One Way Forward (5 page)

For here is the fundamental challenge that we face: We won’t fix this Republic without amending the Constitution. There’s lots we could do before an amendment is enacted, but unless the Supreme Court changes radically, we’re going to need an amendment as well.

In America, an amendment requires massive cross-partisan agreement. It can’t be done, and won’t be done, by one faction alone. The Tea Partiers can well be proud of the success of their movement (even if it scares some of the rest of us). But the Tea Party alone is not “the Second American Revolution.” Nor are Occupiers on their own going to radically change the way society works. We must recognize that there is no 99 percent that shares a common set of substantive political values. We are, as Americans, different, even if there are dimensions (for example, constitutional dimensions) upon which we all agree.

So this, then, is the third bit to add to the dilemma that ended the last chapter:

If we’re to be successful, we must not only:

In my tribe, we want the government to do more to assure basic equality of opportunity; we want it to be as aggressive in protecting individuals from (at least some forms of) failure as it has been in protecting banks from their failure. We believe in a progressive tax rate. We also believe (in this corner of the tribe, at least) in free trade and free enterprise. We are skeptical of subsidies—not necessarily opposed, but skeptical.

Your tribe might be different. You might want a flat tax, or a much smaller government. You might not believe that the government has a role in providing security against social threats as it provides security against physical or terrorist threats. You might be against gay rights. You might be for traditional marriage. You might believe it is the responsibility of the state to protect the unborn, regardless of the burden that imposes upon a mother.

These are real differences. And as we think about reform, each side is likely to think about these differences, and about whether the proposed reform is likely to make the objectives of one side easier or those of the other side harder.

But even if we could find “an effective reform that a vast majority of us could agree upon,” there is still the impossibly difficult challenge of convincing different tribes to join a federation to push for its adoption. So entrenched is the business model of polarization that one can’t even describe the idea of talking across tribes without being called a traitor to one’s own.

I know this personally, and I have the bruises to prove it. At a teach-in at Occupy K Street, I implored the Occupiers to invite Tea Partiers to sit down with them. “You may or may not like capitalism,” I told them, “but nobody likes ‘crony capitalism,’ and it is crony capitalism that has corrupted this system of government and given us the misregulation that led to the collapse on Wall Street.”

Just after I said that, in a scene that could have been scripted in Hollywood, a man sitting in the front row raised his hand and said, “I was one of the original Tea Partiers, and today I run a site called
AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
. I can guarantee you that if you started talking about the corruption from crony capitalism, you’d have thousands of Tea Partiers down here joining with you in this fight.”

I thought the argument was obvious, and that the next steps would happen almost automatically.

They didn’t.

Instead, soon after my speech, a sportswriter for the
Nation,
Dave Zirin, started tweeting about my speech and then writing about it on his blog. We should not, he instructed, be collaborating with the racists from the Tea Party. It was enough, apparently, for the movement to hang with its own.

 But here’s the puzzle: Someone in the Occupiers’ “We can’t talk to the ‘racists’ of the Tea Party” camp needs to explain to me how the Occupiers can speak for “the 99 percent,” once we subtract the 30 percent who call themselves supporters of the Tea Party or the 40 percent of Americans who call themselves conservatives. Zirin thinks these “numbers actually tell us very little about what ideas hold sway among the mass of people in the United States.” But are the Tea Partiers, or the conservatives, just confused?

Zirin’s concern is important. It grows from a desire to build a “true movement.” Such substantive movements are built around shared ideals and shared values. The ideals of we on the Left are different from the ideals of them on the Right. And if a true substantive movement has to give up talk about its own different values or ideals, then it dies. We need to be able to defend universal health care, even though that isn’t something 99 percent agree upon. We need to argue for a progressive tax rate, even if most Americans don’t agree about just how progressive that rate should be. We need to constantly and vigorously remind America about the harms caused by racism and sexism and homophobia; about the plight of immigrants, whether “legal” or not; about the hopelessness of the poor in America—even if the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t put those concerns anywhere close to the top. We on the Left need to have our movement, to build and rally our team, for the inevitable fight over the substantive policies that government will enact—whether or not we achieve fundamental reform.

And so too on the Right. Tea Partiers and others from the Right want a smaller government. They need to rally their troops against all sorts of do-gooders (like me) who have all sorts of new ideas about how to spend tax dollars. They need to keep their troops in line, and, perhaps more important, they need to avoid alienating their members by confusing them with talk that sounds, well, too liberal. Sure, there are Tea Partiers who would pay attention enough to understand the subtlety of a cross-partisan movement. But there are also Tea Partiers who have two jobs, or three kids, or a hobby they love, and who are just as likely to skim an e-mail about “Reform” and get furious that someone not from their tribe gets mentioned approvingly.

But the challenge, and the practice, that I am describing is different. Our challenge is not to build a movement that coheres around a common set of values. No one’s going to convince every conservative to become a liberal, or every liberal to become a conservative. Our challenge is to build an alliance that can agree about the need for a fundamental change in the system itself. An alliance for constitutional reform. An agreement not about which side should win in a battle between Left and Right, but about the rules that should govern that fight.

