Oh, Dear Reader, some of us voters and future voters will not just sit in the bleachers until the final count. Instead, we’re going to confront the politicians with two defects in our American political process that don’t get much attention: The lack of any national dialogue worthy of the name, and an excess of secrecy. The body politic cries out, first, for civilized conversation between citizens and politicians that provides political education and makes it possible to hold the politicians accountable in public, and secondly, for reliable political information, especially about what our politicians are hearing from paid lobbyists behind closed doors and in private written messages. Our politics are gridlocked by the powerful players and full of lies and evasions. The overwhelming majority of our incumbents and wannabe incumbents are paralyzed by vulture capitalist campaign money, by prancing would-be autocrats, by party deviousness, by witch-hunting book-burners, by feckless foreign policy operatives, by biased journalists, and by a judiciary corrupt from the Supreme Court on down. These forces cause our politicians to stay busy (1) cooking up a new Cold War, (2) making empty gestures toward dealing with fat-cat domination and the desperate needs of our people and the environment, (3) ignoring the routine gruesome global deprivations and mass slaughter of helpless civilians, and (4) pretending there is no global slide into mob rule and dictatorship. We voters and future voters say it’s time to wrestle capitalism to the mat and take popular control of our own governance for the first time in our history. We plan to conduct a robust intervention against all the bad habits of our politicians, starting right now.
First, though, we should take a moment to re-examine the American Revolution. It was the world’s first mass attempt to establish a democratic form of government that still trudges on today, so an intervention focused on this long-term experience might inspire people around the world to ask themselves whether they, too, suffer from the same political weaknesses we do around dialogue and secrecy. The American revolutionary movement got stunted by two key developments that set up a way of governing that, to this day, gives overwhelming political power to moneyed interests who get routinely supported by our justice systems and government monopoly over the use of force. In the 15 years following July 4, 1776, the bold drive for democratic home-rule took a couple of tragic detours.
The cynics are right that the dominant motive among the founding fathers was to protect their wealth and gain control over the flow of commerce. That helps us understand how the values of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” set out in the Declaration of Independence shortly got reduced to “Life, Liberty or Property” in the 1791 Bill of Rights. That step-down in declared values eventually hardened into a worship of property rights and chronic suppression of human rights. The second detour was complete when the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” got corrupted by state legislators into “all white men who own property.”
However, the revolutionaries’ bedrock principle defining a new political process is still sound: The Declaration of Independence states it as a “self-evident” truth that no government can protect the people’s rights unless it “DERIVES ITS JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.” Alas, for the past 247 years, we have failed to establish any process that can achieve such consent.
Consent of the governed can not be developed through the mere election of a particular candidate or slate of candidates – once they get seated in office, it’s too easy for politicians to change their colors on any given issue. Consent of the governed can’t even be expressed through ballot proposals for new laws (“initiatives”): Corporate money dominates and corrupts the process by sowing doubt and confusion among the voters.
‘’CONSENT” of the governed can only be developed through a nation-wide, legally established process of dialogue: Ongoing, mandatory, publicly broadcast, one-on-one conversations between citizens and politicians, once every month for every officeholder (once a week for every ballot candidate during election season). The citizen would be chosen each time by lottery and would have the option to appoint a volunteer proxy spokesperson to appear across the table from the politician. Think of the thousands of potential proxies: friends, neighbors, teachers, journalists, scholars, podcasters and others to choose from – we’d finally be marshalling our nation’s intellectual resources and providing first-class political education for concerned citizens. Best of all, these conversations would hold the politicians accountable in front of everyone, and lead to a national ”CONSENSUS”, i.e., a common opinion, wide agreement on an important issue that emerges after extended public discussion, a new understanding that is adhered to by the largest proportion of interested citizens, amounting to a clear expression of the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED as impetus for genuine reform. Take health care, for example: Public polls consistently report a minimum of 75 to 80 percent of Americans favor Medicare-for-All, but for decades we’ve gotten nothing but pathetic half-measures. Imagine: A televised citizen’s question to Senator So-and-So: “How do you live with yourself using your free, comprehensive Senate-provided health insurance, while you vote against Medicare-for-All and support the Medicare Advantage scam?” We’ll get real results only when we make our politicians sit up straight in public and answer for their actions.
Oh yes, we have corporatized newspapers, letters to editors and congress members, talk radio, news broadcasts, podcasts, digital platforms, websites and so on, but it’s all splintered and diversionary, so we can never even hope to see such hard-hitting public confrontations that everyone can witness at the same time. Our hundreds of thousands of internet, broadcast and print sources produce a wide variety of divisive opinions and attitudes leading to cruel and crack-brained policies. Town Hall meetings and televised “debates” provide little more than shouting matches, and the people are bereft of any chance to take part in or learn from a common conversation that could reach an identifiable consensus.
And finally, we must abolish the routine secrecy that keeps us in the dark: Yes, we will also have to establish it as a further duty of office (and candidacy) to publish every paid lobbyist’s oral or written communications with an incumbent or ballot candidate, requiring that every such communication be recorded and posted on the internet daily. The Supreme Court sees corporate campaign contributions as freedom of speech, so we have to assert our right to hear or read the actual speech that inevitably follows the filthy dollars. Freedom to listen or read is at least as important as freedom to speak.
This 2024 voters’ and future voters’ intervention will only succeed if we shift away from the current focus on voters’ rights, and focus instead on voters’ powers; we’ll rise up well before Election Day and overwhelm the candidates with an irrepressible demand for a genuine pledge: “Will you or will you not support the creation of open and accountable government?” We can refer them to www.Voters-Intervene.org to explain the innovation. For guidance along this path toward new constitutional standards, we can invoke some of the inspiring but unfulfilled words of leaders who’ve emerged since the Revolution: “Government of the people, by the people and for the People” (President Lincoln); “Open covenants, openly arrived at” (President Wilson); Our “Four Freedoms” – speech, religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear (President Franklin Roosevelt); “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can successfully confront the Military-Industrial Complex (President Eisenhower); “I want to change the mindset that got us into Iraq.” (President Obama). This intervention is a spontaneous, do-it-yourself project: Use all your resources, starting with your limitless imagination. Yours truly, Ed Frey
Voters Intervene 