It was 1998. Before that, the debates during family lunches on Saturdays had never been particularly meaningful; we never listened deeply to each other. I usually wanted to express to my parents my disappointment and hatred towards our leading politicians. But the rise of Fidesz—a conservative party led then and now by Prime Minister Viktor Orban—changed the dynamic in our home. My parents had been bitterly disappointed by government before, and saw the Social Democrats as the previous system’s rulers in new costumes. For them, Fidesz was a new hope. Neither of us had the skills to discuss our disagreements, so my parents banned talk of politics in our house.

Nearly two decades later, I discuss politics with my kids. While driving them to school from our North Budapest home this fall, we encounter more than 12 billboards promoting mind-washing political messages in just a few kilometers. Different billboards repeat the same message, sometimes only meters apart about migrants and the threat they cause to Hungary. This is communication pollution.

The nationalist pro-Fidesz messages on those billboards have foreign origins. The American Republican campaign consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein helped design Orban’s communication tactics that led to his 2010 victory and return to the prime minister’s office. (He previously occupied the office from 1998 to 2002). The Finkelstein-Orban method was to amplify images of political enemies in public space—those billboards—with large-scale hate campaigns. Hungary had never before had this volume of political trash propaganda on the streets. But we got used to it very quickly and grew accustomed to judging each other as being supporters or opponents of Fidesz.

Fidesz won a two-thirds majority in local and countrywide elections in 2014 with obvious gerrymandering and without a party program; it was an electro-shock for democracy. They changed hundreds of laws, and Orban, an ardent soccer fan, made soccer his metaphor—he likes the full-field attack strategy, both for his football and his political action. In time, many Hungarians realized that playing soccer for Orban also means that referees can be bought by one team, and that the field’s boundaries can be changed during the game. Johan Huizinga, the famous playwright, philosopher, and anthropologist, long ago pointed out that the game-changer is also part of the game, and the rule-breaker can control the players with new rules.

Orbans concept was to keep democracy, but minimize it. His minimal democracy was painful for me to accept. I’ve become a witness to the rebirth of communist political and media tactics to gain the most power one can get. The tactics continue, even though Fidesz lost some power in 2015, when it lost its two-thirds majority in the government.

You may have read from afar about Orban’s nationalist populism, and his anti-democratic tendencies. But it is another thing to see it up close, as a Hungarian.

In limited democracies, public debate and civic engagement have little significance. It’s unimportant, also, to maintain the image of a balanced public media. Yes, there are public interactions, but they serve merely as a background in the theater where stakeholders can have their say to manipulate the questions posed to the public—but without any intention of eliciting answers. The official doors for bottom-up social innovations are closed. The challenge for civic organizations, like the Hungarian Occupy movement, or the transparency-focused group Glass Village, is to make voices heard, and to get people to participate in civic platforms, like the ones with which I work.

Meanwhile, Fidesz has continued to devour the state, taking full advantage of the fact that once a governing group marginalizes the citizenry from democratic decision-making, it can help itself (and its friends, lovers, relatives, and sycophants) to the spoils of governing. The Fidesz government has rewritten the constitution and slapped a “special project” designation on numerous initiatives and state investments that places them on an insulated fast track, beyond any questioning and ordinary oversight processes. It’s like a martial law for state spending, to advance big projects that enrich those close to the ruling circle while restricting any local or democratic involvement in the decision-making.

Imagine if your government could do anything in your city, even in front of your house, without the democratic approval of the local community.

They do whatever they are not ashamed to do.

There are several very large-scale projects that are awakening citizens in Budapest to the fact that their local rights and security have been stolen by the central government and there is no one to protect their values. Examples of such special projects include the new Russian-financed nuclear power plant; the Liget project, which would relocate museums in the middle of one of the oldest public parks in Europe; the building of football stadiums; and the relocation of the Prime Minister’s office to the historical castle district.

Citizens are not permitted to have a say in these investments; they are presented to the public as a fait accompli. Their financing, purpose, design and, perhaps worst of all, their environmental impacts, are all matters left to those in power.

