But Monterey County isn’t home to even one member of the California state legislature.

The county’s lack of representation isn’t just a local story. It challenges the national narrative, advanced by leading Democrats and progressives, that our state is a leader in diversity and representation. It reminds us that Californians are more distant from their elected representatives, and from the ideals of democracy, than other Americans. And it  exposes the failure of California’s highly touted, voter-approved political reforms—like the top-two system of candidates, or our independent redistricting commission—to improve representation.

Because California’s supposedly democratic reforms have left a place as big and important as Monterey County without any state representation from one of its own.

That fact is the result of California’s extreme stinginess in democratic representation. The average American state legislative district has about 100,000 people. But California hasn’t increased the size of its legislature since 1879, when the state had fewer than 1 million people. So, we have by far the most populous legislative districts in the U.S. State Senate districts have nearly 1 million residents each, and Assembly districts have 500,000.

Monterey County has fewer people than that, which opens up the mathematical possibility of not having a single resident in the legislature.

The county, of course, has people who represent it, but they live in neighboring counties.

John Laird of Santa Cruz is the state senator in a massive district that covers not just Monterey County but parts of Santa Clara to the north, and half of San Luis Obispo County to the south.

In the Assembly, a politician from San Luis Obispo County—former Morro Bay city councilmember Dawn Addis—now represents western, coastal Monterey County, including Monterey Bay, which is 103 miles north of her home. Her district actually extends north into Santa Cruz and south to Santa Maria, the Santa Barbara County seat.

The eastern half of Monterey County is represented by the powerful Robert Rivas, who is expected to become Assembly speaker in June. California media routinely identify him as a Democrat from Salinas, where he has set up a district office.

But Rivas is actually a life-long resident of San Benito County. His official bio is a love letter to San Benito County places—he was raised in Paicines (where his grandfather was a farmworker at Almaden Vineyards), attended public schools in San Juan Bautista, and lives with his family in Hollister.

Ironically, the state legislator with the deepest Monterey County ties, Senator Anna Caballero, a former Salinas mayor, doesn’t represent the county. The redistricting commission pushed her district east, into the Central Valley.

California’s much touted independent redistricting commission is not supposed to consider the residences of existing politicians when it draws up districts. But it is supposed to keep together “communities of interest.” Monterey County is surely a community of interest.

Indeed, Monterey County’s exclusion should remind us just how narrow our conception of representation has become.

The redistricting commission’s chief concerns with representation are racial and ethnic—under voting rights laws, it works hard to make sure there are seats likely to elect Black or Latino politicians. But our system doesn’t consider other kinds of representation. We have no provisions to guarantee gender parity, or for adequate representation of Californians of different ages, classes, education levels, or national origins.

Indeed, our system doesn’t even guarantee that you’ll have a representative from the county in which you live. Other, smaller counties in California, mostly in the North State and in the Sierra, are also without a resident representative.

This is why Los Angeles and other scandal-plagued California cities are wasting their time when they seek to improve representation through the creation of local independent redistricting commissions. No redistricting body can overcome the problems of a system with districts that are bigger than even some of our bigger counties.

California needs to reorganize the scale and structure of its legislative maps. It needs a legislature with more districts that are much smaller. At minimum, districts one-tenth as populous as today’s monstrously large ones—say 50,000 people instead of 500,000 for Assembly seats, and 100,000 instead of 1 million for the Senate.

But such a change would be hard to sell because it would increase the size of the legislature 10 times—with 800 people in the Assembly and 400 in the Senate. And even adding more seats wouldn’t guarantee better representation. To achieve gender parity and other forms of representation, the state would need multi-member districts in which Californians vote for party lists of candidates, which would be required to include a 50-50 gender split and candidates from other currently underrepresented demographics.

Like people from Monterey County.

The post No One in Monterey County Is Good Enough to Serve in the Legislature appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why? Because all my ideas about giving citizens a voice in decision-making went against the grain of her training and outlook on how public life is supposed to work. As a highly competent administrator and expert, she was used to a system where citizens elect officials and get out of the way. Then, those elected officials hire managers and experts, and they get down to the business of governing.

I’ve spent my whole career helping cities, states, and countries engage citizens in more democratic ways. (By “citizens” I mean all of us, whatever passports we hold, and I use it to honor our contributions to democracy and civic life.) When I tell people about my work, most Americans expect that resistance to these practices comes mainly from conservatives.

It doesn’t. Some of the strongest opposition to democracy comes from progressives, particularly people in positions of influence and authority.

To succeed politically—and, more importantly, to make a greater contribution to American society—progressives should take a closer look at what democracy means, why it really matters, and how innovations in democracy offer a much more productive debate about our future as a country.

Why are progressives so uncomfortable with democracy? Because, from its beginnings, progressive philosophy didn’t give citizens a central role in public life.

The core ideals of progressivism were established in the early 20th century, as a reaction to the main challenges of the times. Back then, American cities and towns were beset with corruption, poverty, and illiteracy.

In response to those problems, Progressive-era reformers helped create a new set of public-facing professions, including city management, social work, and modern policing. Expertise in these areas promised to improve public health, end child labor, rein in organized crime, and solve many other problems. Free and fair elections, combined with transparency in public decision-making, helped combat the political “machines” that dominated the cities.

For the most part, it worked. Progressive expertise helped us survive the Great Depression. But it also isolated these experts, as well as elected officials, from the people they ultimately serve. Many professionals came to see citizens as rank amateurs at best, obstacles at worst.

Conservatives also put government above citizens. But progressives want officials to govern proactively, while conservatives believe they will “govern best by governing least.” Neither approach is satisfying to citizens today. Those early-20th-century institutions and professions have lost the trust of most Americans.

The reverse is also true. Progressive public officials and experts have become more mistrustful of their constituents—and thus more skeptical about democracy. One reason for this mistrust is that they hear only the loudest, angriest voices. This is true online and on social media, but it’s also true in most public meetings and hearings, which operate according to an old formula where people get a few minutes to speak at the microphone. Angry constituents dominate these meetings, and there is very little meaningful exchange. Many progressives associate these kinds of horrible public meetings with “democracy,” and it makes them less and less enthusiastic about interacting with citizens.

Political polarization makes this worse. Most progressives now think of conservatives as uneducated, racist, mindlessly anti-government, and manipulated by Fox News. Why give those people a meaningful say in public decisions?

