The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Adam Lake. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Adam Lake. Adam is a social entrepreneur and experienced founder focused on mission-driven ventures at the intersection of technology, ethics, and civic engagement. He’s led business development across sectors, from scaling an organic food startup to working in the internet industry before founding and directing the Mosaic Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to humane organizational design and systems-level social change. Welcome, Adam.
Adam: Great to be on the show, Jim.
Jim: This should be a good conversation.
Adam: Yeah, looking forward to talking with you about Reboot America today, one of the Mosaic Foundation projects.
Jim: And you can find Rebooting America at RebootAmerica.us, as I recall.
Adam: It is RebootAmerica.us.
Jim: I’d also point out that we’ve covered some analogous territory, though with a very different focus, back in EP 219 with Catherine Gell, where she had some very specific ways about reforming the electoral process and the congressional process. Not nearly as big picture as what Adam has, but it’s relevant. So if you find this topic interesting, check her out. And as always, there’ll be links to all this and everything we talk about at the episode page at JimRuttShow.com. So let’s start, Adam, with big picture. What are you trying to accomplish with Reboot America? What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
Adam: I just wanna start back and just say that I’ve been a follower of the GameB ecosystem and your podcast for a long time and take very seriously this assessment that there’s all these existential threats that humanity faces. Right? Nuclear war, climate change, artificial general intelligence upon us. And I feel like a sense of responsibility to do what I can to address that and kinda bend the arc towards a more positive future and avoid some of the worst outcomes in this inevitable transition that is upon us.
It seemed to me that righting the ship of state of the American experiment here and getting us back on track would be a significant contribution to that effort. Feels like if we have a stable United States of America that we can better deal with those variety of existential threats. How do we do that? I mean, this is an audacious concept of how can we formulate a concept to enable a mass movement that can turn the tide on decades of corruption that we’ve seen in the United States.
We see a massive gap between public opinion and public policy. We see a two-party corporate duopoly that’s funded greatly by the same donors and is just simply not doing a good job representing we the people. Represent.us talks about this Princeton study a lot that says that public policy has zero correlation between what the bottom 90% of income earners want, and there’s a 70% correlation between what the top 10% of income earners want and gets passed into law. So that’s a pretty bleak statistic, and that was back in 2014. I don’t think any of that has gotten any better since. So that’s the situation we’re at. I mean, we could talk about a lot of other metrics of the state of the union. We have increased wealth and income inequality. Long story short, our country is in a poor state, not to mention the current administration. So, like, this is the big question is, how do we get out of this hole we’re in, and what is a vision for the future that people can rally around that not only gets us out of a hole but progresses us into the future?
Jim: That’d be nice. Right? Regular listeners know I was involved with the No Labels movement, before it kind of imploded from being too K Street, in my professional opinion. And they were also thinking about this, you know, that the two-party duopoly has not delivered the goods for the American people. As Ralph Nader said, the pro-abortion, pro-corporatist party and the anti-abortion pro-corporatist party. So let’s start with some of your core problem diagnoses. Let’s go down one level. Things suck. I think many of us will agree about that. Let’s start with how do they suck in some detail, then we can talk about the underlying drivers.
Adam: I mean, Katherine Gehl in “The Politics Industry” talked about this, and there’s just real perverse incentives. Like first-past-the-post voting. Like, winner-take-all voting is a real core problem. These two major parties will try to appeal to their more radical fringe base rather than the center. And so we’re selecting candidates, generally speaking, that don’t represent the middle and the consensus view of the American people. Obviously, there’s a campaign finance issue starting, maybe even earlier, but as far back as Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 that said money equals speech and then Citizens United in 2010 that says corporations are people. Right? So those are some of the problems. And then polarization has gotten worse over the last ten years drastically. Obviously, social media plays a role in that.