There are rules for governing in this system. Never admit a mistake. Strike back mercilessly at critics. And repeat catchy mantras that remind people of the previous failures of other political parties. After years of this, these tactics of communication have spread from the billboards and press releases to many regular conversations between citizens.

There are other rules, too. Weaken the democratic safeguards of checks and balances. Turn Parliament into an assembly line for the laws you wish to enact. Attack the freedom of information, turning away the investigative journalists who ask for public data. Capture and direct public media and press agencies, and co-opt private media by your selective deployment of state advertising. Copy the authoritarian Russian model—in other words, including the brazenness of its lying without fear of consequences.

There is a shame in living like this, a shame in understanding what has been done in the name of democracy, by the power of the majority. Many of us Hungarians feel depressed by the unstoppable, overwhelming force of these tactics. Can Hungary be considered a democracy in the face of growing favoritism, corruption, and the plummeting levels of trust towards the government, parliament, and public institutions?

Orban is now in the middle of his third term, and he faces a difficult personal choice. How does he conserve his power? In this sense, he is like any regular politician. But in consolidating his power, his biggest obstacle may be the damage he has done to our society—the way he has bred division, a hunger for power, and hate in our society. Can anyone govern a country like the country Hungary has become?

There comes a point of no return for authoritarian democracies when they must either correct course to retain any claim to be a democracy, or abandon all pretense and embrace their authoritarianism. I am afraid Hungary is approaching that point, and I am worried that enough Hungarians, let alone outsiders able to influence our government, are paying attention. Sometimes it’s just easier to look away.

The post The Shame of Living in an Authoritarian Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Oh, please.

So far, this new force has confined itself to narrow lobbying for favorable regulation of Uber and Airbnb. The real story is just how cautious and cowardly these companies have been in their approach to politics. If their model really is the future, why haven’t they applied it to the essence of campaigns and governance?

Well, I believe in these companies and in California—perhaps more than they do. And so I hereby—in all modesty—offer a proposal. To democratize our politics and government, we need an Uber that connects us more closely to politicians and their campaigns in the language those pols understand best: money.

The political-influence business—from campaign finance to lobbying—is an industry not unlike taxis or hotels: a regulated monopoly that serves too few people at too high a cost. Getting the attention of politicians requires making campaign donations far in excess of what most of us can afford. And government is so complicated that, when we need something from it, it’s awfully hard to know, without an expensive lobbyist on retainer, whom to approach.

In political influence, as in our state, we face dangerous and growing inequality. Buying access has become more and more costly, and so fewer and fewer people and interests account for more of our campaign donations. And that means fewer people really have much hope of getting what they want from government.

In other words, the cost of buying a politician or a government official has gone way up. In California, the problem is particularly severe, since we have so many billionaires who can buy access, and so few politicians. California’s state senators, for example, represent 10 times more people than the national average.

But don’t be frustrated. This is the perfect opportunity for a Silicon Valley solution!

Here is the key insight: Most of us don’t need or even want to own a politician. But almost everyone has moments when it would be helpful to rent one. I propose a new app, Rent-A-Pol, to eliminate this inefficiency and allow millions of more people to buy the access and political favors they need.

It’s very much like hailing a ride from Uber. You have a moment when you need help from a politician or government official—maybe you’d like the right pol to write you a letter, or return your call to answer a question, or get a pothole filled, or fight a regulation that’s troubling your business, or call a hearing to examine an important issue, or introduce legislation you’ve drafted, or maybe even vote your way on a budget item that matters to you. All you have to do is use the app to inform politicians of your needs and how quickly they must be met, and then government officials and their aides let you know what the price will be—either in campaign donations or government fees. A deal is reached—and suddenly calling politics “transactional” isn’t an insult anymore!

Sure, we’d have to tweak existing laws that define and criminalize corruption, but the end result would be more efficient, and transparently honest, than the disingenuous status quo in which pols do what their big donors want, and everyone denies any causality.

And the winners in our reformed Rent-A-Pol world won’t just be the citizens who get what they want or the politicians who get more campaign money from a broader base. We all win, because of the system’s outright transparency. We’d see more than just who is funding campaigns (as existing apps now tell us). We’d be able to see the exact price it takes to accomplish certain official actions.

