Political Projects

Democrats and the Politics of Winning

Over at the Progressive Alternative, our initiative to broaden the vision and restore the integrity of the Democratic Party, I just published a piece on the first Democratic presidential debate, arguing that the party should resist the lure of the “everybody loves a winner” mode of politics:

This election season, we desperately need an alternative vision in contrast to the one put forth by the Party of Winners. This alternative vision should be inspired by our democratic faith in the constructive genius of ordinary citizens: a vision which affirms that if you wish to find the best ideas, you should visit the outskirts of town, not the shiny towers in the city center; a vision which aims to hold our democracy and economy open so that the present arrangement, including the winners at the top of it, do not get locked into their position; a vision which calls on us to not just rise from the ranks, but to rise with them. Unlike the one put forth by the Party of Winners, this alternative vision is not of a nation judged by the heroics of its few phenomenal heroes. It is a vision of a durable republic continually co-created of, by, and for its extraordinary ordinary citizenry.

Such a democratic vision could fit comfortably within the heritage of the Democratic Party. We were the party founded by Jefferson and formed by Jackson as the democratic alternative to political elitism. We took the populist route out of the Great Depression. We redeemed our originally-narrow view of who constitutes “the people” to become the eventual home of Civil Rights and feminist movement veterans. We best understood the role that the ambitions of immigrants and young people play in enlivening the nation. And, most proudly, we took as our party mantra the complete rejection of the greatest threat to our democratic faith: fear, itself.

…

“It is no surprise that Trump spent Tuesday’s debate belittling candidates (@realDonaldTRump: “Sorry, there is no STAR on the stage tonight!”) and recommending that they be silenced. What is saddening, though, is that most political journalists and Democratic elites did the same thing. They could not resist joining in on Trump’s game, hoping to feel for themselves the same pleasure he must feel while he bullies ‘total losers.'”

…

Compare Sanders’ theory of change to that of the debate’s winner, who has presented no theory of where the American people can participate in her plan for change aside from donating money and showing up to vote.

Read the full essay — Laughing at Losers: The Trumpification of the Democratic Party — here at the Progressive Alternative.

Ideas

The Virtue of Not Being a Genius

I just read this great quote by Lionel Trilling, writing about George Orwell:

“If we ask what it is that he stands for, what he is the figure of, the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.”

Though Orwell was a Brit, of course, I feel that the “virtue of not being a genius” is one of America’s great virtues. Our nation’s best accomplishments have been achieved by extraordinary ordinary folks remembered much more for their open-hearted devotion and practical creativity than their mental majesty. The Ida B. Wellses and Benjamin Franklins; the Eleanor Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchots in our history weren’t once-in-a-century minds– they were just citizens who had a high estimation of their own significance and an open ear to the challenges calling them.

“He is not a genius,” Trilling wrote of Orwell. “What an encouragement!”

I hope the same for millennial America: that we can be ever better built of, by and for extraordinary ordinary citizens, so that our descendants may say “our ancestors accomplished so much and they were not geniuses… what an encouragement!”

Ideas

A Cooperative Uber?

Over at The Progressive Alternative, an initiative I co-founded to broaden the vision and restore the integrity of the Democratic Party, I just published a piece on how the Party should respond to the growth of the digital gig economy by supporting cooperative alternatives to corporate gig networks:

One under-explored answer to this challenge is the promotion of cooperative technology that replicates the consumer benefits of sharing networks like Uber, but rather than placing control of the networks in the hands of corporate managers, places control in the hands of each network’s workers. The decentralized structure of the digital gig economy is especially amenable to such a project. As The Nation’s Mike Konczal points out about Uber, for example, “almost all of the actual capital is already owned by the workers, in the form of cars that they pay for and maintain themselves.” Therefore, once the initial digital network has been built and popularized, the bulk of what corporate managers at companies like Uber contribute is advertising, lobbying for regulatory changes, and maintenance of their apps, which, as Konczal points out, are tasks that get “cheaper and easier by the day.” This is not a radical analysis. Digital gig startups pitch investors on the exact premise that they will be able to develop and popularize a decentralized network and then, with most moving parts and capital assets externalized to network participants, profit off of the increasingly simpler maintenance of the monopoly network.

Cooperative alternatives to these corporate networks could come in a range of forms. On one end of the spectrum are those that replicate the major elements of network technology but change the structure of the organization that maintains and promotes the technology. For example, one could replicate the Uber app–including its centrally managed pricing system, prescribed hiring process, and customer review system–but have the corporate management of the app’s network be replaced by cooperative management elected by its drivers and structured in a way to incorporate more network member input. Network management organized cooperatively would likely lead to a variety of benefits for members, including insurance, forums for dispute resolution, minimum workplace standards, pensions and health plans.

On the other end of the spectrum are empowering changes to the technology itself. For example, Airbnb is not cooperatively managed, but it lets users set their own prices, rules, and check-out times. Such are the signs of actual open markets–like eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist–as opposed to “networks” that centrally control the prices, rules, and network entry and exit processes (essentially, hiring and firing) of a decentralized workforce. By creating markets for gigs online that are more open, members are empowered to be entrepreneurial, using the technology for their own interests, rather than having the technology (and the corporate managers that profit from it) use the workers for its own interests.

