Lawmakers’ avoidance of accountability undermines self-government. Faced with a complex, hard-to-solve problem, there is a natural human tendency to solve a much simpler, easier one instead. Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, dubs this cognitive process “substitution.”
We know our political system is broken. The signs are everywhere: knee-jerk partisanship, massive debts and unfunded liabilities, widespread citizen dissatisfaction, trillion-dollar deficits, rampant public and private corruption, and a federal government that has less support than King George III at the time of the American Revolution.
But fixing the system is a staggeringly complex undertaking. The causes of its dysfunction are deep and obscure.
So what do we do? We use substitution: we focus on electing a president who promises to solve all our problems. Conservatives did this in 2000, progressives did it in 2008, and both sides are doing it again in 2012.
But it won’t work. There is no silver bullet, no shortcut, no Superman who will save us. In fact, by focusing almost exclusively on the presidency, we are making the problem worse, not better.
Our nation’s core political problem is a loss of self-governance, and the restoration of self-governance cannot come from the election of a single leader who will fundamentally transform America. It will only come from changing the way we think about political conflict, breaking the cycle of incumbency that has destroyed electoral accountability, dispersing power that has become too centralized, and re-engaging citizens in the political realm. The biggest impediment to these changes is not the president—it’s Congress.
This is not to say that the presidency is irrelevant. But Congress is the most powerful branch—it writes the laws and holds the purse strings—and it is utterly unaccountable for reasons that are widely misunderstood. Perhaps the greatest mystery of American politics in the 21st century is how Congress can have an approval rating that dips into the single digits while, on average, more than 90 percent of incumbents win re-election.
If Congress is unresponsive, restoring self-governance is impossible. But lawmakers will not reform themselves. Thus the critical first step in returning to self-governance is making congressional elections work—reconnecting the ballot box and the people’s will. This is a difficult task, but not impossible. Primary elections are the key.
This year, I have worked with a small group of committed men and women on a simple mission: to use a SuperPAC to defeat, in primary elections, unpopular congressional incumbents in “safe” districts.
Our organization, the Campaign for Primary Accountability, has targeted Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. In its first three months, we engaged in nine primary contests and won four. To put this in perspective, only four incumbents out of 396 lost their primaries in all of 2010.
We have beaten an establishment Republican in Ohio, a Tea Party-supported Republican in Illinois, a Blue Dog Democrat in Pennsylvania, and a mainstream Democrat in Texas. In the process, we have been called conservatives, liberals, Tea Partiers, anarchists, right-wingers, and both pro-Obama and anti-Obama. We are the political equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat.
There have been two principal responses to our campaign: fear and confusion. This essay will hopefully alleviate the latter—and thereby enhance the former.
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