Rent-A-Pol would provide accountability for these transactions via a 360-degree rating system. Not only could citizens rate their rented pols—like you can currently rate your Uber driver or Handy housecleaner—but pols would also be able to rate their influence-seeking customers, based on the reasonableness of their demands. These ratings would be game changers—they should make citizens more reasonable and politicians more responsive to our needs.

And Rent-A-Pol would be good for the state budget. The data from the app’s transactions could guide state fiscal policymakers as they try to more accurately price the government’s own fees for various services. The state could also take a small cut of each transaction for the general fund (in a way similar to proposed taxes on marijuana favored by legalization advocates); that money might go to programs designed to boost citizen participation in the political process.

OK, let’s face one hard fact: despite all the ways that Rent-A-Pol would help us, there are some brain-dead good government types who will moan that this noble technological advance would condone bribery, and worsen the state of our politics. Instead of letting technology make our politics more responsive, these old-school types keep demanding new regulations, most recently with a new ballot initiative that could add to the costs of compliance and thus extend the influence-peddling monopoly of the rich.

I’m sorry, but the notion that government is not for sale is pretense. And everyone knows those anti-corruption laws we’d be tweaking are badly outdated—many of them are part of the same early 20th-century reform movements as the health, occupational safety, and labor laws that Uber and Airbnb have so easily flouted. Plus, do you really believe a U.S. Supreme Court that says money is a form of speech is going to disallow the Rent-A-Pol app?

Silicon Valley’s revolutionary technologies are all about disrupting old industries by leveling the playing field, cutting out parasitic middlemen, and empowering individuals. That’s the promise of Rent-A-Pol; for one thing, the app has the potential to decimate California’s ever-growing lobbying industry.

The rich already buy what they want from government. Why not the rest of us?

The post Can the Sharing Economy Make Politicians More Responsive? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A lawyer and actor, Thompson had been elected U.S. Senator from Tennessee by that night in the late ’90s. He was visiting California, and I was a young Republican staffer, assigned to be his driver for the evening. It turned out I was lucky to get the gig. He gave me one of the most memorable nights of my career, and insight into how powerful people navigate the world.

Fred Thompson, who died this week at age 73, was tall in stature—he stood 6 feet 6 inches—though bigger in presence. But with a friendly demeanor, wry sense of humor and Tennessee drawl, he wasn’t threatening.

Driving a black SUV rented for the occasion, I picked him up at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, and we fought traffic all the way to a Beverly Hills mansion where he would be the main draw at the evening’s fundraising event.

Thompson was invited to California under the auspices of raising money for the GOP and one well-heeled but very forgettable Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate that year. He would come out for the event—a private dinner at her home—but use the opportunity to meet new friends and donors should he need them if he ever decided to run for president (which he would a decade later).

He didn’t have much time for small talk. Mainly he wanted to know who I was and what I knew about politics. I sensed he didn’t tolerate bullshit, and as a twenty-something kid, I wasn’t about to bullshit a 6-foot-6-inch U.S. Senator anyway.

“Has this woman got a shot at winning the primary?” he asked me directly.

“No, sir,” I responded hesitantly, knowing even then that that kind of response could get me in to a load of trouble quickly with people way above my pay grade.

“So why did the party ask me to come out here?” he asked.

“Because she’s rich and she can fund her own campaign,” I said. “The party can spend the money they raise tonight in other places.”

I peered into the rear view mirror not knowing what to expect. He smiled broadly and nodded.

“Well, you’ve passed the honesty test, son,” he drawled “Let’s have a talk about California.”

We spent the next hour bouncing back and forth between questions about California politics. Was modern-day California more likely to elect someone like Reagan or someone like Nixon as Governor? My answer: neither. We also talked about life in the public eye. I asked: Which are better to deal with, political fans or movie star fans? His answer: neither.

Dinner was an intimate gathering of 15 people. Studio executives, socialites, and lawyers. Much of the discussion focused on immigration.

“We’ve got to secure our borders,” he said over dinner. “But I’ve got to believe we can approach a solution in a way that isn’t alienating what I believe are potential Republican voters.”

