Category Archives: Ideas

Ideas

Hearts, Laws and Our 1L Orientation

I just published my first essay — a reflection on my law school orientation and how change happens in politics — in the Harvard Law Record:

Throughout my 1L orientation, my mind kept returning to this overlooked moment in the 2016 Presidential campaign– a moment that teaches us much more about American politics than the entire telethon of Trump-focused punditry ever has nor ever will. In a backroom after a Hillary Clinton campaign event, Julius Jones, a Black Lives Matter activist, is face-to-face with the frontrunner herself, challenging her to explain how she would change “hearts and minds” to address racism in America. Clinton, in a rare candid moment, responds passionately: “I don’t believe you change hearts; I believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”

What a great political tension! To address the great public problems of our time, should we be changing Hearts or changing Laws?  

Of course, Jones and Clinton are both right. Heart and Laws — and consequently, Heart-changers and Law-changers — are not opponents, but rather interlocutors in democracy’s great conversation.

Read the full essay — “Hearts, Laws and Our 1L Orientation” — here.

Ideas

Going to Work Everyday

To remind myself about the importance of work, I keep this clock on my desk with the batteries out so that it is always set to 9:20 PM.

Twenty years ago yesterday at 9:20 PM, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, play stopped and the banner on the B&O Warehouse switched from 2130 to 2131, creating what is (along with the last out of Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS) the greatest moment in modern baseball history: the certification that CalIMG_6639 2 Ripken had broken Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games played record.
If football is about going to war, with generals from the sidelines commanding their troops to seize land from the other team, baseball is about going to work, with everyone honing their specialized craft, with the front offices crunching the numbers, and with the players needing to perform with consistency, day in and day out, for over a hundred and fifty days a year.

That’s why Cal’s record is the most important in all of American sports: it’s just about a guy who went to work everyday. And not only that: it’s about a guy who went to work everyday with unmatched dignity and commitment; it’s about a guy who went to work everyday at the same factory in which his brother had gone to work; it’s about a guy who went to work everyday because he learned from his father that that’s the honorable thing to do.

calripken2131 (1)And of course, the most important reason 2131 is America’s greatest sports record is because it’s not about Cal Ripken. It’s about the hundreds of millions of Americans who go to work every day in much harder jobs. Cal put it well himself: “[My fans] all had stories, they all had their own streaks, like working for a plant for 31 years and never missing a day. Whoa. Now that’s a streak. We should be celebrating those streaks. That’s work. I just played baseball.”

Laboring daily — going to work — is like breaking bread or praying or caring for the sick: it’s one of those basic and honorable practices that make us human. It takes us outside of ourselves. It brings us together. It has a grace and momentum of its own.

Without a strong Labor movement, calls to go to work everyday — to have our own streaks of committed Labor, like Cal’s — are perverse and cynical, the smarm of bosses misusing this sacred human practice to squeeze more out of us for their own private profit (and often, worse, have us smile while they fleece us).

Labor Day is about recognizing those people — like my grandpa Joe Gubbins, who was a Chicago union lawyer — who have struggled to make sure that this dignity of Labor — this American pride in going to work everyday, like Cal did — is not perverted by the greed of a few. It’s about building workplaces which empower people to go to work everyday with the secure knowledge that their Labor will be respected. It’s about blabor-movementuilding an economy where we can all go to work everyday and be proud of our Labor, because we had a hand in deciding what is done with it, because we had a hand in deciding in how it was treated, because we had a hand in deciding how it was rewarded. It’s about recognizing the centuries-long union struggle that gave us the weekend and compensation for injury; that gave us health and safety standards and sexual harassment protections; that gave us sick pay and an end to child labor; that gave us parental leave and the forty hour workweek.

I want to live in a country where we can talk about the dignity of going to work everyday without rolling our eyes; where streaks like Cal’s and streaks like that of his fan at the plant are both respected: not just with pats on the back, but with serious power and serious paychecks. Our American Labor Movement — and the more democratic workplaces and fairer economy that have come with it — has brought us much closer to that country than we could have ever imagined a century ago. Think of how much closer we will be if we keep supporting it, if we keep building it, if we have the commitment and dignity to ensure we’re not going to be the generation that breaks its magnificent streak.