Before 2016, many Democrats as well as Republicans were voicing frustration with politics and advocating systemic change. But since Donald Trump’s version of systemic change basically amounted to demolishing the system entirely, he provoked an understandable knee-jerk reaction from Democrats defending government.

Now, progressives are increasingly fearful—for good reason—that Trump and his allies are poised to make voting much harder and are even preparing to steal the next election. Progressives are urging us all to “save democracy”—but by democracy they mean voting, and only voting.

This is a weak vision of democracy, and it is a losing message for progressives.

These days, most people vote not out of enthusiasm for their preferred candidate, but out of fear, and a desire to keep the other side from causing harm. Some Americans think their votes aren’t being counted, others think that voting fails to produce the policy changes they support. Asking Americans to pin all their hopes for change on voting seems like a doomed strategy.

By putting all their emphasis on voting, progressives continue to push the idea that governance should be left entirely to the experts and elected officials. Progressives risk coming across as dismissive, condescending, and pedantic—a recipe for defeat.

Progressives are missing an opportunity. When citizens are presented with practices and reforms that would give them a more meaningful say in public decisions, they respond with enthusiasm. In one national opinion poll, Americans were asked about a list of possibilities for participatory democracy. There’s been strong support for these ideas—including participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies, which allow everyday people to contribute to policymaking—without significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. Giving power to citizens is a message that seems to translate well on the campaign trail.

There is no reason why progressives can’t advocate for a broader, more inclusive vision of democracy, one that actively engages people of different backgrounds in making decisions and solving problems together (and voting too).

Engaging citizens this way has another advantage: It works.

First of all, efforts at bridge-building and deliberation can succeed despite partisan polarization. Most of these efforts rely on paired or small-group discussions; they include the wave of participatory processes that emerged 25 years ago, the “Text Talk Act” discussions of the National Dialogue on Mental Health nearly 10 years ago, and the digital America Talks process of the last two years. When people meet in these kinds of settings, where they have the chance to share experiences and interact on a human level, they are more likely to empathize with one another, find common ground, and understand the reasons for their disagreements.

Second, these deliberative processes have a long track record in creating candid, productive discussions on issues of race and difference, the kinds of sincere conversations that don’t seem to happen inside the Democratic (or Republican) Party.

Third, engaging people taps into the skills and capacities of 21st-century citizens. Regular people, volunteering their time, improve their communities and country in all kinds of ways—they plant trees, mentor young people, share information online, raise money for important causes. Whether they are big or small, these actions matter: Confronting most of the daunting public challenges we face, from climate change to the pandemic, will require millions of people to make basic changes in their daily lives.

Fourth, democracy doesn’t threaten expertise, but strengthens it. As everyday people work with officials in more intensive ways, they gain greater respect for the expertise of the professionals. Citizens who work with city staff in participatory budgeting projects, parents who partner with teachers to improve schools, and patients who talk with their doctors all gain greater respect for those institutions. Giving citizens a say is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Most people want professionals to continue making most public decisions; they just want a voice in the ones that set the overall direction of governance, and that affect their lives most directly.

Finally, research from a range of fields shows what may be the most significant value of these citizen-centered forms of democracy: They strengthen community networks and connections, which has positive impacts on public health, economic development, racial equity, environmental resilience, and student success—all things progressives care about.

Peggy Merriss, the city manager I spoke with 25 years ago, just finished an illustrious career as one of the most innovative city managers in the country. Decatur, Georgia, the city she led, is firmly established as a participatory local democracy and steadily improving its quality of life. The Georgia Municipal Association inducted her into the Local Government Hall of Fame.

What changed for Merriss? She participated in projects like the Decatur Roundtables, which engaged residents in discussions about land use, race, and education. She was involved in Decatur Next, a large-scale community planning process. “I participated, but I had no more influence than anyone else,” she said. Her experience working directly with residents in these settings reassured her that citizens can, in fact, be reasonable, open-minded, and capable of compromise.

To govern more effectively, progressives should follow Merriss’ lead. This is an emotional transition as much as it is an intellectual one: People in positions of authority need to realize that they were not elected or appointed to make every decision and solve every problem. Creating situations that tap the collective intelligence and volunteer capacity of citizens would help them best serve their communities and their country.

The resulting policy debate, about what kind of democracy we want, would be far more meaningful than most of the campaign rhetoric we hear today. And progressives would be speaking to what voters actually want: not just the right to elect representatives but the right to have a voice.

The post Why Progressives (and Conservatives) Don’t Get Democracy—And Why They Should appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And if American democracy is going to be saved, that rescue needs to start in Southern California.

This may come as news to Americans who, when they worry about the nation’s democratic future, obsess about developments in Washington, pronouncements from Mar-a-Lago, or election-related legislation in purple states. But the truth is that it is L.A.—America’s most populous county—that best demonstrates the most fundamental failure of our democracy.

Democracy in this country starts with elected representation, and we Angelenos have less of it than Americans in the other 49 states. Angelenos are often accused of not paying attention to government and politics. But perhaps that’s because our politicians don’t pay attention to us. They are too distant from us to represent us effectively.

The core problem is that American elected bodies have not expanded, even as population has grown. This is true at all levels of government, and especially in Tinseltown.

In the city of Los Angeles, population four million and counting, there are just 15 city councilmembers. That means each councilmember represents 270,000 people, the highest such ratio in the country.

At the county level, Los Angeles is even less democratic, with just five elected supervisors to represent 10.3 million people. Those local districts, with one official per two-million residents—are by far the most populous local jurisdictions in this country, and among the largest anywhere in the world.

At the state level, Angelenos have the misfortune of being Californians, who suffer under the least representative state government in the country. Our state Senate has just 40 seats for nearly 40 million people—giving us the most populous Senate districts in the country. Our Assembly, the lower house, offers just 80 seats, with 500,000 Californians represented per district. That’s nearly three times more people per member than any lower house in the country, and five times the national average.

And if that’s not outrageous enough, look at the federal government. Suffice to say, Californians, with just two senators, have the lowest level of representation in the democratic fraud scheme that is the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives, by guaranteeing one seat to even small states, gives Wyoming and Vermont residents more than three times the electoral power of Californians. It’s also worth noting that, with San Francisco kid Stephen Breyer’s retirement, there is not a single Californian on the nation’s real ruling body, the unelected U.S. Supreme Court.

