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And in Iowa only 171,517 Iowans participated in the 2016 Democratic caucuses. This was only 5.4 percent of the 3.1 million people in the state. You could assume that the number would grow somewhat in 2020, but the field would also be much more crowded. So my projection was that if I got approximately 40,000 Iowans on board I could win. (Indeed, Bernie Sanders wound up getting the most votes, with 45,652, so my working assumption was pretty close.)
Often, what the questioner really seemed to be asking was, “You haven’t spent years acclimating yourself to Washington, schmoozing donors, doing robotic press conferences, and generally insinuating yourself with the political leadership class, demonstrating that you will get very little done. How can we also trust you to get very little done and maintain the status quo?”
As the cable news audience ages and people’s news consumption fragments, we are likely to see more outliers from outside conventional politics making dramatic rises that would have been unthinkable not that long ago. Institutional gatekeepers will be replaced by individual opinion makers, and politics will start to veer more toward the extremes as candidates draw attention and resources directly from people. If you are a fan of moderation, you will likely see less of it as the media gatekeepers recede in prominence.
Ninety percent of Americans use the internet regularly, which is a significantly higher proportion than file taxes. How is it that our vast federal government with more than two million employees could not do something that the government of Togo and our brand-new nonprofit could both accomplish?
One farmer in Iowa said to me, “I believe in getting health care to more people. But our government couldn’t even get a website up. How can we have confidence that it can run something as complicated as health care?”
Bureaucratic failures will continue to recur because many of our governing institutions aren’t built for efficiency, urgency, or accountability. They are built for continuity, stability, and the bureaucracy itself. They will fail us during the next crisis, and we will be left crying for answers time and again.
Before the advent of nonstop social media use, if you had some awful ideas you wanted to share, you would have a hard time finding people to listen to you. What would you do? Write a letter to the editor of your local paper? Hand out leaflets? Stand in the town square? But today you can stake out your corner of the internet and find some people to listen to you: the more outrageous or toxic your ideas, the more likely they are to evoke a reaction.
Social media is affecting our mental health. In an interview about his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier, the technology futurist, said that “the behavior manipulation machine makes you cranky, makes you irritable, makes you paranoid, makes you sad.”
Facebook has become both a behavior modification machine and an artificial intelligence superpower. In his book Zucked, Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who later became an outspoken critic of its business model, put it this way: The artificial intelligences of companies like Facebook (and Google) now include behavioral prediction engines that anticipate our thoughts and emotions, based on patterns found in the reservoir of data they have accumulated about users. Years of Likes, posts, shares, comments, and Groups have taught Facebook’s AI how to monopolize our attention. Thanks to
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Screen time is what’s known in economic terms as an inferior good: the poorer you are, the more of it you consume. As Jaron Lanier, the internet pioneer and futurist, put it in an interview, “A lot of the stuff that people experience when they’re using social media is genuine and positive…[But] there’s this other thing going on, this behind-the-scenes engine that’s getting all your data, constantly surveilling you, and then tweaking what you experience.”
The fifth approach to alleviating police violence that has worked is federal oversight. Departments that went through federal investigations led by the Department of Justice and subsequently adopted new policies saw police shootings fall between 27 and 35 percent. Increased federal oversight and investigation is crucial given the incentives running against local district attorneys and officials confronting bad cops. If you’re a local DA, you would love to have the Feds available to handle an investigation free from local pressure. The standards for federal investigation should change from
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Since 1976, an average of twenty-three House members have retired each two-year election cycle. That’s only a 5 percent retirement rate; there is a 95 percent chance that you will be running against an incumbent.
Between 2006 and 2008, there were sixty-seven conference committee reports on legislation that reflected input from both sides for reconciliation. By 2016–2018, that number was down to eight.
Meanwhile, Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND Snacks, at one point asked us if we were hungry. A bunch of us said yes, and he opened his jacket pockets and produced all of these experimental KIND Bars that none of us had seen before; he was the Batman of snacks.)
We need to immunize those in charge of government from this kind of influence by compensating them at higher levels and then making it so they don’t feel they have to head to industry right afterward. Here’s a proposal: ban members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after their service but give them a stipend of $100,000 a year for ten years if they work for a nonprofit or academic institution afterward.
The main lever that we can access without Congress is to get ranked-choice voting and open primaries in states across the country. As I’ve said, this, to me, is the skeleton key that could unlock our government from stasis and engender meaningful reform. You don’t need Congress; you just need motivated people in states around the country to activate this process change that would strengthen and enliven our democracy.
doesn’t sell advertising. Repeat: it doesn’t sell advertising. C-SPAN stands for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network; it’s a nonprofit network that started back in 1979. The network’s founder, Brian Lamb, called it “anti-commercial” television. Its annual budget is about $73 million, paid for by a tiny cable license fee covered by the cable companies themselves. While we don’t have the viewership numbers, surveys have shown that C-SPAN viewers are evenly divided politically; apparently, an equal number of viewers of different political leanings like unfiltered public affairs programming.
According to Haidt’s research, genetics determines between one-third and one-half of political differences in a group, more than the politics of the household we are raised in. In a country where there are only two major choices, we are essentially born either Democratic leaning or Republican leaning.
“Partisan animosity is one of the few forms of discrimination that contemporary American society not only permits but actively encourages,” writes Klein. This blind spot dramatically fuels division, because many conservatives feel that they are constantly being dismissed as uneducated rubes and their moral language is deemed not worthy of consideration.
Imagine if major outlets discussed how our kids are faring or our mental health or air quality in the same way they currently do GDP or a big company’s quarterly stock performance. It would at least provide some concrete grounding for a set of stories that would bring people back to reality. And it would make us and our quality of life the point.
While campaigning for president, I pledged to use a PowerPoint deck during my State of the Union to report how we are doing instead of the strange theater performance we are currently subject to. Imagine the head of a business walking in to update his or her people without any numbers or baselines to measure improvements or declines.
At this point a majority of Americans recognize aspects of this problem and agree that our politics needs a new dynamic. The solution is the emergence of a viable third party. More than 60 percent of Americans say that both political parties are out of touch, while 57 percent say there is a need for a major third party. But the structural forces make it nearly impossible. You can’t win races. You don’t have a capital structure financing you. The media will marginalize, attack, or ignore you. Partisans will say that you are empowering their opponents—whom they will characterize as a toxic
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I hope you consider joining this movement. And here’s the great thing: if you subscribe to these principles and ideas, you can consider yourself part of the Forward Party while keeping your current party affiliation. There will be Forward Democrats and progressives, Forward Republicans and conservatives, Forward independents and unaligned, and so on. This movement is inclusive; it’s about giving our democracy and government a real chance to function in a way that benefits us.