And I do think another, like I mentioned, the wealth and income inequality is a core issue. I’ll bring up Bernie Sanders. I think that he’s been a pretty good example. I don’t want to distort this message because I’m not just about Bernie Sanders and the progressive movement, but I think that he’s been a pretty good faith actor really trying to speak out for the American people and do what he thinks is right rather than being corrupted by big money donations. So he’s at least a decent example of a principled politician. We need a whole new wave of principled politicians to get elected to really change the system now. And I bring that up because he, you know, one of his data points is that $80 trillion has been siphoned from the bottom 90% to the top 1% over the last fifty years. And all that means is that if we’d had wealth and income inequality or wealth distribution levels stay what they were in the 1970s until now, each individual, the mean, the average individual would have $250,000 more in wealth today. I mean, that isn’t just a dramatic change in the lived experience of the American people. I mean, imagine being able to afford a home or pay for your kid’s college, and not live check to check and have that fear of scarcity. Those are some of the highlights.
Jim: Yeah. I’m glad to see Bernie getting back on track. I actually worked for the Bernie campaign in 2016. I was really enthusiastic about it. But unfortunately, in 2020, he bent the knee to the wokes, which are pretty revolting. Second, he published some absolutely insane ideas about energy and reaching zero carbon, and I think that’s one of the most important issues of the day. And if you get that wrong, you’re not gonna get my vote. And third, he publicly labeled himself socialist, which, yes, he’s always been a democratic socialist, but he kept it kinda quiet. Come out and give a speech about it. Bad politics. You’re gonna lose, dude. So I did not back Bernie in 2020. But he is no longer playing those silly games. He’s back to where his real strength is, which is basic economic populism. And I’m glad to see that.
Adam: Yeah. And even, you know, I would like to – I’m trying to encourage the Sanders movement. You know, this Fight Oligarchy tour is incredible. What turnout! I mean, they’re having rallies bigger than the presidential campaign, and half of those folks were not previously on the Bernie Sanders mailing list. So there’s a real renewed appetite for something. I do think that he can evolve this just anti-oligarchy “Fight Oligarchy” message into more of an inclusive movement set on very defined principles that includes folks from outside of his progressive ideology. I think we need a big tent movement that isn’t centered around any particular ideology, but centered around the democratic process and delivering for the American people what we actually want, which happens to be hundreds of policies that a supermajority of citizens want that are hardly even being championed, let alone passed into law. And so I think if he and the Forward Party and other movements can kind of snap out of their narrow lane and their narrow ideology and join forces around renewing the democratic process and still advocate for the policies that they want – it’s not like they have to set their ideology aside. But if they can join forces with other principled politicians and other pro-democracy efforts that seek to update electoral process with ranked choice voting and do citizen assemblies so we better understand the consensus view of constituents – like, there’s something really powerful that can happen there.
Jim: Yeah, to your point about many of the policies that a clear majority of the people want not even getting a serious hearing, at the No Labels movement, we did a bunch of serious polling and put together a quite significant, as you say, list – I think dozens, if not hundreds – of policies that have clear majority support but can get no traction in the current game. People want to read that book, it’s at nolabels.org/ourideas. And it’s, I think, very complementary to the kinds of things Adam’s talking about here. Now I do hope, you know, when I see the Bernie-AOC tour, the problem with AOC is she’s fully loaded up with all the left goofy crazy stuff, right? All the “Latinx” and the trans extremism, etcetera. And if the Democrats are going to be the vehicle, which I have my serious doubts for that reason, they got to keep her quiet about that stuff because that is just a pure loser with the real people in this country. Yes, we need to have respect for trans people. They should have full civil rights. But the idea of a six-foot-two dude putting a dress on and then going out and playing ladies’ rugby? No. That ain’t gonna play. Right? Homie ain’t going for that. So this is the big dilemma that Dems have: Can they pivot Bernie-style to truth telling and anti-oligarchy without dragging along all the deadly cultural baggage that they’ve assembled over the last ten or fifteen years?
Adam: Right. Well, I think this is where my suggestion can kind of soften some of those less palatable ideas. If AOC says, “This is what I think about the trans issue, but if my constituents or the voters think we should keep trans women out of women’s sports, I will pass laws according to your preferences.” Like, I’m willing to give deference to your consensus view. I think it becomes a little less problematic to have “extreme” views. I’m not exactly sure that’s what her position is, but I certainly have seen some sentiments from her that aren’t particularly unifying. I think we need more unity politics – condemn the Trump administration for violating the Constitution, but invite Trump voters into this movement to actually drain the swamp. We can’t blame the voters and demonize half of the country, which both sides do. There’s a perception gap at perception.gap.org – you can go there, but there’s just significant misunderstanding about what the left thinks the right believes and vice versa.
