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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

In a first past the post system, starting yet another fringe party is pointless. If technologists want to have a real impact on American politics, the solution is to take advantage of the current disorganization within the Republican party. If the tea partiers can do it, so can the technologists (so long as there are a few deep Silicon Valley pockets willing to bankroll the escapade).

"Obama's NSA is spying on your church groups and trying to figure out how many guns you own" would be a pretty powerful political platform that could get a few people elected.

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I don't think you need a disorganized party to hollow out and crawl inside of.

The secret to the US two party system is that primary elections are really, really important and virtual no one partakes in them. Democrats get elected in safe blue districts and Republicans get elected in safe red districts and only a tiny number of purple districts are really up for grabs. So if you want to shape who wins the general election, the place to apply your time and money is in the primary elections.

Even if you don't win, nothing turns a politician faster than a strong primary challenge. Most of the "old guard" Republicans who defeated their Tea Party challengers none-the-less have shifted course to appease the Tea Party.

So if you want to get Congress to move on domestic spying, start primary-ing Congressmen with anti-spying candidates.

This is exactly right. I predict a backlash against the Democrats after Obama's epic failures (that doesn't mean most people will vote Republican, but it probably means a lot of dems simply don't show up next time around).

And you're spot on about pulling a "Tea Party". The fact is, politics is a nasty business. We need a large group of people willing to say whatever it takes to get voted in. Once in, the only goal should be voting reform. If we can get rid of FPTP we can fix everything else eventually.

Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move. I am not a Ron Paul person, but you can look at what the party did to disenfranchise him. The problem here is that political parties are basically clubs, they have their own rules. So when party leaders violate parliamentary procedure to ignore successful votes to remove leaders, when they set up shadow offices for Establishment candidate when he doesn't win in a district, when they call police to eject people who win votes, your only alternative is "to form another party." At the same time the RNC and DNC have managed to weasel their way into preferential treatment under state laws, so they get to have their cake and eat it too.

I don't have a solution.

> Regardless of the disorganization, there is a set of people at the top that are going to be extremely difficult to dislodge, and they will thwart your every move.

You don't need to dislodge them. You just need to convince them that you've got a political platform that will get votes, to counter demographic trends (people who remember the Soviet Union dying off, etc) that don't work in their favor. Bill surveillance as an attack on religious groups, a way for the IRS to more strictly enforce tax laws, etc, and you can present them with a platform that will get votes from their base.

I haven't been watching the news lately, but I can't believe that the republicans aren't already trying to tie the NSA thing to the IRS thing.

You're right, I was coming at it presuming they don't want to address this issue. But I think I have a good case for that. These programs pump a lot of money into the defense industry, which they are beholden to. I don't see that changing. I could be wrong about that, but they are a strong lobby.

I believe some republicans are trying to tie the NSA and IRS things to the Obama's campaign voter-database prowess.

I think a lot of people who oppose ubiquitous, unchecked surveillance also want to fix the two-party system, and would have a hard time compromising on the second to accomplish the first.

I mean that's the basic problem, isn't it? Some people can't compromise. Many people who are proponents of privacy rights, oppose copyright, etc, consider themselves too good to participate in the political system, and would never stoop to, say, trying to find common ground with religious or social conservatives on the subject of surveillance, even though there might be politically valuable common ground to be found.

The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country.

Too bad there is no land left on the planet to move to. You can't try new ideas that would flip the worlds political ideologies on their head without somewhere to try it.

The alternative is what all the communist countries and most of Europe did in the last 200 years - violent revolutions overthrowing the current regime. Problem is, our regime isn't nearly as bad as those regimes were, so the pressure isn't there and it is much harder to justify.

I'm all up for a floating city on Venus, though.

> The solution in every generation before this one was to go somewhere else and start a new country.

That's not true. England transitioned from a feudal society into its modern state with a shocking amount of continuity.

If omitting things like the War of the Roses, Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the English Civil War, then yes, they did have a good amount of continuity (at least when compared to much of what mainland Europe went from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution). However, they were not without their times of chaos and uncertainty.

