In a recent post, Jeffrey Feldman argued
The problem is that these same Democratic Party leaders are the people who long-ago decided that passing a health care bill depends 101% on making anodyne arguments that persuade people who (1) already have health care, (2) are too self-interested to want reform to help others, and (3) only care about reducing their monthly expenses. That means the organizers of the town halls see these meetings more like open enrollment information sessions than historic battles in the push for reform.
In other words, it is the Senate, Congressional, and White House Democratic Party communication teams that have created the ideal, quiet conditions for a half-dozen fever-pitched teabaggers to shout "tyranny!" and disrupt the hushed sessions.<!--more-->
If, by contrast, the Democrats leading these sessions had gone into them with more passion, the political stage available to the teabag protesters would have been radically diminished, if not eliminated altogether. Beyond just inviting people to kick off the town halls with a story of how their families have suffered as a result of the health insurance industry, Democrats could have followed communications strategy where the overall goal was to control the emotional symbolism of the town halls--wherein everyone who attended would be so shouting mad and teary-eyed in favor of reform that there would be no silent vacuum that could have been filled by protesters.
Because the Democrats treated the town halls as information sessions rather than symbolic stages, they left the emotional terrain wide open for a few voices to exploit, which is exactly what the teabaggers have done.
Feldman recommends that Dems reclaim control of the debate by introducing healthier passions - passion for reform that actually exists in a majority of Americans; bear in mind that huge majorities favor reform in a nebulous sense without necessarily supporting specific reform plans. Dems need to connect the generic desire for reform to specific policy proposals. It's also important than those policy proposals address specific problems the public has with our current health care system. Feldman is right but I don't think his critique goes deep enough.
At its core, the problems confronting health care reform are deeper than the format of town hall meetings. Support for reform extremely high - but extremely vague. Specific reform proposals are easily defeated since the public desire for reform is somewhat inchoate. To that end, looking at what happened under Clinton and now, I see some paths out of this particular impasse.
In Adam Kahane's Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities, he defines three axes you can use to determine the sort of process for problem - dynamic complexity, generative complexity, and social complexity. Each axis addresses a unique aspect of a particular problem or situation.
Dynamic complexity refers to cause and effect. When cause and effect are close together in time and space, the problem is one of low dynamic complexity; situations in which cause and effect are distant in both time and space (and which are also less direct) have high dynamic complexity.
Generative complexity asks questions about the future - is it familiar and easily predictable? If so, then the problem is one of low generative complexity and it's likely that the rules of the past will solve it. By contrast, when the future is difficult to predict and unfamiliar, then the solutions of the past are unlikely to work.
Social complexity concerns the "assumptions, values, rationales and objectives" (location 401 in Kahane's book*). When participants share those four things, the situation has low social complexity; when there is diversity of assumptions, values, rationales and objectives you have stumbled into a circumstance with high social complexity.
Kahane describes his involvement in the painful and complicated process of moving South Africa away from its repressive Apartheid regime and the effort of South Africans to create a non-racial democratic government. At these meetings, Kahane had representatives of many South African political parties. These parties did something extraordinary - they negotiated a non-violent transition from Apartheid to democracy, which included an important set of decisions about economic policy that minimized the economic effect of the political transition. The South African model provides unique and powerful lessons. It was not expected to succeed and yet South Africa transitioned from Apartheid to democracy without going through a civil war like Iraq or Yugoslavia. Although South Africa continues to deal with the legacy of Apartheid in the form of pathological levels of violence and crime and horrific poverty, the nation made a successful transition to a functioning democracy. South Africans arrived at these meetings prepared to listen to one another, understanding that they had a uniquely South African problem that needed a uniquely South African solution. Participants in the meetings were able to work through a myriad of challenges facing South Africa because they recognized that they were in uncharted waters and were prepared to put aside their canned solutions to the problems and embrace new ideas and actions.
Kahane described a process the US should study and adapt to our own circumstances. The Birthers, the Deathers, the Teabaggers are all symptomatic of something deep and worrisome - public discussion has bogged down, the process of crafting public policy has badly eroded, trust between elected representatives and voters has eroded to the point that a sizable minority believe without question that a man who is legally ineligible could be elected president, that their government would want to put them death, that someone could be elected president and want to destroy America. These extremes shed light on the attitudes and values of the rest of society. Generally speaking, Americans feel disconnected from our government and our elected officials; it seems again and again popular proposals get nowhere in Congress while unpopular ones dominate the discussion. The continuation of both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan perpetuates this impression. Americans want out but we're still in. On an issue by issue basis, Americans embrace broadly progressive policy positions.
At the same time, the public discussion is flooded with not only bad information, but outright lies and misinformation. Sarah Palin can lie through her teeth and claim health care reforms will lead to death panels because so much other misinformation is flooding out public discourse. The mainstream media is apparently incapable of calling a lie a lie so such statements continue to move through our public discourse. Paul Krugman recently told a story of being invited to speak on a news show; then uninvited when the producers couldn't find someone to represent the opposite opinion.
I was tentatively scheduled to be on a broadcast dealing with - well, I won't embarrass them. But first they had to find someone to take the opposite view. And it turned out that they couldn't - which led to canceling the whole segment.
In a way this goes beyond my original point, which was the unwillingness of the news media to referee a controversy by actually reporting the facts. Now it seems that a fact isn't worth reporting unless someone is prepared to deny it.
This dynamic is entirely too widespread in the media. As a result, our public discourse become distorted and the public is unable and unwilling to trust what is reported. It's not a matter of bias as conservatives have long claimed - instead it is a result of a media establishment entirely too lazy to call out lies when people like Sarah Palin declaim them loudly in public.
These issues point to process problems. The Clinton plan of 1993, failed to gain public traction for a simple reason - it felt dictated from above. The Clinton process was sound enough but conducted in private. The current process has been public - debated in Congress - but conducted in a top down manner. In both instances, the entire process undermined the ability to rally public support. The intent wasn't to exclude the public buthte outcome was the same. (The Bush administration's mode of operation for all eight years had the same effect - it was authoritarian and top down. This experience only reinforced the sense the government was uninterested in and unresponsive to the public.)
The US is a mature democracy. That's a good thing - we have strong institutions and a long and established history. It is also a surprising weakness - a mature democracy can become stuck when parties believe they have irreconcilable policy differences. In our case, as well, we have three to four decades of consistent and virulent attacks on the very notion of government itself. Conservatives have spent decades deliberately undermining belief in the ability of government to act in the best interest of the American people.
As a result, we now find ourselves in position in which public policy and public discourse have ground to a near halt. The old ways aren't working - we are finding ourselves working them twice as hard to get less than half the expected results. |
STATE BLOGS