This sorry state of democratic representation hurts Angelenos, and Californians, and dangerously undermines our trust in government. In order to get elected in districts of such size and scale, our representatives must pay attention to those who can fund their massive campaigns. Our relative lack of representation thus allows big-money politics to co-opt our interests. And that, in turn, explains why people with less wealth or fewer connections—especially women and people of color—are so badly underrepresented in our governments.

The answer to this problem is straightforward: massively expand the number of our representatives at every level. That way, each elected official would represent a smaller number of people. And creating more positions would open doors for more regular people with more diverse backgrounds and less attachment to political careers to join our governments.

The good news is that there is real momentum for such change, including in Los Angeles. L.A. city attorney Mike Feuer, now running for mayor, has called for doubling the size of the Los Angeles city council—an idea that has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Times.

And at the county level, the new Citizens Redistricting Commission, even as it discharged its duties to draw those five giant supervisorial districts, issued an unsolicited public plea to increase the number of supervisors. There are too few supervisors to truly represent the diversity of Los Angeles, they argued. With more districts, supervisors would be “more responsive to their communities’ needs” and citizens would “have greater opportunities to have their voices heard,” wrote the commission.

At the state level, recent years have seen debate around a proposal to increase the size of the legislature to as many as 10,000. But that idea has been hurt by its association with the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, whose 2018 initiative to expand the legislature narrowly failed to qualify for the ballot.

The momentum for expanding representation has been quietly growing at the federal level, too, and on both sides of the political spectrum. In December, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives.

The proposal would lift the 1929 cap on the House of 435 representatives and add 150 seats. (California might get 13 new seats under the proposal, and close the gap in representation with smaller states.) Such an increase in House representatives would also increase the number of Electoral College members—mathematically making it more difficult for the loser of the popular vote for president to win the election.

In recent months, I’ve heard people as different as Ace Smith, a top Democratic political strategist who has worked for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and Paul Jacob, a Libertarian-minded activist for term limits and direct democracy, argue for a larger House of Representatives. Lately, I’ve been joining conversations among Californians and other Americans about expanding representation, as part of a national campaign for more democratic representation by the organization Citizens Rising.

One crucial lesson: If you want to go big in democratic representation, it’s essential that you think small. Adding a few districts to our city council, or even a few hundred to the House, won’t bring people that much closer to their representatives. Instead, the country needs a real commitment to keeping districts so small—between 30,000 and 50,000—that we actually know our democratic representatives.

Yes, that might give the county board 200 supervisors, and create a House of Representatives of 6,000 people, a huge number of people to gather under one roof and make decisions. But such numbers will allow for more oversight of government, and the pandemic has shown that large legislative bodies can meet and effectively make decisions via digital technologies.

An America with larger city councils and county boards and more legislators would offer many more opportunities for people to serve, and makes money less determinative of who wins elections. Indeed, such larger bodies might be filled not just by elections but also by lot, in the manner of citizen assemblies that are now used around the world to bring everyday people into decisionmaking.

Such changes would make the biggest difference in Los Angeles and in California, where our democracy deficit is largest. So, the next time you hear public officials here talk about the need to save American democracy, please ask them to start by giving us more democracy right here at home.

The post What If Everyday People Ran Los Angeles? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Strictly translated, it signifies authoritative power (kratos) by the citizenry or people (demos)—particularly the lower and middle classes—in the public affairs of a political order. Of course, this does not describe our reality.

We Americans live in a republic, whose laws are made by public officials in whom citizens invest power and authority, legitimating their power over the citizens who are governed. Citizens vote for their representatives, but there is often little relation between what citizens vote for and what their representatives do. Thus, President Lyndon B. Johnson campaigned on a peace platform in 1964; George W. Bush voted to keep America out of foreign entanglements in 2000; Donald Trump campaigned as (inter alia) a champion of the working man who would restore America’s infrastructure. The First Amendment grants citizens freedom of speech and religion, but those rights are extended only as far as is accepted by agents of the three branches of government. White supremacists can demonstrate in Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, but protesters at the Republican National Convention are put in pens far from the convention hall.

When today’s public officials refer to the American state as a democracy, they often do so to make themselves look good, not to be truthful. For few actually advocate programs that politically empower the people, and they often disregard the preferences of citizens. Polls show that a majority of citizens favor stricter regulations of guns and polluters; higher taxes on the wealthy; a relatively tolerant immigration policy; liberal views on “social issues”; and health care for all. Yet the Congress does not adhere to these public opinions—and I don’t think it’s because they’re smarter or more virtuous.

But the trouble with democracy transcends contradictions between words and deeds or citizens and their representatives. A fog blurs the meaning of democracy, especially when it is invoked to describe our political order. But that fog reveals a real question—is democracy a beneficial political order or merely a linguistic honey?

In my scholarship, I have found that confusion about democracy stems from the misunderstood and opaque relationship between democracy and ideas of goodness, especially goodness as it relates to common and public affairs. This misunderstanding is particularly disturbing in the midst of democracy’s invocation today: Few citizens understand democracy’s ability, practically or ethically, to improve our social lives, and few politicians genuinely want to.

Practical roots of this misunderstanding recur to the American founding. The drafters of the American Constitution did not intend to create a democracy—thus, the Electoral College and the Senate (although having two houses of Congress can have democratic benefits). To the contrary, they secured a republic that would regulate American democracy and protect slavery not only because of racism but also because they didn’t trust ordinary citizens with political power.

As the nation extended suffrage and abolished slavery and segregation, the political question became how democratic should the republic become. Americans may wonder whether greater democracy is even desirable, since few in the echelons of society that dominate public communications and our capitalist economy are prone to entrust more power to the many who are often seen as uncouth—incapable of political judgment and likely to threaten their positions.

While anti-democratic thought often stems from prejudices of one kind or another, it actually is true that democracy does not inherently provide an automatic guide for just political action. Democracy is not automatically just, because the demos is not automatically right. This is not a uniquely democratic foible; human beings are fallible. And it is not that we must fear “tyranny of the majority,” because a genuine political majority of a populace rarely exercises power. It was not a majority of the American citizenry that favored or fought for slavery; it was not a majority of the French citizenry that authorized the Reign of Terror; it was not a majority of the German citizenry that elected Hitler.

Besides this historical truth, political action in democracies and all other political orders occurs amid conditions of uncertainty. When citizens engage political dilemmas, they have reason to wonder exactly what the two conceptual pillars of democracy—freedom and equality— mean. What is political freedom for, if not anything should be allowed to “go”? How are we to put political equality into practice, if we do not seek sameness? This critique puts a moral and intellectual burden on the understanding and practice of democratic citizenship and governance: How can one be sure that becoming more democratic means that society and its citizenry will become better?