The English civil war is a good example of continuity. Despite the violence, it was a war between supporters of the monarchy and supporters of parliament, two institutions that had existed for hundreds of years. Unlikr in other countries, nobody was trying to wipe the slate and start over.

It should be noted that we also had a civil war to decide the boundaries of powers in our government (between the states and the federal government).

It was more than just Monarchy versus Parliament though. The Roundheads in Parliament were ultra-conservative Puritans that wanted to reform British Culture to match their beliefs as sort of a "counter-culture" to what they considered the extravagance/depravity of the Monarchy. Of course not all members of Parliament were Roundheads, but they were stuck until the death of Cromwell in following much of what they demanded. In some ways, no different than the Iranian Revolution (if not reading too far into details).

While you are correct in that it involved 2 labels of British Society that had been around for years, the details behind each faction and the changes that the leaders of the side of Parliament wanted to bring were more discontinuous. If Cromwell's supporters and his son had been able to hold onto power after his death, I would imagine Great Britain to have changed in some striking ways over the next few centuries.

> If the tea partiers can do it

They were backed by the billionaire Koch Brothers. We'd have to get Bill Gates or someone like that to pull off something similar.

I propose something called "The 4th Amendment Party" which directly addresses privacy issues, in the US anyway. An international Pirate Party could be used for hopefully countering the negative effects of multinational corporations.

Peter Thiel?

Surely Silicon Valley can round up a few billionaires?

Heck, take advantage of Citizens United and get Google, Facebook, etc, to chip in. If, as has been extensively speculated in other threads in the last few days, NSA surveillance is a dire threat to the global competitiveness of U.S.-based online companies, they have a legitimate business interest in funding such groups.

Heck, CBS's entire market cap is only $30 billion, which Google could buy with cash on hand. How much for just the news divisions? I bet you could get a major presence in US media with just a $5-10 billion acquisition.

Now to motivate the big money guys to help out a bit. Surely some of them are displeased with PRISM and all that?

Why restrict "pulling a tea party" to only the republican party? You could start a movement whose primary objective is the infiltration of both parties with candidates aligned with the movement's ideals. As adverserial as both parties are, it would be quite easy to start a movement with meaningful principles whose ideas align with both parties' stated principles.

The lobbyists know how this works: they fund both sides to hedge their bets, and they fund individual candidates, not parties. They understand that the balance of power is not between republicans and democrats but it exists inside of both the parties.

Don't start a fringe group, do what the tea party did? Fight government spying, utilize the party that authored the Patriot Act? Not sure I follow your logic here.

I didn't say "fringe group" I said "fringe party." The Tea Party organized itself as a faction of the Republican party, which enabled it to get national credibility. In our first past the post voting system, not having an (R) or (D) next to your name basically ensures you'll not get elected, so you have to caucus with one of those parties. Your only concern is about which one.

Now, given that, it makes sense to target the Republican party. The party is in a period of disunity, and as a natural tendency Republicans are more amenable to arguments based on distrust of government. Democrats will oppose government when they dislike negative effects that they can see actually happening (e.g. as the Iraq war dragged on), but arguments along the lines of "we shouldn't trust government with these powers, even if you can't see the negative effects yet" work better on Republicans.

Moreover, people don't care about "privacy." Abstract arguments about "privacy" aren't going to get votes. You have to put those abstract arguments in concrete terms that people understand and that relate to things they care about. Paint the issue as giving the liberal administration the ability to snoop on conservative political organizations ("Obama is reading the Tea Party's e-mails!"). Paint the issue as secularists being able to snoop on religious organizations ("Obama is reading your church's e-mails!"). Figure out how to tie it to something Biblical and you're cooking with fire.

This is not a cynical argument, by the way. The whole reason to be worried about surveillance is because of its chilling effect on freedom of political assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. "Obama is reading your cypherpunk IRC logs!" would resonate with a lot of people on HN--but ordinary people don't care about cypherpunks or pirates or groups like that. But there are groups they care about. The chilling effect of surveillance impacts cypherpunks and pirates and anti-abortionists and religious fundamentalists alike. If you don't caucus with those groups, you'll never establish a coalition large enough to have any political impact.

