Political Philosophy

If you're going to expend personal effort towards politics, start at City level. If you can, focus on your County next. If you've done what you can there, pay attention to State politics. If you have nothing better to do, pay attention to Federal politics. Why? 

1. Local Matters More: Don't misunderstand, it's not that Federal politics don't matter. They do. Just not as much. Presidents and Congress don't have much authority over student/teacher ratios in local schools, how the Police Department uses it's budget, or whether or not that pothole on your street gets fixed this year. Local politics affect your life much more immediately.

2. Effort: You can affect greater change with less effort by focusing locally. Case in point: the difference in votes between the winning candidate and the losing candidate for my  district's City Council seat in the last election was 157 votes. That means that a coalition of as few as 400 people could dramatically affect the outcome of that race. A coalition of 4000 voters would be large enough to control the outcome of every single elected office in the city. That's achievable for people like you and me. Depending on your party, your entire state might not even warrant a visit from a Presidential candidate because the outcome is already determined before the race even begins. 

3. Money: The amount of money it takes to reach out to the voters in an entire county can be raised by normal working families in that county. That same amount of money wouldn't fund a single ad buy in a competetive race for a Federal Senate seat.

4. Policy:  Local government is much more agile than the federal government. We can implement new policy more quicly, measure outcomes more accurately, and change our minds more easily. Policy that's proven in one place can easily spread to other places, whereas the contagion of bad policy is much more easy to contain. Not so with Federal policy. Change takes a LOT more time and the results of poor choices are more difficult to fix.

5. The Bench: A young person that serves on a City or County Commission can gain experience on how local government works. This can prepare them for being effective in City Council or on the School Board. That is great preparation for serving as a  County Commissioner or Mayor. All that experience at the local level is what we need in our State Representatives. Those serving in State Government then have the experience necessary for becoming out Governors and Representatives in Congress. But if we haven't built that bench from the ground up, how can we expect to have reasonable candidates for those Federal positions? How can we expect them to understand what's needed here if they've never learned what it takes to govern here?

Many people tend to think about politics in the context of politicians, or the personalities that get elected. And why not, that's what we see on television–a carefully curated public performance. But this largely fooling stage play has very little to do with governance. It's all about fundraising. Let's not get sucked into the stage craft.

The job of the local political party is not simply to get people from their team elected. It's certainly not for the purpose of playing political theater. Rather, it is to shape and influence the policy that those individuals will implement once they are in office–and to replace them with someone else if they fail to do so. If the party has sufficient influence (just a fancy word for power), the elected official will understand that they can't fundraise their way out of the hole created by bucking the desires of their party. 

This leads me to a very important corrolary: Power is built through coalitions of voters. Right now these coalitions are largely influenced by name regognition (personality), and the exploitation of wedge issues (abortion, guns, etc.). It doesn't have to be that way. We are capable of building coalitions of voters around policy goals. For example a coalition of voters could choose to focus on decreasing the student/teacher ratio to no more than 15:1, increasing the inventory of housing units by 10,000 in two years, and creating a new department on the city level that provides 1:1 case management for all students through High School in need of social services of any kind. If the coalition of voters is big enough, elected officials will have no choice but to get in line behind the agenda.

Let's just get this out on the table right away: registering as an Independent is pointless. We established that the point of political activism is to wield sufficient power to affect policy. You simply cannot do that as an Independent. It might feel cathartic to thumb our nose at the system, but the only real result is a mis-shapen nose. So, where is a powerful coalition of voters going to come from? The State and Federal Party is too far from the action to do much good. Activist groups are too small and focused on niche issues. Religious institutions are too fractured to influence enough of the community. This leaves one organization left that's uniquely poised to make the biggest impact on local policy: the County-level Political Party. Period. If you're still not convinced, consider this: political parties alone have the legal backing of the State to play in the organized political space. In the political system that we have in Pueblo right now, there are only two parties of relavence: Democrats and Republicans. That could change, but that's the way it is right now. 

So, what, practically, does all of this mean for the average voter like you and me? What do we need to do?

1. Join a Party. Registering as an independent in Colorado has only one advantage: you get to vote in whichever primary you want. That's it. Neither Party is perfect, we all know that. But if you're not involved in a party, you're not exercising any influence over local politics outside of your one vote, and that's not much. If you stupidly rich, this doesn't apply to you because you can afford to buy influence in ways I can't, but I'm not talking to you anyway, so feel free to ignore me. If, like me, you're not stupidly rich, getting involved in the County Party is your next best option.

2. Get involved in that Party. Like we said before, no Party is perfect. But you can't make it better by shaking your head on the sidelines. Get in the game. I'm a Democrat so I'll tell you how to get involved here. The first thing to do is simply to show up at the monthly executive committee meetings. These are open to all registered Democrats. So, change your registration status if you have to and start coming. All kinds of opportunities will flow from that. There's lots of other ways as well, but that's the easiest.

3. Donate locally first. Before you send money to any other party organization, candidate, or cause, max out your donation to your County Political Party. Why? The State and Federal PAC's and Parties will not be helping with our next Mayoral race, City Council seat, or Board of Ed position. They just won't. If we have too much money to spend on the local level, we can always send it up the chain, but it rarely goes the other way without strings attached. We can't hire locally, train locally, or organize locally without local money. No one is surprised to find out that the State doesn't really understand very well what the local Party needs. But if we don't donate locally first, we have no right to complain.