These questions of how and whether democracy produces goodness are serious and longstanding. Demokratia connoted the power of “the many” over “the few,” and noteworthy political theorists have argued that “the many” are more trustworthy political judges than “the few.” But neither is automatically good. Since its inception, democratic activity has needed ethical compasses to enable citizens who make decisions to do so beneficially, for the public as a whole. But there is no single intellectual or practical source for these compasses. Citizens may believe in God or think reasonably, but there is no God or Reason or website or algorithm that identifies the needs of democracy.

And that’s the point. We are not born with these virtues and practical skills. And yet everyone can learn the basic skills of political navigation, given the requisite general education and political experience.

This is why democracy can’t be only an ideal; it must be a practice of ongoing political activity wherever possible and practical to acquire this education and experience. When citizens’ political participation exclusively involves voting in official elections, it is reduced to being an adjunct to the agendas of the few individuals who both seek public office and have the wherewithal to be serious candidates. What I call the “political activity” of citizenship does not entail “activism” for all citizens, but it does require constant attention to the well-being of democracy. Every instance of democratic (not Democratic) opposition to republican (not Republican) rule needs to justify not only greater kratos for the demos but also political movement in a beneficial direction that reaches out persuasively to opponents. Every time women or subordinate races are mistreated as such, everyone should speak out on their behalf.

Citizens also need to explain to themselves and others why a political decision in a democratic society is good for the people. This calls for a kind of reconciliation between democracy and goodness that is hard to achieve. We must ask: How can democracy not only be an agent of power but also of goodness? And how can ethics, power, and knowledge operate practically in a way that benefit, rather than subvert, democracy? Without a democratic ethics, democracies will be run by factious majorities only interested in their own power. And with a democratic ethics that lose touch with actual citizens, a political elite may enact a morality that harms minorities or even the majority of those citizens.

Over the course of history in “the West” there have been various watchwords of goodness in democratic contexts that can be instructive. I have found five such watchwords that express ethical standards that complement democracy, although their benefits are no more automatic than democracy itself.

The first is “virtue,” used as a standard of political excellence. Today, it is hard to understand virtue in general, but we can identify unusual efforts to excel in honoring and promoting the well-being of the public realm—profiles in political courage. Among individuals, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr., strike me as good candidates. But note that each of these examples stand on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens that energized them.

A second notion that must complement contemporary democratic ethics is “representation.” This term became politically salient in the 17th and 18th centuries as secular states sought legitimation by reaching out to non-aristocratic and even (at times) non-property-holding men. We cannot do without representation today, as it is needed to link large numbers of citizens to modern political power. It can be done well by promoting dialogue between leaders and those they lead. But it also can be a tool for consolidating rule by a political elite over the majority of citizens.

Third, there is a sense of “civil rightness,” a neologism I have coined to refer to equal opportunity plus merit. “Civil rightness” is the achievement of goodness in civil society. It became the economic hallmark for equality amid the competition that marks job-seeking in modern societies. It can be used to open doors, when equality is extended to relatively powerless people and practices in civil society, or to close doors, when notions of merit are practically used to block access by the meritorious but unconventional. That said, it cannot be ignored in contemporary societies if they would be both democratic and good.

A fourth guidepost for complementing democracy and goodness today is “legitimacy.” Previously used to define rightful heirs in powerful families, including royalty, it has become more widely used in public discourse since the beginning of the 20th century, when and where no one ethical standard for a non-theocratic collectivity and government was accepted by citizens.

The final watchword for reconciling democracy and goodness today is “human rights.” In official international discourse, it is a kind of goodness that automatically complements the democratic character of modern states. It has risen in importance since the end of the Cold War, and human rights organizations do good work when they shine light on the horrible, politically caused suffering of human beings. But even attachment to human rights can become undemocratic when focus on their abuse distracts attention from a society’s common political needs.

The goodness of democracy also requires cooperation—so that winners and losers in political contests keep playing with and against each other in the same “game” of promoting the public interest (as each sees it) in society. Democratic citizens, therefore, need to reach beyond themselves when acting politically, lest power become the only name of the game. Only if citizens learn productive arts of cooperation amid the slings and arrows of fortune can democracy become good. That is not easy amid the obstacles generated by society’s dominant powers. But it is a task that everyone can accomplish. Undertaking it suits us to cast futures that are both democratic and beneficial for our mortal selves and endangered planet.

The post Can Democracy Be an Agent of Both Power and Goodness? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Created by constitutional fiat and controlled by Congress, the District of Columbia is the undemocratic capital of this democracy. Washingtonians have no representation in Congress, and the decisions of their municipal government are subject to congressional veto. Furthermore, the city’s lack of political power and basic self-determination has had a profound influence on its history, placing it at the mercy of the federal government and forcing the city’s residents into a frustrating role as dependents and claimants, rather than full citizens.

At the center of the district’s struggle for democracy is the rawest issue in American history and politics: race.

Democracy and race have been inextricably intertwined in Washington since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton cut a deal to place the nation’s capital on the shores of the Potomac. Safely ensconced between two slave states, the new federal district supported slavery and the slave trade from its inception, becoming the nation’s largest slave-trading city in the 1830s.

But, during the Civil War, D.C. became a magnet for former slaves, who helped create a progressive, biracial local government during Reconstruction. This exercise of black political power created a backlash, leading Congress to strip the vote from all Washingtonians, black and white, in 1874, ushering in a century-long period of disfranchisement and racial segregation.

Eventually, a locally driven, post-World War II civil rights movement toppled legal segregation and won the right to vote in local elections, but persistent racial inequalities remain to this day. An Urban Institute study found that in 2013 and 2014 white wealth in D.C. was 81 times greater than black wealth, and astronomical real estate values make it increasingly difficult for low-income residents to remain in the city.

As black educator and D.C. activist Mary Church Terrell articulated more than 100 years ago, no city better captures the ongoing tensions between America’s expansive democratic hopes and its enduring racial inequalities than the nation’s capital.

“Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States,” Terrell said, “because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawns so wide and deep.”

Terrell knew that what she was saying was not literally true. She herself embodied the potential and achievement of the D.C.’s black elite. The daughter of former slaves who became wealthy business owners, she graduated from Oberlin College, traveled the world, and taught at D.C.’s M Street High School, the top black secondary school in the country, before being appointed to the city’s school board. Washington offered Terrell and other black people significant opportunities unavailable anywhere else in the South, which in the early 20th century sank into an abyss of lynching, debt peonage, and codified segregation. There were indeed more hateful and hideous examples of racism and persecution than what she experienced in Washington, D.C.

