A Case for a Cross-Party Ticket

Step 1: Save Democracy. Step 2: Everything Else.

Twitter distortion and increasingly radicalized evangelical churches notwithstanding, people don’t generally spend the day sharpening their political tongues; they just want things to get better, imagine “getting better” through the lenses of their wallets and their family and community influences, and vote (or not) accordingly.

In my campaign for state representative, I had two goals: to win, and to set the table for constructive dialogue between the various constituencies of a deeply purple district. To achieve the latter, I sometimes had to forego the obvious strategies associated with the former: namely, I spent a significant amount of time knocking on the doors of homes displaying my opponent’s yard signs. I did this not to persuade them that I was a better choice — I knew that wasn’t going to happen — but because I sincerely cared. I wanted to hear about their concerns, learn from their perspectives, and cultivate a nuanced approach that didn’t shove my own worldview down the throats of all members of our ideologically diverse community.

This choice was not particularly welcomed by my campaign manager and advisers, who appropriately emphasized the numbers game. But I felt very strongly that this “long-game” approach to community dialogue and engagement would be crucial for all future efforts, whether I won or not (spoiler alert: I didn’t, though I did give that 20-year incumbent a true run for his money), because establishing trust is a pre-condition for any human endeavor and it was rapidly eroding in our community.

So goal #1 was not achieved. But when a grown man took my hands into his, tears in his eyes, and thanked me profusely for stopping by despite his yard sign, or when people standing outside the polls on that rainy election day — again, my opponent’s signs in hand — told me that if I won, they’d support me, and if I didn’t, they hoped I’d run again, I knew I’d made a lot of progress toward achieving goal #2. These encounters also happened to be among the most memorable, poignant, and affirming of the entire (looney) campaign experience.

With the American democratic process hanging on like an 8-year-old’s loose tooth, I think it’s time for a redefinition of winning over the next four years: creating and electing a pro-democracy coalition dedicated to the preservation of our republic and the re-establishment of a baseline investment in trust. To state the obvious: if our democracy crumbles, we have zero chance of achieving any of our urgent policy goals. Climate, guns, healthcare, reproductive rights, civil rights in general, the rule of law — gone.

Approximately 90% of Democrats, 60% of Independents, and 30% of Republicans believe that our elections — including 2020 — are fair. A good-faith, pro-democracy, cross-party partnership up and down the ballot, exempt from the pressures of their respective bases, could commit to a term-limited agenda of transparent, anti-corrupt public service. Such a coalition could fast-track democratic innovations that might begin to reverse the damage wrought by the former president and inoculate us against further internal rot.

Each party relies upon its base to do the heavy lifting in terms of both money and manpower. Just as there is the underlying incentive for even the most well-intended nonprofit to almost but not quite solve the problem for which it was created — because, in some very real way, fully solving the problem would force that organization out of existence, and with it the jobs, networks, money, and shared purpose that it brought into being — our current two-party system tends to reward (with power, money, influence) those who do the best job of dramatically presenting a set of problems and holding themselves up as the only one who can solve them. It’s an arms race to see who can find new and increasingly raw red meat to feed a population eager to be riled up, because being riled up keeps us feeling alive, real, important, right, and aligned with a tribe of similarly riled-up people.

Those of us playing “inside baseball” feel deeply, powerfully defined by our allegiance to one of these two parties and the worldview it represents. But it seems to me that we are like a family riding in old station wagon towards the end of an unfinished bridge, yelling at, blaming, and strangling each other while the car hurdles ever-closer to the point of no return. Maybe the older sister is right, and the brother is a paternalistic neanderthal asshole; it won’t really matter when they both find themselves in free-fall, suddenly hugging each other one last time before they hit the water.

My daughter’s friend once wore a t-shirt that still cracks me up when I think about it: “This nap isn’t going to take itself.” Well, we can’t get to where we’re going on a broken bridge, and that bridge isn’t going to fix itself.

To be clear, this is not a “good people on both sides” argument; it is simply an attempt to reveal the co-dependency between politicians and their respective bases, and to offer a thought-experiment towards changing that game for the sake of bridge repair so we can a) not die and b) actually get somewhere. Because it seems evident to that there is, in fact, an “exhausted majority” who is as sick and afraid of authoritarian chest-beating on the one hand as it is offended and angered by woke cancel culture on the other.

As we work to avoid a midterm “shellacking” in 2022 and set our sights on 2024, perhaps we should actually consider a cross-party ticket such has been implemented in Israel. In a region that’s no stranger to political division, according to Thomas Friedman, “key Israeli politicians swallowed their pride, softened policy edges and came together for a four-year national unity government — led by rightist Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and left-of-center Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid. (They are to switch places after two years.)” Though it’s beyond the scope of this discussion, the polarization-reducing dynamics of Ranked Choice Voting could really come into play in these scenarios, naturally engendering a more civil discourse and making it more likely that, say, we could pass legislation that has long stagnated despite a 90% general approval rating.

I am a progressive person who wishes to see progressive values in full bloom across our society and around the world. Our next best step, though, is not to lock into a progressive vision in the hope that, like an inversion of the fabled “trickle-down economics,” it’ll simply seep up into the consciousness of and transform our country on the basis of its righteousness (we might call this “trickle-up magical thinking”). Of course we need to be visionary beacons — as so many have been before us — of truth, justice, and equality; but we can see, with our own eyes, that our current strategy, combined with the unprecedented social, economic, and technological conditions of the moment, is not working right now. What appears to be blooming is not so much a renaissance of enlightened liberal values but rather a red tide that is, in many ways, choking our waterways and feeding our predators.

Renewal is entirely possible, but we first have to acknowledge where we, ourselves, are stuck. So do we want to be right or do we want to win? As Freddy DeBoer quoted in a recent newsletter, “Everybody wants to be a gangster until it's time to do some gangster sh*t." In this case, we might say, ‘everybody wants to make things right until it’s time to do the messy work of making things right(er).’ So let’s do the messy sh*t and join forces with everyone determined to strengthen this democracy. Now’s the time.