Category Archives: Uncategorized

making big donors part of the political debate

Leave a reply

Peter Beinart quotes an estimate that $5 billion may be raised from private donors for the 2016 election, much of it coming from extremely rich individuals who are able to keep relatively low profiles. Some of these donors may personally give amounts in the hundreds of millions. Here is a case for forcing them onto the public stage.

On one hand, there is no doubt that their money conveys power. You can’t make a serious run at the White House without raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Barack Obama did comparatively well at raising small contributions, yet (according to our good friends at the Center for Responsive Politics), 68% of his support–almost half a billion dollars–came from “large individual donors” in 2012.

On the other hand, the only true power is the vote, which is distributed to adult citizens equally (leaving aside felony disenfranchisement and a few other exceptions). Billions are spent to persuade voters how to use their power. But voters have the ability not to be persuaded, and they have–collectively–far more persuasive power over their fellow citizens than all the big donors and professional campaigns in America.

So campaign money is both a massive force and a kind of phantom, theoretically susceptible to being ignored and therefore becoming irrelevant.

Of course, there is something romantic and bootless about that latter point. It’s like saying that HIV has no real power because we could all just stop having unprotected sex and the virus would go extinct. Its power is very real because human behavior is predictably imperfect.

Likewise, we could imagine, per Habermas, that the only power becomes the power of the stronger argument. But real people (including me) will miss valid arguments unless they are loudly and repeatedly delivered, and we will accept invalid arguments that are effectively transmitted. Since expensive political communications are generally untrustworthy, it would be better if everyone ignored them all and decided how to vote based on personal discussions and reflections and high-quality news media. But as long as they are pervasive, they will matter.

The question, then, is how to break the spell of money. Beinart has a suggestion. He observes, “Right now, while presidential candidates experience proctological scrutiny from the press, mega-donors experience relatively little. As a result, they wield enormous power over government policy without facing the public glare that, in a democracy, those with great political power should have to endure.” His proposal: the news media should put the mega-donors under close scrutiny, reporting all their statements and positions and financial interests. Then a candidate who takes money from Billionaire X would gain power to communicate but also become associated with the embarrassing personal opinions and interests of the said Billionaire.

This is not a direct strategy for getting people to ignore what money buys. It actually makes money more central (while perhaps discouraging candidates from taking funds from some sources). The reporting that Beinart recommends will encourage ad hominem arguments, i.e., not “You are wrong because your premise is mistaken” but “You are wrong because you took money from a guy who said offensive things.” But once you are using large amounts of money to purchase influence over voters, your motives and goals do become relevant. If campaign spending is “speech,” then a donor is a speaker in the public sphere who can be held to account. And Beinart’s proposed strategy could be a disruptive move that, while it does not create an ideal political conversation, breaks the spell of the current one.

the parable of the bricklayer and the Cathedral

Leave a reply

(En route to Chicago for an #OFA event) Two people are working side by side, laying bricks at a similar speed. When asked what they are doing, the first says, “Laying bricks,” and the second says, “Building a cathedral.”*

In civic or political organizations and campaigns, we need the activists to feel that they are building cathedrals. Then they will be motivated to go beyond their assigned quotas, they will contribute their ideas to improve the whole structure, they will bring other people into the team, they will hold their fellow workers accountable, and they will go on to start new cathedrals when the current one is finished. On the other hand, if they are just laying bricks, the best we can hope is that they will do what they are asked.

Also, in any political context, we are not working with inanimate objects, like bricks. Rather, people are working with people, which takes enthusiasm, listening, and tact. So the subjective attitude of the worker is even more important in the political domain than on a construction site, although it matters there as well.

In order to get their workers or volunteers to build cathedrals instead of laying bricks, some organizations try to tell them about the overall goal in inspiring ways. They use exalted language and charismatic leaders. That approach will not work if the workers really are laying bricks—just implementing the instructions they have been given. They will only feel that they are building a cathedral if they are building a cathedral.

That means that volunteers and paid employees must (on the one hand) be treated as serious and important workers and held accountable for results: attractive and strong walls. They should not be patronized by being praised for just showing up and trying; results matter. But (on the other hand) they must be given opportunities for creativity and innovation. If they can figure out a better way to lay bricks, or a better brick, or a better wall, or a better cathedral, they should be encouraged to try it.

