LESSIG Blog, v2

I apologize for the brevity of this, and more is coming in the morning. Today is the birthday of two of my 3 kids (Willem, 11, Tess, 5), and I’ve promised a day away. 

There’s been a bunch of frustration and anger about reports that Mayday.US is “supporting” Stark360 in New Hampshire. Stark360 is a New Hampshire based libertarian superPAC. It supports candidates at the state level who don’t support campaign finance reform. Supporters of Mayday.US are RIGHTLY asking the question why we would be “supporting” an organization that doesn’t support campaign finance reform.

The question is correct. The premise is not. We are not supporting the organization at all. We are supporting joint activities designed to benefit the common ground we have found — support for Jim Rubens in the Republican primary — and only that common ground.

That means that while we have supported messaging supporting Rubens, and voterID projects to identify Rubens supporters, and canvassers to support Rubens, we have not supported activities that might also be said to support people who our backers don’t support. So, for example, we turned down an offer to help fund a common suggested ballot, because we believed it might be read to be support for people we don’t also support. And we refused to permit canvassers that we have jointly supported canvass beyond the candidate we have common agreement on (and again, there’s only one: Jim Rubens). 

I made the decision to do this — in this way — both because I thought it could advance the campaign, and because I believe it is important to practice working together where there’s genuine common ground for working together. The Stark360 folks came to me after we announced our support for Rubens. They too had endorsed Rubens. We both thought it was a chance to work for a common objective, recognizing the other areas in which we don’t share a common end. I get that there are people who wouldn’t even do that — people who think the best way to deal with the other side is scorn and shun. I don’t agree with that strategy because I don’t believe in the ethics it makes manifest. We are a democracy, not a sports team. What being citizens in a democracy means is we must find ways peacefully to work with people with whom we don’t agree. 

Finally, some have called this “compromise.” But that’s a confusion of the word. Compromise is accepting less than what you want, in order to get at least some of what you want. So, e.g., Obamacare was a compromise for Obama, since it got him something but not everything he wanted. 

But working with people you generally disagree with ON ISSUES ON WHICH THERE IS COMMON GROUND is not to compromise anything (except the “principle” that you should scorn the other side, a principle I don’t accept). It isn’t “compromise,” because it isn’t about getting less of what you want so that you get something. It is about getting precisely what you want, from a coalition that includes a more diverse, maybe surprisingly diverse, mix. 

So, in the corruption reform space, “compromise” in my view would be to give up reforms aimed at changing the way elections are funded, in exchange for a deal that gave us better disclosure. That’s the sort of compromise I will never support. But it is not “compromise” to find a way to craft a small dollar public funding bill that includes ideas from the Democrats (matching funds) and ideas from the Republicans (like Rubens’ tax credits to support vouchers). Such a deal gives us exactly what we’re fighting for, even if it includes more than just liberals signing up. 

So again: We are supporting Stark360 to help advance our common goal — to have Rubens win the Republican primary. We are not supporting Stark to help it advance a goal we don’t share — to elect other candidates, including those who don’t support corruption reform. I’ve seen no actual evidence that what’s happening on the ground is different from what has been decided by me and agreed to by our manager on the ground — Ryan Clayton — and the people at Stark360. If there is, I’m eager to hear about it. 

Thanks again to the people who have raise this, and especially those who have raised it in a way that is conducive to reasoned discussion. They in particular have given me hope.