It was the first time I had heard a Republican senator consider Latino immigrants potential Republican voters. After all, Proposition 187, passed in 1994, the same year Thompson won his Senate seat, was still a recent memory. But Thompson was very different from most of the freshman Republicans elected in that era.

That answer has stuck with me over these many years. It wasn’t the red meat Republicans were expecting. But it didn’t leave them unsatisfied either. Rather, it was a bigger question that none of them seemed to have considered before.

Thompson had always had a broader, more philosophical approach to conservatism than his colleagues. He was not an ideologue. At that dinner, and in other public settings, he seemed perfectly at ease pondering the answers to tough questions he didn’t have a canned response for. His conservative philosophy was more a lens through which he approached problems than a manuscript from which there was no budging.

After dinner, I remember driving him to a famous restaurant in Beverly Hills. The whole time he was looking out of the window wistfully taking in the Westside streets.

“I filmed a scene at this intersection,” he pointed out.

I didn’t say anything.

“More people will remember me for the characters I played on TV or the movies than anything I’ve done in Washington—you remember that.”

The senator met up at the restaurant with some of his Capitol staff, an entertainment executive, and the restaurant owner. Cigars were smoked, and poker was played. I joined them for a while, but, as the young guy nobody else knew, I decided to excuse myself to wait in the car. They went pretty deep into the night.

Sitting in the parked car left me with a lot of time to think about how different this person was from all the politicians I worked with daily.

Though he was comfortable in both arenas, he had not aspired to Washington or Hollywood as a young man, and you sensed that about him. That lack of aspiration distinguished him from most politicians, a group obsessed with titles and climbing the next rung. Thompson had walked away from Hollywood and he could walk away from a life in the United States Senate without blinking an eye—he would do so in 2002, after just eight years in office.

How did he move so seamlessly through two of the most ego-driven cultures in the country? The secret may have been that while he didn’t adhere to all their rules, he wasn’t disruptive or disdainful of them.

As the evening wrapped up, the senator emerged and asked me to take him back downtown to his hotel. At well past three in the morning on a Wednesday, the streets were dead. Completely empty.

I rolled up to the first street light, which was red. We stared forward together in the silence down a long quiet city street. The next 10 street lights were all synchronized together, meaning we were gonna have to stop at each of the red lights despite there being no traffic at all.

“Son,” he said, leaning forward towards me, “if it were me, I would just drive on through—I don’t think any of those red lights are meant for us.”

The post Driving Fred Thompson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is not more rage, but a new political perspective. Around 1900, after years of anger at “vulgar” politicians, a young journalist pushed voters to resist the easy impulse “to go out with the crowd and ‘smash something.’” It was too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe that bad politicians were just immoral people. Instead he asked his massive readership to look at the structure rather than the individual, to think about the warped systems that enabled political corruption, and to consider the ways angry voters inadvertently encouraged behavior they condemned.

Lincoln Steffens was the perfect man for the job. The young writer had bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan, driven by wanderlust, contrarianism, and a preference for the sleazy over the respectable. He honed his scorching prose, and learned about New York’s “low-life,” as a crime reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. There was something feisty about Steffens. Over his long career, he was often wrong, sometimes a sucker, but rarely a coward. One politico called him “a born crook that’s gone straight.”

Like many Americans, Steffens grew up cursing his leaders. Between 1865 and 1900, frustrated citizens pointed to the never-ending string of political scandals and stolen elections, as leaders failed to address the massive traumas of the Gilded Age. Citizens often looked down on the parties, like the wealthy young man who wrote that all politicians were a “shifty-eyed lot, dribbling tobacco juice, badly dressed, never prosperous and self-respecting … a degraded caste.”

Attacking leaders was an easy route to becoming one. Self-impressed tycoons, high-toned editors, and rising politicians “greedy for power” all insisted that they knew how to clean up politics. Replace bad, immoral men with “the best men”—wealthy, God-fearing, respectable—and the democracy would fix itself. And by “the best men,” they meant themselves.

