Be the Revolution You Want to See: Resisting Transactional Politics and Embracing Transformational Politics for Our Time
Yan Liu and Louis Metzger
“Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Few would disagree that our political system is dysfunctional, and that this has caused great suffering and unprecedented crises, ranging from systemic social-economic injustice to global climate breakdown. It is up to us to reinvent politics and to create a better future.
1. Real change is based on shifting the Overton window.
“[Optimism is] not naive and it’s not innocent. [It’s] a moral and political position. It’s a choice made to insist that things could be better if we worked at it.” — Kim Stanley Robinson
The Overton window is a key social science concept, yet is often ignored by media makers and politicians. It is the range of ideas that the public will accept. Policy proposals within the Overton window’s aperture are perceived as viable, while those outside of it do not gain traction.
Many mainstream political ideas were once considered fringe, including social security for the aged and disabled, racial equality, women’s suffrage, gay rights, etc. All social-political reform movements have succeeded by shifting the Overton window; this is the true meaning of changing hearts to change norms.
No single person, not even a head of state, can shift the Overton window. However, when opportunities arise, true leaders facilitate a shift by encouraging conversation and by providing political cover for candid debate. Faced with the host of perception-derived obstacles to enacting better public policy, influencers and politicians should foremost focus on shifting the Overton window.
2. Zombie laws and flip-phone politicians are incompatible with this era of exponential change.
“Rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic.” — Susan David
The supposition that “the purpose of a [commercial] firm is to maximize stockholder value” is now officially the world’s dumbest idea. This destructive mantra, the economic schools/models which it sustains, and its associated economic-political movement — neoliberalism — have been refuted by a growing chorus of thought leaders, including Joseph Stiglitz and Nick Hanauer. Following four decades of immeasurable social and environmental destruction wrought by neoliberals, these refutations are welcome, yet they are late and insufficient.
A vast body of laws, tax incentives, regulations, and deregulations arose under the auspices of discredited neoliberal “economic orthodoxy.” Most of these enactments are detrimental to our society, and undermine the very bases of our social contract. Although neoliberalism has lost both its moral and practical justifications, it maintains its destructive power so long as its enabling laws and structures are left intact. Our citizenry is turning against neoliberalism, but many incumbent politicians are still living in the flip-phone era: they are either too foolish to discover how the world has moved on, or they are too entrenched to imagine alternatives to the status quo. It is time for these incumbents to be voted out.
Technological progress is advancing in an exponential rate. This will potentially enable us to satisfy both the material and psychological needs of all people. At the same time, a global increase in volatility and violence is jeopardizing the promise of the coming technological singularity. It need not be this way if a new wave of leaders renegotiates a social contract, one which does not subordinate citizens’ well being to the maximization of corporate profits.
3. “Business as usual” politicians are neither pro-entrepreneurship nor pro-science/technology: they’re pro-accounting-statement and pro-rent-extortion
“The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” — Ayanna Pressley
In times of stability, politicians can espouse incrementalism, and can attempt to please subsets of constituents who possess fundamentally incompatible interests. In times of crisis and of widespread discontent, this approach benefits few and pleases no one. Now is the time for choosing sides. Excessive financial capitalism is increasingly at odds with true entrepreneurial capitalism. It undermines the people and businesses that make real contributions to our society. According to global business analyst Rana Foroohar’s research, “Only 15% of all the money flowing through financial institutions today ends up in businesses. The rest of it is staying within the closed loop of the market itself.” Those who seek to maximize predatory economic rent extortion (such as turning housing/land, a basic human necessity into speculative investment vehicle) are crippling the advancement of essential and creative endeavors. Teachers and social workers, artists and scientists, are increasingly priced out of hitherto “creative hubs,” such the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Politicians who defend an outdated order, favoring speculators, pursue policies which are fundamentally incompatible with humanity’s long term needs.
4. Crushing human dignity foments societal destruction
“With history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a nation.” — Emperor Taizong of Tang
The past cannot be used to predict the future, but it serves as a window through which to glimpse the workings of human nature in a way that is decoupled from the biases of personal immediacy. Many evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists agree that inequality of opportunity breeds destruction and atrocity. A food shortage caused by an El Nino cycle was the spark which ignited accumulated proletarian resentment of the French aristocracy’s monopoly on power (and thus on economic/political opportunity), leading to the conflagration of the 1789 French Revolution. A mismanaged war effort, coupled to long-accrued, widespread frustration with the stagnant social order of Tsarist Russia gave rise to the wars and revolutions from which a totalitarian Soviet Union emerged. Hyperinflation caused by the punitive Treaty of Versailles turned German society into a medium upon which Fascism fed. The reduction in social mobility, caused by a decades-long hollowing out of the United States’ middle classes by neoliberal policies, has led to our rule by charlatans and grifters. The size of government matters little. The type of economy matters little. Bad things happen when human dignity is widely trampled, and when social advancement is decoupled from merit. We live in a society and a world where increasing numbers of people have nothing to hope for and nothing to lose. Such sentiment is the stuff of revolutions. We must be mindful of the lessons of history, and take action before upheaval leaves everyone in diminished circumstances.
