In our democracy, extremist candidates can win. And once they start winning, they can keep winning.

Let’s look at one example. Let’s take the example of Lou Gohmert in Texas, a socially-ultra conservative. He recently voted against a bill intended to promote the recruitment of women scientists. He said:

“women were created for one thing and one thing alone,” … “Women are beautiful creatures, no doubt about that. We marry them, we look after them, we provide for them and we love them, but that does not mean they are the same as us. It is the job of a woman to stay at home, to maintain the household, to bear children and look after them after they’re born. Nowhere in the scriptures does it say that women should be chasing after fancy titles and knowledge. The only knowledge they need is the one we men allow them to have.”

One of his opponents was Sam Winston. From an article in November:

Winston, 57, of Lufkin, said Gohmert has busied himself with self-promotion on television and radio for the past decade. Gohmert has gone beyond ineffectiveness, Winston said, he’s been a detriment to Texas and East Texas.

“Washington D.C. is in gridlock,” Winston said. “It’s a circus up there and he’s one of the main clowns.”

He lost in the Republican primary in March. Why does this happen? Gohmert got 82% of the vote, 96,000 of $116,000. This page says Gohmert spent $367,000 while this page says Simon Winston spent only $56,000. So Winston spent about 13.2% of the money spent on this race and got almost 13.9% of the vote. Not only did Winston spend less, but he was facing Gohmert’s huge name recognition advantage from his decade in office and the “self-promotion” he accused Gohmert of.

Winston’s not an experienced politician. An experienced politician would know to spend almost everything he had on the primary. In such a one-sided district, the primary determines who wins.

My question: Do the people know all the bizarre things Gohmert says? If Winston could get his name in front of people, does he have a chance of winning? How about if he buys ads showing how extreme Gohmert is?

In our system, is Gohmert accountable for what he says and how he votes? He’s not. All that matters is campaign spending. But the real question is, if we did have accountability, would Winston have won?

Let’s find out. Please help us create it. Please add your name to our announcement list.

A woman on Yabberz posted an allegation that Bernie Sanders is a fraud. And then someone posted a link to it on LinkedIn, where I saw it.

The candidates are not frauds

No, Bernie’s not a fraud. Bernie has always felt like an outsider. He has voted very independently. He’s had pressures to maintain the status quo as well, but fewer than most. He has tried to run a very clean campaign and has done admirably. To me, the author of the article sounded very defensive, spinning everything as extreme as she could.

Hillary is not a fraud either. Hillary is pragmatic. She compromised her ethics like most in Washington feel they must do to stay in power in that she played the game of accepting huge contributions, trying to rise above the conflicts of interest. Even in the case of the bankruptcy bill, it looks to me that she did not sell out to Wall Street. Or if she did a bit in 2001, she came back from that slippery slope in 2005. But 2/5 of Democrats actually voted for the bill in 2005, and Hillary did not. On the other hand, who knows? Maybe she could safely vote against it since others were voting to pass it.

Perhaps as POTUS, she will feel the freedom to live closer to her values. But maybe not. Perhaps she’ll simply continue the game, supporting Democratic values as best she can while keeping in line with the status quo.

The real fraud is our political system

The real problem is that our political system, both our system of campaigns as well as once elected, encourages dishonesty, animosity, ethical compromise and blame. This is the serious problem, the real fraud.

Blaming candidates is part of the way the system protects itself from change. Bernie and Hillary criticize each other. Donald and Ted bicker. Republicans blame and demonize and Hillary. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell steadfastly oppose everything Obama tries to do, even refusing to consider a Supreme Court nominee, lying when they say presidents don’t nominate Supreme Court appointments in their final year. And the Democrats blame the Republicans. And all that blame keeps scrutiny away from a bad system.

When I talk to people, the blame rattling around their heads prevents them from seeing the bigger picture. In our current political system, lying, blame, intransigence and conflicts of interest are all supported. They’re part of the system. The candidates are merely adapting to it.

In my view, Bernie’s doing it the least of all.

The real solution is outside the box

The real solution is to look outside the box of politics-as-usual.

The real solution is to reduce the importance of money in politics. We need to reduce the need for money. As long as politicians are reliant on money, moneyed interests can manipulate them.