Such a process will require, first, as Stav Shaffir said about the Israeli protests, a “first line of code”: a common plank that each side can stand upon. Together. A common recognition that the system itself is broken. And a common understanding that to fix this broken system will require not just a victory in Congress but constitutional reform as well.

We did this at least once before. This is the story not of the Declaration of Independence and the war against Britain. It is the story of how that newly independent nation saved itself from almost certain failure. The story, that is, of the framing of our second constitution (1787) and the rejection of the first (1781).

When people today think about that framing—if indeed they think about it at all—the image is not a celebration of diversity. Seventy-four white men, all basically upper-class, all basically elite. Sounds like a very boring party.

But in fact there was radical disagreement among those Framers of our Constitution. There were men in that hall who believed that slavery was just, and there were men in that hall who believed that slavery was the moral abomination of the age. Yet these men, with their radically different views, were able to put aside that disagreement enough to frame a constitution that gave birth to this Republic, because they realized that unless they did, the nation would fail.

There is no difference today between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement—or between the Left and Right in general—as profound or as important as that between the factions who fought about slavery. Nor is our challenge as profound as the one that divided them. They needed to craft a new nation. We need simply to end the corruption of an old government.

If they could do what they did, we should be able to do this.

We are different, we Americans. We have different values and different ideals. But take out a dollar bill and read after me:
E pluribus unum
: Out of the many, one. And out of our many, we need to find “one” in the sense of a common understanding that could lead us on a path to save this Republic. While we still can.

We don’t have a common end. We do have a common enemy.

There isn’t a single thing that we all want—save perhaps peace, justice, and the American way (whatever that means). But there is a single thing that is blocking the ability of all of us to get from our government what we think we are getting when we actually succeed in securing government power.

I’ve written a book to prove that point—
Republic, Lost.
This isn’t that book. Instead, I will simply assert here what I try to prove there, because it turns out that most of us already believe what I show there.

At the core of our government is a corruption. Not the corruption of criminals, violating the law by engaging in illegal bribery. There is some of that, but not much, and even if we ended all of that, we wouldn’t begin to solve the type of corruption that I’m speaking of. Instead, the corruption that I’m speaking of, and the corruption that debilitates this government, is legal corruption. It is the economy of influence that guides Washington to regulate or not to regulate as the funders of campaigns want and, more pressingly and more recently, as the barons of super PACs demand.

This corruption blocks both the Left and the Right. For different reasons, it blocks us both from getting the change that each seeks.

The Left wants climate change legislation. It will never get that so long as this corruption remains. The Left wants real health care reform—with real competition for insurance companies and real competition in drug prices. It will never get that so long as this corruption remains. And the Left says it wants a vibrant and modern broadband Internet infrastructure. But it will never get the competition it needs to inspire that building so long as the incumbents can spend less (through the regulatory system) to block competition than providing that service would cost.

The Right wants different things, but again, they are things it will never get so long as elections are funded as they are now funded. The Right wants a smaller government. But so long as a bigger government means more targets for fundraising (i.e., the regulated), the system is biased against what the Right wants. The Right wants simpler taxes—whether Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan or Rick Perry’s flat tax. But taxes—or, more precisely, the complexity of today’s taxes—are tools in the fundraiser’s toolbox. Got a tax benefit that’s set to expire? Expect a call from a congressman or his fundraiser, eager to enlist you in the fight to “preserve your tax freedom.” What congressman would simplify taxes when that only complicates his opportunity to raise campaign funds?

The key is for both sides to look at these failures and to connect the dots. Not to the one or two critical changes that never seem to happen, but to link the five or ten critical changes that never seem to happen, and to ask “Why?” If, to invoke the author of my one sacred text, Henry David Thoreau,

the key is for this thousand to pause their hacking and to begin to go after that root.

The “root” is the role that money plays within this system. Or, more precisely, the role that money from a tiny slice of America plays within this system. It plays that role along two dimensions—one familiar and one brand-new.

The familiar is through campaign contributions. So long as congressmen spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money, they will be responsive to their funders. But so long as the vast majority of us are not “the funders,” this economy of funding will corrupt the system. So long, that is, as the vast majority of funds come from a tiny slice of the top 1 percent of us—0.26 percent of us give more than $200 to congressional campaigns, 0.05 percent of us max out to any congressional candidate, and 0.01 percent spend more than $10,000 in a campaign cycle
²⁹
—that funding will corrupt this system. Members become dependent upon the you-pick-your-fraction-of-the-top-1-percent to fund their campaigns. Government becomes responsive to the you-pick-your-fraction-of-the-top-1-percent to keep the funders happy. No longer do we have a government “dependent,” as the Framers put it, “upon the People alone.”

The dynamic here is complex, but not too complex. Only the very few (some might say idiots) make the link between the funding and the special benefit explicit (and hence illegal). Practically everyone else is smart enough to avoid crossing that line while still securing the support they need. Jack Abramoff writes in his recent (and excellent) book
Capitol Punishment,