assumption that voters are capable of punishing lies at the polls. We all know that American political campaigns have devolved into largely negative campaigns which stretch the truth as much as they can get away with to paint the opponent in the worst possible light. The voters can only punish this behavior by voting for no one, which undermines rather than preserves the health of the democratic system.
Furthermore, the assumption that the electorate will reward and punish candidates for good and bad behavior defies both overwhelming empirical evidence and economic theory, since rewarding and punishing such behaviors depends on being fully informed, which is rarely if ever the case. To take a market example of the dilemma, few people are such “free market” purists that they argue in favor of rescinding health and safety laws protecting consumers from toxic and dangerous ingredients in goods offered for purchase. Few say, “after a few thousand kids die from dangerous parts in toys, people will stop buying them.” In fact, such an approach ensures that small, quick-hit start-ups will in never-ending succession sell dangerous or unhealthy items that yield higher profits than attention to health and safety would, and simply switch to a new one once the consumer learning curve catches up.
Similarly, not all, or even most, of the electorate ends up informed prior to the election of deceptions incorporated into political campaign ads, becoming informed requiring both that the deception is discovered and reported upon by the press, and that the electorate affirmatively seeks information about candidates beyond the information that is targeted at them in the course of their daily lives. Also, and more problematically, even informed voters are susceptible to sophisticated psychological manipulation, meaning that well-designed deceptions can affect elections even if everyone is informed of the deception, leaving inchoate impressions that affect voting behavior independently of the quality of information.
The latter question bleeds into the very sensitive question of “how much democracy is too much democracy?” Do we want a pure democracy, in which the entire polity votes on every single public policy decision; or some kind of a representative democracy, in which we select people to govern presumably with some degree of professional expertise and information-intensive analysis? If the latter (which is what we have), do we want to preserve some kind of unfettered free-for-all process of selecting those representatives, in which any exploitation of the psychological manipulability of the electorate is fair game, or do we want to refine the process to be one in which popular decisions are made on the basis of reliable information?
While I respect the sophistication of our existing social institutions, and believe that preserving the core of our system is certainly a good idea, I am of the opinion that there is almost always room for improvement on the margins. I have always said that there are two demands that must be met in any representative system of government: 1) That the agents (our representatives) be held accountable for acting in the interests of the principal (the people), and 2) that they be enabled to do so effectively. This principle can be extended somewhat to two broader requirements of our political system: 1) That the electorate be allowed to choose its representatives according to their perceived interests, and 2) that they be enabled to do so effectively.
Whether the British law is preferable to our anything-goes system, and whether a (another?) marginal shift in power from the electorate to the courts would (continue to?) tilt the scales in an unhealthy way, is something about which I am not going to state any conclusions. But I do advocate that we engage in the debate, in the ongoing consideration of how to refine our system, and in the cautious effort to do so. Despite our patriotic mythology, there is always room for improvement. There was in 1776. There was in 1787. There was in the 1860s and 1960s. And there is today. Let’s not let national pride blind us to the need to progress. Let’s not cite those who were most famous for arguing on behalf of the need to refine social institutions as authorities whose refinements prohibit us from every refining them again.
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Martin Luther King, Jr, (apparently borrowing from an earlier Christian philosopher) said that “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” John Maynard Keynes (later plagiarized by Winston Churchill, directing the reference toward Americans in particular) said that “[people] will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.” What these quotes illustrate, aside from the prevalence of plagiarism among famous orators (John F. Kennedy got his “Ask not…” line from his prep school, whose motto it was, substituting “your country” for “your school”), is the combination of optimism and cynicism that characterized these two quite different but equally visionary thinkers. In both phrases, the short-term is frustratingly full of injustice and irrationality, but the lathe of trial and error, and the impetus of the human soul, tend to sort it out in the long-run.
