This year settles it: The two-party system in American politics is ripe for radical, burn-it-down, Internet-fueled disruption.
The two parties might have been the towering sequoias of the U.S. political system, but they now stand dead and hollow. The 2016 presidential nominating process has been like one of those disastrous alpine blowdowns—a freak storm that leaves millions of trees worth of tinder-dry kindling wood on the forest floor, just waiting for a hot, dry wind and a spark.
As we watch these two
horribly flawed and
widely reviled candidates bumble down the final 90 days of their scandal- and gaffe-strewn runways, millions of us are asking each other two questions.
“Is this the best America can do?” and “Who’s got a match?”
Fuel the burn
But how? How do you burn down a system with a 160-year-old stranglehold on our body politic?
I believe it’s time to adopt the approach of
America’s favorite societal pyromaniacs: the technologists and venture investors of Silicon Valley. We need to take their strategies and tactics for disrupting and dismantling ossified industries and put them to work to eviscerate the two party system.
In dead earnestness, it’s time for the party in the cloud—a citizens’ political party-as-a-service. A 21st-century fast, agile digital movement built on the foundation of a powerful social web organization and communication platform. Not a party of insiders or elites. A party that lets the idiot fringe be the idiot fringe on both the left and right, and instead seeks to serve the citizens in the middle.
In fact, let’s just call it the Citizens’ Party.
As venture capitalist Hank Vigil of Seattle-based
Acequia Ventures said after a long discussion where I first broached the subject to him, “I think what you’re talking about is creating some kind of technological infrastructure that forms a kernel capable of attracting talent to create the swarm dynamics that overwhelm the traditional model.”
Yes, Hank. Yes. That is exactly what I’m talking about.
“Swarm dynamics.” That’s a phrase nobody in politics has ever said. Swarm dynamics that allow us drones to gather together to batter down state and federal election law barriers to entry, and bring candidates and policies to the fore that actually represent mainstream American thinking, and burn those two big old dead trees right down to their jet-black stumps in plenty of time for November, 2020.
I want us to come together to build this Citizens’ Party to enable the broad range of Americans who fall under the fat part of the bell curve in our political thinking and attitudes—those of us who find the Democrats’ socialism-fueled platform as repugnant as we find the Republicans’ nativist one—to identify and nurture candidates and raise funds and build organizations that reflect our non-outlier beliefs about how our country should work.
I want Americans who believe in getting along with other Americans—who still think that we’re all on the same team and that we’ve got to find a way to pull together rather than beat the snot out of each other—to self-organize in a way that is vastly more powerful and transparent and user-friendly and effective than are the two doddering, self-absorbed almost-bi-centenarian incumbent parties.
I want those of us who find the byzantine, arcane presidential caucus/primary/delegate nomination system to be mindlessly archaic and broken to go and do something about it. Something big and muscular and bristling with a healthy preference for economic prosperity and innovation and tolerance and a sense of shared purpose and destiny—the stuff that truly does make America exceptional.
If we’re going to disrupt this market for political leadership—the market the two parties collude to control in a way no Justice Department would ever allow in any other context—we’re going to need to bring expertise from the technology, political, policy, legal, communications, and fundraising industries and communities into the swarm and make them all buzz together.
It will require us to develop and follow a roadmap and methodology that Silicon Valley has used to astonishing effect to disrupt the status quo and steamroll complacent, lazy, irredeemably customer-hostile competition in dozens and dozens of industries before this one.
And when it happens, and it can happen, this disruption’s going to be vastly more satisfying. Because it won’t be done for profit or for self-aggrandizement. It will be done for our kids and each other—the same reasons the best Americans have always come together to accomplish hard things.
The Two-Party Disconnect
21st century America is a place where consumer things increasingly just work. Any physical good that exists can be on our front porches 48 hours from now. Unimaginable entertainment and social options are available to us anywhere, anytime with a few taps of the magic screens in our pockets. The world we live in, whether we’re average Josephines or one percenters, has been utterly transformed by information and connectivity, and now new information-based tools and business models are even starting to reform broken sectors that everybody needs like education and healthcare.
All that re-engineering and systemic improvement comes to us from organizations—new ones in most cases, reinvented older ones in some—that grasp the technological zeitgeist and ride it in order to serve our (and thereby, their) needs.
Except in one consumer market—that for political leadership. In that market, American consumers would like to find some honest men and women who appeal to a broad majority of us, who understand the dynamism of the world we live in and the technology that’s reshaping it, and who are guided by some stomach-calming personal qualities like honesty, hard work, common sense, thrift, courage, respect, kindness, and maybe most of all, the ability to seek and find common ground.
And what do we get when we try to order that for our national front porch?
We get Donald F. Trump and Hillary F. Clinton. That’s what.
Built to Last… 160 years?