An 1867 cartoon by Thomas Nast depicts an African American man casting his ballot in the mayoral election for Georgetown, which was a separate municipality from Washington, D.C. until 1871. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collection.

Yet her point underscored something critical about Washington: It is the stage for American democracy, the parade ground where we celebrate our ideals and put them on display for the world. Whether considered to be “an example for all the land” (as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner called the district during Reconstruction) or “the showpiece of our nation” (as President Dwight Eisenhower claimed in the 1950s), D.C. is a symbol of the country and the embodiment of its democratic hopes.

Because of this symbolic significance, D.C. also has long served as a battleground for major political fights over race. During the long struggle over slavery that consumed much of the nation’s first century, the city became a focal point. For abolitionists, Washington was, as William Lloyd Garrison declared, “the first citadel to be carried” in the battle to end slavery nationwide. For Southern slaveholders such as South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, Washington was a crucial barometer of Southern power: If D.C. should fall to abolitionism, then so too would the rest of the South, they feared. Abolitionists flooded Congress with so many petitions demanding an end to slavery and the slave trade in D.C. that in 1836 Congress imposed the infamous “gag rule” prohibiting any public discussion of the issue in the national legislature.

D.C. is also a fertile laboratory for ideas. Because Congress has ultimate authority over the district, its members often use the city as a petri dish. Sometimes, this approach benefits the cause of racial equality. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Radical Republicans in Congress ignored the vocal opposition of white voters in the city to push through a series of racial reforms, including emancipating D.C.’s enslaved population in 1862, establishing black public schools, and granting black men the right to vote in 1866. It was an extraordinary and important social revolution—but it was not democratic.

At other times, national meddling has proven catastrophic to the city. In the 1950s, federal lawmakers, urban planners, and city boosters used Washington as a testing ground for “urban renewal,” a federally supported effort to use modern planning to revitalize and redevelop crumbling residential areas.

With sanction from the Supreme Court in its 1954 Berman v. Parker decision, which allowed public officials to take property and give it to corporations for redevelopment, urban renewal led to the wholesale destruction of poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in D.C.’s Southwest quadrant. At a cost of about $500 million (about $4.6 billion in 21st-century dollars), developers destroyed 99 percent of Southwest’s buildings, forced 1,500 business to move, and displaced 23,000 residents. In their place came 5,800 new housing units for a population half its original size. The racial demographics of Southwest flipped. In 1950, the area had been almost 70 percent black; in 1970 it was nearly 70 percent white, at a time when the black population was growing rapidly in the rest of the city.

The catastrophic impact of urban renewal helped inspire an era of grassroots citizen activism throughout the city. From the late 1950s through the late 1970s, black and white activists fought back against the business interests and unelected officials who ran Washington, challenging embedded economic inequalities in the black-majority city. Mobilizing citizen power, they pushed for self-determination, community control, and participatory democracy.

Some of these battles have been won. After a century of complete disfranchisement, in 1973 city residents regained “home rule” (municipal self-government), including a remarkable space for neighborhood autonomy in the form of elected Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. The early 1970s also witnessed the triumphant climax of the anti-freeway movement, an interracial, cross-class coalition that successfully challenged the vast network of city freeways envisioned by Congress, local officials, urban planners, and boosters in the press. And in those neighborhoods saved from the wrecking ball, tenants organized against slumlords and gentrification to establish their right to the city.

Other battles are ongoing. Local activists still struggle to build adequate, affordable housing and prevent displacement amid a new, 21st-century burst of gentrification. And the district still lacks any representation in the national legislature (a fact emblazoned in capital letters on D.C. license plates).

With these battles still to be won, it is no wonder that Washingtonians, people who daily live in the shadow of the great temples of American democracy, cast a critical eye on the celebrations of American freedom that take place therein.

The post Why Washington, D.C., Is the Most Undemocratic of Capitals appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We are witnessing a rising tide of nationalist populism. The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring about a cosmopolitan, globalized, liberal world. But now larger and larger segments of voters in Western democracies want to close borders, cut trade, and kick out the brown and yellow people, especially the brown people who practice scary religions.

Whether you use “populist” as a compliment or an insult depends a great deal on what you think makes “populism” tick. If you think populist movements are about the disaffected and left-behind forcing their governments to help them, you’ll like populism. But if you think—as I do—that populist movements consist of misinformed people pushing for counterproductive policies, policies that will hurt them rather than help them—then you’ll sigh with relief when such movements fail, as they usually do in the end.

Politics are often thought of as apocalyptic battles of good and evil, of the good guys versus the bad guys. But economists prefer to think in terms of incentives. In particular, people behave (and misbehave) as they they do because they’re incentivized to do so by the way we distribute political power.

When we concentrate power in the hands of an elite few, such as kings, oligarchs, or a band of aristocrats, they have every incentive to use it for their own interests at the expense of others. When we spread power out widely, as in a democracy, no individual voter has significant power. This removes the incentive to vote selfishly, but it also removes the incentive to vote wisely. Individual voters aren’t rewarded for being knowledgeable or thinking carefully about their votes; they aren’t punished for being misinformed or indulging delusions. To illustrate, imagine you were in a 1,000-student class and the professor announced a final exam. But suppose she adds, “I’ll grade each of you, but instead of being awarded your own grade, I’ll average all the grades together, and you’ll each receive the class average.” The other students and you probably wouldn’t study much, or might not bother to focus on the more challenging material presented in lectures. The class average could easily wind up being an F.

Democratic politics faces the same problem. The American National Election Studies and other surveys of voter knowledge routinely find that most voters are uninformed. Voters know who the president is and not much else. They can’t estimate the unemployment rate within 5 percentage points. They don’t know how much money the government spends on different programs, or what the government did last year. After the Brexit vote, we discovered that “leave” voters who wished to flee the European Union greatly overestimated the number of immigrants in the U.K. and greatly underestimated how much foreign investment comes from the E.U. Voters not only lack the background in the social sciences needed to evaluate or make sense of the relevant facts. They lack knowledge of the relevant facts themselves. Non-voters tend to know even less.

