Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be attending a series of guided discussions entitled “The Promise of Our Democracy.” Presented by the Wisconsin Union Directorate and the Interactivity Foundation, it features two nights of discussing ways to improve our democracy over dinner.
Before I go, I want to bring together a few thoughts on what makes these events such a good idea. In particular, guided discussions help bring the policy agenda back to the public.
The Interactivity Foundation hosts events like these to bring together small groups of people to have guided public-policy discussions. Its mission is to bring citizens together to have productive discussions on issues that matter. As they put it: “The health of our democracy depends greatly on how well citizens discuss, explore and develop public policy.” It would be great if this happened, but as they say, “increasingly, in the real world, however, policy choices are made in response to crisis and/or highly-charged political contexts.”
The first part is simple enough. Responding to a crisis leaves little time for skepticism and care, and worse policies result from it. I’d like to focus on the results coming from highly-charged contexts, which are more interesting.
Why is it bad that policies come out of politics? First of all, most people—myself included—do not know enough about the details of public policy and legislating to write good policy. Besides, most political debates are run by philosophers and not by policy wonks, and the details of policy proposals are almost never accurately portrayed. That should pretty much make the case for keeping citizens out, right?
Well, not quite. It’s probably true that, for the most part, the public is not capable of writing actual public policy. However, this isn’t all that citizens can do. Besides setting policy, they can also set the policy agenda—the list of things that we want to get done. Currently, the public does not really do either of these things.
Right now, politics follows a master narrative—the story behind all other stories—that treats politics as a competition, as a race. And in a way, it is—that’s what politicians do in a democracy. But this is a distorted picture of what is happening. Things happen at two different levels in a democracy. At one level, politicians try to solve collective-action problems. In the next layer politicians fight for votes. In a healthy democracy, we treat the competition as a means of getting things done. However, our master narrative is all about the competition—the game.
And for the most part, the press helps portray that narrative by acting as professional stenographers for politicians and lobbyists. Even if someone is wrong, it’s not the press’s job to correct them—unless you’re a Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization like Politifact—because that would be “editorializing.”
For any benefits there might be to this deliberately even-handed reporting, it also has the unfortunate—and unnecessary—side effect of letting political actors set the policy agenda based on what they want to talk about.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Now that campaigning is the perpetual-motion machine of the political press, the policy agenda is set based on what campaigns want, which isn’t necessarily the same as what people actually want. And when press stenography makes campaigning a question of making good television, the political echo chamber just becomes louder.
It doesn’t have to be like this. A long time ago, someone (Walter Lippmann, to be specific) “decided” since the public was clearly not qualified to make or even think about policy, citizens only job could be waiting for politicians to make proposals and align themselves behind certain politicians they agreed with. We can decide to change that. That would mean looking to what people want to hear about as a basis for campaigns for legislative focus. And it would mean having more public discussions about policy, because a policy agenda without any policy at all is meaningless.
The facilitated discussion on public policy isn’t a new idea, but it’s an underused one—especially in the media. As these discussions happen, I’ll be using my column to report and reflect on the ways we can improve our democracy—and how the discussions themselves might be the best way to do that.
Zach Thomae is a freshman majoring in computer science. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