Ideas, Political Projects

Political Equality First

I just wrote a new essay — “Political Equality First” — for The Progressive Alternative.  I attempt to make the case that the Democratic Party’s revival of the economic message of Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism (the idea that state power should be deployed to ameliorate disparities in economic power) will fail if we do not revive Roosevelt’s political message that political equality — restoring political power to the people and away from the grip of monied interests — must be achieved first:

Although the same sentiments are expressed, President Obama and his fellow “New New Nationalists” have echoed only half of Roosevelt’s program. They have failed to articulate the role political equality plays in achieving economic equality. The progressives of the First Gilded Age understood that if they wanted the New Nationalism to work — if they wanted state power to be able to occasionally counterbalance free-wheeling economic power — they had to ensure that state power was free from the control of economic power. They had to fight for state power to be deployed democratically, in the interest of the public sentiment of equal citizens.

In the Gilded Age that Roosevelt faced, state power was not deployed democratically. In practice, there was not an equal distribution of political power. Worse, the disparity in political power mapped on to the disparity in economic power, so that those with economic power had political power and those without economic power did not have political power. The government was not in the control of the People; rather, it was controlled by those with the economic power. Our nation — conceived as a democracy of citizens with equal political power — suffered a crisis of immeasurable political inequality.

…

Today, with the crisis of economic inequality in the spotlight, but the crisis of political inequality sidelined, we must finally address this second strand of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and give the cause of political equality its due. Even more, we should call forPolitical Equality First: the strategic prioritization of equalizing our distribution of political power. If we want to use state power to better achieve income equality, wealth equality, or structural equality — or even gender equality or racial equality — we need political equality first. We need to wrest back control of state power from those with economic power.

Practicing a strategy of Political Equality First comes with important benefits. Whereas a sizable portion of Americans are — rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly) — philosophically opposed to efforts to increase economic equality, most Americans believe in the democratic principle of political equality. Political equality takes the relatively popular sentiment of “the rich deserve their economic power” off the table and centers focus on the even more popular sentiment of “the citizens deserve their political power.”  Whereas most efforts to increase economic equality will immediately affect the direct experiences of only a segment of Americans, the 90+% of Americans who have little to no voice in government would — given efforts to increase political equality — immediately experience increased political power.

Read the full essay here.

Ideas

Who is the serious politician?

This morning on Morning Joe​, Bob Woodward​ called out Joe Scarborough​ for endlessly focusing on Donald Trump​ without ever asking the serious questions, like “Can Trump govern?” This is a common sanctimonious trope of the “serious people” in Washington over the past few weeks: “let’s stop focusing on Trump so we can get back to the ‘serious’ election process with the Trump-copter-Getty-640x480‘serious’ candidates.”

I’m disturbed by Trump as much as the next guy, but let’s get real here: the current process isn’t that serious without him.

When it comes to domestic policy, no candidate would be able to honestly answer that they “can govern” that much better than Trump because domestic policy is, for the most part, controlled by Congress and Congress is fundamentally broken. First, Congress is flooded with corporate lobbyist campaign contributions that distort the legislative process and disconnect the legislative process from the general public sentiment. Second, Congress’ members are so taken by Washington paychecks that over 60% of those from the last Congress that aren’t in this Congress are lobbying their former colleagues for the sake of private interests. Third, Congressional districts are so gerrymandered that in many places, the candidates are choosing their favorite voters instead of the voters choosing their favorite candidates. Finally, politics has become so deadening, available voting technology has become so suppressed, present vehicles for citizen engagement have proven so lackluster that tens millions of Americans do not have their voices heard on election day to hold Congress accountable. Does Woodward want Trump to get out of the way so that he has time to promote one of the only serious candidates, Lawrence Lessig​, who actually has articulated a serious plan to fix Congress? Doubtful.