That recipe—measurement and accountability for outcomes along with scope for creativity and agency—is what Wellesley College professor Hahrie Han, my fellow speaker tonight in Chicago, finds essential for developing leaders and building strong and effective organizations.

*Google tells me that I took this story (like much else) from Harry Boyte.

voting and punishment: Foucault, biopower, and modern elections

Leave a reply

Michel Foucault wrote a great deal about punishment as a tool that governors use to discipline the governed. Voting seems like the opposite: a device for the governed to discipline the governing. But Foucault’s concept of bio-politics can be illuminatingly applied as a critique of modern voting.

Foucault begins “Security, Territory, Population” (his 1977-8 lectures at the Collège de France) with a “very simple, very childish example” of punishment in three forms.

  • Juridico-Legal: The law defines a category of actions as a crime (e.g., theft), and sets a certain punishment to follow it in order to restore justice. This punishment is usually conducted in public and on the body of the accused.
  • Disciplinary: Punishment is used to influence behavior, both of the person being punished and of others who may be deterred. Punishments are now designed to have results; for instance, prisons become “houses of correction.” If a given punishment lacks beneficial consequences (as Cesare Beccaria argued of torture), it should be repealed. But in Discipline and Punish, Foucault interprets this apparent humanity or leniency as a reflection of an ominous improvement in the efficiency of discipline, whose purpose is “not to punish less, but to punish better.'”
  • Security: The objective becomes to influence the frequency of undesirable actions (such as theft) in the population as a whole. Outcomes are measured statistically, for instance, in terms of crimes/capita or probabilities of recidivism. A given punishment, such as imprisonment, is now a mere tool for security, to be assessed by its aggregate costs and benefits and compared against other tools, such as paying or training people to behave as desired or subjecting them to surveillance and monitoring.

Foucault emphasizes that these three “modulations” of punishment have not simply replaced one another in a historical sequence. Even medieval law sometimes aimed at security; juridico-legal thinking remains alive today. But security has become far more prominent in the current era than it was before.

Like punishment, voting has adopted relatively durable forms but has changed its purposes and rationales in profound ways. Drawing on Michael Schudson’s accessible history, I would identify the following three stages in the history of US voting:

  • Nineteenth Century: Voting is mostly a public expression of full membership in a group. By voting at all, a man shows that he is a full and free US citizen. By voting for a party, he shows his loyalty to a sub-population, e.g., Southern white Protestant farmers vote for Democrats. Voting is conducted in public (ballots are not secret) along with torchlight parades and other public rituals. Generally, everyone in a given community votes alike and reinforces each other. Voting is an obligation.
  • Progressive Era: Voting is a private choice among independent candidates and ballot questions. Voting maximizes the degree to which the government represents the voter’s interests and values. Elections also punish corrupt or incompetent incumbents by rotating them out of office. To enable a free and precise choice, the ballot is now secret; candidates are distinguished from parties; numerous offices are made elective; and important questions are put to referenda. Reporters, experts, and civic educators purport to assist voters in making up their own minds. Voting is a source of power that should be employed responsibly.
  • Post-Watergate: For individuals, voting is one means of influencing the government (at a time when other means have proliferated) and is one optional way to spend time and energy. A prospective voter is assumed to weigh the costs of voting–including the costs of becoming informed–against its benefits. The population is assumed to vote as a function of large external factors, such as the billions of dollars spent on campaign advertising and the constantly shifting procedures for registering and voting. Candidates are entrepreneurs who make heavy use of Big Data to target and influence citizens. Some prominent political scientists and jurists defend private campaign finance on the basis that the various campaign donors cancel each other out in a competitive market. Voting, running for office, and giving money are choices; aggregate results can be predicted.

The three stages of voting resemble those of punishment. In each case, we see a move from 1) symbolic to 2) deliberately manipulative to 3) scientific and statistical. We also see a move from 1) automatic to 2) individually tailored to 3) designed at a social scale. And a sequence of 1) physical impact on bodies, to 2) influence over individual minds, to 3) tweaking the milieux that shape mass behavior. Foucault calls scientific control over the contexts that shape human behavior “bio-politics,” which is the ascendant norm.

In the case of punishment, the tool’s effectiveness has increased, but control is increasingly dispersed. The medieval king was fully in charge of the gallows, but he couldn’t influence much of his realm with it. The modern regime of schools, prisons, and police is much more effective and pervasive, but there is no single king. Power strengthens but also multiplies.