Jim: Absolutely. And I can tell you I’ll give you a real live example from 2016. We had a storefront for the Bernie campaign in our two counties, and lots of people came in. We talked to lots of people, and in Virginia, as you know, Adam, you also live in Virginia, is a non-partisan registration state. You don’t register as Democratic or Republican. You can vote in either party’s primary, but you can only vote in one. And we had many people tell us they were either voting for Trump or Bernie. When I tried to explain that to my Blue Coastal friends in the Bay Area or New York or Massachusetts, they said, “That’s impossible! How could that possibly be?” And that’s because they were focusing on the cultural issues and not on economic populism. The regular working people of West Central Virginia feel like they’ve been screwed by the system. They saw both Trump, probably erroneously, because I think personally he’s a phony and has been playing his people for dupes, but Bernie more authentically – they both seemed like they were speaking for the people against the power. While certainly the run-of-the-mill Republicans are all corporate clones, basically, and certainly Hillary as well. So I thought it was entirely natural that many people were looking at those two candidates. While I think we got some of them to vote for Bernie, I guarantee every single one of those people who voted for Bernie also voted for Trump in the general. Until the coastal blues can understand that I did not hallucinate, and our people did not hallucinate when they saw that phenomenon, they’re not gonna be able to fix their problem.
Adam: Yeah. And there were a bunch of Obama-Trump voters who voted for Obama first and then Trump as well. So it’s not – I mean, just like any large group, they’re not monolithic.
Jim: Yeah. Not at all.
Adam: No. So and I’m so glad that I live in Trump country. I mean, it has its pros and cons, but I understand that my neighbors are good, decent people fundamentally.
Jim: I live in a precinct that voted for Trump by 83%. And yet the people are good people with good values. We do have a few screwballs, but we have a few screwballs every place, of course. And this stereotype that there’s a bunch of racist haters, they wanna put all the homosexuals in concentration camps – bullshit. People have a different set of priorities and different orientations and different world views. But what’s wrong with that?
Adam: Yeah. And
Jim: So you got to engage people where they’re at and thinking that you’re going to turn people who live in Appalachia into folks that would be happy sitting down for a latte in San Francisco – you got something else coming, dude.
Adam: Yeah. Hopefully we can, you know, all of us or a lot of citizens here can start to say, “I reject both corporate wings of both parties.” Like, Trump supporters have been hoodwinked by him to some degree thinking that he was gonna drain the swamp. And then Democratic voters didn’t even get a Democratic primary, right?
Jim: Yeah. Talk about the fix being in.
Adam: So hopefully we can all just acknowledge that both parties are corrupt, then not waste too much time over which one is worse than the other and start to build something new. Right? A new movement that transcends all of that.
Jim: An example of kind of a meta level is in both parties, and of course it’s pervasive across our late-stage decadent society – one of the core virtues that’s lacking is courage. Right? It was obvious to me in June of 2023 that Biden was geezing bad, and there is no way he had any business running for a second term. And yet all the Dems refused to tell the emperor he had no clothes, right? And even many of those who were ambitious were too cowardly to step out and say the truth, except one minor guy, right? Some dude, congressman from Minnesota. And this is reprehensible that people are so cowardly.
And the same is true, of course, on the Republican side. Think of all these people – Marco Rubio, a very sound guy, very smart, very educated. He parrots the horseshit of Donald Trump like a total sycophant, completely lacking in the courage that you’d expect from a U.S. Senator. I like to point out the difference in 1790, at the beginning of the constitutional regime, United States had a population about three and a half million, about the same as Kentucky today. And yet our leaders were people like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, the Morrises, George Mason – you go down the list – Ben Franklin. These are high quality people whose writings and thinking are still respected 240 years later. And today we have Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. What the fuck? Right? And we have a hundred times the population we did then. So there’s something just fundamentally broken in the filtering mechanism to give us the kind of leaders that we really deserve.