Represent.us has a good plan to remove much of the corruption from Congress. Lawrence Lessig ran on this issue, but even the Democrats silenced him, instead of embracing the issue.

Their plan is great. But even it doesn’t go far enough. We also need to remove the need for money from political campaigns. That’s where PeopleCount steps in.

Please join us. Please add your name to our mailing list.

Some people wonder; Why do people attend Trump rallies? How can they support such vitriol?

Obviously, I don’t know. I’ve neither been to one, nor have I talked to people who’ve gone, although I did read this article. But if I would attend one, it’d be to join them in indulging some base emotions.

I’ve done this before- at sporting events. Getting caught up in the suspense. Empathizing with the efforts to move the ball downfield or execute a basket. It’s fun. And it’s more fun with other people around- people shouting and yelling, elated and disappointed. Part of the fun is in the sport, but part of it is indulging and expressing emotions.

What’s really happening in a football game? Big guys wearing padding are trying to move a ball downfield. In boxing, guys are trying to knock each other out. At a concert, people make rhythmic noise to “rock out”. At a Trump rally, a guy is trying to overthrow the political establishment with yelling and bravado. That has an added edge of reality. And at all of these events, the goal is to make the fans go wild.

Politics is a game. It has rules. Where pro-football teams play for money and bragging rights, politics is played for money, power and bragging rights. We willingly put our lives, our economy, and these days even the deadly warming of the planet into the game of politics. How many millions of people did Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their buddies kill and displace in their quest for power and Cheney’s quest for wealth? They cost us trillions of dollars, too, and ignored economic problems till the economy collapsed and an adult had to take over.

Trump is just doing overtly what the Republican elite has been cultivating. Fox News took over much of it years ago, creating anger against Democrats and indignantly claiming the right to be politically incorrect. We should thank Donald Trump. By playing it so crassly, many more Republicans are seeing what they’ve been party to.

Politics ALWAYS worked when people made it work. It was never designed to keep out the troublemakers and bullies. And we’ve seen lots of problems with it over the centuries- fights, killings, corruption and political machines.

Election politics has not been about good governance for a long time. It’s not about responsible representation or accountability. It’s about generating excitement and energy among people to “fight the good fight” which means donate money and turn out in mass spectacle. It’s about winning and acquiring power.

Do you want a better game? One designed to cultivate responsibility and accountability?Join our efforts here at PeopleCount. Add your name to our announcement list and make a contribution.

After the previous letter, it took me seven days to find time to write another. This one’s a request to orient government toward political reform.

Dear President Obama,

I’ve been putting this under the subject “civil rights”. Do you know there’s not even have a “political reform” subject on the whitehouse.gov/contact form?

You say you want to transform politics, make it civil, make it work. But your site isn’t even organized for people to message you about it. This is NOT a criticism. It’s an observation. Our culture is not organized to fix its political problems.

Do you want to know the real problem with our political system? It’s the system itself. It was never designed to either truly represent people, nor for politicians to be accountable, nor to handle the problems caused by the wealthy or by political parties.

Currently, everyone in America is doing exactly what they think they should be doing with regard to politics. Some are lobbying. Some are fighting for control or using money to steal the people’s power. Many are name-calling or manipulating emotions. Many are apathetic or cynical. Given our political system, those are all appropriate!

We, the people, can’t effectively wield our power. So special interests step up to wield it. The parties have taken over.

It’s actually pretty easy to fix it. The hard part is getting through the cynicism. To start, anticipate change. Orient the government toward political reform. And call me.

For you readers, my request is the same- please add your email address to our mailing list.

In my view, America was intended to be self-governed. It was designed to give people power, which they’d wield through their representatives. But it wasn’t adequately designed, so parties quickly formed.

Politics is all made-up, a make-believe game we believe

There’s no such thing as politics. Politics isn’t a “thing”. Politics is made up of a huge set of societal conventions and rules about it plus the vast pattern of people’s political behaviors. It’s very complex. And it’s all made-up. Invented. It’s completely up to us.