One reason why the political services market is so broken is the wildly geriatric age of the organizations serving it. The younger of the two, the “Grand Old Party,” is 162 years old.
Quick: Name every phenomenal customer-oriented company you do business with that’s 160 years old. I’ll wait.
It’s also because the two parties have built their own gigantic regulatory barriers to entry inside an electoral-law system of their own molding. And because members of the two organizations themselves legislatively man the self-designed barricades, they’ve been able to repel all attempts to compete with them for almost two centuries.
Imagine if you were Jeff Bezos, circa 1994, and every member of every state legislature and Congress was named “Barnes” or “Noble.” Think you’d have a clear runway to building your category-killing company?
But it’s even worse than that, because Barnes & Noble used to run some pretty good bookstores. The two political parties are taking the technological tools that every other kind of consumer organization has used to make and deliver products and services that appeal to the fat center of the American consumer psyche and are instead using them to design products—candidates and policy platforms, in their case—that appeal to the most extreme tastes of their most extreme consumers.
It’s like going online to order a boxed set of all the James Bond movies and then receiving snuff porn videos. Over and over again.
Enough. It’s time for our national Hulkamania moment, where the blows to our collective head from the fists of the two-party system stop concussing us and instead start building that crazy, wide-eyed intensity (in the two-thirds of us that don’t find blind loyalty to extreme political ideologies to our liking, anyway) that can enable us to rip our shirts off and pound the hell out of our Republican and Democrat tormentors.
And maybe actually find some leadership that can pull us forward from the center instead of pulling us apart from the extremes.
But how?
I’m not suggesting somehow that Silicon Valley can save our political system. It’s clear that there’s broad disagreement as to whether the technology industry is America's most powerful engine for economic growth and vitality or whether alternatively it's some kind of vampiric middle class woodchipper.
But who cares, in this case? We’re watching a large cabal of party insiders on both sides carry out an ongoing 17-decade theft of America’s political patrimony. The Valley’s denizens (and related digital forest-dwellers in Seattle, Boulder, Austin, Reston, and elsewhere, lumped for simplicity's sake under the “Valley” umbrella) have a burning urge to innovate and a strong experiential knowledge set about how to disrupt huge existing industries.
What I’m suggesting is that the Valley has an approach, a kind of rough algorithm, for the way its ecosystem attacks and has successfully disrupted enormous markets/problems/opportunities over the past 30 years. This “Valley Way,” not surprisingly, isn’t uniform or codified, and of course often fails. But there’s a discernible pattern to how it’s gone about its successful work, particularly when invading an information-driven industry like politics.
If I were to give you my outside observer’s take on that algorithm for building revolutionary and disruptive organizations from scratch, I’d identify ten core elements in the process:
1) Start with knowledge of the full technological stack—the available tool kit—and what existing participants in the marketplace are doing with it already.
This is table stakes. You can’t use information and technology as your disruption engine if you don’t understand how the engine works. And of course you don’t want to spin your wheels disrupting a market that’s already been disrupted. So you come to the fight armed and aware. And the political market hasn’t yet been disrupted — not in the Valley sense, anyway. It’s been co-opted by some ill-intentioned mountebanks, but it hasn’t been disrupted.
2) Identify high-energy, high-achieving, highly intelligent, aggressive, inquisitive and hard-working individuals, and organize them into two- or three-person insurgent teams.
The single greatest determinant of success in the Valley, you’ll hear so many times when talking to people there that you’ll come to see it as gospel, is the quality of the entrepreneur and his or her founding team. It’s the sine qua non of disruption.
3) Encourage those teams to identify huge commercial and societal problems and dysfunctions, and to seek out and break down the root causes of said dysfunctions.
At its best, the Valley doesn’t create small companies that offer niche improvements to existing products or business models; instead, it creates wildly different approaches to serving huge existing categories. (Online retail vs. 6,300 physical Wal-Mart stores, Uber vs. unreliable, corruptly-regulated taxi companies, iTunes vs. Tower Records, etc.)
4) Pool capital to back the teams to identify and create small technologically-driven demonstration footholds while identifying plausible product and service roadmaps for the climb ahead.
Valley entrepreneurial teams can get a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars to start work on a big problem and to begin to try to craft a business model solution to it. They aim for “minimum viable product” to get into the game, knowing that they’ve got to start somewhere.
5) Attack the climb. Test the footholds and either keep climbing or pivot in search of better footholds.
Valley VCs don’t expect a complete, elegant solution to be laid on their desk pre-funding. They expect early investments to be used to design small-scale, testable models that allow further exploration and/or route correction.
6) When successful approaches become apparent, slam the accelerator to the floor and aggressively pour human, financial, and technological resources at the opening.
The whiff of successful progress inevitably brings the need (and usually the
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