Adam: Absolutely in the filtering mechanism. Because I feel that we have a lot of brilliant, purpose-driven public servants that would do a much better job amongst our 330,000,000 people or so. Right? They’re just not being lifted up to the top and elected and put in those positions of power and service.
Jim: In fact, frankly, probably most of them aren’t even elected officials because anybody with any brain ain’t gonna play that game. Anyone with any self-respect realizes it’s just a goat fuck of prodigious proportions, and they’re much better off spending their time on something else.
Adam: I think there’s some truth to that, Jim, but I really hope for our sake that that changes. Right? Hopefully, we can kind of catalyze a movement that those good-hearted, brilliant folks would be interested in joining. Like a Reboot America movement, for instance.
Jim: Yeah. And I was gonna say, now let’s get up to your actual proposed solutions and mechanisms. And let’s start with your concept of the politician’s pledge. Tell us why you formulated that, what role it serves, and then let’s go through the six points.
Adam: Sure. I’m gonna just start with the fact that I came into the pro-democracy space trying to find an organization that was doing something that I felt could make a tremendous impact. I kept learning more and skipping around from the reformers who wanna do ranked choice voting and open primaries, to the bridgers who are helping the left-right divide understand one another, to citizen assemblies and mobile voting, which are types of civic innovators. I just kept feeling like, wait a second – none of these feel like they’re going to be the thing that breaks through to the mainstream. All of these organizations have been working on these various aspects and haven’t broken through to the mainstream. The trajectory is what it is – things are getting worse by a lot of metrics here in the United States.
What I came to the conclusion, at least currently (I’m happy to change my view), is that what’s missing is an engagement between these pro-democracy organizations and actual candidates who would ultimately get elected and have the legislative power to change the social operating system of America. We need to actually change legislation to see these changes. That’s what this pledge does – it tries to bring together these disparate entities into these founding principles. There’s a lot of core values in this pledge from the reformers and the bridgers, and it also defines what it means to be a reboot politician. I’ve tried to come up with a list of commitments that were specific enough to get the job done and really transform the U.S. political system, but vague and general enough to not alienate people and actually get a sufficient number of signees.
Jim: Let’s get into the six points and talk about them in some detail.
Adam: So number one is reject big money donations. There’s a variety of tiers of what this means. This would have to be teased out. But if you’re gonna be a reboot politician – and I just wanna highlight, you can be a reboot Democrat, Republican, Independent, Forward Party, any type of candidate or representative – you would need to reject big money donations. I’m a little concerned about this one because I do hear a reasonable argument that you don’t wanna unilaterally disarm, but I have seen AOCs and Bernies reject big money donations to an extent and then win. I think Bernie almost won the presidency. A lot of people point to that as an example of how we can’t take on a major party, but I do think it’s possible to reject big money donations and win. But I am sensitive to the argument that we don’t wanna unilaterally disarm. So that’s item number one.
Jim: Yeah. The other possibility is to have some form of sterilized big money. You know, put together a super PAC, but make the rules such that all contributions are anonymous and will stay anonymous, for instance. So that’s a possible way to split the difference between the two.
Adam: I thought about that. I didn’t know if there were any legal restrictions to that. But if you could put the money in a black box, that could be a way to do it.
Jim: Yeah, there’s a way. It’s… anyway, that’s for people who understand the ins and outs of the Federal Election Commission regulations. There is a way to do it, but it has some limitations. But just to the point, there may be some clever thinking around the edges of that idea, because you’re right. Unfortunately, with the billionaires in particular – Soros on one side and Elon on the other and bunches of others – in that kind of environment where we’ve allowed the Federal Election Commission legislation to be totally gamed, unilaterally disarming may be stupid.
