In this and several subsequent posts, I will dig deeper into a number of topics that I raised in my post on 2/19/22, “Get up, Stand Up”
First: Do voters have a clue?
My answer: Sometimes. But a clue is about as much as the vast majority of voters can ever get. And that’s a big problem.
Consider this thought from my “Get Up, Stand Up” post:
It’s not just that “the people” are not ready to accept a huge investment in a “Green New Deal” or child tax credit. It’s more often that the leadership of the country and/or state, or the Chamber of Commerce, etc., is not ready or willing to accept democratization or changes in investment priorities and so therefore find innumerable ways to make such policy choices, or their implementation, difficult-to-impossible.
A simple example is the failed expansion of ObamaCare into Medicaid. There are millions of American ready to have better health care, but a conservative Supreme Court found the inclusion of this Medicaid provision in the legislation unconstitutional and numerous (exclusively Republican) governors and legislatures refused to sign-on. They have willfully deprived their poorest citizens access to affordable health care and they have done so while most of those citizens were not even made aware that this choice has been made for them. This happens all the time across endless issues and initiatives from the very top of our federal and judicial systems all the way down to the local level.
It seems to me that there is something very important here that we must factor into our policy debates and political strategies. The operative phrase above is: “. . . While most of those citizens were not even made aware that this choice has been made for them.”
Our policy literature is full of accounts of how the average voter is a “low information” voter. Studies show that the average voter hardly pays attention to, or understands how, government and policy-making works, who their legislators and officials are, or the ins-and-outs of most public policy issues. It is often found that average voters care mostly about “bread and butter” issues. They want basic things like access to affordable housing and health care, and to decent jobs and schools. They want safe neighborhoods. Maybe they have one or two ”culture” issues that concern them: abortion/right-to-life, religious freedom/freedom from religion, masks/no masks, etc.
This literature paints a very dim view of the “average voter.” This view is, more or less: “The average voter hardly has a clue.”
Why voters can’t get a clue
But consider an alternate possibility:
Getting more than a clue about public policy requires that our voting public has access to accurate, timely, understandable, and useable information. Voters need accessible and accountable representation and service from public servants as well as non-profit organizations and our fourth estate, the press. This is very, very hard, and well nigh impossible, for the average person to get.
So here’s a theory:
The “average voter’s” knowledge, preferences, motivations, and sentiments are all heavily mediated and framed by the workings of a vast array of governmental, non-profit, and corporate institutions —including media organizations —and the leaders and knowledge workers who manage them.
In this theory of the problem, the cause of the average voter’s near cluelessness is not their indifference or their choice. Instead, there is a phalanx of institutions, agencies, and operatives at all levels of government, public policy, and the media that/who essentially mediate how and what the vast majority of people know about the policies and institutions, both public and private, that affect their lives and life choices. They effectively control and “ration” the services and information people can get in order to make good, informed decisions.
The problem is that these institutions, agencies, public servants, media, and operatives all have vested interests in maintaining the status quo. And by this I mean not simply that they strongly prefer current policies and practices (which by virtue of habit and inertia they generally do), but they also have a very strong interest in maintaining the incomprehensible processes and procedures that they have mastered and that define their work and their roles in our society.
There is an advantage to being remote, impenetrable, and incomprehensible. The status quo essentially works well for the people and institutions of our governing ecosystem, who are, or are on the road to becoming, a privileged elite. It gives them good, steady work, provides validation in mastering often arcane processes, procedures, and vocabularies, and it gives them privileged status as knowledge workers and professionals in an increasingly knowledge-driven economy.
Bottom line: the leaders and managers of governmental functions and entities, as well as the ecosystem of policy makers and private entities that “work the system,” are invested in the sustainability of an ecosystem government that is inaccessible to the vast majority of people. The fact of being opaque, impenetrable, and nigh-on incomprehensible to mere “civilians” and non-specialists is a feature, not a bug.
Everyday examples
A simple example: The average person, looking to get a license to drive or to operate a business is faced with daunting gauntlets of procedures in interacting with public policy mandates and bureaucracies. To engage with our public institutions and public policy is to be overmatched and often disempowered.
Or take the current assaults on voting rights and many other fundamental rights happening in almost all Republican-controlled states. The legal and procedural mechanisms and machinations, not to mention the ramifications, involved in these efforts are hugely complex and almost entirely obscure and non-influenceable by the average person. This is not by nature or by accident, but by design.
Or take our criminal justice system, where ordinary people accused of petty crimes are routinely arrested, fined, and jailed within a system that requires money, influence, and expertise to navigate. At the same time, people of wealth and stature routinely are able to use their resources and knowledge to game the system and significantly delay and even avoid accountability for all sorts of illegal and unethical conduct.