5. The center of nowhere
“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
Many incumbent politicians believe themselves to be “independent,” “moderate,” or “centrist.” Vox political writer David Roberts has written an excellent article explaining why these are not meaningful designations, and why we do ourselves a disservice to categorize them as such. A summary of his observations:
1) True independents who switch votes between parties consist of only ~10% of the U.S. population. Most self-identified “independents” vote like partisans, and they are just less engaged with politics therefore less likely to vote.
2) The abundance of moderates is due to statistical artifacts.
3) The political center espouses inaction. Centrist policies are based on the premise that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the current economic structure. This might have been the social consensus in the 90’s. Not anymore.
The world has moved on from “centrism.” Politicians and politics must evolve accordingly. Now is the time for making stark and definitive choices, not for fence-sitting and for the embrace of false equivalency.
6. Seeing the world from the perspective of centrist politicians
“It’s important that we ask ourselves, constantly, how much of that conventional wisdom is all convention and no wisdom? And at what cost?” — Franklin Leonard
Thomas Frank, one of the foremost American political analysts, has dissected the thinking of transactional politicians in his latest book Listen, Liberal, a work which explores the genesis and role of a particular species of neoliberal, Wall Street-aligned centrist Democrats. Among Frank’s most striking hypotheses are that policymakers have mistaken titles and credentials for meaningful expertise, that they worship orthodoxy and consensus over real-world facts, and that they tend to seek advice from the milieu in which their careers were moulded. This creates a feedback loop of informational asymmetry, with dire consequences for everyone.
The New York Times’ “A Lost Generation of Democrats” describes the dynamics that gave rise to the present field of (mostly) small-minded politicians who evince passionless, yet deeply ingrained, socio-economic assumptions. They are true believers of incrementalism, and are hostile to bold experimentation.
Politicians see economic growth as an accomplishment, instead of a means to an end, or a side-effect of enacting sustainable socio-economic policy. Due to their deep reverence for consensus and conventional wisdom, such policymakers are incapable of critically evaluating alternative economic models. The field of Economics, while arguably quantitative, is not a science based on immutable rules. It is simply a collection of models through with which to observe — and with which to justify — governments’ interventions in the complex, chaotic system comprising the global economy. It is therefore unsurprising that many established neoliberal politicians embrace austerity, as it is a simplistic alternative to the complex, experimental, and (initially) ambiguous interventions which might lead to better outcomes for the majority of their constituents. When the next global recession comes, and with the Great Recession still fresh in citizens’ memories, austerity will not be an option, unless the political classes wish to exchange Occupy protests for the French Revolution.
7. In polls they trust
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford
If Steve Jobs had relied on polls, we would not have smartphones. With politicians fixated on an ever more granular flood of polling data, is it surprising that few politicians are willing to act on long-term visions? Polls have three major problems: they can mislead due to unintentional design flaws or intentional manipulation, they facilitate feedback loops to justify/prolong the (apparent) status quo, and they are based on static or linear models. Polls are therefore not predictive when the rate of change is accelerating, as it is presently, in areas as diverse as technology, social structure, education, and ecological destruction.
When polls are no longer reliable, reasonable people will conclude these surveys’ design and premises may need to be updated. The present crop of political pundits tend to reach a different conclusion: that the populace has temporarily deviated from reason and sanity. Complacent minds see society as a discrete panorama, rather than as a chaotically dynamic system.
Conventional political wisdom holds that young people today are not interested in politics because they don’t turn out to vote. Yet comprehensive data clearly indicate this to be untrue. Young people are simply not enthusiastic about a political class that enacts laws benefiting entrenched property owners, who through conservatism and NIMBYism, perpetuate an unsustainable status quo.
8. In the supply side of politics, the future belongs to those who speak truth to power
“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” — The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Democratic government can only be as good as the best options on the ballot. Democracy can only be functional when factual information is widely available and understood, and when candid debate and dissent are encouraged.
Participatory politics is like a healthy-eating regime; it’s not about what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s Day — it’s about what you eat during the 11.75 months between New Year’s Day and Christmas. To truly transform American politics, citizens need to be active year-round, not just between the primary and general elections every 4 years.
Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have changed the long game of politics by giving hope to people who don’t fit the neoliberal mould. Her election has shown that the Overton window is beginning to shift. Walls will crumble. Silos will fall. People who have foresight and conscience will join forces and enter politics. They will crush the purveyors of “conventional wisdom,” and they will rewrite the rules of economy and government. These people might not care about climbing the political ladder, but they will attain the pinnacle of power simply because they have never lost faith in humanism.
We are not just drops in the ocean. The mighty ocean is but a multiple of drops. The time has come for a rising tide of the the politically awakened to wash away the neoliberals’ sandcastles, and to build new, more durable socioeconomic edifices. The perils facing our country and our world demand it.
This article was originally published on Dec 18, 2018: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/revolution-you-want-see-resisting-transactional-our-time-metzger-iv/