How to Make Americans Care About Money Corrupting Politics
A walk across New Hampshire showed that citizens don't just
hate the current system—they're willing to act. The trick is creating a
true grassroots movement.
As we started the 185-mile trek from Dixville Notch to Nashua, there were certain things that I knew.
I knew that our system of government had become corrupt. That the system—not
necessarily any individuals, but all the individuals together—had been
contorted into a shape that makes it impossible for government to
address even the most fundamental and important issues sensibly.
I knew this in the way that any academic knows anything:
I had studied it, across history and in its current form. I had seen
numbers that captured its contours. I had spoken to people who had
participated in it, both now and before it had metastasized. I knew it
and believed it, and believed passionately that we have to find a way to
bring more people into a movement to end it.
For seven years, I’ve been speaking about it. In
lectures across the country and across the world, some small, some very
large, I’ve been developing a way to explain it, using slides and
stories that aim to bring people of all sorts to this view: that this
corruption may not be the most important issue. But it is the first
issue that we, as a nation, have to solve. And that until we solve it,
we will solve nothing else, sensibly.
Yet throughout these years, a nagging truth has haunted
me: Americans just don’t seem to care that much. Even though 96 percent
of America believes it is “important” to “reduce the influence of money
in our politics,” the reality, as any political pundit will tell you, is
that it is almost impossible to translate that belief into any
meaningful political action.
This puzzle only increased for me over the first few days of the walk, a march across the Granite State that we were calling the New Hampshire Rebellion.
People knew who we were. New Hampshire is a small state with a limited
media market. The one major television station had covered our walk
extensively. We were on a few popular radio shows. We’d done a good job
promoting the walk on the web.
So as we walked, the people of New Hampshire
reacted—wildly. They honked their horns, they came out in their pajamas,
a woman painted a sign and put it on the front of her lawn. When we met
them—at stores, on the street, or going door to door—they almost
screamed their frustration with the current system. Indeed, one person
did scream. Many were overjoyed that “someone was trying to do something
about this.” Many remembered fondly the woman who had inspired us,
Doris Haddock, aka “Granny D,” who 15 years before had begun a 13-month
walk from Los Angeles to Washington with a single sign on her chest:
“Campaign Finance Reform.” They were eager to see the movement that she
started continue.
So why is it that face to face, people can be so
passionate about this issue, but forget it in the voting booth? What
would lead them to honk their horns, lean their bodies out from their
cars, stop, to give their thumbs up, chant as we walked, and yet allow
them to give politicians a free pass?
As I walked more, and thought about this apparent
contradiction a lot more, a second number from that same poll became
increasingly salient: While 96 percent of Americans do believe it
important to reduce the influence of money in politics, 91 percent
believe it is essentially not possible. It's like flying as Superman
does, or traveling through time as starships in Star Trek did,
or curing the incurable disease: Of course we all want that, but we’re
mature, we’re adults, we know what we can’t have, and so we don’t waste
our time pushing for things we can’t have. We are resigned, as a people,
to the corruption of this government. We have learned to accept a fate
that seems unavoidable.
But here’s the obvious fact: We may not be able to fly like Superman or travel like the Starship Enterprise, but we actually can end
the system of corruption that has destroyed the capacity of our
government to govern. Even without a constitutional amendment to deal
with the mess that Citizens United created, we can radically
change the economy of influence inside Washington, and undermine the
economy of corruption that has overtaken it. A single statute could
remake D.C., if only we could build the political pressure to force
Washington to adopt it.
For political pressure comes in a currency that the
people still hold: the vote. And a very small number of votes in New
Hampshire could well set the direction of the 2016 presidential
campaign. If just 50,000 New Hampshirites made this issue central—if
they weaved a briar patch throughout the state, making it impossible for
any presidential hopeful to avoid answering this single question: How are YOU going to end the system of corruption in D.C.?—then
New Hampshire could create the conditions for a leader to take this
issue on, credibly. And if a candidate could make reform credible—if she
could somehow convince the voters that unlike every president promising
change before, this time, this will be different—then that candidate
could begin to thaw the enormous potential political energy frozen in an
issue that 96 percent of America believes must be solved.
That tantalizing hope is what our walk seemed to
trigger. We weren’t politicians promising “CHANGE.” We were ordinary
citizens from across the country, putting our feet first. As Granny D
had, we were presenting a case in a respectful if physically demanding
way. People saw us. They heard us. And they began to echo us, as they
knew again the reform that we as a nation must achieve.
And here is where I learned the most important lesson of this walk: the lesson of the we, not the one.
What was striking about Granny D was this lone and aged
soul walking across a country for a cause. Of course, people joined her
along the way for at least part of the walk. But the image that survives
is of a single soul suffering an incredible burden to make a critically
important point.
Our walk was not about a person. It was about a team.
Though when I announced the plan to walk across New Hampshire, from
north to south, in January, I was not certain, or even confident, that
anyone would join me, in fact hundreds did for part of the way and just
about twenty did for the full 185 miles.
As we did this, we did this. We did it
together. The days were filled with conversations that bound us forever.
As soldiers in a platoon (and three of our walkers were former
soldiers), we knew our purpose, and showed our resolve, through freezing
rain and heavy snow, across some of the most beautiful mountains in
America. And through the calm but determined action of walking in a
physically demanding context, we gave others a reason to listen, and
gave at least some the inspiration that dedication rightly evokes.
Granny D walked 3,200 miles. It took her 13 months.
Together, we walked 6,400 miles. It took us two weeks. And if we imagine
3,200 miles as a unit of measurement—call it one “GD”—then there may be
a way that this model of activism could scale.
Now imagine that we multiply the teams of walkers—say 16
walkers, and four support staff, per unit. And imagine we multiply the
routes, synchronizing each so that they all end up at the same
place—Concord, Des Moines, Columbia—at the same time. Anyone could join
the walk along the way, but each unit would commit to walking the full
distance within an allotted time.
As we increase the number of teams walking, we would
increase the number of “GDs” walked in the name of reform. Let’s say
2,016 GDs by 2016. All across the country, but especially in the early
primary states, these walkers would raise awareness of this cause, and
evince a movement much more powerful than the clicktivism of online
organizing. And rather than “the top down tendencies of online political
organizing” that TechPresident’s Micah Sifry recently lamented,
these literal feet on the ground are units of activism that will
convince other citizens of the seriousness and commitment this movement
can inspire.
And then maybe it will trigger the same kind of
recognition that we saw again and again in New Hampshire—a look of hope
and surprise, as one citizen shows another that maybe, just this once,
the game could be changed. That we still have that power, at least if
thousands of us show them the right determination.
Twenty miles into the walk, you feel that determination.
A hundred miles into the walk, you can’t help but show it. And 185
miles later, there’s the seed of an issue planted in New Hampshire,
which with the right care, may finally allow this democracy to grow.
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