Last weekend at Netroots Nation, Matt Palevsky of The Real News had a brief but thoughtful interview with Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com about how much the Netroots can change American politics and the world. Stoller, as always, was militantly realistic:
The scale of what we need to do is far larger than our capacity right now. Just changing the way we relate to each other and the land around us - because we have a country and a world that is actually run by thieves - that's the problem.
The subprime mortgage crisis, Iraq, oil, any of these different problems boil down to the fact that the people that are running our culture, our elite institutions are basically stealing. And we have not solved that problem so there's that crisis of legitimacy in the leadership.
What we have to do is figure out how we displace that leadership and replace it with people who believe in social responsibility towards one another and believe in stewardship of the land - who are basically liberal - that's what we have to do.
I mostly agree with Stoller's diagnosis - our country and our world are run by thieves, and that's causing a lot of enormous problems. But is his prescription any good?
I'm basically a "structuralist" - when political and economic structures are in place, the people who fill those structures will basically perpetuate them, rather than change them - or use them to change the world outside them. In simpler terms, most people are paid to do a job, and they are satisfied if they get their job mostly done so they can keep it. That's what the term "9 to 5" used to mean - show up, get it done, and go home to live the rest of your life.
Using this "structuralist" analysis, changing the people who lead major institutions isn't going to produce any significant change. Ivy League universities will turn out skilled lawyers, bankers, scientists, and academics, no matter who leads them. Banks will finance businesses that appear to be profitable, no matter who leads them. And weapons manufacturers will make deadly weapons, no matter who leads them.
If we want to change our politics and our world, there's little point in changing the people who run major institutions. (I would of course make the exception of our political institutions, where the difference between electing Democrats and Republicans in our generation is the difference between regulated capitalism and neo-fascism.) Instead we have to think creatively about how to change the structures themselves.
Our suicidal (both economically and environmentally) dependence on oil is largely due to the structure of our transportation system. Our cities used to have electric cable cars like San Francisco, but the auto companies bought them up and shut them down so everyone would have to buy a car. We need to get back to a system like that, and draw more people from suburbs back into cities. We also need to encourage businesses to let more workers telecommute, since it's now so easy to do most everything at home. If we do this, we will reduce the power of the oil thieves who elected Bush and Cheney specifically to steal Iraq's oil.
Similarly our food system needs to switch from large-scale industrial production to smaller-scale, sustainable local production. If we do this, we will reduce the power of the agribusiness thieves who contribute enormously both to global warming (through fertilizers) and global poverty (through insane biofuels like corn ethanol).
I'm surprised Stoller doesn't make this point, since he's one of the leaders of the movement for Net Neutrality, which is fighting to preserve the open architecture of the Internet - arguably the single most important structural change since the invention of the personal computer.
Update 1: I see Stoller posted a link here. Let me return the favor by linking to his very creative thinking about how the Health Care for America Now coalition "could and should become a much broader fight than one about health insurance" by focusing broadly on health, not just narrowly on medical insurance:
if HCAN took on what it means to be healthy, the playing field broadens dramatically. Rather than a giant denouement around a bill in Congress, with a loss or a win, the coalition can fight on the Agriculture bill, in the Transportation bill coming down the pike early next year, and can team up with businesses to move forward on healthier infrastructure. With important books like The End of Food hitting the shelves, this issue is poised for an explosive fight on the internet, as health intersects quite dramatically with the carbon intensive agricultural system we use (which also has national security implications).
With a broadened mandate, HCAN could go to the states, through agencies, and hit at individual companies that aren't expecting it, like Florida Crystal and Walmart, for peddling sugar (there's an alliance with progressive foreign policy elites there as well). The internet might explode in support of the innumerable obvious and interesting fights HCAN picks.
Brilliant - I hope it inspires more creative thinking along these lines.
