MAP 150

I attended the Citizens League-MPR “Policy and a Pint” session last night, which explored how money influences politics. The discussion was a well-moderated, frank and lively exchange of viewpoints. But it left me with this very Map 150-ish question: What happens when a system is broke, everybody realizes it, but even the experts throw up their hands in a loss for answers?

This isn’t the first time this question emerged from a Policy and a Pint session. This dynamic deserves attention, because I think it is a miniature of what’s happening in the larger policy world. Audience members (citizens) get it. They ask smart probing questions, often centered around some solution only to be quickly dismissed by the experts. (If not blamed for the problem in the first place.)

What failing systems could we be talking about? Well, depending on your point of view it could be the housing market, education, health care, care for the elderly, transportation, environmental protection, social safety nets, pensions, social security, immigration…..

Citizens get that these systems are failing them, their families and society. They know changes are needed—like the retiree I mentioned in my previous posting who railed against Medicare Part D—because they experience that changes are needed. But when they turn to the experts with an idea or a question, they get answers that just explain why things are the way they are.

How do we find ourselves in situations where we’ve developed so much knowledge, expertise and information, and rarely (effective) solutions? First, by turning policy-making over to experts, we’ve severed an important connection in understanding the problem, the urgency of the problem and the willingness to do something about it. (That’s why Map 150 journalists are out talking to citizens this sumemr.) Audience members last night showed a refreshing openness and creativity to the problem of too much money in politics: ban television ads; limit the amount of personal funds a candidate can spend; limit overall spending. Constitutional freedom of speech protections makes these suggestions improbable (I guess) but that misses the point. People are willing to try something, anything, to get so much money out of politics and make it a more democratic process again.

Second, in the movie Clueless, a teenage boy is described as a “Monet”: looks hot from far away, but up close he’s a mess. Experts are often so close to the problem that they see the detailed confused mess, not the big impression. As one audience member pointed out last night, the corruptive influence of money in politics may not be on individuals, but on the system. Experts don’t have answers because they are trying to come up with solutions focused on details inside the system (which they’re responsible for managing or being successful within), even though the real answers may require reconstructing that system altogether.

Based on last night’s performance: experts 0, citizens 10.