How to Get 99 Percent of Us to Agree

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its analogues across the country tell us that they represent the 99 percent of this country who aren’t plutocrats in control of greatly outsized wealth and power. I believe them. I think I’m one of them. I just don’t agree with every placard raised, or all the manifestos in circulation. Really, I don’t really agree with any of that stuff much beyond the limbic satisfaction that comes from rooting for the home team. Others agree far less.

Placards and manifestoes are fine in their own way. Slogans and statements are things that people can coalesce around, ideas that harmonize the necessary chaos of individuality. But the world is too complex to adopt slogans as policy. Tradeoffs abound. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Single payer health care tomorrow means millions of insurance company employees out of work today. No nuclear means more coal. Immigration reform probably means punishing some people, and letting others break the law for the greater good.

At some point in its early stages, every mass movement must strike some balance between the general and the specific. A 36-point declaration will put people off right away, and empty sloganeering will cause a slow erosion of support. And yet, to influence the world you need lots of people agreeing on at least a few things. To get lots of people agreeing on things, they have to be clear and simple. But “clear” and “simple” are kissing cousins to “rigid” and “obtuse.” When they are rigid and obtuse, they can have disastrous consequences. Consider the famine and hardship that arose out of China’s Great Leap Forward, or the endlessly unproductive War on Drugs.  

The good news is that there is a solution to this dilemma. It’s called democracy. There’s something we can all agree on. I don’t know about 99 percent, but certainly 80 percent of us feel that there is too much money in our political system. Some of us feel that corporate money threatens to bankrupt our government through overpayment on things like Medicare and defense. Some of us feel that corporate money strips away the basic protections that labor has fought so hard for. Most of us are tired of the limited choices on offer at election day. All of us want something big to change.

We may not agree on the specifics, but democracy is the common thread between people who show up at Tea Party rallies, and those now showing up on Wall Street. We all feel like it’s being taken away from us by money. We disagree on why, but we all feel like we are not in a fair fight, that our work is increasingly fruitless, and that nobody on top gives a damn. Most of us would prefer to fight out our differences in the squared circle established by the founders of our nation, not in some Tahrir Square moment of absolute upheaval.



Consider This

My proposal: A constitutional amendment to shore up our democracy, reduce the influence of powerful interests, free candidates from their parties, encourage greater participation in civil society, and ensure that everyone who can vote has the chance to do so. But those are just my ideas. It would be important to have representatives from across the political spectrum hash something out. A thoughtful amendment movement could circumvent many of the ideological and cultural battles we are so embroiled in; a good first step towards bringing diverse opinions together to work towards the common good for a change. A Harvard ethics professor and a major figure in the Tea Party have already started to lay the groundwork.

We will always disagree, but this amendment is not about picking winners and losers, at least not for 99 percent of us. It doesn’t say who is right or wrong about global warming or gun rights. It changes the rules of the game so that all might benefit. More practically, a constitutional amendment would require intense, bipartisan political pressure on the House and Senate, a mass effort in all 50 state legislatures to ratify the amendment, and could create a structure for launching new political parties and coalitions at all levels of government. It could reinforce our belief in the American system right when we need it most.