4. Policy is priority. When you do talk to your fellow Party-goers, drive the conversation back to policy constantly. You will notice that we are quick to talk about the horse-race, and slow to talk about what to do when we win. Focusing on policy takes discipline and we're all pretty out of shape.

In my experience good organizations break down when they try to accomplish too much. Lasting change comes in increments, and slowly. A political party can only do so much in a finite period of time. Because of this, I believe that it's important to push our leaders to focus their efforts on narrow sets of specific, actionable policies within a finite period of time. 

This is difficult, of course, because we all have a cause we think is most important. But we have to figure out how to focus our efforts more narrowly. Practically, this means we need to choose an actionable goal, set a timeline for achieving it, drive it home to a finish, celebrate the win, and then shift to a new priority. 

At this point it's worth remembering that a coalition of voters does not need to include everyone in order to be effective. It just needs a critical mass. As a Democrat, I enjoy the fact that we draw support from a wide variety of faiths, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, and education levels. But that doesn't mean that we need an infinitely large tent to get the job done. 

We would probably be more wise to focus on 4-year policy goals, and then recruit agressively until we reach a specific number of members in each precinct of the county. The mistake would be to think that we need to isolate our attention on one or two particular sub-groups of society with tactics akin to coaxing a kid into a van with candy. Even if it works, it's not a good look.

The most powerful force in the world is agreement. Big and historic things happen in the world when large numbers of people find something they agree on. It is a creative force—it is gravity. It cannot be refused or ignored or silenced. When we agree on something, the world changes. It has no other choice.

Disagreement, on the other hand, is weak. It is a fickle force that can be manipulated by the powerful or the wealthy. It can be shaped to be one thing on Monday and an entirely different thing on Tuesday. It is easy, cathartic, and enraging, and it accomplishes very little. 

Disagreement lights things on fire. Agreement builds things. Finding agreement takes more patience, more energy, and more intelligence, but it's worth the work.

We shouldn't expect the solutions to our problems to be simple. Trite, overly-simplistic talking points may help silence an opponent for a moment, but they are rarely the stuff of long-term solutions. If the goal is good policy, we MUST train ourselves to think about and address complicated problems.

This also means that we need our leaders and electeds to be complex thinkers and excellent communicators. Anything less and we get nothing but short-cuts, and band-aids. Most of what passes for legislation on the city/county level are short-cuts and band-aids... and construction projects. Everybody likes construction projects.

I suppose it goes without saying, but this is one of the reasons we need an excellent education system. If all we manage to teach our kids by the end of High School is to recognize words in order, and perform remedial math, we've failed. We need graduates that have become accomstomed to wrestling with complex problems, questioning their own assumptions, and steering clear of poor argumentation. An uneducated population is an easy target for manipulation.

I believe that the most important beneficiary of local policy should be the working family. Every policy, every project should have to answer the question: how is this going to benefit our working families. Are we thinking about a new housing development? Great, how many of the units are affordable for our average working family? New public works project? I love those. How will it be utilized by working families? New tax policy? No problem. But what's the cost/benefit break-down for our working families? Why the laser-focus on working families? Here's a few reasons:

1. They are the foundation of the local economy. They build, cook, grow, design, clean, teach, deliver, and repair everything necessary for a community to thrive. We can survive without the wealthy. We will always have the poor. But we don't last a week without our working families.

2. The gains of working families are re-invested in our community. Conversely, the wealthier a family gets, the more of their money is spent outside the community. Vacations, second homes, exotic cars, investment accounts... none of these things benefit our local economy. If a person does not shop in our stores, buy cars from our dealerships, eat in our restaurants, or send their kids to our schools, their contribution to our economy is minimal. Whatever money they extract from the community is largely exported. Therefore, our policy need not benefit them. I'm not suggesting that our policy should antagonize the wealthy. I'm mearly saying that any policy that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class family is fundamentally a mistake.

3. Stable working families stabilize the community. If the majority of our families have safe housing, quality education/child care, consistent nutrition, reliable transportation, access to health care, and has enough left over to save, we will see the results in the community. Drug use goes down, crime goes down, civic participation goes up, neighborhoods are cleaner, education outcomes are better, and demands on services are lighter. Stable families produce more stable families. Conversely, generational poverty is exceedingly difficult to turn around. And the impacts of generational poverty on the neighborhoods are obvious.

4. There are a lot of them! Any policy that brings a little more stability or advantage to a working family is going to naturally serve the majority of the community. This creates a positive feed-back loop in the economy. Would we like to see a more vibrant downtown with more shops and entertainment? Then we need more families with discretionary income to spend. Who needs a new restaurant if there aren't families that have the time or money to eat there? What good is it to host a big concert downtown if our average working family is juggling two to three part time jobs for each adult with no paid time off or savings?

5. The family part is important simply because we need people to replace us when we're dead. If families can't thrive in our community, the community atrophies. Unless a city can thrive on tourism or retirement alone (and Pueblo is not that kind of city), we need our kids to build on what we've started. 

If we want cleaner streets, less crime, better schools, and a brighter future, it all comes down to the health and well-being of our working families. Everything rides on their well-being. If we protect them, everyone benefits. If we let them suffer, everyone suffers.