The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  This philosophy is so different from the dominant consensus that it takes far more than two paragraphs to explain, let alone argue for. But who’s even trying? Instead, the audience is forced to read a shelf of Chomsky and reverse-engineer the principles behind it.

  This is better than nothing—it worked for me—but it obviously puts a hard limit on who can be persuaded. People without the time or the ability end up as the folks you see in liberal blog comments: people who know something is badly wrong, but aren’t quite sure what it is or what to do about it.

  In short, leftist intellectuals need to move from simply poking holes in the dominant consensus to clearly articulating their alternative and proposing a concrete method for promoting it (Chomsky, for all his brilliance, seems to espouse a theory of change that doesn’t go much beyond getting people at his book readings to join the local ISM chapter). I hope that more people will, because I sometimes fear that if they don’t, there may not be many leftist intellectuals anymore.

  Professional Politicians Beware!

  http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5490

  2008

  Age 21

  This essay first appeared in Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age, edited by Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, and Joshua Levy (Personal Democracy Press, 2008).

  “By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people.”

  The government of a republic, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 39 (“Conformity of the Plan to Republican Principles,” 1788), must “be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.”

  Looking at our government today—a House of professional politicians, a Senate filled with multimillionaires, a string of presidential family dynasties—it seems hard to maintain that our officials are in fact “derived from the great body of the society” and not “a favored class” merely posing as representatives of the people.

  Unless politics is a tradition in your family, your odds of getting elected to federal office are slim. And unless you’re a white male lawyer, you rarely get to vote for someone like yourself in a national race. Nor, in reality, do we have an opportunity to choose policy positions: no major candidates support important proposals that most voters agree with, like single-payer health care.

  Instead, national elections have been boiled down to simple binary choices, which advertising men and public relations teams reduce to pure emotions: Fear. (A bear prowls through the woods.) Hope. (The sun rises over a hill.) Vote Smith. Or maybe Jones. Nor does the major media elevate the level of debate. Instead of substantive discussions about policy proposals and their effects, they spend their time on horse-race coverage (who’s raised the most money? Who’s polling well in Ohio?) and petty scandals (how much did that haircut cost? Was someone somewhere offended by that remark?)

  The result after all this dumbing down? In 2004, voters who said they chose a presidential candidate based on the candidate’s agendas, ideas, platforms, or goals comprised a whopping 10% of the electorate. So it’s not too surprising when political scientists find that voters’ decisions can be explained by such random factors as whether they like red or blue, whether the economy is good or bad, or whether the current party has been in office for long or not.

  Aside from the occasional telephone poll, the opinions of “the great body of the society” have been edited out of the picture. Way back in Federalist No. 10 (“The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection [Continued],” 1787), Madison put his finger on the reason. “However small the republic may be,” he noted, “the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few.” But similarly, “however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.”

  The result is that the population grows while the number of representatives stays fixed, leaving each politician to represent more and more people. The first Congress had a House of 65 members representing 40,000 voters and three million citizens (they had a whopping 1.3% voter turnout back then). That’s a representative for around every 600 voters or 46,000 citizens (the size of the average baseball stadium). A baseball stadium may be a bit of an unruly mob, but it’s not unimaginably large.

  Today, by contrast, we have 435 representatives and 300 million citizens—one for roughly every 700,000 citizens. There isn’t a stadium in the world big enough to hold that many people. It’s a number more akin to a television audience (it’s about how many people tune in to watch Keith Olbermann each night).

  Which is exactly what the modern constituency has become: the TV audience following along at home. Even if you wanted to, you can’t have a real conversation with a TV audience. It is too big to convey a sense of what each individual is thinking. Instead of a group to represent, it’s a mob to be managed.

  I agree with Madison that there is roughly a right size for a group of representatives “on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects.”

  But what Madison missed is that there is no similar limit on the number of such groups. To take a technological analogy, the Internet is, at bottom, an enormous collection of wires. Yet nobody would ever think of it this way. Instead, we group the wires into chips and the chips into computers and the computers into networks and the networks into the Internet. And people only deal with things at each level: when the computer breaks, we can’t identify which wire failed; we take the whole thing into the shop.

  One of the most compelling visions for rebooting democracy adopts this system of abstraction for politics. Parpolity, developed by the political scientist Stephen Shalom, would build a legislature out of a hierarchical series of nested councils. Agreeing with Madison, he says each council should be small enough that everyone can engage in face-to-face discussion but large enough that there is a diversity of opinion and the number of councils is minimized. He estimates the right size is 25 to 50 people.