When it comes to foreign policy, actions by the previous two Presidents have resulted in the deaths of ~150,000 Iraqi civilians (which, at the absolute least, includes ~4,000 children), ~26,000 Afghan civilians, ~200 children in drone strikes, and ~6,000 American troops. Do the serious people in Washington want Trump to get out of the way so that they can bring in Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai to ask the other Republican candidates if these 180,000+ deaths unconnected to 9/11 were all just the cost of ‘defending our freedom’? Do they want Trump to get out of the way so they can finally listen to the folks at The American Conservative​ magazine, who are bravely standing up to their fellow “conservatives” to say “enough is enough!” to the mass-produced, government-issued death that the previous two administrations have rained on Middle Eastern humans without apology? Doubtful.

So, in my book, we might as well have the Donald in the race, because he takes time away from his opponents, who are not only tremendously unserious about what America needs right now, but — worse off — are treated too tenderly by a Beltway press that takes them too seriously.

Who then is a serious person in politics right now? I have some ideas about who that might be in the short term (see: Lessig, Lawrence; Sanders, Bernie; Webb, Jim). In the long term, though, it’s the same answer it has always been: YOU. As a hopeful candidate in 2008 once said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” This today is as true as ever.

Grip your trowels, hit the garden, and start planting, weeding and watering. Citizen action: there isn’t anything in politics more serious than that.

Ideas

Civic Idea of the Day: On Intentional Browsing

About once a month, the “is the internet good or bad?” conversation comes up. We all know this conversation:

There’s the “internet is bad” side we all know. The internet is a giant hole that sucks us in, wastes our time with nothingness, and makes us feel worse about ourselves. Who has ever felt good after reading a newsfeed for 20 minutes? Does it really matter that we knintentionalbrowsingow if some goofy celebrity said something racist some time back? Do we need this or that random opinion about this or that tiny news story? Aziz Ansari put it best: he said that he reads the internet so much that he is “on page a million of the worst book ever.”

We all know the “internet is good” side, too. It’s a tool filled with all this great and useful information that lowers barriers to connect with people and tunes us into new worlds with which we can immediately engage.

Usually these conversations end with each of us saying it’s all “mostly good” “mostly bad” or “alas, I donnow.”

I’ve been feeling more and more that the answer to whether it is indeed mostly good or mostly bad comes down to whether you are participating in what we might call ‘Intentional Browsing’ or not.

What helped clarify my thinking was a statistic I recently remembered from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone regarding television viewing data: “Selective viewers [of television] (that is, those who turn on the television only to see a specific program and turn it off when they’re not watching) are significantly more involved in community life than habitual viewers (those who turn the TV on without regard to what’s on and leave it on in the background), even controlling for education and other demographic factors. For example, selective viewers are 23 percent more active in grassroots organizations and 33 percent more likely to attend public meetings than other demographically matched Americans.” The gist: if you watch TV with intention (“I want to watch this show and then stop watching TV”), TV viewing isn’t really that bad. If you watch TV without intention (“I want to watch TV to watch TV”), it has all the standard negative effects you expect.

Cannot we think of the internet this way, too?

If we go on the internet to “be on the internet” — if we open up a browser or app without intention — then it usually ends up making us feel bad. Unintentional browsing is a timesuck and, worse, a soulsuck… as anyone who woke up after a two-hour Buzzfeed daze can attest.

If we go on the internet to “learn about something”, to “connect with someone”, to “find out what’s going on with something”, to “explore something new” (action verbs!) — if we go on the internet with intention — then it usually ends up making us feel good. Intentional browsing is useful and enlivening…as anyone who found that they organized all their friends into a party in 10 minutes or finished a collaborative google doc or learned everything about Bulgaria or has a set Google Alert for some specific topic’s news each day can attest.

This idea of “Intentional Browsing” has implications for all of us as individuals and for public interest web designers.