Adam: It may be. There may be other ways to get media attention, you know, low-dollar means, earned media. If there really is a political movement, there is social media, although the algorithms may be rigging who sees what there. So anyway, moving on to number two, which is champion anticorruption measures. Not all politicians are gonna reject big money donations, but we would want to get to the point where there’s a threshold of these types of politicians who will just write into law to change the campaign finance system. The second commitment is to champion anticorruption. Represent.us has outlined a very detailed anticorruption act as one example of what anticorruption laws might look like. Number three is advance electoral reforms. Ultimately, we need to change the rules of our electoral system. We need to have real competition in our political system and open the way for independents and third parties so that citizens have options. I’m not completely sure that my litmus test for which policies should be advanced is a supermajority of support. I’m not sure that 60% or more at the very current moment support ranked choice voting, for instance, but just vaguely number three is advance electoral reforms.
Jim: For the benefit of the audience, obviously I know this shit, but the audience may not or may not have listened to Catherine’s episode. Why don’t you tell us what your initial proposal might be in the area of electoral reforms and include as much detail as you can?
Adam: Just the basic concept of ranked choice voting would dramatically change the election process. So you could’ve had, for instance, we’ve been talking about Bernie – Bernie, Hillary, and Trump running a three-way race. Almost certainly in the first-past-the-post voting system, most of the Bernie supporters would vote Hillary because they’d be afraid of the spoiler effect. And if they didn’t vote for Hillary, then Trump would win. In a ranked choice voting situation, they can put their favorite candidate first without any risk of negative outcome. And then if enough people did that, well, we have this outsider that just won. But if enough people didn’t vote for that outsider, then it would automatically defer to their second choice, whether that be Hillary or Trump. And I don’t wanna favor the Democrats in this.
Jim: Yeah. And of course, to make the ranked choice voting even more powerful, the idea of having open primaries – the so-called jungle primaries as they do in Alaska, where there are no partisan primaries, which is very important – then you take the last four or the last five people and have a second round of ranked choice voting. That strikes me as even more powerful than ranked choice voting at the final level only.
Adam: Yeah, combined. Absolutely. So where I live in a Republican-heavy area, we might have five Republicans selected in the primaries, for example. Right? But then a more moderate Republican will get elected in the general, most likely, because all of these lefties that do live here would turn out and vote for their preferred Republican candidate. So it tends to have a forcing function. Drives the election towards the most moderate centrist, consensus-based candidate versus at the fringes.
Jim: Because that’s one reform. Now another reform that other countries have used, and let me tell you why I like it potentially. This is certainly a step forward from what we have, because you said something, centrist in the center, not at the fringes. I’m going to argue that the fringes are actually good, right? We want to have room at the fringes for things to start to happen because the consensus middle-of-the-road answer is often not the right answer long term. And the analogy I like to use is rock and roll. Most garage bands suck, but if we didn’t have garage bands, rock and roll would eventually die. And so other countries, many other countries, those with parliamentary systems, use what’s called proportional representation, where any party that gets above 5% of the popular vote gets its proportionate share of seats in the legislature, and they typically have a party list ranked in order. So if their pro rata share gets four seats in the legislature, the top four people on their list go in. Now that’s very different than this reform model. But what it does is it provides a more interesting surface for idiosyncratic ideas to exist, get some visibility, and then see if they can gather support over time. Because I’m not entirely sure that just being middle of the road is the right answer right now. I suspect we may need…
Adam: Some…
Jim: …considerably more radical refactoring of our civilization.
Adam: Yeah, I do want to differentiate between middle of the road in our corrupt political system and middle of the road in terms of sentiment of the US population because a lot of policies that Americans agree on are considered radical by the corporate establishment. So definitely different. But yeah, I think that we want fringe voices to challenge preconceived notions. But ultimately, in a democracy or a democratic republic, we want to pass policies that have consensus, that are the consensus view.
Jim: I would agree. We want to have working majorities in Congress that can do sensible things, but I do think it’s interesting to have visible and politically engaged fringes. Germany is quite interesting. Their method is half individual seats like we have, and then the other half is proportionate representation in a party list proportional representation means. So you get some of both. You could implement the jungle primary plus ranked choice voting for the half that’s elected from districts, and then the other half, some other method, I hadn’t really thought too much about it, that ends up with party lists based on the total proportion of votes on a nationwide basis. That might get both, which is a tendency towards more team player-ish politics on the district side while still leaving room for idiosyncratic new ideas to get visibility and be part of the discourse.
