The Long Game Jon Ward

We keep looking at our broken political system — the politicians who show up on our TV's and our phones, the lawmakers who end up in Congress, and the general lack of solutions to our biggest problems — and we shake our head. We promise to vote the bums out. We vow to drain the swamp. We pledge to overturn the plutocracy.
But we don't think about our assembly line, the system that gives us the choices we are presented with.
Remember Lee Drutman's line? "Who chooses the choices?"
That's the right question. When we show up to the toy store, and don't like our choices, we're not asking who is making the decision to limit us to these options. We simply keep buying from their limited selection, hoping for a different outcome.
The point of Nick's Troiano's book, The Primary Solution, is that we have to change the way we choose our choices. This means getting rid of party primaries, which have become a weapon used by ideologues and zealots to turn our politics into a bloodsport rather than something that serves its citizens.
Nick's book is an explanation of how that came to be, why it should be changed, and how we can change it. 
You can also read a series of four Substack posts on the book here. 

Break the system.
 
That's what one New Hampshire voter, a 58-year old retired Army officer, said he wants the president to do, in an interview with Politico Magazine.
 
It's only the most obvious example of many of us tend to do from time to time. We pretend, or actually believe, that politics is a form of magic.
 
In other words, we think we can elect a person, or pass a law — as if we were waving a wand — and this will fix our problems.
 
But Michael Wear argues in The Spirit of Our Politics that a politics of magic is like trying to take a shortcut, and it won't work.
 
"Our society, politics, and churches are hampered by a technological conceit — that we can attain the kind of society we seek without coming to terms with the kind of people we are and without becoming a different kind of people," (147) he writes.
 
"Our society produces mass shootings at an unparalleled rate and scale, for instance, not in spite of the kind of people we are, but because of the kind of people we are."
 
What is needed, Michael argues, is a resurrection of spiritual formation.
 
"Spiritual formation is not a question for Christians alone," (137) he says.

The 1950's and 60's were an age of widely shared prosperity in the U.S. — across class and economic lines — that have never quite returned. Things were improving for all parts of society during the post-war period, and for all groups including Black Americans, despite the real presence of racial bias and discrimination against them. And things have not improved equally in recent decades. Things have improved since then. But the rate of steady and ongoing improvement and progress has slowed in many ways, and stalled in some.
All this is the subject of today's episode, an interview with journalist David Leonhardt of the New York Times. You may know David from the daily newsletter for the Times that he writes, which is the Times' flagship newsletter, The Morning. David's new book is called "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream." It was recently named one of the year's top 10 books by The Atlantic magazine.
"The economy has grown more slowly than it did in the postwar decades," Leonhardt writes, "producing less bounty for the population to share." And, he adds, "the economy has become more unequal, with a declining share of that bounty available to most Americans, because it is flowing to a relatively small percentage of affluent households" (xxiii).
This is a problem for democracy, Leonhardt writes. His book is one of several recently that are, together, sending a loud signal to Democrats that they have become too strident and purist in ways that alienate large numbers of voters who they need to win elections. These books are imploring Democrats to focus on helping working class voters economically and to cast a wider and more tolerant tent on social and cultural issues.
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Tim Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism, is a sobering look at the results in history when a religious movement morphs into a political movement, and allows its identity to be taken over by political imperatives and goals.
Alberta's book documents the spread of Christian Trumpism, aided and abetted by conflict profiteers who have made "fear and hatred a growth strategy" inside the evangelical subculture for decades.
But Alberta also writes that, to his surprise, he found evidence that the doomsday industrial complex has been "floundering" more recently and that "somewhere along the line their momentum had stalled."
Alberta details the way that Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, David and Nancy French and others have begun to try to unite, connect and organize the many disparate and isolated members of the American church who do not worship a political leader or give blind allegiance to a political party.
Time will tell if this is accurate and durable. But Alberta's book is a remarkable work of journalism. Tim also tells his own story of loss, heartbreak, and trying to come to grips with the moment in which we find ourselves.


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This is a Builders conversation. I'm doing these about once a month to highlight people who are not just cursing the darkness but are also building up their local community — and the country — through making something beautiful, through problem-solving, and by stitching together places of belonging and meaning. (Thank you Joy Moore for the inspiration!)
This past summer, we took our kids to visit WERU in Maine, which is near Acadia National Park. The station's General Manager, Matt Murphy, gave us a tour, and he even had our two youngest daughters do a brief on-air announcement in support of the station. We saw the floor to ceiling shelves of CD's and records, the small studio, and the kitchen, also filled with music.
I wanted to interview Matt for my Builders series because, as he says: “There's so much in the world that's challenging ... and all the hard times can have a certain degree of paralysis to them."
"And there's a lot of things in the world that I can't do anything about, but I can do a lot about making community radio a good environment for people to do their thing and serve the community," he told me. "So having something to do, that you feel can help make even a little bit of a difference, is really important."
That's exactly it. Having something to do to make even a little bit of difference is the cure for the ways that the bigger, broader world can make all of us feel hopeless and powerless sometimes.
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This week's podcast interview (audio above) is with Ruy Teixeira, about his new book with John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.
It is an argument that both parties have been co-opted by big business. It spends all its time blaming the Democrats for their part in this, but that's because the authors believe the Democrats used to be the party of the working person, and that it can and should be again. They also view the Republican party, or at least large swaths of it, as a threat to democracy.
They are interested in Democrats winning elections, and winning elections is an issue of math. And they believe, based on quite a bit of statistical evidence and history, that the Democratic party has alienated key elements of the country that they need to win elections, both by losing touch with working class people on economics, and on social issues.
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