A great and perhaps decisive battle
Procedure vs. engagement, the science of justice, baseball is back, and more.
One of the most persistent beliefs of modern American politics, holding sway since the post-war era, is that you can increase participation in democracy by simply giving voters the proper tools. There are many manifestations of this belief (‘good governance’, accountability, technocracy, digital democracy, ‘open politics’), and many applications (leadership forums, opinion polling, public records, oversight, transparency), but the goal is always the same: a constituency that is given the tools and the information to understand how decisions are arrived at by those in power. The theory goes that the more knowledge to which the voter is exposed, the more engaged they will be in the democratic process.
This approach – not unique to liberalism, but widely embraced by liberals – played itself out recently in the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I am a member. After much highly contentious and sometimes rancorous debate, the Transparency and Accountability Proposal (TAP) passed at the chapter’s first general meeting since 2021. For its defenders, it was a reasonable and uncontroversial set of standards meant to promote democratic participation in debate and hold elected leaders accountable to the membership; to its detractors, of which I was one, it was a burdensome mandate of rules that demanded vastly more labor from leadership without providing them with the tools to meet those demands. Its passage included an amendment which will require a more balanced and reasonable path to implementation, but pass or fail, it exposed what I think is a fundamental difference in political vision.
The various pushes for ‘good governance’ over the last several decades have been largely bipartisan in nature, insofar as both parties believe their opposition cannot be trusted and neither is particularly trusting in the institutions of the state they struggle to control. They are also generally if not specifically popular with the public, because it is not wrong to say there should be plentiful mechanisms in place to prevent abuse of power and an overall atmosphere of secrecy in government. Open politics are based on an entirely understandable experience with the tendency of state power to be abused.
But, to begin, it should be remembered that political organizations like DSA are not the state; the unpaid volunteers who constitute its leadership are not highly paid legislators who can effect wide-ranging change in the lives of their constituents; and the little power it has, which is largely administrative and procedural, is not the kind of material power possessed by representatives of the U.S. government. So, too, should we be aware that there have been innumerable good-government oversight programs, from budgetary processes to the No Child Left Behind Act, that had good intentions but poor execution that didn’t actually create more democracy or accountability, but just placed layer after layer of bureaucratic demands on government entities. As others have pointed out, there are many examples of accountability laws, from the municipal to federal levels of government, that intended a specific and positive effect, but did not actually result in better governance or more democracy.
Why is that? I believe that it comes down to a fundamental philosophical difference between competing factions. The proponents of TAP, I think, have faith in the ability of procedural fixes to increase democracy. If we simply put in place the tools of transparency, the people will pick them up and utilize them; if we build the democracy, they will come to it. There is thus nothing wrong with mandating a new set of rules on elected leaders, because obviously, it will increase participation in government, and there will be plenty of people who will willingly volunteer to do the extra work.
I have a number of issues with this approach; first, it smacks of managerialism, of the idea that in a socialist organization, the people you have elected to represent you are not your comrades but your servants. DSA leadership is not the state, and DSA electeds are neither bosses nor employees; treating them like that only represents the divisive and hierarchical mechanisms of capitalism we should be struggling in every aspect of our lives to erase. Beyond that, though, it ignores the crucial fact that all the tools in the world will not increase democracy or accountability if your membership does not feel as if they have a stake in using them.
It is almost an article of faith in leftist circles that there are no easy pathways, no quick fixes, no “one neat trick”s to getting people to participate in building a mass movement. It’s even the title of one of our most popular guides to organizing: No Shortcuts. The more experience you gain as an organizer, the more you learn that no matter how many administrative tools and procedural processes you put in place, they are just so many words without a membership that is engaged enough to use them. In my experience as co-chair of the chapter, as well as in my ongoing work as a chapter mentor and a member of the national organization’s Growth and Development Committee, I have both learned and taught the principles that will create a better DSA: chapter growth, leadership development, and the process of engaging members to move from the base to the core.
We don’t have to look too far to see this in action. CDSA already struggles to have competitive contests for leadership positions; our attendance at both in-person and online meetings hovers at just over 10%, making it occasionally difficult even to meet quorum. This is a problem that cannot be solved by procedural fixes. You can’t give people reams of information and statistics and expect them to read them if they can’t even be bothered to show up for meetings, and you can’t think that democracy will increase by simply archiving and disseminating data when 90% of the voting body are essentially paper members. You move those members by bringing them from inactive membership to active membership and from there to the core. That requires a (sometimes slow, often arduous, and occasionally frustrating) process of engagement, communication, and participation, not through inundating them with reports and numbers.