  So, to begin with, let us imagine a council of you and your 40 closest neighbors—perhaps the other people in your apartment building or on your block. You get together every so often to discuss the issues that concern you and your neighborhood. And you may vote to set policy for the area which the council covers.

  But your council has another function: it selects one of its own to send as a representative to the next council up. There the process repeats itself: the representative from your block and its 40 closest neighbors meet every so often to discuss the political issues that concern the area. And, of course, your representative reports back to the group, gets your recommendations on difficult questions, and takes suggestions for issues to raise at the next area council meeting.

  By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people. But—and this is the truly clever bit—at the area council the whole process repeats itself. Just as each block council nominates a representative to the area council, each area council nominates a representative to the city council, and each city council to the state council, each state council to the national council, and so on.

  Shalom discusses a number of further details—provisions for voting, recalls, and delegation—but it’s the idea of nesting that’s key. Under such a system, there are only four representatives who stand between you and the people setting national pol
icy, each of whom is forced to account to their constituents in regular, small face-to-face meetings. Politicians in such a system could not be elected through empty appeals to mass emotions. Instead, they would have to sit down, face-to-face, with a council of their peers and persuade them that they are best suited to represent their interests and positions.

  There is something rather old-fashioned about this notion of sitting down with one’s fellow citizens and rationally discussing the issues of the day. But there is also something exciting and new about it. In the same way that blogs have given everyone a chance to be a publisher, Wikipedia lets everyone be an encyclopedia author, and YouTube lets anyone be a television producer, Parpolity would let everyone be a politician.

  The Internet has shown us that the pool of people with talent far outnumbers the few with the background, connections, and wealth to get to a place in society where they can practice their talents professionally. (It also shows us that many people with those connections aren’t particularly talented.)

  The democratic power of the net means you don’t need connections to succeed. In a world where kids can be television stars just by finding a video camera and an Internet connection, citizens may begin to wonder why getting into politics is so much harder.

  For many years, politicians had a ready excuse: politics was a difficult job, which required carefully weighing and evaluating evidence and making difficult decisions. Only a select few could be trusted to perform it; the vast majority of the population was woefully underqualified.

  And perhaps in the era of a cozy relationship between politicians and the press, this illusion could be sustained. But as netroots activists and blogs push our national conversation ever closer to the real world, this excuse is becoming laughable. After all, these men and women of supposedly sober judgment voted overwhelmingly for disasters like the Iraq War. “No one could have ever predicted this,” TV’s talking heads all insist. No one, that is, except the great body of society, whose insistence that Iraq did not pose a threat and that an occupation would be long and brutal went ignored.

  New online tools for interaction and collaboration have let people come together across space and time to build amazing things. As the Internet breaks down the last justifications for a professional class of politicians, it also builds up the tools for replacing them. For the most part, their efforts have so far been focused on education and entertainment, but it’s only a matter of time before they turn to politics. And when they do, professional politicians beware!

  The Attraction of the Center

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whycentrism

  July 12, 2006

  Age 19

  “Centrism” is the tendency to see two different beliefs and attempt to split the difference between them. The reason why it’s a bad idea should be obvious: truth is independent of our beliefs, no less than any other partisans, centrists ignore evidence in favor of their predetermined ideology.

  So what’s the attraction? First, it requires little thought: arguing for a specific position requires collecting evidence and arguing for it. Centrism simply requires repeating some of what A is saying and some of what B is saying and mixing them together. Centrists often don’t even seem to care if the bits they take contradict each other.

  Second, it’s somewhat inoffensive. Taking a strong stand on A or B will unavoidably alienate some. But being a centrist, one can still maintain friends on both sides, since they will find at least some things that you espouse to be agreeable with their own philosophies.

  Third, it makes it easier to suck up to those in charge, because the concept of the “center” can easily move along with shifts in power. A staunch conservative will have to undergo a major change of political philosophy to get a place in liberal administrations. A centrist can simply espouse a few more positions from the conservatives and a few less from the liberals and fit in just fine. This criteria explains why centrists are so prevalent in the pundit class (neither administration is tempted to really force them out) and why so many “centrist” pundits espouse mostly conservative ideas these days (the conservatives are in power).