Our Administrative state is too big for our own good
And there is another fundamental issue here, which is that our administrative state, along with our public policy development and implementation processes (including the media), are all far too vast and far too removed from the everyday lives and experiences of our people. They have become so far removed that many people simply avoid them or pay no attention. This is evident from the workings of local school boards to the highest reaches of the government, and federal and state policy making.
Many ignore our governing institutions and the complex policy debates that they sponsor and spar over, rather than face feeling constantly inadequate, intimidated, unwelcome, patronized, and disempowered. Instead, people/voters latch onto the only issues that are promoted into the community, which are often framed simplistically so that they become the “hot button” issues that more and more have become partisan identifiers and clan-signaling issues and stances on behalf of parties, causes, and candidates.
So the theory, once again: public sentiment is massively mediated and framed by — and a reflection of — massive and unassailable bureaucracies and by the sentiments, sensibilities, and self-interested priorities, of “managing elites” — elites who frame public policy and put it into action. And those managing elites are — surprise, surprise — essentially the top 5-10% of the workforce (or on that ladder) in terms of income and wealth.
So here is another theory:
The voter preferences and sentiments that are constantly polled and interpreted and acted upon are mostly a proxy for the preferences and sentiments of the knowledge workers and institutions that populate and manage this ecosystem and of the powerful vested interests that manage it.
So, what might be the implications for politics of this impenetrable phalanx of institutions, knowledge workers, and operations that serve as an enormous “filtering system” of laws, regulations, and procedures, and that is built-in to our polity and its many layers of elected and appointed officials and private players?
Perhaps Democrats, at least, are neglecting an important target for outreach and influence with voters.
What if our political stalemate reflects a stalemate/ambivalence within the ecosystem of elites, knowledge workers, and institutions that manage our polity? What if our “popular” partisan divides, are reflection of such divides within the policy elites and “influencers” of various types, rather than the other way around?
The Democratic Party focuses on direct voter outreach because the assumption is that people make up their own minds based on facts and/or emotion. The Party tends to neglect mass and strategic messaging. But what if the capacity for participating in self-government and self-determination have become so crimped and caustic that most people don’t have a sense of civic agency that they can bring to issues surrounding “The Commons?” What if the reason it is hard to win-over and to turn-out voters is because most of the apparatuses of the government and public policy are perceived as a black hole into which one does not want to get pulled?
Perhaps the key to winning voters is not simply direct outreach from the party to voters to change their minds, but, also, the urgent reform of our governing and public policy ecosystem such that the interests and operations of the institutions of government and policy, and of the managerial class, are recast and aligned with those of the average voter — or even — at this late stage, with the interests of the diversity of our voters?
It’s time . . .
The political problem to solve is not how to move or mobilize individual voters (which we already now a lot about), but how to move and reform the enormous bureaucratic public policy ecosystem that keeps people/voters from . . . getting a clue. For Democrats, in particular:
It’s time to think smaller-scale.
It’s time to think simple (but not simplistic).
It’s time to think local.
It’s time to move power and decision-making closer to The People.
It’s time to radically reduce the complexity of government and governing.
It’s time to speak plain English.
It’s time to create new forums for popular input and conversation.
It’s time for more transparency.
It’s time to be more present with The People.
It’s time to ”unroll” much of the complexities of the federal government.
It’s time to prioritize empowering our “essential workers.”
It’s time to hold the managing elite accountable for Democratic outcomes rather than bureaucratic effort.
It’s time to expand the House of Representatives so that The People have authentic and accessible representation. (This cannot be provided by representatives who represent hundreds of thousands of people.)
It’s time to reform countless House and Senate rules and procedures that effectively obscure, and often undermine, democratic process.
It’s time to get off of our high horses and get to work with saw horses to build adequate housing
It’s time to vastly simplify the tax code for the average taxpayer.
It’s time to make the tax code fairer and to support the needs of a sustainable democratic republic.
It’s time to champion the welfare of The People
It’s time to champion the public education of The People.
It’s time to seriously simplify our electoral system to make both running for office and voting more user-friendly
It’s time to move from being bleeding hearts to leading hearts.
This list could go on and on, and it should.1 Hopefully many people will find reason to think more about these issues and how to be sure that our voters, The People, can get a whole lot more than a clue. What do you think and what would you add?
See George Friedman’s eye-opening book, The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. Anchor Publishing. 2021
Great insights! I think this is really pinpointing the key issues so well and I love that you end with some concrete things that we can do to improve our strategy!