In an average election year, voter turnout in America hovers between 40% and 60%. More than half of eligible voters – most from the multiracial working class that is the key to socialist struggle – simply do not show up to participate in democracy. While some of this is because of voter suppression, far more is simple indifference: The working class knows full well that neither party will do anything to change their material conditions, and correctly sees the democratic process as something of a waste of time; no amount of voter information or easy registration will change that. We need to focus on bold changes, real progress, and the advancement of a clearly articulated vision of socialist politics to make people care about transparency and accountability, not simply equip a rarely-visited workshop with tools nobody uses.
Speaking of oversight, this week marks the one-year anniversary of the release of the Netflix true-crime documentary How to Fix a Drug Scandal. We are taught by state propaganda and its media enablers to believe that the criminal justice system is fair, balanced, free of any kind of bias, and based on physical evidence and scientific standards. We know from bitter experience that this is far from the case.
The four-part series, directed by Erin Lee Carr (daughter of storied New York Times columnist David Carr and the mind behind several other worthwhile true-crime docuseries, including Mommy Dead and Dearest and I Love You, Now Die), focuses on two unrelated but contemporaneous cases in the Massachusetts of the 2010s. Both involved employees of drug testing labs that processed evidence in narcotics cases: one, Sonja Farak, tampered with LSD, marijuana, speed, and cocaine from the evidentiary chain, stealing them, and taking them herself (frequently during work hours), and the other, Annie Dookhan, falsified data and misidentified evidence in order to establish herself as a reliable ally of prosecutors and district attorneys.
Once the misdeeds of Farak and Dookhan were exposed, the entire criminal justice system in Massachusetts was thrown into disarray. Because it was now impossible to tell what evidence was tainted, tens of thousands of drug convictions were overturned; a further attempt to cover up the chaos by the then-attorney general of the state (now a high-profile corporate lobbyist) only deepened it. It’s a compelling story, skillfully told and well-paced; it does a terrific job of illustrating how, in a complex system, two bad actors can cause untold amounts of damage. But most of all, it shows us how much we take for granted the idea that everyone in the criminal justice system is doing their job honestly and conscientiously. Prosecutors were more than willing to accept their findings as long as they resulted in convictions; plenty of checks and oversights were in place to verify the work, but no one had the desire or the time to use them.
Watching it, I was reminded of the cast of Tulia, Texas, where, in 1999, a so-called “gypsy cop”, who went from town to town providing half-baked ‘expertise’ and going undercover to make highly questionable drug busts, managed to send some 20% of the town’s black population to prison using falsified evidence (including substituting crushed sheetrock for cocaine) and completely fabricated documentation. Since that time, local police have only been given more funding, more equipment, and more leeway to make questionable arrests, and while legislation has been proposed over the subsequent twenty years to prevent such abuses of power, none have become law. It is all too easy to suspect that what is shocking is not that two such people could have committed so much evidence-tampering at the same time, but how many such similar cases must have happened – and must continue to happen – without our knowledge.
Baseball is back!
Baseball is always back. Like the simultaneously annoying and inspiring Chevy commercial narrative by James Earl Jones that’s in heavy rotation during MLB-TV broadcasts, baseball has been the American century’s one constant in war and peace, prosperity and depression. Last year was the first time I didn’t really feel excited about Opening Day, even in years when my beloved White Sox were doomed from the start; it seemed a pointless waste, during the COVID-19 pandemic, to have a season at all, given that it would be laden with asterisks and played in front of empty stadiums.
But this year, there’s life, and there’s hope. You still couldn’t get me to go to White Sox Park or any other MLB arena for love or money until I’ve gotten the COVID-19 vaccination, and I still shudder watching the half-empty venues with maskless fans all clustered together. This time, though, it’s more real; the whole thing doesn’t have the reek of being stage-managed for the sake of someone’s bottom line (or, at least, no more so than any other baseball season), and a full season without the players constantly at risk of death signals a return to normalcy of the sort politicians keep rattling on about.
The White Sox are going to have problems this year; Eloy Jimenez’s injury will slow the offense terrible, the bullpen is still a question mark, and there’s always Tony LaRussa being a turd in the background. But the first few games have been ridiculously exciting with some fun performances, and seeing Yermin Mercedes go five for five in his big-league debut was one of the most electrifying things I’ve watched in years.
Baseball isn’t the same. It may never be the same. But it’s back, as always, and I’m happy.
Today’s links: Jacobin considers Eugene Debs from a Marxist perspective; MEL looks at the encroachment of organized crime into small-town America; Dissent considers the problem of “anarcho-liberalism”; the Chicago Teachers’ Union has its full collective bargaining rights restored, against the wishes of Mayor Lightfoot; and a new sexual harassment scandal emerges at a U.S. Army base.