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.

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