Our rules and conventions help us build certain structures- patterns of behavior that we’ve named. Some of these are parties, elections, electoral votes, districts, Congress, candidate, incumbent, donation, budget, lobbyist, campaign manager, etc. After naming them, all these fuzzy behavioral patterns become “things” to us.

Support Structures

Let’s define “structure of support” as something we’ve invented that helps reinforce certain behavior patterns of society. We humans create words for certain patterns of behavior. These words of structures, things, that support behaviors. Consider all the political words in the paragraph above to be structures of support.

For instance, because we invented “campaign manager” and it’s in common usage, you can now look this up on LinkedIn or Monster.com and find jobs related to it, or recruit for such jobs.

Similarly, an “election” is a structure of support for voting. It’s on (or before) a certain election day. People assemble voting booths and hang up signs. We send everyone a sample ballot and a voting guide. There’s another “structure of support” called a “ballot”.

We can invent new custom whenever we want

We can change our customs and invent new ones whenever we want. In 1877 someone in England invented voting by mail. Today, elections are often a range of dates and you can send in a ballot early, by mail. In 1998, voters in Oregon passed an initiative requiring that all elections be conducted by mail. But some people are very resistant to change. 12 states still insist you give a reason for voting by mail, while 3 states only have by-mail voting.

Similarly, we have “plurality voting” where you vote for a single candidate. You might favor a third-party candidate. But if you vote for him or her, the major party candidate you prefer might lose. Plurality voting system helps keep us locked into not giving third parties a chance.

America intended to have representation and some accountability

There’s nothing in our rules and conventions that stop Congress from being accountable to people. In fact, some accountability to people was intended in the American system. The House of Representatives was designed to represent citizens. “No taxation without representation!”

And yet, our system doesn’t really support true representation, nor accountability. The main part of representation is knowing what people want. Most Americans aren’t involved in politics because being involved seems to make no difference. Many Americans don’t keep informed. Many would care, but caring about politics is frustrating, so many of us become apathetic. The only way we have of knowing what people want is using polling, but polling uninformed and apathetic citizens is expensive and pretty worthless.

The main part of accountability is reporting, which America lacks

And the main part of accountability is reporting. But currently, there’s no way a member of Congress can report to citizens on the issues they care about.

PeopleCount.org proposes to fix these problems by creating a system that empowers and rewards citizens so we can care and be rewarded for being informed. And it gives our politicians a way to report to us on the issues we care about.

There’s more, but this is enough to start. Please add your email address to our mailing list so we can invite you to the site when we go live.

In the last post, I said that politics is cultural, and we don’t like our politics. But does this mean we can fix it?

The problem isn’t our ideas about politics, it’s how we practice it. And our practices correspond to the shape of our political system, the opportunities we have to interact with it, our choices when we vote, and the ways in which our politicians interact with us.

For instance, from time to time we don’t like some things about our sports. After the 2000 Olympics, we decided table tennis games were too fast, and players weren’t volleying long enough to make it good for television audiences. So they made the ball slightly bigger. This gave it more air resistance so it went a little slower. The game changed.

We do this in politics, too. Until the Supreme Court stepped in with the Citizens United ruling, there were strict limits about campaign donations. But if you look back, there’s a rich history of campaign finance laws.

If we change some of our basic practices, we’ll change the system and we’ll interact with it differently. Given our dissatisfaction with our current politics, you can be sure we’ll make changes to it.

PeopleCount offers new ways to practice politics. You vote on issues, see the results, hear from politicians monthly and grade them. That’s new. You won’t have to sign petitions every month and never hear what effect they have. You won’t have to take 20 minutes to send a single opinion to one of your 3 members of Congress and then search for it to see if he or she answered your question a week later. You won’t have to try to decide which candidate you like better- you can just look at their grades. And, you won’t have to hear their endless pleas for money, and wonder if you should protect your vision of America by contributing more. Using PeopleCount.org, candidates will easily be able to run a campaign on much less money.

Plus PeopleCount offers a new narrative about how to rejuvenate democracy. We do it by using a new communication system that allows politicians to be accountable to people and frees them from being accountable to wealthy donors and to the parties.