Again and again, angry voters tried this approach, throwing the bums out in election after election. In major cities, “reformers” applied the same formula, winning the mayor’s office periodically, but falling out of power just as quickly. And control of Congress changed hands with dizzying speed in the 1880s and 1890s, yet politics only grew more corrupt.

But as a crime reporter who befriended crooked cops and scheming politicos, Steffens stumbled onto a new approach to journalism. Instead of moralizing, he listened. People would talk, he found, if you let them. Steffens hung around police stations and pool halls, absorbing everything he could. He even tolerated the ceaseless lectures of a young police commissioner named Roosevelt (though Steffens devised ways to shut his new friend Teddy up). And he refused to sit, isolated, in New York, setting out across the country to study dirty tricks from Boston to San Francisco.

Steffens introduced American readers to corrupt bosses who make today’s most obnoxious candidates look timid. He befriended characters with nicknames like “Hinky Dink” and “Bathhouse John.” Taciturn party thugs opened up to Steffens, analyzing their best tricks like fans of the same sport. By humanizing election-buyers, union-busters, accused murderers, and confirmed murderers, he helped explain why America’s leadership problem persisted.

Steffens came away with two major insights. Bad politicians were not necessarily bad people, and society, as a whole, encouraged their sins.

He learned the most from Israel Durham, boss of the Philadelphia political machine, an organization so rotten that Ben Franklin and George Washington’s names often showed up on voting rolls. (People in Philly joked: “The founders voted here once, and they vote here yet.”) But Steffens liked Iz’ Durham. He concluded that Durham was not a bad man, but merely a successful man, trapped at the head of a system beyond his control. Durham was certainly guilty of tremendous crimes, but society kept rewarding him for them. Among other things, Durham explained that regular campaign donations, coming from upstanding citizens, did more to buy influence than any illegal kickback. Such contributions, the boss shouted, were “worse than bribes!”

Conversations with Durham and other bosses led Steffens to conclude that the angry public was focused on the wrong problem. Political dirty tricks were not “exceptional, local, and criminal … not an accidental consequence of the wickedness of bad men, but the impersonal effect of natural causes.” Americans—obsessed with individualism—liked to rage against immoral men, but really it was big, impersonal structures—like the steady drip of campaign contributions—that did more to buy power and harm the democracy.

Steffens began to write, furiously, publishing his “dawning theory” in his famous “Shame of the Cities” series in McClure’s Magazine between 1901 and 1904. Politicians were not a special caste of wicked men; they were no more immoral than bribing businessmen or lazy cops or short-sighted voters. Often, angry middle-class citizens, looking for someone to blame, perpetuated the pointless cycle of reform and relapse, throwing out individuals but failing to make real change.

Illustration from Puck, November 16, 1881, “American Invention for Blowing Up Bosses.”

Their outrage at the “bad men” in government was really just a “thought-saver of the educated who think that they think,” Steffens declared, a way to avoid considering the deeper problems with their political system.

Steffens was the most articulate voice of the new burst of reform remaking American democracy after 1900. American voters began to see that the country’s political problems were, really, social problems. Instead of hollering about immoral bosses, reformers simply went around them, introducing primary elections, ballot initiatives, recall votes, and eventually the direct election of senators. Progressive activists focused on improving political structures, not what they labeled electoral “lynchings” of the bad guys.

Some clever bosses jumped on the bandwagon. Tammany Hall cleverly recast itself as a reform organization. But this was fine; it meant that voters were rewarding reform over corruption. By 1910, journalist William Allen White imagined the sleaziest bosses of the 19th century observing the new, cleaner elections, “cackling in derision until they were black in the face” at neutered politicians forced to play by the fairer rules. These changes marked the greatest moment of political reform, not sparked by a major crisis like a war or depression, in American history.

In our own era of intense skepticism towards the media, it’s important to remember how much we owe muckrakers like Steffens. And in our time of anger at politicians, it’s important to consider where bad leaders come from. Those today who call politicians “losers” are no better than phony Gilded Age moralists, who condemned the “bad men” in Washington while trying to join them. Their rhetoric turns every campaign into a contest that rewards anger, providing a smokescreen behind which elites masquerade as outsiders.