Adam: Yeah. How does a new idea gain popular preference without initial exposure? Like, I’m into the universal basic income or a citizen dividend or however you want to look at an AI and automation tax that gets evenly distributed to citizens, and I doubt that’s supported by a super majority of citizens. So I’d love to see that talked about more so that ultimately it can win over the majority of the public. So I agree with you.
Jim: Alright. Let’s go on to your fourth point.
Adam: Yeah. So some of these points just sound so simple. They kind of come off as naive, but I think we need to get back to the basics here. Right? Engage with and listen to the constituents. Like, there needs to be a more concerted effort, not just dialing for dollars half the time. Go out and talk to the constituents, understand them. And if their incentives are actually aligned with the constituents because they’re not taking big money donations anymore, they’ll kind of get the pulse of the pain and desires of their people and want to advance policies that will solve those issues. So just more contact and engagement with constituents through town halls, surveys. There’s a lot of room for civic innovation these days in how we can interact and understand concerns and preferences of citizens.
Jim: As you know, I have an interest in liquid democracy, and I’ve often thought that an intermediate step towards liquid democracy would rather than actually using it as the voting mechanism, which I think would be great, it could be used in the same way as an advisory mechanism to elected officials.
Adam: That’s right.
Jim: Does that make any sense to you?
Adam: Yes. Yes. So you could have these democratic processes in town halls and such that happen in between elections. Citizens could vote, but that voting process could take the form of liquid democracy where they delegate their vote on a particular issue to somebody else they trust in that area.
Jim: Yeah. The reason why I think liquid democracy is a superior way is otherwise, it’s just the activists. Right? Because if you do town halls, who shows up? All the cranks on both sides. In reality, most people are not represented by the cranks. And liquid democracy provides a way for you to find a person who you trust, who’s near you in your views, then you can proxy your vote to them. And so everybody can have more or less equal weight of representation without having to be the kind of cranks that go to town hall meetings.
Adam: Exactly. Well, this leads perfectly into number five, which is utilize digital democracy tools. Right? And so something like you’re talking about could greatly enhance the democratic process and enable these reboot politicians to better understand the views of their citizens. So that’s number five. Number six is the simplest and the most important: do the will of the people. Right? And so once they’ve listened to their constituents and they’ve aligned their incentives by rejecting big money donations and utilize the best tools available to better understand their constituents, while they are still absolutely encouraged to voice their policy preferences. Like, say they might be advocating for Medicare for All, which is something I support, but I don’t know that a super majority of citizens support. If their constituents don’t support a Medicare for All system, they will not vote on that. They will not vote to pass a Medicare for All system if their constituents disagree with them. So ultimately it’s a commitment to giving deference to the consensus view.
Jim: Of course, that’s also very controversial. Right? In the Federalist Papers, the writers actually say that representatives should not necessarily do the majority will of their constituents, but rather should be mature reasoners about the issue. And they go into considerable detail on how the hot passions of the masked person should not be disintermediated into policy. Yeah. And there’s some sense to that as well. So that’s kind of the other side of this idea of doing the will of the people.
Adam: Yeah. So I’m sensitive to that. This is an advisory commitment. Right? They’re not gonna be constitutionally bound to do the will of their constituents. And if they have a firm disagreement, they can vote against the will of their constituents on a particular issue, and they may or may not get reelected as a result of that. Or maybe in between when they went against the will of their constituents and the next election season, they do a good job of explaining why they did that and why they thought it was in the best interest of the citizens. So there’s still a deliberative process that happens, and they’re certainly not locked in to doing it. But I think a general commitment to doing the will of their constituents is probably pretty good overall.
Jim: Yeah. And probably most of them, if you asked them, they would say so. Right, today. They’re not gonna say, “No, I don’t do the will of my constituents.” Right? That would be a good way for them to get voted out.
Adam: Well, sure. They would say they do. But when you kind of compare and contrast their voting record with what their constituents actually want, I have a feeling there’s a significant gap there. There certainly is a massive gap there at the national level. Like, what we want is not getting passed into law.
