Dear Chamath
It appears that you’re {NOT} on track to run for Governor of California with the Besties as your campaign team — that’s {NOT} awesome! California, and the country as a whole, is badly in need of common sense solutions to our biggest problems. Your platform is thought provoking and while I don’t agree with everything, it’s a great place to start the discussion.
tl;dr Career politicians funded by big money special interests have rigged the political system to benefit the elite and handed political power to the extreme fringes of both parties. Most Americans want common sense solutions which will never be accomplished without fundamental political reform to give power back to the people. You & the Besties can help make that happen.
My feeling is that most Republican politicians are duplicitous “corporatist scumbags’’ who would sell out their mother for campaign contributions and/or populist votes (see: Kansas, Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan). And most Democratic politicians have crazy ideas and are generally incompetent at accomplishing anything (see: San Francisco, California, the Squad, Bernie Bros). You’ve mentioned the need for a third political party and I think a center-right party could dominate politics with a common people platform — “liberal” on social & environmental issues & “conservative” on fiscal & business regulatory issues but with big bold ideas.
While much can be done at the local & state level, the largest problems confronting humanity are global in nature: climate change, rise of populism & authoritarianism, unchecked power of China & Russia, future pandemics, and so forth. Given that reality, I implore you to use your voice and campaign to amplify much needed political reform across all levels of government.
Volumes have been written about the problems in our political system and fixing it seems overwhelming. Clearly the two main political parties want to continue their status quo duopoly. While there are lots of things which need to be done, just three fundamental reforms could kick start the whole process.
1. Redistricting — Every 10 years after a census the party which controls each state’s legislature redraws the congressional and other districts. No surprise, they redraw them to virtually guarantee that they will control the government be selecting their own voters.
The only reasons these districts exist is to dilute the other party’s voters. Scumbag consultants have taken redistricting to whole new levels of rotten and the partisan Supreme Court has allowed it since their party was in control after evil genius Karl Rove cemented GOP control after the 2010 census. Politicians cannot be allowed to continue selecting their voters.
SOLUTION: After every census, new district boundaries are created via an open source algorithm to draw the most compact, equal population districts by grouping census tracts based on:
- Existing county, city, and neighborhood boundaries
- Natural features (rivers, lakes, mountains)
- Man made infrastructure (bridges, interstate highways, etc)
- Population density
A citizen redistricting commission could only change these districts for egregious issues such as the dilution of minority representation and courts could only examine those changes. The open source algorithm could be changed every decade by a super majority vote of either Congress or all the voters.
2. Open Primaries — Currently the party voters decides their representative in the general election. No surprise that the far left & far right of each party control this process and select candidates who are far from the mainstream center of the political spectrum. And once your district is gerrymandered, that party will win it. So tiny portions of vocal partisans decide who goes to Congress creating the current massive dysfunctional rift. Let’s ask a fundamental question: Why should citizens pay for an election allowing the parties to choose their representative in the general election? F&@% that! We need to purge voter registrations of party affiliation, have open primaries and allow the top 2candidates to advance to the general election. Whether that’s 2 Republicans, 2 Democrats, a Libertarian & a Democrat, a Green & a Republican, a Chamthian & a Libertarian, whatever. We’ll get the two candidates who appeal most to the general population, are less likely to push the fringe politics of their “base”, and who will represent their districts by winning a majority of votes instead of a plurality. If the political parties want to choose one representative to coalesce around, that’s their choice, let them pay for their own f’ing election to do that!
3. Publicly funded elections — It’s no secret that dark money from special interests along with career politicians beholden to that money has corrupted politics. Every business has to play in this game — getting government contracts, favorable regulation or deregulation, special subsidies and tax breaks, trade policy, etc. If you’re a CEO, the best investment you can make is political lobbying — for high 6 to low 7 figure investment, you can buy off enough politicians to generate millions or billions of dollars in profit for your company. Nothing else a CEO can do has that level of return. Guess who pays for those billions in profits? American citizens. Every one of us. It’s an insidious hidden tax on society which must be removed. There are lots of proposals to accomplish this but the core we need to overturn Citizens United and advancing public election funding with multiplied matching funds from small donors and perhaps “liberty dollars” which each voter can allocate to a candidate.
That’s it! Three huge ideas which would transform the political landscape and allow us to solve the big challenges facing humanity.
But that won’t happen by itself. Even after your run for governor (successful or not), I hope that you will fund efforts towards political reform. As one of millions of people who left California in the last few years (after two decades), I hope you bring common sense back to politics.
Best (not Bestie),
Trishan
