One Way Forward

Spring comes in waves. At first, unrecognizably. And then, unavoidably. And when it finally fully comes, we wake up.

We, the People. The sovereign. We tumble out of the stupor that is our sleep and exercise a power that is ours exclusively. We might exercise it well. Many think we would exercise it poorly. So when its first hint becomes clear, we should take steps to assure that we will exercise it as well as we can.

The first step is to name it, this, our power. For it is different from the ordinary power that gets fought over in the context of ordinary politics. This is the thing that the commentators miss. They see a fight between the Right and the Left. That is the game, and the frame, they understand. There was Clinton. His side got defeated (sort of) by George Bush. Then his side got defeated (or so we thought) by Barack Obama. Left versus Right versus Left versus Right, fighting for the control of government and of government policy. And even when there’s a fight that doesn’t actually happen in D.C.—the Tea Party or the Occupy Wall Street movement—the chattering classes squeeze that battle into a Left/Right fight within Washington. The Tea Party, the insiders insist, is just a mobilizing (and very effective) whip for the Republicans, the Occupiers still a mere hope for the Democrats. As if politics is only ever about the normal battle to determine which side wins control of an existing government.

But as well as the Left side and the Right side, there is an inside and an outside. There are those inside normal government (and their wannabes), who work to direct government policy or at least control government power. And there are those outside normal government, who want nothing of normal government save that it does its job and otherwise “leaves us alone.”

The outside spends most of its time ignoring the inside. Maybe once every four years it takes notice. Maybe in a catastrophe, or when some celebration rises above the ratings of
60 Minutes.
But until then, the outside just wants to live its life. It wants to drive across a bridge without worrying about the engineering. It wants to believe that our kids are safe and that public education works. It wants to climb aboard an airplane without wondering whether the FAA is competent. It wants to know that there is a government that is at least trying to do what’s best for this nation. The outside wants to trust. It wants to trust that there’s an inside that’s at least competent.

The outside is us. It is the we who have other lives. The we who want to do different things. The we who find basketball or hockey more interesting than congressional politics. Or who believe that an afternoon helping at a homeless shelter or a morning at our church is a better use of our time than going door to door for a candidate for Congress. We, the outside, live our life (almost) never even thinking about this thing we call government—even though, for many of us, this thing called government is the single largest financial expenditure that we make every year.
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But then something happens, and we can’t ignore the inside anymore. And then we start to wake up. Limbs twitch. Eyes open, ever so slightly. An arm moves, then a leg. And a lumbering and clumsy giant finally comes awake.

In our time, I mark the first such twitch in 1998. The insiders were obsessed with whether the president had had an affair with an intern, and then whether he had lied about it. The outsiders were mainly bemused. But after four years of a frenetic special prosecution, spending millions to suss “The Truth” about the integrity of the president, it became clear that our Congress was actually going to invoke the mechanism of impeachment—only twice credibly threatened in the history of the nation—to address this pathetic question. By then, most of us were simply disgusted. Not just with the president but, more important, with a system that had lost all sense of proportion. “Seriously,” we asked, “
this
is the number-one problem facing America?”

Two software developers from Berkeley, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, were moved to do something about it. What they did followed directly from the background that they had: They started an e-mail list. Because of an innovation in their list technology, they were able to collect the names of the people to whom the e-mail was forwarded. That meant they could track its growth. On the first day, there were a couple hundred followers. The second day, a couple thousand. By the third day there were more than twenty-five thousand. More than a hundred thousand by the fourth. Boyd thought the growth “staggering.” And soon a movement—
MoveOn.org
—became a cross-partisan player and the only
adult
on the field, demanding that Congress censure the president and get back to its work. Its real work. The work of a republic, not the game of persecuting a hopelessly flawed, if genius, president.

