I think the 2016 election has been eye-opening for me personally, and there's been a lot
of personal reflection around “what does it mean to be involved?”
for a lot of people.
I think—and I hope—that we take President Trump's victory as a warning of what disengagement
can cost us.
And I think our leaders have failed to lead on a lot of different dimensions.
I think government has lost a productive culture of public service that makes it hard to participate,
it makes it hard to understand the value of engaging in politics.
Our first associations with the word “politician” is like, corruption/dishonesty.
Public service should be about our highest ideals, it should be about our collective
success, it should be about what is best and most ambitious for a group of people working
together around a shared sense of purpose.
So I think as people wake up to “Wait a second, how is this possible here?”
I think there's a couple of things at work there.
One is: as the country becomes more urban, and urban centers are decidedly more liberal,
we have a sense that the country is much more liberal than it actually is.
Turns out it's a really big country.
It turns out there's a lot of people who still don't live in cities.
It turns out there are a lot of sort of frustrated people who live in cities who believed in
Obama because of the promises he made about changing the system that Trump was a much
more natural successor to than Secretary Clinton was.
So I think the concept of someone who is frustrated and anxious seeing President Obama fail to
largely change the culture of politics, see Trump as the bull for the china shop and there's
a pretty straight line, and this is a lot easier to see in retrospect.
I thought Secretary Clinton was going to win, so this is all with the benefit of hindsight
and a lot of thought, and a lot of talking to a lot of people in a lot of places that
aren't Chicago and aren't downtown New York.
But what I think this has awakened in people is the reality that people have to participate.
There's this saying that “history is decided by the people that show up,” there's like
nine different versions of that aphorism that are largely true in a participatory democracy.
And I think we've gotten a little lazy, and I think President Trump scares a lot of people
in a way that has been amazing to watch new people engage in politics.
And I think the question, to get back to where the question started, which is: “Okay, where
do people begin?”
This is where the increased access that technology provides to low barriers to participation
are really, really great.
So you can start participating in politics just by being more aware, being more educated,
being more plugged in to what is actually happening with leaders, with leadership, with
campaigns at a level of just access to that process is so much greater than it's ever
been.
But there's a choice and a desire on our side that we have to go and seek out those answers
to those questions.
And then there are so many ways to start to engage in simple ways: calling congressmen,
writing letters, like everything from 5 Calls to Resistbot, and these are all progressive-oriented
things but all of the same tactics apply for conservatives, and a lot of what we see with
progresses really embracing the power of being face-to-face with elected officials in town
halls was something that the Tea Party used to incredible effect ten years ago in 2010
in terms of particular just post the Obama election.
And so these tools themselves are not particularly partisan, but they've reduced the barrier
to participation sufficiently that it makes it easier for sort of first-time activists
to get started.
And what I would say is that there's a couple of sort of lies at the heart of progressive
politics that are super problematic.
One of them is that all politics is local.
I would say that when Tip O'Neill said that in the '80s, “local” was meant to be an
analog for what matters most to you.
The true statement is: all politics is personal, what matters to you is what matters to you
and that might be local, or it might not be.
And the thing that I always say to people is to start.
There is no magic way to participate.
We live in a republic.
We have to win elections to gain power.
We don't live in a direct democracy.
So like large scale open-source policymaking is interesting as a listening exercise and
for understanding communities and for surfacing ideas that we haven't thought of, but we don't
live in a direct democracy where open-source policy actually creates policy directly, so
we have to participate in all kinds of ways.
I think one of the places where we need more attention is converting this sort of generic
resistance participation we see on the left right now into political power.
So in L.A., in the city elections back in March, fewer people voted than turned out
for the Women's March on inauguration day.
That's maybe just a function of the fact that it wasn't a contested mayoral election and
it's sort of off-cycle and not competitive, but an 11-and-a-half percent voter participation
turn-out rate should scare all of us.
That's a problem because we do live in a republic, we do need to believe in the value of participating
in this process.
And this is where leadership matters a lot.
This is where reclaiming the sort of joy and optimism and public service about politics
and government is something that has to be a coherent priority of the party, of our leaders,
of people running for office on both sides, or we're going to be in a place where democracy
is a system of faith; and cynicism is extremely dangerous and long-term corrosive.
There's been a lot of talk about the normalization of propaganda and lying since President Trump
took office and I think those things are super problematic because the institutions of the
system matter a lot more than the personalities.
And when personalities start trumping institutions, no pun intended, or pun intended I guess,
you start leaning toward autocracy pretty fast and that's not where we want to go.
The net neutrality argument usually gets wrapped around things like Netflix and cable television
and sort of commercial content distribution, that kind of thing.
I think the place where net neutrality is particularly important is around activism
and around governments.
If companies can change the way they route packets and prioritize content based on financial
decisions they can also do it based on ideological decisions.
And you start inching your way toward government-run media, it's not a long jump between that question
and government-managed suppression of participation from insurgent or counter opinion ideas.
That's not a long leap.
I worry less about the commercial problems because I think, look, if Netflix has to pay
more for faster pipes they'll figure it out—like they'll figure out how to make money, they'll
figure out how to get more episodes of House of Cards.
It will work out for them.
They will make money.
Activists not being able to use services like Twilio effectively to call Congress because
net neutrality has changed the way that people have access to information is potentially
catastrophic for people understanding that their participation is valuable.
And one of the things that these tools, like I said when we were thinking about this question
of new activism and giving more access to more participation, if people don't believe
that that participation will work or it literally won't work, now we're starting to create barriers
to participation, and in a participatory democracy no barriers to participation are good.
Whether they're voting, whether it's content, whether it's listening, whether it's being
able to hold leaders to account, limits on any of those things are bad.