On the day of the No Kings protest, I went into town to get tacos from my favorite food truck.
As I was waiting for my tacos to be made, I walked over to the nearby group of protestors (who were very nice) and asked them what they hoped to accomplish. The best answer was that they felt good to be around others who agree with them and oppose Donald Trump.
That is fine as a personal motivation. As a political strategy, it is a pretty weak rationale given the massive amount of time and effort expended by people across the country.
While I think those efforts would be better spent doing something that has a direct benefit to the community, like giving blood or cleaning a park, I can’t really blame the protestors for trying to oppose government policies they disagree with.
There is an enormous gap between the apparent importance of public policy and the public’s ability to impact the decisions being made by politicians and bureaucrats. People sense that the state and nation are moving in the wrong direction, but are unclear as to how they can influence the decisions that have contributed to that trend.
People want to do something, but they don’t know what. What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
They grasp. People try whatever they can think of that might change the course of politics, even if they can’t say exactly how.
Whether it is the 2014 People’s Climate March that promised to “change everything,” (it didn’t) or conservatives gathering on the Capitol steps in Olympia to support parental rights, or the No Kings March, people hope that rallying together will force politicians to listen.
Protesting isn’t the only approach, of course. People contact their elected officials, either through phone calls or emails. In the most recent legislative session, more than 110,000 people signed-in to oppose the state’s new income tax. For busy people who aren’t used to engaging with the Legislature, it was an opportunity to express their opposition.
But do these things actually make a difference? It doesn’t seem like it.
The response from Donald Trump and his supporters to No Kings protests has been to taunt them.
In Olympia, legislators claimed the more than 100,000 people who signed in to oppose the income tax were just “bots,” and ignored them. State Senator Manka Dhingra laughed off the huge number of people, telling the public and her colleagues to take these numbers with a “grain of salt.”
Some of those same legislators are actively working to block citizens from having their say on decisions made in Olympia. For example, the income tax includes a “necessity clause” whose only purpose is to make it more difficult to put the income tax before the voters.
It isn’t only the Legislature that seems to view the public as a nuisance. Bureaucracies regularly make it difficult for the public to engage meaningfully.
When I was at the Department of Natural Resources, we released a very thick Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) about the state’s plan for timber harvests in Western Washington. We held a series of town meetings and accepted public comment. The thickness of the EIS was supposed to demonstrate that we had considered every potential issue relating to the harvests.
In reality, that EIS was a public relations document, designed to intimidate the public with its size. Who are you to question our decision – look at everything we’ve considered! That doesn’t mean the decision was wrong. The foresters who helped write it were extremely smart and thousands of pages more could have been added explaining a range of various considerations. But the purpose of the EIS wasn’t to assimilate public comment, it was to dismiss it.
After working at a state agency and around government for a quarter-century, my perception is that politicians don’t see themselves as public servants and they don’t see the public as sovereign.
At a basic level, members of the public understand that politicians and bureaucrats are patronizing them, treating them as an annoyance. They understand that politicians brazenly lie to them to shut them up and tell them their opinions don’t count.
Over the past decade in Washington state, political decisions have routinely made life more difficult and government is failing to do its most basic job. Meanwhile, politicians and bureaucrats tell those whose lives are harmed by government failure that their input isn’t wanted.
So, frustration grows and people lash out, doing whatever they can to get attention. Often that means becoming louder and more strident. Former CIA analyst and author Martin Gurri writes in his book The Revolt of the Public, that the need to get attention encourages people to become louder and more extreme. “Stridency will infect every mode of communication, but will be most disruptive of political rhetoric. Just to keep an audience, politicians and commentators will have to scream louder and take more aggressive positions than the competition.” He wrote that in 2014.
That approach – which we see every day – is unlikely to make things better.
First, politicians don’t want to hear it. They gaslight the public with lies and when the public gets angry, those same politicians condescendingly dismiss them.
More important is the reality that it will be hard for some bureaucrats and politicians to change government without undermining the rationale of the system and their own value within it. Who wants to be a servant of the public when you can be their savior? Too many politicians and bureaucrats believe they are societal saviors and bowing to public pressure – like a lowly servant – is inherently at odds with their self-perception.
To be sure, there are many politicians of all stripes who do want to make the world a better place and are not motivated by self-aggrandizement. I worked with many agency staff who were committed to doing the best they could without glory or attention. I do worry that those people are not the ones making decisions, but there are many like them.
However, even assuming that politicians and agency leaders are willing to change the system to make it more responsive, could they? Most of the errors made by politicians and bureaucrats aren’t a result of corruption or nefarious intent. As hard as it can be to believe, most politicians actually believe the things they say. The failures we see every day in Washington state are primarily a result of incompetence and political blindness. Fixing the system isn’t a matter of simply replacing corrupt politicians or self-serving bureaucrats with a new batch who are more civic-minded. The problem is that politicians and government are trying to do something that is simply not possible, like guiding extremely complex systems – the economy or healthcare or the global environment. The result is that they fail again and again even as they get more power and funding.
For the public to have a meaningful say in the policies that impact them, government needs to be closer to the people.
How do we move away from the cycle that Gurri highlights, where the more the public feels dismissed, the more strident they become. He writes, “The most effective alternative to the steep pyramid of industrialized democracy isn't direct democracy…It's the personal sphere,” where decisions are made locally, using “local knowledge, as part of an observable series of trial and error.”
Acting locally doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes. It simply means that the avenues of political change are more obvious and manageable and direct feedback can be acted on more quickly and effectively.
History demonstrates that this can be effective. Even the Civil Rights marches, to which some people point as evidence that protests work, started locally. Rosa Parks’ protest, and the protests that supported her, were about a local bus issue. The Memphis garbage strike, with its powerful protest signs held by black workers that read simply “I am a man,” was about a local issue.
This culminated with The March on Washington and Dr. King’s powerful and moving speech. I don’t discount the power of that protest. But the foundation was local.
For the public to have meaningful input and impact, there needs to be a diversity of approaches and local efforts are the most likely to be meaningful. Protests can be part of that, but we must be honest about what works and what doesn’t, using trial and error to find ways to engage and influence policy. The best place to do that is in our communities.
There is no easy path to get to a place where public involvement is more meaningful and government that is more accountable. Politicians and bureaucrats have many incentives to protect the existing system. As long as our primary form of engagement is focused on influencing politicians, we are tacitly acknowledging that they have the power, not us.
I don’t have a good answer as to how we make the transition to a more locally engaged approach to addressing societal problems.
The first step toward changing that dynamic must come from the public and that requires acknowledging that the social benefits of protesting are clouding our perception of effectiveness. Perhaps the first step is to simply start looking for new opportunities to take power back. Anyone who has purchased a new car has experienced the feeling that suddenly that care is everywhere. The same can be true of opportunities for the public to find new ways to change our communities and government. But we have to start looking rather than hoping that screaming louder will make a difference.
The public’s voice can make a difference, but the burden is on us to make it meaningful.