It’s not that citizens are stupid; it’s that they just don’t care—and that’s a rational response to the incentives democracy creates. Since none of our individual votes matter except as part of the collective majority, it’s easy to conclude that we can afford to remain ignorant, or indulge irrational and false political beliefs. In fact, understanding how to vote well—whether politicians deserve to be kicked out and replaced—requires tremendous knowledge. One needs to know 1) who has been in power, 2) what they had the power to do, 3) what their options were, and 4) what the likely effects of different policies would have been.

It’s tempting to view populist movements as the people “taking back” their government, rebelling against corrupt and incompetent leaders. But this gives the movements more credit than they deserve. Populist waves tend to be made up of low information voters. Consider a stereotypical early Donald Trump supporter. He might look around his rural hometown and have a vague sense that white people in the fancy suburbs are richer, happier, have healthier children, and hold better jobs. He might know that 50 years ago his hometown held a small factory, which disappeared when he was a child. He might vaguely be aware that poor Chinese people have gotten richer, and wonder if somehow that happened at his expense. But being aware of these conditions does not magically transform him into a good voter. To know which policies would help his hometown, he’d need significant knowledge of economics, sociology, and related disciplines. If you have felt ill for the past month that does not magically enable you to self-diagnose that you have cancer, nor does it magically imbue you with the medical knowledge to treat your cancer.

Representative democracy tries to split the difference between elitism and populism. To win elections, politicians have incentives to cater to the policy preferences of the median voter. But politicians and bureaucrats also retain significant independence. They sometimes override or ignore what voters want.

They can use this independence for good or ill. Recently, political scientist Martin Gilens measured how responsive presidents have been to different groups of voters. Gilens found that when voters at the 90th, 50th, and 10th percentiles of income disagree about policy, presidents are about six times more responsive to the policy preferences of the rich than those of the poor.

As a committed “small-d democrat,” Gilens is upset by these findings. But he admits there’s a positive twist: Voters at the 90th percentile of income tend to be significantly better informed than voters at the 50th or 10th percentiles. Gilens found that poor Democrats approved more strongly of invading Iraq in 2003. They more strongly favor the Patriot Act, invasions of civil liberty, torture, economic protectionism, and restricting abortion rights and access to birth control. They are more opposed to gay rights. In contrast, high information Democrats—such as party elites—are more strongly in favor of free trade and the strong protection of civil rights, and are less interventionist.

I read Gilens’s work as showing us an uncomfortable truth: Democracy works because it doesn’t quite work. If politicians just did exactly what the median voter wanted, we would have worse policies — policies people support because they are ignorant or misinformed. Democracies work because politicians and bureaucrats can to some extent override most voters’ preferences. Often they make better choices aligned with what better-informed elites would like to see.

Political elites are far from perfect. They often cater to special interest groups in ways that undermine the common good. For instance, economists of all ideological persuasions despise agricultural subsidies. Yet the federal government grants subsidies and protective tariffs to the corn lobby—that’s why your Coke has corn syrup rather than sugar in it. Limited benefits are concentrated for a select few (companies like ADM) and steep costs diffused among the many (taxpayers and consumers). This kind of “rent seeking” is pervasive in representative democracy because politicians have every incentive to indulge it while voters have no incentive to learn about it, let alone fight it.

These problems—voter ignorance and misinformation, populism, rent seeking—are endemic to representative democracy. It’s not because bad people sabotage the system. Rather, the system incentivizes these behaviors. No one has yet come up with a workable solution.

The good news is that representative democracy still performs better than the other political systems we’ve tried. In general, people living in representative democracies are more prosperous, happier, and healthier than people living elsewhere. Representative democracies do a consistently better job of protecting civil and economic liberty. They allow popular movements and educated, powerful elites to serve as checks against each other. Overall, representative democracies work quite well—and that’s true whether you prefer railing against elitist cosmopolitanism or pitchfork nativist populism. But there’s no guarantee that the system will continue to work. Democracies do sometimes collapse when populist demagogues rise to power. It looks like we’ll dodge that bullet this election, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about the future.

The post Much Like Alcohol, Democracy Is Best in Moderation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You can see it in the houses, in the development, in the grocery stores finally arriving, in the people who—as I did several years ago—decided to stay. There’s a real sense of unity and possibility. It can feel a little (dare I say) like Brooklyn, with the renaissance in some neighborhoods, the sexy feel of the place. And we’re just a $5 Uber ride away from everything happening in downtown. Maybe I should stop here—I don’t want too many people to come to South L.A.

But I also want to raise questions about the big things that haven’t changed. Who gets the money produced by the hard work and striving of people in South L.A.? Who gets to decide how public money is invested to improve South L.A. neighborhoods? And most of all, who gets to represent South L.A.?

For now, the answer to those questions is: the same old Los Angeles establishment. South L.A. doesn’t get to invest in itself, represent itself, and govern itself. One reason for this is that running for office in L.A. costs a lot of money—and citywide interests with little sense of South L.A. are the funders who can afford to participate in our political races.

South L.A. has always been a pawn in games played by other people. There is a strong sense of identity among people here, but our bureaucrats and politicians have divided the place up so they can do as they wish. Some parts of South L.A. are unincorporated and in the county, some are in the city. Within the city, South L.A. has been divided up between three or four different council districts. On top of that, the city has divided South L.A. into three different planning areas, each with their own plan.

Throw in the school district, the police and sheriff departments, and various other state and local government entities, and it’s often hard to tell who is responsible for what. That has made it harder for people here to be civically engaged—and to get power equal to our numbers. And those numbers are considerable: 850,000 people live in South L.A., as many as live in San Francisco.

If the jurisdictions weren’t enough to divide us, the establishment continues to try to divide us between black and brown. People in power are always talking about that demographic divide.

But what I’ve seen over the years are ways to create possibilities. Twelve years ago, I bought a big, 100-year-old craftsman home in South L.A. I grew up a few blocks away from this house, helping my dad with his gardening business while my mom ran a day care. I had some struggles as a kid, but found my way to college, became a graphic designer, and started my own design firm. When my company expanded, I decided to move the firm into the second floor of my house.

I had so much space that I opened The Big House, as we call it in the community. A couple of nonprofits and small businesses have offices in my home. I built a skate park for neighborhood kids in the back. We’ve hosted block parties, health fairs, and all kinds of community events.

With my work colleagues and neighbors, we’ve also tried to tell the story of some of the gains South L.A. is making. For the past two years, I worked on a marketing campaign for Santee High School, which used to be one of the city’s worst, and now is among its best. Many community members didn’t know that. So we put together brochures, and produced original content about how well the students were doing and the school’s offerings in subjects like culinary art, fashion design, entrepreneur courses and perception of the school changed. More people need to be telling the good stories.