I see - that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the response!

Without speaking to your overall proposal, which may be strategically sound, I have a few questions on the details:

> "but arguments along the lines of ['distrust government'] work better on Republicans"

Forgive me, as someone raised and educated outside of the US, I sometimes get a bit confused. Which party thinks the government should regulate abortion as a crime, and regulate which kinds of partnership qualify for marriage benefits? Which party thinks government should be trusted with truly massive budgets to use the US military to coerce other countries (as a possible measure of this, consider on whose watch the military budget grew, and on whose it shrank)?

By their works shall ye know them, I think? I concluded that the Republicans were the party of big government. Did I get confused again?

> "Paint the issue as giving the liberal administration the ability to snoop on conservative political organizations"

Well, you can paint it any way you like. In practice, I haven't heard of any abuses of surveillance aimed at political conservatives, maybe excepting the KKK (who you may or may not see as "political conservatives" anyway). Just look at how they spent the budget for COINTELPRO, a 15-year-plus abuse of FBI power to suppress political "subversion" (i.e. dissent with the status quo); 85% of that budget was spent on things like suppressing civil rights groups and anti-war protesters. Admittedly, COINTELPRO is going back a long way; if you know of specific abuses that are more recent, I'd certainly consider that more-interesting evidence.

> "This is not a cynical argument"

This, ultimately, is the part I'm questioning. I think this proposal's strategic suitability rests crucially on the distorted image that Republican voters have of the Republican party, and of the overall public discourse.

> "Moreover, people don't care about 'privacy.'"

I couldn't agree more.

You have to be careful to distinguish between subjective and objective elements of policy. When couching arguments aimed at particular people, you have to base your arguments on those peoples' subjective perceptions, not the objective ramifications of their ideas.

> Which party thinks the government should regulate abortion as a crime and regulate which kinds of partnership qualify for marriage benefits?

Religious Republicans don't view this as "big government." You can make sense of the position by thinking about where people think law comes from. Most secularists believe that law is created by governments (though many libertarians espouse belief in "natural law.") If you're a Christian, you generally believe that there is also a higher law that comes from God. Laws concerning murder, reproduction, and marriage, exist, rooted in the Bible, independent of state and federal laws on those subjects. Now, to the extent that state and federal law is consistent with Biblical law, government is "merely" acknowledging inherent law. Attempts to make state and federal law inconsistent with Biblical law are perceived as "big government" attempts to override higher law.

> Which party thinks government should be trusted with truly massive budgets to use the US military to coerce other countries

Most Republicans perceive defense as one of the few legitimate functions of government.

> In practice, I haven't heard of any abuses of surveillance aimed at political conservatives

That's more or less irrelevant.

> I think this proposal's strategic suitability rests crucially on the distorted image that Republican voters have of the Republican party, and of the overall public discourse.

There are two parts to my argument: 1) that the Republican party is a more fertile ground for opposition to surveillance; 2) that privacy advocates need to translate their abstract principles into concrete issues that voters care about. It's the second part that I'm saying is "not cynical," to the extent that there is nothing cynical about trying to find common ground with people whose politics you might otherwise dislike. The former argument is neither cynical nor not cynical--it's just a fact to take into consideration that Republicans trust government less than Democrats, even if they do trust government with certain issues (like defense).

Yes, I'm aware that typical Republican voters typically believe a number of obviously-false things, like thinking "big government" doesn't include a bunch of things that it obviously does include.

Including spending almost as much on military as the entire rest of the world put together (44.5% of world total, and btw twice the per-capita budget of any sane country), and using that enormous military to invade countries that do not pose a threat. I'm not even arguing (here) against this military budget, nor the adventurism. I'm arguing against calling it small-government, and against calling it "defense", because it's obviously neither.

Anyway, that got off-track. To return to the point, I'm perfectly "careful to distinguish between subjective and objective elements", thank you very much. But given that the subjective elements, on this particular subject, are laughably disconnected from reality, it's pretty cynical to exploit that.

I understand the "two parts to [your] argument". I would have thought that was clear. And I'm agnostic on the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. However, I think both parts are cynical.

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