Democracy: A personal story.

Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters. Abraham Lincoln

I have a problem. I was born with a touch of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). When I was a kid, I remember I had to go back into the bathroom at night to make sure that my hand-towel was hung just right. I usually did that about 3-4 times a night.

I’m also obsessed with check-lists. Sometimes I add things I already did to a check-list just for the satisfaction of checking it off. I often add mundane things to my check-lists, e.g. water the plants or wash the dog.

On some particularly busy weeks, I have to remind myself to shower. Put it on the list. Check.

Check

Check

Check

Today, Saturday, is a slow day, but I offer – unadulterated – my calendar page for today. Clearly, I am going to be able to check off “write”. And I hope I can make it to Ross, because I desperately need some new (and cheap) yoga/sports leggings to write in.

My OCD never progressed too much more than these random idiosyncrasies in my youth. Until the introduction of apps.

You know the red notification dots on apps? They are my nemesis. I hate red dots. Every time a new red dot appears, I must stop what I’m doing to see what the red dot master wants. It totally distracts from whatever I’m doing, and there is plenty of evidence to show that multi-tasking is super bad for productivity.

When I see a friend, who has a red dot indicating like 1000 or more unread emails, texts, etc my heart seriously begins to race. My palms get sweaty. How are you ever going to address all of those red dots, I anxiously ask.

In this era of attention-grabbing apps, social media and a proliferation of news, how do we ever get anything done? If you are anything like me, you spend hours going down rabbit-holes. I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I read an article, click on the links in that article to read more, click on the links in the new article, and down and down I go.

When Finn and I started this blog, I wanted to write with some level of authority. To do so, in my mind, I needed to be an “expert” on the topic of the week. This created more and more anxiety as I realized, my true, academic expertise is limited beyond international affairs. So many people are writing and tweeting and doing so with more emotion, and less rational thought. This is what I wanted to combat in our writing, presenting some reasonably intelligent thought that may perhaps bridge the divide that has polarized not only our country, but also the world.

Honestly, I’ve been struggling with this for weeks. I have some big topics on our list: immigration, police, race. I’m furiously researching all these topics and lining up interviews to share a voice that is other than my own with my limited perspectives. In this effort, I have also pretty much signed up for every newsletter under the sun that is related to these and other like topics. I have subscribed to lists that track government legislation, police deaths, civilian deaths, technology events and so on. I have subscribed to newspapers, magazines and have a new stack of books taller than myself.

It’s not that I really care if you like what I write, although of course I do, but I want you to know that I’m at least coming at these topics intelligently. However, I have allowed the fear of seeming unintelligent to overwhelm me so much so that I forgot why I started Truth In Between. I started the blog to engage my son. To show him how his mama, a Gen X’er, sees the world, and to learn how my son, a Gen Z’er, is processing a world foreign to my youth. I believe developing this understanding and engaging other people in this dialogue allows us to work together to create a better future.

Democracy is not passive. Democracy requires action. It requires debate and dialogue.

And this is where my own story I think is relevant.

Our digital world allows for greater connection and communication, critical to promoting democracy. But, we can only really and genuinely process small amounts of information. While you may not have OCD, I’m guessing I’m not the only one feeling overwhelmed in the digital age.

With the flood of information, and our limited capacity to absorb it all, the result seems to be that we are actually reading and thinking less, and this hurts our democracy. There’s so much and we just don’t have the time. This results in our short, and often angry, bursts of communication over mediums such as Twitter and Facebook. We focus on headline grabbing fodder – Roseanne’s racist tweets – at the expense of deeper dives into policies and resolving issues that matter.

Further, in our world awash with information, cut down to these short one-liners, it seems that a lot of our dialogues have devolved into “whataboutism”. We shift the dialogue and the blame all at the expense of really wrestling with the truth in a meaningful and productive way.

As Avi Woolf recently noted in his piece, Conservatives Must Face Black America’s Dark Mirror:

The right and left can and should disagree over solutions and policies in a healthy manner – but we must start learning to agree on the facts.

Facts. No matter what political affinity you have, income inequality is a fact. Racism is real. We’ve allowed Roseanne Barr and Samantha Bee’s comments to create wedges, without really exploring, as a society, the issues behind these wedges. In many ways, I not only blame our use (or misuse) of technology, but also our electoral system.

We have an electoral system that engenders partisanship with very little real competition. As a result of gerrymandering, 80% of house districts are completely safe – there is no competition. As a result, our trust in the system has deteriorated, after all, why vote? Further, according to Fair Vote:

In 1992, 116 House Members represented districts carried by the other major party’s nominee. That declined to 26 after 2012. It is no accident the number of House Members classified as having moderate voting behaviors declined from 129 in 1992 to only 12 in 2012.

Adding to this issue, with the increase in campaign spending, who really controls the politicians? The people or the big businesses that are responsible for the campaign’s success? We have lost faith in our democracy and it has become abundantly clear. Trump tapped into this discontent in his promises to bring the power back to the people. However, like most campaign promises, this one has also fallen short.

There is one initiative that recently came to my attention, and I believe it has the potential to address, in some part, the threat to our democracy. Fair Vote is pushing for a new electoral system called Ranked Choice Voting. David Brooks explains how this works in his article, One Reform to Save America:

The way [to create a better system] is through multimember districts and ranked-choice voting. In populous states, the congressional districts would be bigger with around three to five members per district. Voters would rank the candidates on the ballot. If no candidate had a majority of first-place votes, then the candidate with the fewest first place votes would be eliminated. Voters who preferred that candidate would have their second-choice vote counted instead. The process would be repeated until you get your winners.

This system makes it much easier for third and fourth parties to form, because voting for a third party no longer means voting for one with no chance of winning. You get a much more supple representation of the different political tendencies that actually exist in the country.

Ranked-choice voting is not just an ethereal concept that works only in theory. They have already started to experiment with it in places like Maine. Creative initiatives, and the people behind them, give me hope.

Democracy is not dead. We just need to find innovative ways to navigate this new landscape and ensure we have a voice.

Gen-Z also gives me hope. Despite growing up in a digital age, or perhaps because of it, Finn’s generation craves face-to-face interaction. They embrace the debate and they are more agile in this new environment. The red dot doesn’t bully them into submission or lure them down the same rabbit-holes.

If we join with them to revive democracy, I think we’ll find, at the end of their rabbit-holes, something much different than a mercurial monarch.