Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
— Charles Darwin, from The Descent of Man (1871)
CONTENTS
Talking Points: Rob Dickinson on redistricting reformWit and Wisdom: Late-night round-up
Quoted! Task Force 6-26 on respect for the law
Check It Out: "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"
Featured Article: "Heritage Wars"
Happenings: Progressive Roundtable; new board members
Endorsements: Nancy Pelosi
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor
TALKING POINTS
Since the November election, there has been considerable discussion about the failure of ballot measures in California and Ohio to implement independent redistricting. Unfortunately, most of these discussions miss the point about what is wrong with our current electoral system and how to reform it. And none of them arrive at the proper conclusion, which is that it is time for America to join most other Western democracies in adopting a proportional voting system.
People who supported these measures consider their ballot box failure as a significant missed opportunity to correct our current system's almost complete lack of competition. People who opposed these measures point to the significant flaws in the design of the independent redistricting alternatives or to partisan motives of the proponents.
In either case, both the proponents and the opponents of independent redistricting make the faulty assumption that the whole issue is about who should draw the lines for single-member legislative districts (i.e., where only one legislator is elected from each district) and about what those district boundaries should look like. Once this assumption is made, we have already eliminated the only real opportunity to achieve true competition and fair representation, which is to move from our current winner-take-all electoral system to a more fair and representative proportional system.
It is often taken as a given that competition is the ultimate goal when determining legislative districts. Why is that? Certainly we envision that competitive districts will lead to a richer debate around the issues. We also assume that candidates will have a greater incentive to represent the wishes of the majority of the electorate if they need to compete to win their votes. But perhaps more fundamental than these reasons is a belief that competitive districts are more fair than districts in which the outcome is all but pre-determined, generally with the incumbent winning. Americans value "fairness" and many people see it as inherently unfair that a large percentage of the voters in each district have no chance to elect a representative who shares their views. Thus the desire to make legislative districts competitive is both a desire to make politicians more accountable and to give all voters a greater say in who represents them.
The paradox is that achieving competition in legislative districts actually makes them less fair rather than more fair. Consider an almost perfectly competitive district, where 50 percent of the voters support one major party and 50 percent support the other major party. Obviously, elections in this hypothetical district are very competitive, but how fair is the result? In our winner-take-all system using single-member districts, half of the voters in that district will be represented, i.e. have a representative who shares their views, whereas the other half of the population is effectively marginalized.
The first thing most newly elected officials say when they win is that they will "represent all of the voters and not just those who voted for them." Sadly, this is not often the reality in our highly polarized political culture. Elected officials may want to represent all of their citizens, but voters remain deeply split on many of the most important issues of our time, and so the political philosophies and policy agendas of the major parties are often diametrically opposed. Thus voters who live in districts that elect winners from the opposing party are effectively unrepresented. As a result, competitive districts provide good representation to roughly half of the voters in those districts and little or no representation to the other half of the voters. By contrast, in a district heavily favoring one party, a larger majority of the voters are represented by someone they support, but there is no competition.
An example of how a substantial percentage of the voter base is marginalized is the liberal enclave of Northern California. Despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Alameda, Marin, and Monterey Counties, these areas still have significant percentages of Republican voters, typically between 20 and 35% of the voters declaring a party affiliation. These Republican voters are never able to elect a member of their party. The same is true for Democratic voters in conservative strongholds. Moreover, this imbalance can become self-reinforcing as people choose where to settle based in part on how well they fit with the local political climate. It is fantasy to think that independent redistricting will solve this problem, as the various regions of California are now dominated by one or the other major party.
Competition and representation are mutually exclusive in a winner-take-all single-member district system. You can have one but not the other. Given that, it does not matter who draws the district lines in a single-member district system or how they are drawn since we already know that the solution will not produce both competition and fair representation. Evidently independent redistricting is not the answer.
So what is the answer? States need to have districts that elect more than one person to the legislature, and they need to elect these multiple representatives using a proportional voting system. A moderately proportional voting system for California's Assembly could be based on having sixteen 5-member districts instead of our existing eighty single-member districts. Under a proportional voting system, if 60% of the voters in such a district vote Democrat and 40% vote Republican, 3 of the 5 seats would go to Democrats and 2 of the seats would go to Republicans. Each party would achieve representation in proportion to the support they have among the public.