Read the full essay — Open Economy Watch: Cooperative Alternatives to Corporate Digital Gig Networks — here at The Progressive Alternative.

Uncategorized

Introducing Ralph Nader at Harvard Law

I introduced Ralph Nader at Harvard Law School this past September:

Hello everyone, For students like us, the pre-professional rat race has a certain gravitational pull: diverting our focus from the structural to the trivial, blurring our sense of right and wrong, caging our moral imagination, and diminishing our belief in our own civic power.

Fortunately, there’s hope: if we build up a sense of systemic justice – and knowledge of today’s injustices – then we can inoculate ourselves from this pull, liberating our civic powers to take an alternative path of serving the public interest.

We are blessed that certain law students in history have taken this alternative path. If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more visionary path, we would have never had Freedom of Information requests or the Clean Water Act; If this Harvard Law Student with us here today had not taken this more transformative path, we would have smoking on airplanes and the word whistleblower would not be in popular use; If this Harvard Law student with us here today had not take this more just path, we wouldn’t have the Occupational Health and Safety Act nor the seatbelts and airbags that have saved millions of American lives.  
In an effort to begin our own alternative path towards similar transformative legal vocations, we present the founder of the modern consumer movement, the original Nader Raider, the former host of Saturday Night Live, the only man to convince Sesame Street to have a song sung about consumer advocacy, America’s chief public citizen and a hero of mine… Mr. Ralph Nader.

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.

Political Projects, Press

Getaway Launch Roundup

The first major project out of the Millennial Housing Lab —
Getaway, which builds tiny houses, places them on beautiful rural land and rent them by the night to city folkScreen Shot 2015-07-27 at 10.57.31 AMs looking to escape the digital grind and test-drive tiny house living — had a great launch week. Here’s the press round-up:

  • The Boston Globe: “The first of its 8-by 20-foot homes, located in southern New Hampshire, is ready to rent. The second and third tiny houses are under construction.”
  • Fast Company Article 1: “There’s a huge gap between people who post stories to Facebook about living in tiny houses and people who actually live in one,” Davis says. “We want to add a rung to the ladder so people can ‘test drive’ a tiny house.”
  • Fast Company Article 2: “”We’re making tiny houses accessible to people who otherwise can’t experience them,” says Jon Staff, CEO of Getaway, a company launched at Harvard’s Innovation Lab. The company recently opened its first 160-square foot, off-grid tiny house in the woods near Boston, and will soon add more.”
  • Boston.com: ““We build it all in East Boston,” Staff said. “Then I get in a truck and drive them and we put them on beautiful land out of sight of any house. The first one has been completed and moved to Southern New Hampshire up on a hill.””
  • Treehugger: “The tiny house movement has mostly been ad-hoc, driven by people who for various reasons wanted to break away from the standard routine: get a job, get a mortgage, get a house. It is becoming less ad-hoc all the time as more people look at it as a real alternative model. Many of those are millennials who “trading stability for experience” either through choice or necessity. And now there is the Millenial Housing Lab looking at the problems they face. Founded by Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School and Harvard Design School students it is looking at the problems of housing a generation without stability.”
  • LifeEdited: “Both its modern interior and exterior are clad with attractive rough cut pine. The interior features built in furniture such as a table that doubles as a window cover and two built-in beds, giving the place capacity to sleep four. All electricity is solar, the toilet is composting and water is handled via a 110 gallon water tank that is refilled via the host house the tiny house shares its land with. Bookings also include fresh linens and available “provisions”–a sort of backwoods mini bar with things like coffee, trail mix, pasta, etc (these cost extra).”
  • Curbed: “Another day, another ravishing, eco-friendly, or otherwise fabulous tiny house hits the Internet, and you’re left to wonder: Can I really live in something like this? Without readily-available resources to research and build a micro home or just the sheer willpower to leave behind everything you thought you knew about a “home,” the burgeoning tiny house movement is a tough trend to get in on. But this tricky place between tiny dreamin’ and actual tiny livin’ is where Getaway, a new startup coming out of Harvard University, wants to wedge into.”
  • Boston Business Journal: “Staff said Getaway will build at least three tiny homes in the short-term, but the hope is to build at least 12 over the next year and expand to other places around the country. The homes are all designed by Harvard students and have a composting toilet, solar electricity and propane heat — among other basics.”

If you are Boston area resident interested in booking a Getaway — or hoping to request Getaway to come to your town — check out www.Getaway.house.  As always, if you are interested in getting involved with Getaway or the Millennial Housing Lab generally, please get in touch.  We’ve got many projects cooking — a project to legalize tiny houses, an attempt to build a tiny house village (4-5 houses on one lot) in a city, and an effort to see how tiny houses can help homelessness — so I’m really looking forward to what comes of all this in the coming year.

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.