It’ll change everything. Not overnight, but pretty quickly. There are a few issues about political reform that the vast majority of people agree on. When they take action on PeopleCount.org, one result is that they’ll realize this. Either our incumbents will support this position or their challengers will, and they’ll win. We’ll see action where there’s been no action previously.

So because our politics is cultural, it can be changed with new ideas that are carried out with new possible actions. The actions, in turn, will reinforce the ideas, making the new actions and ideas rewarding. This is how cultures change.

Please join us by putting your email address on our announcement list.

Politics is cultural, so fixing our democracy is possible. In the Washington Post yesterday, there was this article about how strange our politics looks to a German reporter.

Western Europeans can’t begin to comprehend our politics

From the article:

Unlike the formal, coalition-building, consensus-driven politics of his native land, the American campaign is a bare-knuckle brawl. Other parliamentary democracies tend to see it the same way. Western Europeans typically can’t begin to comprehend, for example, the boorish insults spewed by the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump. Or even Hillary Clinton’s fervent bashing of Republican economic policies.

My point is that what happens in our politics is due to our culture. It’s not due to being American or loving freedom or anything else. We can change it.

Plus many Americans disapprove of our politics. 53% think the parties don’t represent the American people. This article says “58%, say a third U.S. political party is needed because the Republican and Democratic parties “do such a poor job” representing the American people.” And this article says that most Americans think money corrupts our politics.

This article says 90% of Americans think our officials should have a decent understanding of science. Yet many people are voting for Marco Rubio who said, “I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” when asked whether humans contribute to climate change. In a committee hearing, much of the science Ted Cruz “cited, however, was presented in perplexing ways. He confused completely different geographic locations, took data out of context, and made at least one unintentionally hilarious historical comparison“. And his stance on climate change is contrary to what 97% of scientists agree on.

This article says “of over 4,000 younger Americans. What they find is that their respondents rarely think, talk or consider politics.”

So our politics is cultural, and our people disapprove of our major political parties and think our political system is corrupt. Plus, the basic qualifications of leading presidential candidates are insufficient and young people don’t participate.

Politics is cultural, and we don’t like our politics. But does this mean we can fix it? We’ll see that this is true in the next post.

In the last article, we saw that money and strong parties prevents democracy from working. There are more reasons as well.

Lack of being able to say what we want means lack of representation.

Representatives are not really representative of their constituents. They can’t represent what their people want because they don’t know. If people were really educated about politics, polling could work. But polling 5,000 people out of 250,000,000 adults doesn’t give most people a sense that learning about politics matters. A lot of people have better things to do than learn things that don’t seem to make a difference. So in America, many people stop being educated about politics.

Today, very few people are knowledgable enough to answer many interesting political questions. So poll questions become simpler and simpler and offer people few real options. So our representatives know even less about what we want.

To have an effective democracy, we’re going to have to find a way to communicate about politics in a way that makes a difference.

Lack of accountability to citizens prevents our democracy from working.

Obviously if our representatives do not know what we want, citizens don’t know either. So we can’t accurately judge if our representatives are doing the right things. The essence of accountability is accounting for ones accomplishments and plans, reporting, so that citizens can judge. But our politicians don’t report to us, and we don’t know what we want collectively, so we don’t know what to judge them against.

The key to all this is communication. If citizens could communicate what we want, for instance if we could vote on issues, we could see the results and know what’s reasonable to expect from our politicians.

And if our representatives could report to us, we’d be able to judge them. If candidates could report as well, they could compete to satisfy us. If this communication were inexpensive, their campaigns could focus on these reports for communication and no longer need much money for campaigns.

Plus, if politicians could communicate with all the people, they’d be free to represent us all and not be so dependent on the parties.

So a communication system that made politicians accountable to citizens could also free politicians from being accountable to the parties and to wealthy donors.

PeopleCount.org – delivering accountability to citizens

This is what PeopleCount.org will release, this coming Spring, 2016, a web platform in which people can communicate with their politicians inexpensively, so politicians can be increasingly free of the need for wealthy donors and the need to side with the extremists of their party.

Delivering accountability to citizens will solve the major problems in American politics. And part of this is giving Americans a say in their future so that learning about political issues will make a difference.

Please join us. Add your email address to our announcement list and you can be among the first to try our platform when it’s ready.