Such a system would also be inherently competitive, as members of both parties would need to get out to vote in order to receive as much representation as they can. And even in an area dominated by one party, the candidates from that party would still be competing among themselves to win the seats that the voters of that party are entitled to.
It's time to move beyond re-hashing the same tired debate about who draws the district lines and think about what it really means to be represented and how to provide fair representation to all citizens. And that requires that we consider proportional voting in multi-member legislative districts.
CI Associate and Executive Vice President of Californians for Electoral Reform
WIT AND WISDOM
"President Bush met with the Prime Minister of Ireland, who gave him the traditional bowl of shamrocks. There was an awkward moment when President Bush said, 'Where are the pink hearts and yellow moons?'" — Conan O'Brien
"I know the country has been mired in deficit spending and it's been terrible burden on the country in terms of interest payments. Good news today out of Washington. They haven't paid down the debt or come up with any program to do so. What they did is raise the limit of debt we can go to to $9 trillion. It sends a great message to the kids: 'Hey, are you getting an F? Don't study harder; make the grading curve go out to K. Then your F looks like a C.'" — Jon Stewart
"In front of a crowd in Florida this past weekend, Al Gore said that, 'The people of the United States are going to stand up and take our country back.' And then the manager of the karaoke bar took the microphone away and said, 'Either sing or sit down buddy.'" — Jay Leno
QUOTED!
"If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." — Unofficial slogan of the U.S. military's secretive Task Force 6-26, which has come under investigation for its interrogation techniques (i.e., torture) at Camp Nama in Iraq
CHECK IT OUT
In our modern confessional era — when personal lives are fodder for public examination, when memoirs both authentic and not-so-authentic top the charts, and when political redemption flows from the mea culpa — it is reassuring (to a degree) when the confessions seem to be moving in the right direction. Such is the case with John M. Perkins's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Penguin), which hit the shelves in the January and quickliy rose to fifth place on the New York Times best-seller list. Inevitably, a movie is in the works: Beacon Pictures has bought the option, and there is talk of Harrison Ford taking the lead role.
So what's all the fuss about? Here's how the Times, in a description hard to improve upon, characterizes the book's basic story-line and theme:
"In the book, Mr. Perkins recounts the nine years in which he worked [as a chief economist] for Main [a Boston strategic consulting firm] in the 1970's. From Ecuador to Panama, Iran to Saudi Arabia, the mission was the same: working in league with government agencies, Mr. Perkins claimed that he inflated the economic growth forecasts of these countries and smoothed the way for the billions in loans that they took on. Ultimately, he said, the funds were recycled to the United States as these countries became clients of big American engineering, construction and manufacturing companies, including Bechtel, Halliburton, Boeing and others."
What sets Perkins's book apart from other recent treatments of the malignant potential of American multi-nationals is his unabashedly Clancyesque style: it is told as a dark and thrilling adventure story rather than as sober analysis. Wonderful. But therein lies the book's central weakness: Perkins has a tendency to oversimplify political and economic relationships, and thus to render his claims about the machinations of international big business less persuasive than they could be.
Nonetheless, it's a compelling read, and an unfortunate sign of the times in which we live. Check it out.
Meanwhile, keep your eyes open for the forthcoming book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, which lays out in forceful terms the perspective of two of the leading progressive bloggers, Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos). Their critical views encompass not only various breeds of conservatives (which they label the Corporate Cons, the Theocons, the Neocons, and the Paleocons), but also the balkanized and faltering progressive nonprofit sector giants, and the Democratic establishment's inadequate efforts thus far to cope with the realities of 21st-century politics. The picture they paint isn't a pretty one.
The latter half of the book, though, takes a more positive turn. It describes the first signs and now growing evidence of a "people-powered mass movement of the netroots and the grassroots." Armstrong and Moulitsas describe a combination of people, ideas, and technology that promises to change the American political landscape. They put special emphasis on the need not only for new organizations and ideas, but also changes in funding patterns and an increased recognition of and support for the folks who are working in the trenches.
