Towards a Non-Partisan, Issue-Centered, Outcome-Oriented Political Discourse System for America

[The body of this piece was uploaded on election eve before the outcome began to take shape. Trump's name was added next day. It could have been Clinton's - makes no difference!]

Finally it’s over. The presidential election of 2016 is history. Big sigh of relief. But not for long, because voter disgust with both candidates is so widespread that the aftermath of the election may be as tumultuous as the run-up to it.

Well, here's how it turned out. Added Nov 9. But for our purposes here, it matters not who won.

That said, America on November 9 will have at least a brief moment to pause and reflect on what’s gone so horrendously wrong with our rigged and money-driven system of political discourse and then ask how (and if) what’s broken can be fixed.

It's amazing that no one is asking this question. No one. Obsessed with partisan concerns, the shrewdest political heads in America have lost sight of both the cause and the remedy for our political ills. 

So it's time to pull our heads out of the sand, ask this critical question, answer it correctly, and then find ways to create a political discourse system that gets governments working again.

The first step towards the restoration of functionality to American politics is general agreement on the nature of our existing political discourse system and why it is failing us so disastrously at local, state and national levels.

The following nine points are my best effort at a non-partisan account of this system and its shortcomings.

1. Our existing political discourse system is election-centered. Its focus at all levels of government is on politicians, political campaigns and election outcomes. It is a system of news and commentary, conventions and debates, political polls, and election-time political advertising.

2. From a formal standpoint, this system is media-based, with network and cable TV still the dominant media for broadcasting the interactions of candidates and voters despite the rise of the Internet. That said, the top-down character of this system, which is owned by a handful of media corporations, is being challenged by the bottom-up citizen use of social media like Twitter and Facebook.

3. Polls confirm that Americans have lost faith and trust in the existing system because it leaves them voiceless in the government decisions that affect their lives. They are aware that citizen input has been displaced by the televised political attack ads that have skewed and determined American election outcomes at local, state and national levels since the advent of network TV in the 1960’s.

4. Political attack ads weaken political discourse in three distinct ways. They alienate voters from government, they polarize voters into hostile extremes of right and left and - most important - they deprive citizens of their right to an informed voice in the political and government decisions that affect their lives.

5. The existing election-centered system is financially underwritten by negative political advertising airing on commercial television. Attack ads are a profit center for the stations that air them. These ads now dominate news coverage of politics in three ways: in news stories about the billions of dollars raised by candidates for office, in news stories about the actual content of attack ads and in news stories about resulting and escalating personal attacks of candidates on each other.

6. To pay for political attack ads, incumbents must to spend up to 25% of their tax-payer paid work week raising money.

7.  America’s election-centered political discourse system primarily serves the financial and political interests of three groups: incumbents and political parties, “Big Money” political donors and the owners of TV networks.

8. Decades of campaign finance reform efforts have failed utterly to restore functionality to this broken system.

9. This system, for all its flaws, is indispensable to government. At this critical juncture in its history, however, America urgently needs political discourse that listens to the people and uses citizen input to get governments working again at local, state and national levels.

If these nine points strike a chord, let's move on to how to America can restore functionality to its political discourse.

FIRST STEPS:

1. Do not attempt to fix the existing election-centered political discourse system. This market-driven system will fix itself in time as Americans abandon it in favor of a political discourse system that listens to them and values their input in the search to understand and solve any and all of the problems that confront communities of any size.

2. Instead, create compelling alternatives to the existing system, systems that do precisely what the existing election system is not doing. Create a political discourse system that depolarizes us. One that get us listening to each other. Create an issue-centered, problem-solving, citizen-participatory political discourse system that gives citizens a direct, ongoing and informed voice in the political decisions that affect their lives.

3. Significantly, anyone - any individual, institution or medium - can design such a system, and can do so at local, state and national levels. The possibilities are unlimited. High school students can create one. What follows are my personal desiderata for an issue-centered political discourse system.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

4. Let this issue centered system focus on matters of concern to all members of a given community: on the definition and solution of the most intractable problems and the discovery and implementation of the most promising opportunities.

5. Let it have two features in common with our election-centered system: let it be media-based and voter driven.  America's Choice shows how prime-time, voter-driven television can help communities solve problems and realize opportunities. It is modeled on voter-driven reality TV shows like American Idol and The Voice.