Jim: Yeah. Per that Princeton research, which shows the general populace has essentially zero impact on actual legislation.
Adam: Yeah. The bottom 90% of income earners. And that was in 2014, and things have not improved since then. You know, a few of these policies that do have a super majority of support, I’m calling the People’s Agenda. This whole reboot concept is to center or focus and unite around the democratic process, if not policies, but popular policies would naturally arise from a healthy democratic process and public servants actually trying to do the people’s will. Right? And so currently, if that’s the type of representative government we had, 87% of people support the Anti-Corruption Act from RepresentUs. I mean, I don’t know how widely that poll was distributed, but certainly, there’s a majority sentiment from citizens that say we need to get money out of politics and even amend the Constitution to do so. 88% support lowering Medicare drug prices. Another 84% support expanding Medicare coverage. 73% of citizens support guaranteed paid sick leave, and the list goes on. I mean, if we can’t ban congressional stock trading, like, we know we’ve got a broken system. Everybody wants that to end.
Jim: Maybe this is the place for you to start. Right? Who would disagree with this? And we see things like Marjorie Taylor Greene trading, you know, ten minutes before the reversal on tariffs. This would seem to be a very simple wedge issue to start with. And maybe just champion that one for the time being. That would be kind of interesting because, as you say, hard to see how you object to that one.
Adam: Yeah. The Young Turks has started this Rebellion PAC and this idea of a populist plank, and they’ve chosen six policies. So they have a little different approach than mine, and they’ve chosen six popular policies that they’re hoping – but they’re just focusing on progressives and trying to take over the Democratic Party. What I’m proposing here is a cross-partisan thing that I think could do a better job of kind of snapping out of the tribalism if it is cross-partisan. It’s not an us versus them thing anymore.
Jim: Let’s talk about People’s Agenda a little bit more broadly and how that might get created.
Adam: Yeah. So determining what lands on the people’s agenda is a little bit tricky. That’s why I’ve said the litmus test for a policy to end up on the people’s agenda is a supermajority of citizen support. Voice of the People, if you go to vop.org, they’ve done a tremendous job of identifying at least hundreds of policies, 200-plus policies that have bipartisan support, not strictly a supermajority of citizen support. And I could see raising the bar to not 60% support, but even 66 percent, two-thirds support. So there’s some fine-tuning there that has to happen, but I think we should be able to agree if some movement like this ever were to gain momentum, which policies qualify and how we measure what that support is. I mean, there’s different polling methods, so that’s a little bit tricky. It’s not a perfect exact science.
Jim: James S. Fishkin is a political scientist who specialized in thinking about popular assemblies, polling…
Adam: And…
Jim: I think he’s really focused on polling as one of the more interesting ways to solicit broad-based citizen input into the policy formulation process. I think that’d be a source worth taking a look at. In fact, it reminds me, I should actually get him on my podcast.
Adam: So there’s polling, there’s direct voting, assuming we’ve got some kind of civic engagement app. There’s citizen assemblies that, with the sortition method, selecting a random and representative sample of citizens in a particular district or municipality and having a deliberative process. So there’s a lot of mechanisms to kind of arrive at which policies do have this supermajority of citizen support. But again, none of them are a perfect science. But I think even attempting to do this and putting a good faith effort into doing this would be far superior to just kind of ignoring the will of people as we are right now.
Jim: All right. So these are a bunch of good ideas. Right? So now let me ask the difficult question. Here you are, some dude in Floyd, sitting in your underwear, typing on your computer.
Adam: How did you know?
Jim: How did I know? How did I know? Right? How do you get from there to tipping the system? I mean, obviously, we have no fucking clue, but give me your theory of change, as we say.
Adam: Sure. Yeah. That’s a great question. You know, as I said, I kind of took the Game B hypothesis, or assessment, very seriously and just embarked on this journey of trying to articulate what a mass movement might look like given the structural realities of our political system. And so I’m doing my best to create a draft that will attract interest and attention from organizations and parties and networks and individuals that already have traction and resources. Right?