  Fourth, despite actually being a servant of those in power, centrism gives one the illusion of actually being a serious, independent thinker. “People on the right and on the left already know what they’re going to say on every issue,” they might claim, “but we centrists make decisions based on the situation.” (This excuse was recently used in a fund-raising letter by the New Republic.) Of course, the “situation” that’s used to make these decisions is simply who’s currently in power, as discussed above, but that part is carefully omitted.

  Fifth, it appeals to the public. There’s tremendous dissatisfaction among the public with the government and our system of politics. Despite being precisely in the middle of this corrupt system, centrists can claim that they’re actually “independents” and “disagree with both the left and the right.” They can denounce “extremism” (which isn’t very popular) and play the “moderate,” even when their positions are extremely far from what the public believes or what the facts say.

  Together, these reasons combine to make centrism an especially attractive place to be in American politics. But the disease is far from limited to politics. Journalists frequently suggest the truth lies between the two opposing sources they’ve quoted. Academics try to distance themselves from policy positions proposed by either party. And, perhaps worst of all, scientists try to split the difference between two competing theories.

  Unfortunately for them, neither the truth nor the public necessarily lies somewhere in the middle. Fortunately for them, more valuable rewards do.

  Exercise for the reader: What’s the attraction of “contrarianism,” the ideology subscribed to by online magazines like Slate?

  The Conservative Nanny State

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/cns

  May 22, 2006

  Age 19

  For years, progressives have watched as both Democratic and Republican administrations have taken away what little remained of economic liberalism in this country. Bill Clinton, for example, took away what meager assistance the government paid to poor single mothers, signed NAFTA, and began attempting to chip away at Social Security.

  But even worse than these policy defeats are the conceptual defeats that underlie them. As cognitive scientist George Lakoff has argued, people think about politics through conceptual moral frames, and the conservatives have been masterful at creating frames for their policies. If the left wants to fight back, they’re going to have to create frames of their own.

  Enter Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and one of the people instrumental in fighting back against the most recent attempt to privatize Social Security (as author of Social Security: The Phony Crisis, he had plenty of facts to demonstrate that the crisis was, in fact, phony). He has a new book out, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer, which takes decades of conservative frames and stands them on their head. (Disclosure: I liked the book so much I converted it to HTML for them and was sent a free paperback copy in return.)

  His most fundamental point is that conservatives are not generally in favor of market outcomes. For far too long, he argues, the left has been content with the notion that conservatives want the market to do what it pleases while liberals want some government intervention to protect people from its excesses.

  No way! says Baker. Conservatives love big government—only they use it to give money to the rich instead of the poor. Thus the conservative nanny state of the title, always looking out for crybaby moneybags to help.

  Take, for example, trade policy. The conservative nanny state is more than happy to sign free trade agreements that let manufacturing jobs in the United States flee offshore. And they’re happy to let immigrant workers come into the country to replace dishwashers and day laborers. But when it comes to the professional class, like doctors, lawyers, economist
s, journalists, and other professionals, oh no!, the conservative nanny state does everything it can (through licensing and immigration policy) to keep foreign workers out.

  This doesn’t just help the doctors, it hurts all of us because it means we have to pay more for health care. NAFTA boosters estimate that the entire agreement saved us $8 billion a year. Using competition to bring only doctors’ salaries down [to] the levels seen in Europe would save us eighty billion dollars—nearly $700 per family per year, just from improved prices for doctors. You’d see similar amounts from other major professions.

  Baker’s book is also one of the few to reveal the shocking secret behind the Federal Reserve Board you always hear messing with interest rates on the news. This unaccountable technocracy, most of whose members are appointed by banks, uses its power over interest rates to drive the economy into a recession so that wages won’t get too high. That’s right, the government tries to slow down the economy so that you get paid less. (Full details are in the book.)

  Baker’s book is also chock-full of fascinating new policy ideas. He points out, for example, that corporations aren’t part of the free market, but instead a gift offered by the government. (A very popular one too, since companies voluntarily pay $278 billion each year for it.) And because of this, there’s absolutely no reason the government can’t tweak its terms to make us all better off. For example, Baker points out that currently, corporate rules count shareholders who don’t vote at all as voting in favor of whatever the directors of the corporation prefer. Baker suggests requiring that all CEO pay packages get approved by a majority of those actually voting, instead of letting major CEOs pick how much to pay themselves, as they do now.

  Or what about copyright and patents? Again, this isn’t a law of nature, but a big government gift. People who really care about shrinking government would want to try to get rid of or shrink the laws that say the government gets to make rules about what songs and movies we can have on our personal computers.