Why We Hate Politics and How to Fix It

Draining the swamp won’t solve the problem — we actually need to fix the swamp.

Our politics have become mean and small and have infected how we govern. Government should be about progress: it should be about how we protect and create opportunity for every American — and our leaders should be driven by a desire to serve. But the incentives in government are broken. We must rebuild a culture of public service if we are going to renew faith in our democracy and reclaim our government.

Government is no longer about public service. Our campaign finance laws, ethics regulations, and redistricting processes have become so distorted over time that politicians optimize around future profits and government is driven by self and corporate interests rather than those of the American people. Running for office has become primarily a financial contest rather than one of leadership. We rarely even use the word “leader” to describe elected officials — we've exchanged it for the increasingly pejorative “politician.” And if politicians spend most of their energy courting donors while running and being courted by lobbyists once in office then those are the ideas and perspectives they will prioritize — the priorities of those for whom the current system is currently working, not the millions of Americans struggling just out of view. Partisan gerrymandering is creating an electoral process that rewards increasingly extreme positions that ward off primary challengers rather than solutions that serve the public. This primary-centric process ultimately drives candidates and parties toward the stale ideological edges of left or right, leaves a massive majority of the country feeling unrepresented, and serves only to continually narrow our focus to winning and losing rather than governing and progress.

The consequence of this tangled mess of flawed incentives is that the whole system bogs down. People who want to serve don’t see government as a viable path to doing good, and the system deteriorates, getting further away from the needs and priorities of the people it is ostensibly set up to serve and gets easier to co-opt by those willing to invest in the broken system. THIS IS WHY WE HATE POLITICS—the leaders we entrusted with its care have defiled a system that is supposed to be about our best and highest ideals, about what is possible for all of us and made it small and narrow and sordid.

But our politics and government are too important to throw our hands up in disgust, cede the swamp as diseased, and ignore it. We must fix them — this focus on personal power, self-aggrandizement, and the value of influence — this deficit in the culture of public service is a gap we can close.

How do we incentivize a culture of public service?

If we want our leaders to focus on our interests rather than theirs, we must make specific changes to the structure of politics that align their interests better with ours.

1. Reduce the campaign window
The length of modern campaigns is profoundly distracting. Campaigns should only be allowed to raise and spend resources within 1 year of their next general election, and direct advocacy from outside groups should be constrained to the same window.

2. Require nonpartisan redistricting processes
Elected leaders must not be allowed to select their voters or to structure the process to dictate which and where elections are competitive. Redistricting must be a nonpartisan process designed to build districts from contiguous census tracts that maximize the value of all votes while optimizing compactness and minimizing the partisan efficiency gap in every state.

3. Increase transparency in campaign finance
Money will always court power, so transparency is essential regardless of how we set and manage limits. All donations made to any entity that operates in any way to influence elections must disclose all donors at all levels within 48 hours of each donation.

4. Eliminate lifetime service
Understanding process, history, and context are essential to good government, but permanent, uncontested tenure isn’t healthy and should not be a goal of our leaders. Limit elected officials to 12 2-year terms in the House, 4 6-year terms in the Senate, and 24 total years of service in Congress.

5. Close the revolving door
Retired elected officials and public servants may not lobby, ever. Period. If we hire and elect dedicated, talented people they will have lots of opportunity post-elected service beyond directly monetizing their relationships and influence.

6. Reform civil service rules
Make performance review and progress a meaningful requirement for retention. Increase GS scale to make government service a meaningful part of career growth and encourage the best of the best to do their best work in the heart of their careers in public service.

7. Increase Congressional pay
If we want the smartest, most talented, most dedicated people in our communities to run for office, we need to ensure that we reward them for their time and talent and do so at a level where the siren song of influence peddling is softer.

How do we begin?

There is an inherent chicken and egg challenge here: the swamp is so gross that only swamp monsters are interested in it, but swamp monsters like the swamp the way it is. This whole series of reforms must be mirrored at the state level, and we need leaders willing to execute. In the last few months, we’ve seen new energy rising from more and more people ready to stand up and reclaim a system that feels distant and broken— the essential question is whether these new leaders are willing to change the system in the interests of the American people? To actively work against their own power, their own individual interests in order to reclaim our democracy in favor of the priorities of the American people? We should ONLY be backing leaders, regardless of party, at every level who are willing to embrace this kind of systemic reform as an essential part of their mission.

We look with euphoric recall to the past and our founding fathers for models for what true public servants look like, but they exist in our communities everywhere every day. It’s just that not enough of them run for office. We have to change that — we can't wait for the chicken or the egg — we can’t wait and hope the swamp gets more inviting — WE MUST BEGIN. Changing the culture of politics starts with demanding more of ourselves and investing our time and energy in the communities and causes we care about, voting for leaders who commit to a new culture of service, and then running for office from local community boards to federal offices while making reclaiming our government a central principle of why we run, how we run, and how we govern. NO ONE IS GOING TO DO IT FOR US.