6. Let it be of, by and for the American people. Let it give all Americans an ongoing and informed voice in the political and governmental decisions that affect their lives.

7. Let it be disseminated via a mediating media dedicated itself to making citizens and governments responsive and accountable to each other in shaping the best futures of their communities.

8. Let it be as scrupulously and recognizably rule-governed as the televised sports contests in which Americans the trust and confidence that is absent from our election-driven political discourse system.

9. Let the rules that govern this system create environments in which participants and spectators alike are rewarded for talking with each other as opposed to talking about each other.

10. Let it be scalable in ways that make it familiar to all Americans in all three communities - local, state and national - of which every American is a member.

11. Let its programs and formats, published and aired in all media, be ongoing, prime time, front page and year-round.

FINANCE AND GOVERNANCE

12. Let it be sufficiently compelling and transformative (as TV executives like to say) to effectively tap the Market of the Whole of all members of a given community.

13. Let this system be substantially but by no means entirely market driven in order to attract advertisers eager to tap the markets it serves: the Market of the Whole of all members of a given community.

14. Let its transformative content strive to depolarize and find common ground between groups that our existing election-driven system has tended to polarize: young and old, rich and poor, male and female, religious and atheist, white and black, gay and straight, employed and unemployed, immigrant and native-born, educated and uneducated.

15. Let this system give media maximum freedom to create programs and formats that meet a given medium’s target audience.

16. Let its voter-driven outcomes be purely advisory and non-binding to elected leaders.

17. Let the governance of this system be sufficiently transparent, rigorous and diverse to keep it from being co-opted by any single entity or group of entities.


That’s it for now. I have return to my day job. Whatever the merits of these ideas, America needs something entirely new – better, smarter ways of doing politics and government - than what it has now. The nation's future is at stake. Thanks for reading. Feedback appreciated.

(Revised October 10, 2016) How many of Chicago's 2.7 million residents have ever heard of Strengthening Chicago's Youth (SCY)? Perhaps 100,000 at most. That's a big number, but its small when you realize that it's also telling us that only one out every 27 Chicagoans has heard of SCY. If you're among that huge number, you have heard of Lurie Children's Hospital, SCY's parent organization. So why is SCY important? In recent years its small but energetic staff has convened hundreds of government, community and non-profit organizations in an ongoing series of quarterly meetings that have done more to advance citywide understanding and solutions to Chicago's violence problem than any other actual or virtual platform I can think of.

Today, for instance, SCY will host a three-hour meeting on the following topic:

Looking at this topic, I wondered when Chicago will get around to talking about Citywide lessons to be learned about Sharing Data for Violence Prevention. We'll get to that. But first, here are the four speakers who will discuss the three projects features in today's meeting, with links to their websites.

Like me, you may not have heard of these four speakers. I'll report on their presentations today in a subsequent post. For now, I want to stress that SCY's events routinely feature speakers who say things that are absolutely essential in Chicago's search to end violence. To learn about and attend future SCY events, just join the SCY email list.

Problem is, all too few Chicagoans get to hear speakers like these. That's because Chicago's civic discourse system is NOT structured to provide citizens with the information they need to end violence in their neighborhoods. News coverage of Chicago's efforts to end violence consists for the most part of editorial blaming of city officials for something gone wrong or of news reports on city leaders pointing fingers at each other. This practice, continued year in and year out, only sows and nurtures seeds of mistrust and alienation from government.

Sadly, what passes for civic discourse in Chicago is for the most part an insider affair designed to engage a tiny group well-heeled and well-connected insiders willing to pay $30 or $40 to hear a public official talk about violence at a City Club of Chicago event or one sponsored by Crain's or Chicago Tribune event. Never do these 'civic' events air radio or TV where all 2.7 Chicagoans might hear them. The exception, of course is the televised election-time debates during which the search for solutions is almost entirely displaced in favor of name-calling and blame-gaming..