In the case of voting, the tool may possibly have become more powerful, but the individual voter pretty clearly has less influence today, for other political acts (from drawing district lines to allocating campaign dollars) have become highly sophisticated and effective. Voting looks more like a dependent variable than the cause of anything.

If this portrait of the current situation is accurate, we need both an assessment and a strategy for improvement. Foucault proposes some theses about assessment and strategy at the outset of “Security, Territory, Population”:

I do not think there is any theoretical or analytical discourse which is not permeated or underpinned in one way or another by something like an imperative discourse. However, in the  theoretical domain, the imperative discourse that consists in saying “love this, hate that, this is good, that is bad, be for this, beware of that,” seems to me, at present at any rate, to be no more than an aesthetic discourse that can only be based on choices of an aesthetic order. And the imperative discourse that consists in saying “strike against this and do so in this way,” seems to me to be very flimsy when delivered from a teaching institution or even just on a piece of paper. … So, since there has to be an imperative, I would like the one underpinning the theoretical analysis we are attempting to be quite simply a conditional imperative of the kind: If you want to struggle, here are some key points, here are some lines of force, here are some constrictions and blockages. In other words, I would like these imperatives to be no more than tactical pointers. … So in all of this I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics.

Contra Foucault, I would like to assert that the current system of elections (and much worse, of prisons) in the US is bad; that this is not a merely aesthetic judgment; that making such judgments is worthwhile if you defend them; and that effective polemics are badly needed. But I take Foucault’s point that a paper argument against the status quo can be valueless or arbitrary. As always, the question “What should we do?” requires tough-minded analysis that is about strategy as well as facts and values. Specifically, if we want to defend the Progressive Era ideal of voting, we must take seriously the deep shift toward what Foucault called “bio-power” in the society as a whole.

See also:when society becomes fully transparent to the state; qualms about Behavioral Economics; citizenship in the modern American republic: change or decline?

will young voters prefer younger candidates?

Leave a reply

We are often asked whether young people prefer young(er) candidates, and this question is arising again as Sen. Marco Rubio emphasizes his relative youth as a selling point. CIRCLE has now collected evidence–which I find pretty compelling–that the age of a candidate is a very modest factor in influencing young voters, if it matters at all. See “Does the Age of a Presidential Candidate Matter to Young Voters?,” which is new on the CIRCLE website

what defines an organization? the case of the global sangha

Leave a reply

(National Airport) What defines an “organization”? Normally, I would cite some kind of boundary around the people who belong to the group, plus some kind of system for making decisions that affect the whole. The boundaries can be temporary or permeable, and the decisions can be partial or occasional, but these seem to be definitive features.

It’s interesting to think about the global community of Buddhist monks, the sangha. According to the received story, The Buddha himself ordained the first monks and nuns and gave them the authority to ordain others. According to this account, today’s Buddhist monastics are descendants of a continuous series of ordinations that go back to the founding; this makes them the sangha. There are strict criteria for membership, and new monks and nuns take detailed vows. Even if the lineage of ordinations doesn’t really extend from each of today’s monastics all the way back to The Buddha, the lines extend a long way through history, and the story makes a plausible hypothetical.

The sangha is clearly a network, because the ties of ordination link everyone. Is it also an organization? It has a boundary (with monks/nuns on the inside and laypeople without). The ordination criteria and vows are tools for constraining the monastics’ behavior and influencing results. A monk can be expelled by his own abbot. Because there is no leader, steering committee, or electorate, it is hard to change the direction of the sangha as a whole (as opposed to the policies of any given monastery). But the practices of the whole sangha can evolve as a result of the members’ aggregate choices. Practices could shift quickly if a change that was compatible with the traditional vows spread fast. Is that enough to make the sangha an organization?

Incidentally, priests in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox churches all claim a lineage of ordinations all the way back to Jesus and St. Peter—the Apostolic Succession. So do some Lutherans, Methodists, and Moravians. If the global Buddhist sangha is an organization, then all of these churches also form one organization that just happens to be internally divided today. I think that is more or less the Anglican view of the situation, but not the Roman Catholic one; and the other denominations are mixed on the issue. This raises the question of whether someone can be a member of a given organization and yet deny it.