Of course, now that we’ve seen so many gains, expectations are higher, and South L.A. needs to be better prepared for the changes that are coming. Six years ago, I incorporated a nonprofit, Nuevo South, that teaches kids how to code and handle various technologies, produce original content, how to seek a job, how to engage in civic life, how to lead. I saw so many talented people leave South L.A. when I was young—I was briefly one of them.

Housing prices have gone so high in South L.A. that some people might be tempted to sell. But where are you going to go? You can’t go to Huntington Park or South Gate—you’re priced out. I like to tell my neighbors: “Don’t move, improve.” Let’s make the “hood” a place we want to live.

A stately home in Jefferson Park.

If enough people stay and become more prosperous here, South L.A. should be able to fund and elect its own representatives.

Then we can steer economic development here, and get local hiring—in everything from tree trimming to the contracting at the new soccer stadium that’s replacing the Sports Arena. South L.A. can develop its own housing policy that works to get the right kind of development—instead of exhausting ourselves fighting every single luxury condo development that doesn’t offer affordable housing or other benefits to the community. And we could provide far more infrastructure to help small businesses.

We also need to completely popularize civic engagement, so people in South L.A. vote in big numbers, and throw their weight around City Hall—which is really not very far away. This is why I’ve decided to make it a little closer. After years of talking about changing politics and representation in South L.A., I’ve decided to do something about it—by running for city council next year.

I’m betting that now that South L.A.’s people and institutions have more money and resources, we can elect one of our own, and gain the power to match what the place has become.

The post Who Gets to Represent a Richer South L.A.? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In classic gay coming-of-age stories, the small-town misfit escapes to the big city—the bigger the better. Robert Mapplethorpe left his home in Floral Park, Queens for art school in Brooklyn and then New York City, where he fell in with a group of artists and eccentrics, most notably Patti Smith, Sam Wagstaff, and George Dureau. “I come from suburban America,” he once remarked. “It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.”

Mapplethorpe found an artistic oasis in New York. The subversive nature of his photographs—boldly homoerotic and gleefully taboo—stand in stark contrast with the Roman Catholic values of his 1950s childhood. In New York City he was first able to explore his sexual inclinations. In New York City he first picked up a camera. His many self-portraits in those early years—often staring straight at the camera as if looking for his reflection in the lens—point to the fact that there, in that city, he had literally found himself.

I’ve had the luxury of coming of age as a queer person after the violence of Stonewall and Harvey Milk’s assassination, in the era of gay-marriage legislation. And yet I know that our community has paid a price for progress: Queer America is now divided into the “acceptable” and the “perverse.” By acceptable I mean the sexless, “family-friendly” portrayals found on network television and in commercials. Think Modern Family. And by perverse I mean everything else: polygamy, internet chat rooms, the kink community. The old invisibility was dangerous, yes, but a curated semi-visibility is no less harmful. I can be Ellen (funny, devoid of controversy, and successful) or I can be invisible. The game is rigged: Something is always left out of the frame.

Molly Landreth, the Seattle-based photographer known for her revolutionary approach to queer portraiture, grew up in a small agricultural valley in Washington state, an hour’s drive south of the Canadian border.

Landreth left her hometown for Scripps College in Claremont, California. While a freshman, she took her camera on frequent trips to Los Angeles to visit her cousin, spending time with him and his group of queer friends as they got ready for nights out on the town. Too young for LA’s clubs, Landreth was only able to participate by photographing the ritual of primping, accessorizing, and glamorizing. It was her way of reveling in the beauty of sexuality while still piecing together her own, safely out of the frame.

Meg and Renee, 2007, Molly Landreth. Seattle, Washington.

But here the familiar narrative takes a discernible turn. Instead of making Los Angeles her artistic oasis, Landreth went back home. It was there, not the city, where she was able to turn the lens on herself.

Fascinated by the seeming contradictions between her childhood home and the world she had documented in Los Angeles, she began to take “a bazillion self-portraits” with her best friend and fellow photographer Jenny Riffle. They photographed themselves and each other against the landscapes of their hometown, looking for palpable evidence of their shifting identities.

In one photograph taken by Riffle, titled “Wallpaper,” Landreth stands against the swooping bird pattern of her parents’ living room walls, boxed into a small nook created by a Victorian-style chair and a modest side table bearing an oppressively oversized lamp. She looks cramped, out of place, suffocated by the ornate room that can barely contain her. Landreth looks directly at the camera, a practice she would encourage in her later portraits.

Landreth continued to seek out apparent contradictions between subject and environment. From 2004 to 2010, she worked on the Embodiment Project, taking portraits of queer people across the country.

Landreth told me that during this time she often thought of a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe in which two men pose in a traditional living room, both clad in leather, one standing and holding a chain tied around the seated one’s neck. The picture “queers” an iconic American portrait. Landreth sought to do something similar. Many of her portraits nod to classic images: In one photograph from the Embodiment Project, two women lie together in a parked car at a scenic overlook, the city lights glowing behind them. The scene seems straight out of either a teenage love story or a horror movie, depending on how you look at it.

Clare Mercy, 2007, Molly Landreth. Bellingham, Washington.

When she began the project in the early 2000s, Landreth said, she didn’t see the kinds of queer people she knew in the media—or even in fine arts work from New York City. She didn’t want to keep documenting the curated semi-visible: queers from the upper middle class, or from New York. She turned to the growing world of the internet, entering keywords into MySpace, reaching out to people who seemed to have a complex identity—something unfamiliar. And she wanted them to participate directly in the process, to take back some of the power from the viewer, choosing how they wanted to be represented. She didn’t want her pictures to force anyone into a familiar narrative.

She found plenty of willing collaborators. Subjects chose where they would like to be photographed and which outfit they wanted to wear. One woman is shirtless, sitting on the trunk of her car with a field behind her, the car plastered in bumper stickers proclaiming “I heart dykes” and “Hate is not a family value” below her boot heels. In another work, a young trans man stands outside his house, the only clue to his queerness being a belt buckle that spells “BOY” across it in bold letters. (He told Landreth that, just like the belt, he could take his identity on and off.) Perhaps one of Landreth’s most unlikely pictures is of two Hassidic Jews seated at a kitchen table in their eclectic home, which includes a NO WAR sign and a hanging Kermit the Frog doll.