Over time this endless soap opera has turned hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans into passive spectators of a political farce that has left them voiceless in the citywide search for solutions to violence here. Chicago's children - potentially the city's most crucial asset in coming to terms with gun, gang, police and youth violence - come of age in this cynical, sorry spectacle. As Mary Mitchell recently noted her piece in the Chicago Sun-Times on the numbing effect of violence on the young, "74 percent of youth [in urban communities] have witnessed a shooting". 

Everyone, including our mayors and police chiefs, gives lip service to idea that Chicago's violence will never be solved without broad community support. But how can Chicago generate that support in climate of universal mistrust and fear? Today's SCY session could easily reach a citywide audience of some 30,000 viewers if only it were telecast citywide on Chicago Access Network TV.  So it's puzzling that SCY has yet to make productive use of this low-cost and effective resource.

With TV in mind, let's take a quick look at Chicago's mainstream TV station Channels 2, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 12. When we do, it's not hard to see how dynamic, prime-time public forums that are unshakably committed to reducing violence and to listening to all Chicagoans would instantly attract huge audiences. Imagine an ongoing, citywide, citizen-participatory search citywide search for solutions to violence, airing prime time Sunday evenings for several months. These public forums would be radically different from anything Chicagoans (or Americans) have ever seen on TV. Their search for solutions would be as exciting as the Cubs' quest for the World Series.

The time is fast approaching when TV stations and newspapers will open their eyes and realize how much money they can make by creating these dynamic public forums. Money. Money often breeds corruption. But it doesn't have to be that way.

In coming posts, we'll show why we're convinced that media's wisest and most profitable approach to politics will be to with dialogic public forums that make citizens and governments responsive and accountable - truthful - with each other in the search to solve systemic problems like violence. Why so? Just think back to last November and the release of the Laquan McDonald video and ask yourself how things have changed since then. That video - its release to the public - opened a new era in Chicago. It gave us Black Lives Matter and a whole focus on police/community relations. It opened an era that will be driven by technological revelations coming from police dashcams, bodycams and cell phone videos. And driven also by the DNA evidence that's reversed scores of wrongful criminal convictions. In politics, fact-checking sites are on the rise. Then there's the Edward Snowdon and Wikileaks revelations that have opened huge windows into government matters formerly hidden from Americans. Sooner or later, the slow-motion instant replays that add credibility to refereeing in sports telecasts are bound to find their way into a system of political discourse that has lost credibility at all levels of government in America.

All told, it's by judicious use of these and many other modern interactive communications technologies that Chicagoans and City Hall, working together as never before in Chicago history, will perforce have to depend on each other in deciding how Chicago can best run itself. We have entered the Era of Interdependence. Over a hundred years ago. Chicago's great city planner Daniel Burnham designed a physical infrastructure. If Burnham were with us today, he would see the development of a public communications infrastructure, accessible to all Chicagoans, as best and only way for Chicago to shape its future in an age of electronic communications.

Greetings Conference participants and thanks for visiting. Click here for my Future of Chicago piece. This six minute read distills 30 years of Civic Media work. If it strikes a chord, let's talk.

WILL THE CONFERENCE POINT TO A TURNING POINT OR LEAVE CHICAGO AT ITS TIPPING POINT?

Here are two Civic Media projects that are relevant today:

• Created in 2015 for the Illinois Violence Prevention Task Force: this "Full Story" proposal enables Chicago's media to supply not some but all Chicagoans,with the information, resources and support they need in order to effectively address youth, gun and gang violence in their neighborhoods. It is endorsed by 8th District House Representative La Shawn K. Ford and by then-Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health Larmar Hasbrouck.  
• This 3,000 word piece, "The Chicago Tribune’s “New Plan of Chicago”: What Would Daniel Burnham Say?" details the workings of a fully functional Civic Media. It describes this media as an Information Age Infrastructure that embodies and empowers that same civic spirit that Daniel Burnham wrote about and realized in the physical and architectural infrastructure that he created for Chicagoans to enjoy and cherish today.

The Civic Media archive is here. A word of caution. Entering this site is a little like entering a crowded attic packed with all kinds of things, old and new, public and personal. But if you browse it, you’ll soon find items of interest to anyone who’s open to the idea that Chicago’s mainstream, social and community media have constructive roles to play in getting Chicago (and Illinois and America) out of the media-driven mess we’re in now. Thanks fort taking a look.