I mentioned the Fight Oligarchy tour. I think that the Bernie folks, if we could get some high-profile people like Bernie to kind of adopt this philosophy, the Forward Party, which I think is doing incredible work – there’s a huge amount of values alignment here. The Forward Party, I wish that they had never called themselves a party. I think that what we need is this kind of what I’m describing here with Reboot America – kind of this new political institution that defines virtues, values, and norms, like you mentioned in your last podcast, for reestablishing the principles our country is founded on. But anyway, other than that critique of the third party, they’re doing amazing work.
And then there’s the entire Progressive Caucus that is rejecting big money donations, and then there’s the whole independent movement. There’s a variety of third parties. So long story short, there’s all these existing established entities that are philosophically aligned with this approach. And so the idea is to build a coalition of existing entities, not start something new and grow it just from this one dude living out in the middle of nowhere in Floyd, Virginia. I would love to see something like this succeed. If I saw another effort like it, I would join it. So this is just my best effort. I haven’t really seen an approach to a cross-partisan mass movement that was compelling enough to me. So I figured, well, I’ll just try to define one.
Jim: What can people do if they want to join up?
Adam: Well, go to RebootAmerica.US and reach out to me. I certainly could use teammates, advisers. I mean, ultimately, financial resources, but advisement initially would be incredible. I’m gonna start maybe a biweekly Signal group to talk about how to proceed and reach out to these various orgs and try to form this coalition. But, honestly, I feel like if we could get a Bernie or a Forward Party Andrew Yang type figure interested, they have the established network already. I’m becoming kind of curious where No Labels is at.
Jim: Yeah. Truthfully, I kinda dropped them. I found them lacking in courage and being way too K Street. They were all afraid to piss off their friends around the Capitol. And if you’re not willing to piss off the incumbent powers that be, you shouldn’t be playing this game.
Adam: Right. And that’s what I’ve noticed from a lot of the pro-democracy organizations is that they don’t wanna be confrontational and I don’t know how you actually turn the tide on forty years or more of corruption without pissing some people off. And so you have to be willing to kind of name the villains and suffer the consequences. But, unfortunately, a lot of the donor money from these, quote, pro-democracy organizations comes from the very people that are benefiting from the established order.
Jim: Of course.
Adam: Tricky tricky tricky trick.
Jim: Yeah. The first order of manipulation is co-opt the marginal opponent. Right? Look at rock and roll music. Started as the music of protest and revolution, ended up under the thumb of six big music companies. So this happens again and again. Anyway, I wanna thank Adam for coming on The Jim Rutt Show and talking about Reboot America. If you are motivated by some of the things you heard here, reach out to him. Any final thoughts before we wrap it?
Adam: Jim, if you have a couple more minutes, I’m curious to understand, you know, what are lessons learned from the Emancipation Party that you started and how all of this might relate to Game B. That was my question for you.
Jim: I ran the Emancipation Party for three months and then folded it. We concluded that we didn’t know shit about how to run a political party and that further, this is important, we did some fair bit of marketing, and we noticed that we could sell to Boomers quite easily. Xers, not bad. Millennials, not at all. Because the term political party was considered about the equivalent of shit sandwich. Nobody was interested in it. And I would suggest that is probably even stronger today with Zoomers. And that’s why we came up with Game B – is how can we provide a more gentle ramp to thinking about change without getting caught up in the binary logic of elections, right? We’ve made a lot of progress in, you know, twelve years. It’s kind of, in some ways invisible, but it’s gradually converting people to this vision, hundreds of thousands of people now, maybe more. And so we found that as a completely alternative route. It also allows us to think more pure thoughts, not just what is sellable in today’s political process, but how should things actually be. Now, means it’s a much slower road, and maybe it’s too slow, and that’s one of the arguments against Game B. But so I would say we don’t have much in the way of lessons. In fact, our lesson was don’t play that game.
Adam: Don’t play that game. Yeah. I do wonder how we’d get from here to Game B. So I’m really interested in these intermediate steps. But if there’s others out there that wanna play this game of, you know, this audacious game of trying to design a cross-partisan movement that can help spark the turning of the tide on decades of corruption, please reach out to me. Thanks so much for having me on.
Jim: I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks, Adam Lake.