Neither of them were counseling complacency, however. Both were counseling perseverance, and commitment to bending the arc more sharply toward justice, accelerating and abbreviating the exploration of all those irrational alternatives. We who believe in reason, who believe in justice, who believe in the shared responsibility to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and in the woefully underrealized potential we have to intentionally and conscientiously improve the human condition, are called upon to be the agents of reason and justice in an irrational and unjust world, not as glassy-eyed fanatics pursuing emotionally gratifying caricatures of the two, but as patient, committed, and good-humored agents of what is good and decent about humanity.
The question that forever presents itself, and that is never more than partially and inadequately answered, is: How do we best confront that challenge?
There is no one answer. Yes, we need to keep generating the best ideas, most disciplined by reason exercised through reliable methodologies, most inspired by focused imaginations, most dedicated to the highest ideals and tempered by humility and dispassionate lucidity. Yes, we need to be pragmatic, political realists, working within that which currently exists to create that which might someday be. These two demands upon us cannot be denied: We must both generate the best ideas, and fight within the political arena to see them implemented to whatever extent possible, by whatever legal means possible. But these two demands, which dominate our attention and seem to exhaust the scope of our obligation, are missing the most vital component: We must reunite the two, so that the best ideas about how to govern ourselves become the means for their own political success. We must create a center of gravity comprised of reason and goodwill, a moral and intellectual force that few can resist.
The two great historical figures I quoted above both did just that, as have others: Martin Luther King, Jr., like Gandhi before him, made passive resistance in service to simple justice a very compelling force, one that few could stand against in the long run, though many stood against it in the short run. John Maynard Keynes helped inform a fiscal and economic policy that remained almost undisputed for over half a century, informed the most massive and rapid economic growth the world has ever seen, and continues to be the certainty of last resort in a fiscal crisis, when “we are all Keynesians.”
My favorite movie line of all time exhorts us all to rise to the level of such leaders, by being followers who honor them by identifying with them: “I am Spartacus!” (This line is in the news again, as supporters of a fellow in England who was arrested for Tweeting a joking bomb threat at a Northern English airport are now tweeting joking threats of their own, with the tag line “I am Spartacus!”). We are all Spartacus; we are all Martin; we are all Keynes; we are all capable of asking the most of ourselves in service to one another, and of doing all that we can to bend that arc of justice more sharply, to abbreviate that exploration of irrational alternatives to whatever extent possible.
Martin, in fact, “was” Gandhi, became Gandhi by emulating Gandhi, as any one of us can become Martin by emulating Martin. Who will be the next to stand up and lend their name to that nobility of spirit that resides in each of us, something we all aspire to realize, something we all struggle to untangle from the baser elements within us that hold it back and keep it buried? It may well be you.
But what does it mean to find that soul of justice and reason, of courage in service to these virtues, of commitment to stand on their behalf and resist the temptation to simply find a quiet refuge to escape their demands (and even, as the Tea Party has now done, create an ideology which justifies and exalts yielding to that temptation)? It means not just submitting to the discipline of reason and goodwill, but also dedicating oneself to making them inexorably attractive forces, striving to give them a voice and an incarnation in each of us that others cannot deny, just as the many could not deny reason and justice expressed through Gandhi and King.
The project I have proposed (A Proposal) is an attempt to give a new philosophical and programmatic life to this ideal. We need to work harder at connecting that place in our soul that can’t hide from the message insisting upon social justice when expressed with the undeniability of a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a Mahatma Gandhi with the efforts we make to reassert that same forgotten commitment to reason and social justice that so languishes today. Few of those Tea Partiers who are, unbeknownst to themselves, spitting on the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., would ever suggest that they aren’t an admirer of his. We need to spoon-feed them that inconsistency, gently but assertively, and force them to work through the cognitive dissonance it provokes. We need to make them face the fact that they are not reasonable people of goodwill, that they are one of those “other alternatives,” that outward bow in the arc that must be bent back toward justice.
That is the ultimate political challenge. It includes creating the best ideas, and it includes fighting to have them implemented, but it also includes appealing to something inside all of us, something that responds to what’s true and right if it is presented in a way that can’t be denied. The phrase “winning minds and hearts” has become a cliche, but it remains the ultimate political challenge.
Let’s not forget to keep rising to it.
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