For web designers, the call is to design webs platforms that promote Intentional Browsing and reject design standards that encourage mindless/addictive browsing. For example, the renaissance of the email newsletter seems good for Intentional Browsing, because it tells you, “Here’s 3 things to read today on a topic you care about,” without sending you into a much deeper clickhole. Linear, one-article-at-a-time, media designs that avoid the shopping-mall-like walls of spectacle that have become popular on homepages seem good, too. Vox.com’s card stacks, that encourage you to step-by-step learn everything about one policy topic seem good as well. Those Chrome apps that warn you when you are getting lost in a Facebook time suck seem like a step forward, as well. Hopefully you can point out in the comments other hopeful examples of design for Intentional Browsing.

For individuals, the challenge is to set up systems and commitments for ourselves that routinize Intentional Browsing and discourage mindless browsing. Some of it might be negative, like committing to stopping doing something. Some of it can be positive, though, too: you can use all this added internet time to intentionally learn all about a specific topic or develop a new skill or get deep insight into some corner of our culture.

This is how I answer “is the internet good?” now: If we intend to use it, then yes; if it intends to use us, then no.

Ideas

Election 2016: What to Consider

The 2016 election is taking shape. How should we approach it? Here’s my take:

Before thinking about the candidates, we should start by taking the election as an opportunity to think broadly about the state of our nation: First, what are the great national problems of our time? Second, what is our national vision for rising out of those problems?

1a. Problems in Democracy

We can answer the first question by thinking about, to use civic theorist Harry Boyte’s words, both “problems in democracy” and “problems of democracy.”

The major problem *in* democracy is that our economy and earth are in trouble.

Economic inequality — not just between the 1% and the rest of us, but between relatively rich and relatively poor folks (which, as Robert Putnam explains in his great new book ‘Our Kids’, maps roughly to “those whose parents finished college and those whose parents did not”) — is endangering the promise of an inclusive economy, as automation, globalization and plutocratic policies chip away unceasingly at millions of citizens’ livelihoods without adequate replacement. Despite having generated enough per capita wealth to eliminate economic insecurity nationwide, we allow the innovative potential of tens of millions of Americans to be hampered by day-to-day fears for financial survival. A singular focus on ‘creating jobs’ has failed to address the fact that millions *with* jobs are disempowered at their workplaces, resigned to see work as only a paycheck rather than a means to innovate, create, and empower. Although the internet has inspired startup businesses, most dreamers are still shut out. Access to financial resources, regulatory know-how, technical skills, and industry connections are limited to a few. The cutting-edge workplace cultures that blur the line between management and labor through fluid roles, continuous education, and distributed authority are still confined to a few industries. Meanwhile, multinational corporations unceasingly homogenize the economy, not only eradicating regional differences and small businesses, but also crowding out alternative economic forms, such as unionized workplaces, worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and other forms of the commons.

This is all without mentioning that our earth is steadily and dangerously warming and systems of sustainability are being implemented too slowly to stem the crisis.

1b. Problems of Democracy

The major problems *of* democracy are that we have lost our sense of community, integrity and vision.

The bonds of community that sustain our democratic republic are weakening and breaking. People feel increasingly disconnected from their neighbors. Groups that could be organized into empowering networks — workers, customers, interest groups — are instead herded under corporate, media and government bullhorns. National solidarity is increasingly limited to writing checks to those in need as opposed to directly interacting with them in authentic ways: the once-communal labors of caring, teaching, healing, feeding, sheltering, and serving are becoming evermore bureaucratized and hidden from view. Divides of race, class and culture are addressed only through changes in law and mass media, instead of also through authentic interactions with real people in shared projects. We are becoming evermore reliant on technical experts from afar instead of on our own instincts and dialogue with those right next to us. Patriotism, which used to help us care about something bigger than ourselves, has now — after decades of perversion by imperial militarism — become something many roll their eyes at. Most Washington insiders have lost faith in the democratic promise: the promise of the constructive genius of ordinary men and women. Democracy, to these insiders, should not be the co-creation of the nation *by* everyone, but rather the election every few years of a slate of a small cadre of experts to manage the whole operation *for* everyone.