This book is likely to be all the talk in progressive political circles this year. Check it out.
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from David Lowenthal's "Heritage Wars," which appeared in the March 16, 2006, edition of Spiked magazine:
"Heritage is piously declared the legacy of all humanity. But the possessive jealousies of particular claimants pose huge obstacles to our global common inheritance. Confining possession to some while excluding others is the raison d'être of most heritage. Created to generate and protect group interests, it benefits us mainly if withheld from others.Click here to read the whole article.
"Chauvinism underpins heritage rapine. The Rosetta Stone entered the British Museum 'honourably acquired by the fortune of war'; Napoleon looted all Europe and North Africa to prove France the Roman Empire's rightful heir; fin-de-siècle Americans threatened to buy up all England. Jingoist rivalry still foments plunder and inhibits global sharing. National and local self-esteem are sacred writ in international protocols. Equating heritage with identity justifies every group's claim to the bones, the belongings, the riddles, and the refuse of every forebear back into the mists of time. All that stands in the way of everyone's reunion with all their ancestral things is its utter impossibility.
"It is impossible because it flies in the face of historical reality. There are no well-attested, long-enduring, pure, unchanged social or cultural entities. Every people are hybrid, every legacy multiple, every society heterogeneous, every tradition as much recent as ancient. All cultures are compages stemming from manifold antecedents. The farther back in time the more mixed is every ancestry. Multiple entitlements vitiate demands based on prior existence, occupance, use and discovery."
HAPPENINGS
2006 Progressive Roundtable — The first Progressive Roundtable convening, held on March 2-5, 2006, and hosted by the Commonweal Institute, was a great success, thanks to the enthusiastic participation and hard work of the members. The participants came from across the country, representing many major progressive organizations, including the Center for American Progress, Demos, Campaign for America's Future, Democracy Alliance, MoveOn, Fenton Communications, and Lake Research Partners. They also brought a remarkable diversity of professional expertise: communications, marketing and market research, framing and language development, public relations, political strategy, public policy, media production, social action, academia, business, and philanthropy.
The conference process was directed toward generating specific ideas and concrete results for building progressive infrastructure. By the end of the convening, the participants had made recommendations for twelve new infrastructure components, and the Commonweal Institute is now coordinating the process of identifying potential funders for proposals to meet the priority infrastructure needs.
The Progressive Roundtable website will continue to be a hub for building progressive infrastructure. Even if you are not a member of the Roundtable, or were not able to participate in the conference, we welcome you to visit the site and learn more about our efforts to build progressive infrastructure. You can also take advantage of the site's Resource Library and register your own organization .
If you have questions about the Progressive Roundtable, would like to participate in future Roundtables, or are a funder interested in supporting the development of progressive infrastructure, please contact the conference director, Dr. Katherine (Kate) Forrest, at kforrest@commonwealinstitute.org or 650-854-9796.
New Board Members — The Commonweal Institute is proud to welcome two new members to its Board of Directors: Harvey Gotliffe and Brooke Warrick, both of whom were members of the CI Advisory Board for several years. Dr. Gotliffe is Professor of Magazine Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University, and has been involved in several progressive political campaigns, in which he was in charge of public relations, promotion, and campaign advertising. Brooke Warrick is founder and President of American LIVES, Inc., a marketing research firm specializing in psychographic market segmentation. He has been a leader in value- and lifestyle-based market research for almost two decades, and specializes in turning quantitative and qualitative data into rich and insightful stories about how to reach and sell to different kinds of consumers.
ENDORSEMENTS
"In these challenging times, we need an advocacy think tank like Commonweal Institute to communicate our principles and programs in ways that will resonate with the broad public and empower citizens to take a more active role in our democracy. Commonweal takes a strategic approach to advancing issues in a way that will help decision-makers be proactive in confronting the challenges of the future." — Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, 8th CD-CA, Democratic Leader of the House of Representatives
GET INVOLVED
If you agree with Nancy Pelosi (see above), there are a number of ways you can help the Commonweal Institute achieve its goals.
Right now, as you read, you can simply forward the Uncommon Denominator to friends and family who might be interested in learning about the Commonweal Institute. Getting the word out is crucial.
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