Meteor Blades had an important recent diary on Big Media's sneering, dismissive coverage of Bernie Sanders. It was a timely reminder that candidates willing to fight for the 99% have a critical task: they have to figure out a way to crash the gates owned by the 1%.
With a national campaign, the easiest way of bypassing Big Media is to talk directly with the voters via the internet. Politicians have been doing this for years: here is Al Gore having an online chat back in 1994, and here is Barack Obama doing one 18 years later. The trouble is that online outreach has had very limited impact, in sharp contrast to the many things which the internet has revolutionized.
Nevertheless, and to his credit, Sanders has experimented with online conversation using Reddit Ask-Me-Anythings (AMAs). His most recent one was a month ago, and as it plainly shows he has been very successful at connecting there, to the extent that he has been dubbed the president of the Reddit community. In this diary I propose a way to similarly connect with the very much larger community of non-Reddit users.
The format of a Reddit AMA is that any registered user can submit questions and vote on others. The interviewee answers whichever questions he chooses for about an hour, and he ignores upvoted questions at his peril. Questions and answers are both short, and there are no follow-ups.
There are many things to like about this new social media form. It is:
- Online and free to use - so it's easy to participate
- Egalitarian - without gatekeepers
- Responsive to good ideas - questions and suggestions are ranked by voting
- Moderated - which keeps things civil
- Nonpartisan - so everyone feels welcome
- Mainly text based - which keeps it simple, inexpensive, informative and searchable
However, one problem with using Reddit as part of a political campaign is that the site is a commercial one focused on entertainment. It actively discourages some forms of political discussion - DailyKos diaries are banned from the site, for example.
A second problem is that the format is a good fit for celebrities promoting something, or for Q&As with unusual people. It is a bad fit for constituents wanting to have substantive conversations with their representatives - among other issues, the politician AMAs that have taken place tend to be dull and unenlightening.
For citizen-representative conversations, AMAs should be redesigned from the ground up. If done right they could:
- help foster a greatly desired connectedness between representatives and their constituents that is currently almost completely absent,
- be a powerful force for counteracting the oligarchs' propaganda that we are all immersed in, and
- be educational as well as entertaining.
I recently wrote a long and boring diary describing how and why I would redesign AMAs for state and local representatives (tl;dr: there should be one nonpartisan discussion board for each officeholder). It is straightforward to adapt these ideas to a national race. I believe these important aspects need to be added to the Reddit format:
- Emphasis on dialogue - to prevent uninformative Q&As where the answer is a talking point, and there are no follow-ups
- Continuously run - a continuing conversation, not a one-off or an occasional interview
- More inclusive - let people log in using their Facebook or other social media accounts
- Non-profit - to keep Big Media, including Big Social Media, out of it
- Non-anonymous - to keep out corporate and government sock-puppets
- Cover a single political office - to narrow the focus
An AMA website designed for citizen-representative conversations is, perhaps surprisingly, very easily achievable. As a hobby, I have put together a fully functional demonstration board to illustrate the concept. The phpBB software used is able to handle very large communities - the largest board running it has 116,000+ registered users. It would be easy for me to put together a board for the 2016 presidential race, and voters would be guaranteed to stop by if Sanders were to participate.
Alternatively, a civic organization could be petitioned by the voters, or the Sanders campaign, to create and host a state-of-the-art AMA site for presidential candidates. The League of Women Voters, which hosted presidential debates until 1988 (when they pulled out due to unreasonable demands from the candidates), would be a good choice to approach.
Sanders needs to be boldly experimental if he is serious about becoming President. He dominates on social media, but that can't begin to compensate for the fact that the financial interests that control Big Media are unanimous in their hatred of him. I hope he seriously considers outside-the-box ideas like the ones in this diary.
Update
Thanks to everyone for their comments and feedback. It is clear my diary was not as clear as I had intended. Here are some points which I want to make sure readers take away.
Sanders particular strength as a politician and campaigner is in conversational democracy. - At least, that is my understanding. Here is a representative quote from a Vermont resident, from Sanders' 2014 AMA:
Vermont is “retail politics” at its best. You had better be out there, talking to actual Vermont residents, in all parts of the state, if you want to win. If you don't have a good ground game, you might as well not bother campaigning. We expect our politicians to respect us enough to actually come find us and talk to us not the other way around. The carpetbaggers ([cough]Tarrant[/cough]) who think they can just glad-hand their way around the big donor circles with only occasional large venue public appearances get their butts handed to them on a campaign platter. If you're not showing up at the neighborhood BBQ, willing to answer tough questions from regular people, you are not really a candidate, just a pretender.
This diary was about conversational democracy and campaigning. I tried to get that across in the title and elsewhere by using “talk directly with”, but it seems I failed. It's an obscure distinction, admittedly. Anyway, TV appearances, position papers, public speeches, etc., are not conversational. Townhall meetings and AMAs are.
Sanders has gotten huge returns for his AMA efforts - He has done 3 AMAs on Reddit (12/16/13, 5/7/14 and 5/19/15), spending a total of ~10 hours doing so, and in return he has a huge fanbase in a online community which has over 3 million users.
Doing Sanders AMAs outside of Reddit could deliver similar huge returns on effort - Less than 1% of online US adults are redditors, whereas more than 70% of them use Facebook. The Sanders campaign could arrange for a nonpartisan organization to create a simple AMA website for the 2016 presidential race. A vast pool of voters would instantly be able to participate by logging in with their Facebook account.
Sanders' competition will do terribly if they participate - Martin O'Malley did an AMA a year ago and tanked. If follow-up questions are built into the format as I urge, it will be even harder for a traditional politician serving the 1% to handle. Hillary might do OK, all the others will do worse than O'Malley.
Sanders' competition will look bad if they don't participate - Reddit is so busy, nobody notices that Cruz hasn't held an AMA. If there is a dedicated site for presidential AMAs, and upvoted questions waiting for Cruz to answer them, and Sanders is there pressing the flesh, will not showing up be a viable option?