Our public institutions that depend on deep integrity are corrupted by money. Legislatures and administrators meant to depend upon the will of the People alone are bribed by campaign donations. Businesses started to create value for everybody begin to limit their scope to creating value only for customers and then eventually limit their scope more to creating value only for shareholders and then eventually limit their scope even more to creating value for only their elite managers, inventing justification after justification to validate their insatiable appetite for more money. Universities that were created as moral communities of shared uplift come to be seen as only tickets to one’s private success. Our emotions, vulnerabilities and precious cultural touchstones get endlessly converted by marketers and “public relations” consultants into tools to squeeze more money and attention out of us, creating a mass culture whose BS-to-non-BS ratio is becoming untenable for many. The President we elected to change the way Washington works surrounded himself with advisors that have quit public service to receive big payouts from McDonald’s (press secretary Robert Gibbs), Citi (OMB direct Peter Orszag), Uber (campaign director David Plouffe), the British Tories (campaign manager Jim Messina), Amazon (press secretary Jay Carney), leverage buyout firm Warburg Pincus (Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner), and the Keystone Pipeline XL’s TransCanada (White House strategist Anita Dunn). Almost half of all Congresspersons become lobbyists after they stop serving.

Lost in the fog, we lack vision of where to go from here: our political parties are abdicating their responsibility to help point the way towards better days, trading that role in for one of co-producing a 24-hour theater of fear and cultural resentment. Our academics laser-focus on tinier and tinier slices of policy analysis to get ahead, instead of helping us see the big picture. Our time has produced few moral leaders to turn to for stories of where we came from, where we could go and how we can get there. The Democratic Party is stuck fighting for tax-and-transfer policies that skim money off the top of a grossly unequal economy to temporarily save the bottom, but have no unified idea of how to work to make the economy less unequal in the first place.

2. A Vision of Where We Should Go

Built into these critiques is a vision of where we should go as a nation.

Regarding the economy, we must both open the economy and strengthen citizens to act in it. To open the economy, we should work on: easing the path to entrepreneurship so that more people have more capital, resources and regulatory acumen to realize their business ideas; making employment resemble entrepreneurship so that, within the context of stable and secure employment, the distinction between being an employee and being your own boss is blurred; preserving and encouraging economic diversity so that homogenization does not close off opportunities for realizing difference; and breaking up monopolies and ending cronyism so that entrenched players do not shut out upstarts. Plus, we should do this all with an eye towards conservation, sustainable development, and a carbon-neutral near future.

To strengthen citizens, we should work on: fortifying economic security so that satisfying one’s immediate needs need not be a barrier to creative participation; decentralizing capital for productive use so that more people have more resources to work with creatively; broadening educational opportunities so that location and age no longer determine one’s access to educational empowerment; promoting empowering pedagogy so that schooling is not for static training but rather for civic and economic entrepreneurship and empowered employment and citizenship; and fighting entrenched discrimination and stigmatization so that arbitrary inhibiting institutions do not stand in the way of the public flourishing of certain groups of citizens.

Regarding community, we should work on: revitalizing local communities; increasing communal self-reliance so economic and cultural power is decentralized throughout the nation; creating participatory counterbalances to corporate and state power by enabling the more routine organization of democratic networks; humanizing the caring economy by supplementing service bureaucracies with widespread participation in direct care for each other; and building programs for national solidarity by bridging divides of race, culture and class through more than just law and mass media.

Regarding integrity, we should, in the short term, work on: driving money out of politics by establishing the public financing of elections through campaign donation vouchers to every citizen every election to replace a plutocratic pre-election fundraising season with a democratic pre-election fundraising season; increasing the level of public shame given to those legislators and administrators who walk through the revolving door and cash in on their access to governmental power; broadening legal options for businesses aiming to move beyond obsession with profit-maximization, such as B-Corps, triple bottom lines, and ESOPS; and supporting the nascent DIY movement that promotes craftsmanship, durability and real needs over the manipulation of conventional marketing.