Ronni and Jo, 2005, Molly Landreth. Seattle, Washington.

Many of the photos feel intimate; looking at them, you feel as if you are intruding, and your eyes wander across the image cautiously. After all, by their very inclusion in the project each subject has outed him or herself. You are now complicit in the outing, and this fact binds you closer to the image and the subject staring back at you.

Looking through Landreth’s photographs, I feel a mounting response to my disquiet about queer representation. I don’t see myself in Landreth’s subjects, necessarily. In fact I’m not sure I’m supposed to. Instead, I wonder if a portrait can ever really capture a person, let alone an entire community. Particularly a community as fragmented and diverse as Queer America, dispersed throughout cities, suburbs, and small towns all over the country.

So I turn inward. I wonder which setting I would choose to be photographed in. Which clothes I would wear. Which emotion I would convey.

In my hypothetical portrait I sit in my own childhood living room, on the green couch that’s been there since before I was born, with a chain wrapped around my neck—an homage to Mapplethorpe. Only there is no one holding the chain. I’m alone, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, free to be queer, to be a queer, visible for the first time. The game is rigged, sure: Something is always left out of the frame. But I’m playing it. And I’m putting my whole self in the frame.

The post Capturing Queer America, 30 Years After Mapplethorpe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, now that so many more of us are included, our highest aspirations are more widely shared. And we struggle with how to share power so that we might navigate the complicated path to realizing our dreams.

Think back to 1960, when Los Angeles was incredibly white and there were twice as many blacks as Latinos. Minority groups, including Asian-Americans and Jews, were excluded from good schools and public sector jobs like police and fire—and were subject to police harassment and other forms of institutional racism.

How to achieve such aspirations? The theory—perhaps best outlined in the 1984 book Protest Is Not Enough, in which scholars looked at blacks and Latinos in the urban politics of Northern California—had three parts. First, mobilization. Mobilize to achieve voting rights. Second, once you have voting rights, use them to achieve representation—the election of members of minority groups.

Third, once you have representation, those new politicians will be responsive to your aspirations. The thinking was: If there could be a black mayor, he could prevent the police from treating black people so shabbily. If you could elect black or Latino mayors, they could prevent housing segregation and the development of ghettos. If you could have a minority running the Los Angeles Unified School District, minority kids would finally have the same educational opportunity that other kids enjoyed. With political power, you could do anything.

A half-century later, progress on the first two parts of the theory are undeniable. Voting rights and representation are realities. Once-excluded groups are now major players in governing, driving the dialogue, and the political process. A black person (Tom Bradley) and a Latino (Antonio Villaraigosa) have been mayors of Los Angeles. Jews have held every conceivable position in the city; today the three at-large elected officials (Mayor Garcetti, City Attorney Mike Feuer, and City Controller Ron Galperin) are all Jewish or half-Jewish. And among Asian-American politicians, Ted Lieu has won a signature Westside congressional seat; John Chiang, of Torrance, is state treasurer; and Asian-Americans hold majority status on city councils in the San Gabriel Valley, including one of our region’s wealthiest cities, San Marino.

But minority representation in elective offices, while crucial, hasn’t achieved all our aspirations. Police brutality is diminished, but remains. Discrimination in housing, while legally barred, remains a reality. Economic inequality has grown. Los Angeles’ progress—and its persistent problems—remind us that minority representation doesn’t naturally translate to getting the change we want.

Responsiveness to the concerns of different groups, we’ve learned, requires more than representation of those groups. It requires coalition and inclusion—specifically, minority inclusion in coalitions that are broad enough and strong enough to dominate a city or county government, and thus make change. And even then, political power, Angelenos have learned by experience, is not all that powerful; political officials have limited impact on economic, social, and cultural decision-making. If anything, power works the other way around—with economic, social, and cultural power forcing political change.

This has flipped our aspirations in Los Angeles. People here now aspire to change by making our culture, our social lives, our economic realities more inclusive first. Politics comes later. The best examples in L.A., and in California, are the myriad efforts to recognize immigrants, documented or undocumented, as full participants in the life of the city. We want to make sure they have the same access to health care, transportation, and police services, and are willing to challenge or flout federal laws. The idea is that if we model inclusion, maybe bigger government and legal change—like comprehensive immigration reform—will follow.

This aspiration for coalition, for connecting and representing people from other groups, is best reflected in the way that African-American politicians in Los Angeles are aggressively seeking to represent Latino concerns. Every single black elected official in the county has more Latinos than blacks in his or her district. Not long ago, if you visited a black elected official’s office, most of the staffers were black. Today, it’s not unusual for the majority to be Latino. The chief of staff to Marqueece Harris-Dawson is Latino. Councilman Curren Price’s staff is largely Latino. Of course, Mayor Tom Bradley pioneered this sort of diverse hiring a generation ago. Today, every elected official must be Tom Bradley.

Coalition is also an aspiration because our aspirations are more complicated, and more difficult to achieve. Chief among these is the aspiration of reducing income inequality. We want the very stubborn issue of housing—and the lack of affordable high-quality housing in the places we want to live—to be addressed now. And we aspire to fix homelessness, to achieve environmental and social justice, and to reverse and mitigate climate change. These goals are broadly shared; the difficulty is figuring out how. And those are challenges that can’t be effectively addressed by one group or one city administration.

Los Angeles can be a cynical place, and there are many who say we can’t solve our problems. But we must aspire to do more, much more, than we are doing now. I wish we had even greater aspirations to increase wages. And I wish we would focus even more on figuring out affordable housing. None of the models we’ve tried have worked, or can work. We should aspire to a revolution in housing, brand new ways to build housing and communities.

As we seek coalition, we are changing how we see ourselves. In surveys, I see us developing an “Angeleno identity,” a clear sense that being in L.A. defines us. I don’t want to suggest this is as post-racial identity; you can be very African-American, very Latino, very white, and still consider yourself very Angeleno. But there is a stronger sense that our fates are linked.

How Koreans do in L.A. will impact how Latinos do in L.A.—and blacks and Jews. The Republican company owner who needs workers wants better schools for kids in South L.A.; the Guatemalan nanny and the attorney trying to get to court know they need shorter commutes; the upper middle-class Pasadena family with an asthmatic kid worries about what’s being put into the air by industry in southeast L.A. County neighborhoods.

Our grandest aspirations in today’s Los Angeles are the ones we all share.

The post In L.A., Political Representation Isn’t Enough appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.