And it confuses the issue: politicians are, as a group, no better or worse than the rest of us. If they stink, something’s rotten with the system that feeds them.

Yet anger at our leaders is the political cliché of our day. As long as we see politics as a war between good and bad individuals, ignoring the structures that reward or punish them, this will continue. America’s stalled democracy is not our leaders’ fault alone, but ours as well, for treating all political problems as personnel problems.

The post Why Early 20th-Century Muckraker Lincoln Steffens Is a Man For Our Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’d think those facts alone would make me happy to see the mayor ride off into the sunset. But the opposite is true. I’m going to miss Mayor Villaraigosa. Not because of the name-calling or for any good government reasons (like most Angelenos, I don’t pay very close attention to the minutia of local politics), but because Antonio was fun to watch. And he was fun to watch for the same reasons he could insult me to my face: He couldn’t hide his rough edges. His impetuousness sometimes got the best of him. And, over the years, he transformed, visibly, into a smoother, better, more effective politician.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mayor and I have never particularly liked each other. Our relationship has been, by definition, adversarial. (Tagging along on a 2006 Asia trade mission, I was left off a bus in Beijing. When I asked the mayor why, he addressed both his aides and me in response: “Why did you leave my friend Gregory off the bus—even though he is an asshole?!”) I’ve been writing about Antonio for a variety of publications for nearly 20 years, and, hell, if I were him, I’d hate my guts. I first interviewed him in 1994, the day after he was elected to the California State Assembly. He was the subject of many of my Los Angeles Times columns as well as cover stories I wrote for the now-defunct California Journal magazine when he became speaker of the Assembly in 1998 and for Newsweek in 2005 when he was elected mayor of L.A.

I’ve written some nice things about him through the years. (When he complimented me on one such story, I, in a brusque effort to keep journalistic distance, told him, “This doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re an asshole.”) I’ve also written some things that could be considered downright harsh. All in all, I’d like to think I’ve kept the mayor on his toes. He has certainly kept me on mine.

In 1994, he was a rather parochial leftist ethnic advocate. Four years later he had turned himself into a pragmatic, politically savvy insider. By the time he first ran for mayor in 2001, he had morphed into an inspirational man for all people, an apt political figure for the amazingly diverse new L.A. Once he became mayor, the one-time union activist mastered the art of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

We all know Antonio Villaraigosa’s imperfections, but rarely do we acknowledge how his own hyper-awareness of his foibles drives his ambition and his evolution as a politician and a man. Love him or hate him, Antonio never stands still or leaves well enough alone.

None of this is to excuse those foibles, but simply to recognize that his well-recognized flaws are also the source of his striving.

In politics as in life, moral rectitude is overrated. And let’s be honest, it’s also a little boring. Somewhere on my refrigerator door, I have a red, white, and blue magnet I picked out at the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. It’s emblazoned with one of Honest Abe’s best quotes: “It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”

Call me crazy, but I like to see some reflection of humanity in my elected officials. I preferred junk-food Bill Clinton over the vegan version. It comforts me to know that from time to time, No Drama Obama has a hankering for nicotine. When all is said and done, Mayor Villaraigosa’s less-than-angelic persona made him interesting, approachable, and ultimately, pretty damn entertaining.

One morning about a year ago, I was walking down Wilshire to my old office in Koreatown when a dark SUV slowed down and sidled up to the curb in front of me.

For a moment I thought I was either going to become an FBI detainee or the victim of a gangland shooting. But just before I could make a run for it, a beaming Antonio Villaraigosa popped his head out of the passenger window and cheerfully yelled out my name. For an instant, the spontaneous absence of pomp or circumstance made Los Angeles feel like a small town.

At his best, that’s what Villaraigosa did for L.A. Whether it was by throwing out the first pitch at a Dodger game, shaking hands with people boarding their bus on the Orange Line, or just stopping to say hello, he made us feel like we were all in it together. And that our town worked: He was the Roosevelt High grad done good whose very success was a reflection of L.A.’s social progress.

So, yes, I’m going to miss Mayor Villaraigosa. You could call him many things, but because he showed up, you could do it to his face.

The post Why I’ll Miss Our Flawed Mayor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.