In the long term, we should support a broad move from a technocratic management aristocracy towards a pluralist membership democracy… in the Founder’s terms, towards a more democratic republic. This will involve working on promoting localism, civic education, the civic infrastructure of public spaces and organizations, and other tools of making citizens, in Harry Boyte’s words, “not mainly spectators of democracy but owners and creators of the democratic way of life, with government as partner.”

I and others have outlined aspects this vision more in depth in The Progressive Alternative intervention document.

3. What Role Does The President Play?

If we believe citizens should be co-creators of the nation, why should we care who the President is?

The spirit behind such as question is right. In the words of one inspirational 2008 presidential candidate: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” (Unfortunately, that same candidate never followed through, governing as a technocratic liberal, failing to continuously activate and engage the broad-based member-driven movement that elected him. We learned the hard way that structural change comes from below, not from a President, no matter how much we like him.)

But, those who want to ignore presidential campaigns completely must acknowledge three things. First, Presidential candidates and the president herself do have the largest platform for laying out a vision for the future of this country. Second, the appointments the President makes — not just to the Supreme Court, but to the entire executive branch — have a serious impact on: what promising initiatives get funded and which get killed (ask a green energy tech firm funded during the Obama administration); what problems get investigated and what get ignored (ask the AIDS activists ignored during the Reagan administration or supported during the Bush administration); and what leaders get raised up and which stay put (ask Robert Reich how famous he would be if he wasn’t appointed Secretary of Labor by the Clinton administration). Finally, the President can block and delay projects with popular support, meaning that the more the President disagrees with your legislative vision, the higher the bar is for you to achieve it.

4. How Should We Judge Candidates?

Given this assessment of the problems of our time, the necessary vision for the future, and the role of the president, how should we judge the available candidates?

The standard way people recommend to judge candidates is to assess their position on specific issues and see how they align with your own. I think this is misguided: the “hot issues of the day” change rapidly and so does every politician’s positions on them.

Rather, we should try to (1) discern a candidate’s (a) assessment of the problems of today, and (b) vision for the future; and (2) see if their assessment and vision align with our own. Their positions on specific issues may help point the way to their assessment of the problem and vision for the future, but so does many other things: their ways of talking about those positions and issues, their past actions on those issues, the themes they choose to focus on; the groups they interact with; and more.

So, I’m going to be looking for a candidate that acknowledges our closed, broken economy and troubled Earth, as well as our desperate need for more community, integrity and vision. I’m going to be looking for a candidate who: wants to open the economy and strengthen citizens to participate in it; face the reality of our climate change crisis; and care deeply about revitalizing American community, restoring integrity by moving from management to membership and the supremacy of money in politics to the supremacy of people in politics, as well as broadening our vision for the future, beyond tinkering at the edges of broken systems.

In addition to assessing candidate’s visions, we should also see if they have shown in their past the integrity, courage and creativity to stay true to the public interest, have a backbone when it gets hard, and try something truly new to break impasses.

This should all be judged not relative to the other side of the aisle (of course most in your party are going to be better for you than those in the other party!) but relative, at least, to the average politician in your party and, even more, relative to the standards of great leaders in history. We have over 300 million people in this country: we don’t need to settle for “I guess she’s alright.”

Ideas

On the Charleston shooting

The most important words said yet about what happened in Charleston are from the families themselves, who spoke to the shooter today:

“You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives. And I forgive you.”

“I forgive you. You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”

“We are the family that Love built. We have no room for hate.”

These are the words of folks filled with Grace.

These are the words of folks who worked hard to be filled with Grace.

These are the words of folks whose family members were in church on Wednesday, because they knew being a Sunday Christian wasn’t sufficient to be the Grace dealers that God needed them to be.

What should we, their national neighbors — who don’t live in Charleston, who don’t live in South Carolina, who don’t live in the South, who don’t live in skin that puts us at risk of falling victim to this twisted form of hate — do in the wake of this burst of darkness?

I don’t know, but I think we should at the very least start by taking a page out of their Good Book and think about how we can be better vessels of Grace this year; better vessels for a country that needs Grace now more than ever.