In that first flicker of life, that first twitch of this sleeping giant, we can see everything in the stories that would follow. The leaders didn’t create any energy; they tapped into it. They were able to tap into it because new technology made it insanely easy to do so. That technology leveraged a passion that was genuine—and cross-partisan. Not just the energy to click and send but also the energy to show up and organize. (Two weeks after MoveOn launched, the team asked for volunteers to “set up meetings with their member of Congress.” The response was “dramatic.” Within forty-eight hours, hundreds of volunteers had shown up at more than three hundred meetings.) At every step, the insiders were convinced that the outsiders were mistaken, until the insight of the outsiders became conventional wisdom for the insiders. As Wes Boyd recounted in an interview for this book,

But, of course, volunteers became the lifeblood of this new genre of political movement. They constituted the energy in “crowdsourced” politics, and they defined its power.

MoveOn’s wave has repeated itself again and again in the decade or so since. Not just on the tech-enabled Left but also on the traditional Left (Obama) and then on the Right (the Tea Party), then on the Gen X/millennial Left (Occupy Wall Street), and now in the unaligned Internet (the Wikipedia-driven anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign). Each time, the pattern has been the same: A surprising and unpredicted “open-source” energy, enabled by cheap and ubiquitous technology, shows us a part of us, We, the People, that conventional politics had forgotten or thought lost. One movement sets the expectations for the next. The character of each sets the framework of legitimacy overall.
Organic
becomes more significant than
organized.
Authentic
always beats
professional.
We begin to celebrate the reality TV in politics, so long as we actually believe it is reality and not just Astroturf.

The most recent wave, the one that blocked SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act) on January 18, may be the most interesting. The copyright industries had exercised their enormous political influence to get Congress to consider legislation to radically increase their power to invoke the courts to block sites said to engage in “piracy.” The bill was roundly attacked by Internet companies and academics, but Hollywood had the express commitment of enough in Congress to all but guarantee its passage.

Then came the Internet outsiders: An extraordinary movement of Internet activists began to rally the Net to oppose SOPA and PIPA. An unprecedented Internet blackout, led by Wikipedia, brought tens of thousands to their virtual feet. Capitol Hill was flooded with calls and e-mails. Never had the Twitterverse sounded so angry.

And support for the bill then crumbled. Leaders from both political parties began to signal their retreat. For the first time ever, the Hollywood lobbyists had been stopped by a grassroots, Internet-based open-source movement. A giant had awakened. It had flexed a digital muscle. Washington responded.  

These waves have flowed in a direction. They speak to a potential that if nurtured could become real. For we outsiders—call us “citizens”—still have the authority over the insiders—call them “politicians.” At least if we can find again a way to speak. And then to act.

The aim of this short book is to point. It is to offer one way forward. I don’t speak as a leader of any part of these movements. But movements today are movements without leaders. They are movements of ideas mixed with passion. And so I offer these ideas, mixed with my own passion, not as a politician or as a politician wannabe but as a citizen, and a committed outsider, who wants a citizen politics to have an important and lasting effect on this Republic. Again.

I have enormous respect for (at least some) politicians. I don’t diminish their sacrifice at all.

But it is time that we recognize a politics that doesn’t depend upon them. And time that we do something useful with it.

On a sunny Saturday in February 2011, I walked into the Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, to attend my first Tea Party (Patriots) conference. I’m not a Tea Partier—I don’t support the substantive vision of most within that movement—but I was fascinated by the Tea Party’s success in the previous midterm elections (Republicans gained sixty-three seats in the House and six seats in the Senate, as well as seven hundred seats in state legislatures and six governorships),
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and I wanted to understand something more about its power.

Though the movement had been brewing long before, the Tea Party got launched on February 19, 2009, when, on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli launched into a rant about President Obama’s mortgage assistance program. He ended the rant with a call: “It’s time,” he said, “for another Tea Party.”

The rant was quickly posted to YouTube, and that link was shared broadly on Twitter. Thousands responded. Grassroots events were organized across the country. Less than two months later, on April 15, 2009 (Tax Day), an astonishing 1.2 million people attended more than 850 Tea Party events across the country. As Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, cofounders of the Tea Party Patriots, put it in their upcoming book,
Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution,
“The first American Revolution may have begun with a gunshot, but the second American Revolution began with a hashtag.”
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