Let’s create something to solve the basic problem in politics. Commonly we think “the problem” is the other party, or the parties, money in elections, gerrymandering, corruption, and on and on. These are all just symptoms.

The American people have political power, but can’t wield it

We, The People, have the ultimate political power in the US. But we can’t wield it. That’s the basic problem.

So what happens? Our elected members of Congress wield it instead. Sure, one of the consequences of this is that power corrupts.

But they have little power individually. So the parties have organized them, and us, against each other. They’ve convinced most of us that each of us is either winning or losing. So the parties wield the power to continue the fight, and most of their energy goes there rather than to solve problems.

And both the parties and members of Congress need money, so the wealthy have influence. In fact, when Congress does pass new laws, it’s usually laws that the wealthy want.

The parties, the expensive campaigns and the corruption of money are not the problem. These are all things that arise to accommodate our situation. The real problem is the situation. We have a system that doesn’t give people and politicians an efficient way to communicate.

The real problem: a system that doesn’t let people wield power

There are two sides to this problems

1) We can’t reach politicians, so they can’t represent us. We have no easy/fast way of reaching them, so decent communication from us to them doesn’t happen. At best, they can only guess what we want. At worst, some don’t even bother to guess.

2) Politicians can’t reach us. The available communication system is lousy, especially in two ways.

A) It’s expensive: Ads, post-cards, outreach and surveys costs tons of money, so campaigns are expensive. Our current solution is for winning candidates to raise lots of money. This makes it easy for the wealthy to have undue influence.

B) It’s lousy: They tell us whatever they want to tell us, not what we’re interested in hearing about. They tell us tiny phrases and sound bites because the only thing worse than hearing crap that we already know about or don’t care about is hearing a lot of crap about them. If something isn’t in the news, chances are low that we’ll hear about it.

When communication is poor, relationship is poor or missing entirely. What we want is a relationship where politicians our accountable to us citizens. Since the communication is poor, we have little or no accountability.

Let’s solve the basic problem, not the symptoms

So the problem is the system.

But let’s not rush to change it. There are lots of “solutions” floating around today to fix this or that symptom. What we need is a purpose-built solution to remedy the problems above. We need a system that not only enables good communication both ways, but enables the communication needed for accountability.

I’ve written about this extensively elsewhere. That’s what PeopleCount.org is all about.

The next article will be about the effects of this system.