The easy thing to do is to take this tragedy and use it to think complacently about how some folks we’ve never met in some community we’ve never lived in, way over there, in that far-off part of the country, are outside of the light.

The easy thing to do is to say racism or violence or darkness are apart from us, the disease of the other side.

The harder thing to do is to admit that we have the disease, too. Our own time and our own attention and our own tax dollars are complicit in the racism of our age. Our own souls are susceptible to the violence of thinking that some group is the cause of all of our problems. Our own moments of darkness are contributing to an environment where some child feels like he needs to shoot someone to feel a part of something.

The harder thing to do is to not just feel something, but to turn that feeling into doing something. No, not to tell someone far away to do something for you, but to do something ourselves: to go forth and listen to someone who is different than us; to go forth and amplify the voice of someone trying to say something; to go forth and help folks find a purpose beyond hate.

This isn’t an easy task, being vessels of Grace.

We might need to put in some extra effort. We might need to put in some extra time. We might need to be together more. We might even need to start going to church on Wednesday.

That’s what the family that Love built did to make sure they had no room for hate.

Ideas, Political Projects

The Democratic Promise, a Strong People, and an Open Nation: The Philosophy Behind the Progressive Alternative

I just posted my first major essay to ProgressiveAlternative.org, our new initiative to restore the integrity and broaden the vision of the Democratic Party.  It regards the philosophy behind the progressive alternative, examining the ideas of the democratic promise, strong people, and an open world. Here’s an excerpt:

That is what it means to have faith in the democratic promise, in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women. Unlike fundamentalists, we start from a place of political uncertainty. Unlike conservatives, we believe institutional evolution can lead us down bad paths and thus believe present ideas from living humans for institutional reform and replacement are worth considering. Unlike technocrats, we believe those ideas are not the providence of a small set of centralized experts, but rather should be harvested from every ordinary citizen.

This constructive genius has been called creative intelligence by secular thinkers like John Dewey. It has been called divine Grace that works through each of us by religious thinkers. InFalse Necessity, philosopher Roberto Unger describes it as follows:

The infinity of the mind is the model for our relation to all the social and cultural worlds we build and inhabit.  There is always more in us — more in each of us individually as well as more in all of us collectively — than there is in all of them put together, the past and present orders of society and culture.

This inexhaustibility is the most important fact about us.  It is inscribed in the plasticity that characterizes the human brain and makes us into language-speaking and culture-producing organisms.  Its deployment is the most important instrument of practical progress as well as of scientific discovery. (li-lii)

To the Progressive Alternative, our people’s living and constructive genius – our creative intelligence, our experience of divine Grace, the infinity of our mind, our inexhaustibility – is the great tool we have with which to face political uncertainty.

From this belief comes our political mission: to empower and equip this constructive genius of ordinary men and women, while restoring its political supremacy over non-living structures. Wise scripture, inherited institutions, and technical expertise should not be abolished, but they should be the servants, not the masters, of this constructive genius and its stewards, the living citizens and communities of today.

Read the full essay — “The Democratic Promise, a Strong People, and an Open Nation: The Philosophy Behind the Progressive Alternative” — here.

Read the original Progressive Alternative intervention, the founding document of the Progressive Alternative initiative, here.

 

Ideas

Civic Idea of the Day: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Giving Up Civic Hope

Unfortunately, many of us are beginning to resign ourselves to the belief that healing some of the great social ills of our time is impossible. But most who believe that haven’t yet gotten their hands dirty trying to help. So here’s three questions to ask oneself before saying “we’ve already tried and failed.”3questions

1. Are you serious?

To be serious about solving a public problem means that you actually care about solving the problem. When helping to solve public problems, we are tempted to care more about personal things: mimicking the style and affect of an activist subculture, affirming our own innocence in opposition to social ills, or scoring points in the eyes of our peers. To be serious is to not give into these temptations. To be serious is to be strategic: thinking, experimenting, and analyzing about what needs to be done to solve the problem. Many times, being serious means being willing to do something uncomfortable, like thinking about what the “other side” values and speaking to them in their own language.

