Though nearly all of us resonated with President Obama's call for civility last week, we know that Washington will soon descend into the usual vitriol. For that, most of us blame our politicians, the voters who elected them or the media. But if any of the above were the true culprits, we might as well give up on a solution. We would be stuck with a politics of personal destruction -- because we can't redesign our politicians, voters or the media.
Fortunately, we can redesign the one thing that most drives our politicians to be uncivil: our elections. As our elections work today, one Republican competes against one Democrat in nearly every district, each containing 700,000 residents from all walks of life.
To get a feeling for why politicians in that position so often accuse their opponents of being despicable, imagine being in their position. Suppose you were member of Congress meeting with 20 constituents your staff had picked out of the phone book. Say you asked all 20 how you should go about:
● Creating jobs
● Reining in our budget deficit
● Making our tax code fairer and economically saner
● Curbing our addiction to foreign oil
How many different opinions would your 20 constituents have on these four issues? If you presented your own ideas, how many of those constituents would strongly object?
Now imagine trying to placate the 700,000 residents of your district. They would include young singles, middle-aged parents, senior citizens, teachers, lawyers, truck drivers, salespeople, managers, business owners and the unemployed. These groups may agree on the time of day, but not on much else. They hardly ever agree on how their representative should handle taxes, deficits, creating jobs, or energy independence.
So, would you try to convince your constituents that your positions on these hot-button issues were serving their best interests? If you wanted to inflame most of your voters -- thereby risking your job -- you might give it a try.
Most members of Congress, having worked hard to get to Capitol Hill, are unwilling to leave in defeat. And nearly any legislator can stay in office just by convincing most voters that his main opponent is a bigger threat to their way of life than himself -- a message that any politician can convey to voters of all kinds with a few colorful sound bites.
In effect, if a member of Congress demonizes his/her political opponents vividly enough, he keeps his seat. Meanwhile, if he tackles our gravest problems honestly, he risks his job. Some choice.
How did our lawmakers get into this bind? When the United States began over two centuries ago, 80 percent of Americans were farmers, while most of the rest sold goods and services to nearby farmers. The residents of a typical district thus shared very similar concerns. A district representative could therefore explain to his voters how his actions in Congress were serving their interests, if in fact his actions were.
We have long since ceased to be a nation of farmers. One city block can encompass more interests, occupations and lifestyles than an entire district did in the 18th century. So a typical representative today can hardly ever convince most constituents that he is acting in their best interests on the complex issues of these times.
Nearly every lawmaker is therefore afraid to advocate realistic solutions to divisive issues. Instead, nearly every legislator runs for reelection by vilifying his/her opponents.
The vitriol keeps growing more intense because:
● In each election cycle, politicians gain more knowledge of how to win.
● Each insult begets other insults.
● Since nearly every politician benefits by painting his/her ideological opponents as evil, many politicians inevitably start believing that their opponents are evil.
● And yes, the media stoke all of the above by highlighting the nastiest conflicts.
But the media didn't start this. And the media can't stop it. Neither can the president or anyone else by giving eloquent speeches.
On the contrary, as long as each legislator has to represent a district whose residents cover the gamut from young to old, from singles to large families, from bricklayers to website designers, from poor to well-to-do, most of our politicians will be afraid to tackle America's problems honestly. They will, instead, demonize their adversaries.
Fortunately, the Constitution doesn't require that members of Congress represent districts. The Constitution doesn't even mention districts.
We can find a more sensible way to organize elections by looking at how other kinds of representatives resolve controversial issues intelligently. Take a labor union leader bargaining with a management spokesperson. They often have starkly different agendas, yet 96 percent of the time the two representatives put together an agreement that meets both sides' needs. How do they succeed so often?
It's largely because any labor union representative understands his constituents' interests and expectations, as does any management spokesperson. So both start out confident that if they can hammer out a deal that makes sense to them, each will be able to sell it to his or her own camp. Each can say something like: "This contract isn't exactly what we set out to get, but it's better than our alternatives. Here's how it meets our needs... " And since the workers know that their union representative is on their side, they listen to him make his case. If he makes a solid case, the majority usually go along.
Likewise, if we want our lawmakers to work out intelligent agreements, we need each member of Congress to have a similar connection to his or her voters. We need each member of Congress to have constituents who all share his/her basic political outlook.
That's easier to arrange than it sounds. To see how, let's shrink the task down to a small scale. Say the residents of a small town want to organize their town council so that it will resolve the community's problems fairly and sensibly. For that purpose, the whole town meets in a large hall. Each person who wants a seat on the council hands out copies of his or her priorities for the community.
The person running the meeting then asks each candidate to move to a different point in the room. Each townsperson then gathers around his/her favorite candidate. If any candidates attract very few followers, say less than 5 percent of the town, the moderator asks those townspeople to pick another candidate, one backed by more than 5 percent.
Each townsperson would thereby end up with a representative whose political objectives were similar to his/her own. Each representative would, in turn, understand her constituents' concerns far better than any elected representative does today.
Suppose also that each representative asked her constituents to write down their names and addresses, so she could send them regular reports about her work on the council. A typical report might read, "I wanted to let you know how my latest agreements with the rest of the council meet the objectives you elected me to pursue. . . . It's not everything we wanted, but for now it's as much as we can realistically get. Here's why . . . ."
Some voters would, of course, be dissatisfied. Some voters would have unrealistic expectations that their representative could never fulfill. Some people are built that way, and no election system would change them.
But if elections were organized along the above lines, each representative would be in a far better position than now to win voters' support for sensible decisions.
Meanwhile, vilifying opponents would be a foolish strategy. To see why, imagine the town holding the above kind of election for the second time. Say one group of voters had a choice between a) their current council member who had mostly insulted his colleagues and thereby produced little results, or b) a candidate who spelled out how he/she would make progress on the issues that mattered to those voters. Who would most voters choose?
That's somewhat like asking: Would most workers prefer a union leader who provokes a strike or one who presents a credible plan for negotiating a good contract? Labor-management negotiations, in fact, lead to a strike only 4 per cent of the time. So the vast majority of workers clearly prefer a contract.
Likewise, if each voter could choose a representative as freely as described above, a typical voter would also prefer a spokesperson who could produce solid results on the issues that mattered to that voter.
We could implement this kind of election at any level of government by creating districts with multiple representatives and by using ballots that let voters pick a first-choice candidate, a second choice, and more if necessary. The details are spelled out at www.GenuineRepresentation.org/Congress
Granted, these changes are highly ambitious, but what's the alternative? Are we just going to accept today's politics of personal destruction, today's politics of reducing critical problems to simple-minded slogans?
Fortunately, these changes are feasible if they start at the local level, in cities where voters can use referendums to modify their elections. The National Civic Review's next issue will make a case to civic leaders in troubled cities that they need to organize their city councils along the above lines. If just a handful of cities take that advice, and their councils then negotiate sensible solutions to long-festering problems, citizens across the country might demand that their cities adopt a similar process. If those campaigns succeeded, voters might then mobilize to make the same changes in their state capitols.
In time, if enough Americans see that we can organize elections so that lawmakers will resolve major problems rather than fight over them, the majority of us might vote out of office any members of Congress who refused to adopt that election method for themselves.
A long road, but until we start down this path, our lawmakers will prefer blasting their opponents to resolving our gravest problems. To restore civility in our political life and to reverse our country's decline, we have to design our elections for that purpose.