2. Are you ready to devote time?

Time is the currency of public problem solving. If enough people are not willing to devote enough time each week to help, the problem will not be solved. A good practice for getting involved in helping to solve a public problem is to start by committing to set aside a certain amount of hours per week (or per month) to the task. It’s even better if you routinize it — “Every Thursday night, I’m going to devote two hours” — because you will get into a rhythm and be less likely to go back on your commitment.

3. Are you ready to turn that time into a project?

The time you devote can be wasted if it is not organized into a project. At the beginning, it might be good to not have a project: taking that time to explore and learn and follow your curiosity will help you discover how you can be helpful. But, eventually, you have to transition away from always following your whims and towards laying out a direction and set of first steps you hope to accomplish.

If you start answering yes to these three questions, the hope starts pouring in. If you start thinking seriously about how to solve a public problem, you start reading the news differently: you start to have a proactive optimistic attitude instead of a reactive cynical one. If you start setting aside time for this work, whole new areas of your imagination are opened up during that time and tasks that seemed too out of reach start seeming doable. If you turn your work into a project, you start respecting your civic self more: you start believing that your ideas are worth listening to and might just be helpful; you start looking at your work and thinking “woah, this is real!”

So, before you give up hope about some public problem, give this a try for a while: get serious, carve out some time to work and start thinking about that work as a project. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the joy and civic hope that comes from it.

Ideas

The Soul of Facebook Venting: Empowered Alternatives to Ranting Online

I had an essay published recently in Front Porch Republic​ on better things to do than rant online. Take a look to read one guy’s take on the spiritual origins of Facebook rants as well as the case for a small, empowered alternative to venting: philanthroventing, donating $5 to a positive organization or leader every time you’re mad about a news story: 

I know I am not alone in experiencing the Facebook venting cycle:

1. First, a glowing screen that you are reading or watching projects some news that upsets you. Perhaps it was news from a cable channel that is engineered to ceaselessly produce anecdotes designed to upset you. Perhaps it was news from a comedy show whose most popular bit is to aggregate upsetting quotes from those cable channels. Perhaps it was news from a viral media website who curates clips from those comedy shows about that cable channel’s quotes about those upsetting anecdotes. Whatever the source, the process begins with a glowing screen making you upset (with, of course, the source raking in the advertising revenue).

2. Next, a tension builds inside of you. You cannot stand the thought of living in the same world where that news occurred or being part of the same human community as the person who committed the upsetting act. You feel like you need to do something about it all. You sometimes even feel as if you cannot continue your daily work or see your friends or care for your family until this tension is resolved.

3. Finally, you release the tension by posting a link and rant to the ever-present release valve that is your Facebook status update box. Some rants are long-winded, but even short bursts – like “This is horrible!” “I can’t believe this is happening in 2015!” or “Kids these days!” – do the trick: you have “raised awareness,” you have declared your opposition to the upsetting news, your conscience is cleared, the cycle is over and you may continue with your day.

…

Perhaps Bottum’s interpretation of our spiritually “anxious age” explains that deep tension that builds up when the news upsets us. Perhaps we see in those upsetting anecdotes a post-Protestant demon — social sin peeking out from behind the social order. Perhaps the tension that must be vented is our uncertainty in the presence of such sin: Am I going to be tricked by this evil or am I going to be aware enough to see it at work? Am I going to become part of it or am I going to reject it? Am I on its side of the great divide or am I on the side of the redeemed?

Facebook venting resolves this uncertainty. By pasting a link to a news story and properly identifying the social evil at work – “This is racism!” “This is bigotry!” “This is evil!” – you stand at the digital altar and testify to your awareness of social sin. By ranting against the news story, you validate that you have rejected this sin, broadcasting that you belong among the redeemed. When you click submit, your uncertainty about your moral goodness is temporarily washed away: you can proceed with confidence that you are one of the elect.

Read the whole essay — “The Soul of Facebook Venting: Empowered Alternatives to Ranting Online” — here.