Institutions and Acting on your Policy Agenda

Breaking the Cycle #

I’ve spent a lot of time musing about how to break this cycle:

My approach has focused on making it easy for anyone to have something like this, customized with their own prioritized concerns, preferred outcomes, criteria, and ranked potential actions.

How can it break the cycle? When a new concern arises, add it to the priority list. If it’s high enough to merit further attention define your preferred outcomes and weighted criteria. Discover relevant analyses and proposed actions. Score them using the defined criteria, and when one meets your requirements commit to supporting it.

If we want to maintain focus on what’s most important we need a policy agenda, a prioritized list of proposed actions. Without that we continue to suffer from One Damned Thing After Another, complaining and helpless.

The importance of Institutions #

Ezra Klein interviewed Anton Jäger, author of Hyperpolitics. The interview highlights why having a policy agenda is so important today, and makes clear that when we decide which action we prefer, the next step requires engaging with an institution with an aligned (or alignable) policy agenda.

Hyperpolitics is a concept that describes a change in political culture in the West in which we see an increase in political activity on a variety of metrics, whether it’s voting, protest, but also political violence. But that increase in political activity is not matched by an increasing institutional strength. So if you look at the indices of union membership, party membership, or other civil society organizations, those have stagnated or have continued to decline.

Klein makes multiple efforts to focus the discussion on social media and attention, starting here:

So I don’t want to question your definition of your own concept, but one thing I feel like that doesn’t quite pick up on, but which is part of why this idea has resonated, is the hyperness of hyperpolitics. This feeling of things rising and falling with incredible rapidity. It’s like one year, you’re deep inside Black Lives Matter and wokeness, and then it’s like the vibes have shifted to Trump, and then, you know, they come all the way back.

Jäger largely resists narrowing the discussion to social media. He returns to the lack of engagement with institutions to move concern into action:

Because what do institutions do with political activity? They stabilize it, and they give it longevity over a longer time period. And if you don’t have these institutions to tie your political action to, and also not, let’s say, the mechanisms of delegation or representation that come with these institutions, I’d say also maybe discipline, that means that short-termism is the de facto mode of a lot of political action. Because you can be enormously interested and invested in one question for a couple of weeks, you follow the media cycle, but then once, let’s say, the popularity fades or it doesn’t seem as urgent, you move on to the next thing. And there’s no institution that’s actually there to set the agenda, to help you articulate a long-term vision that might unite your politics across all these short-term issues.

Klein comes back to social media, saying that an institution that uses social media just inflames the problem:

Donald Trump communicates with the Republican Party through Truth Social. So, sort of saying there are these two spheres, institutions and the digital world, it doesn’t feel real to me. I watch people who lead these institutions communicating with each other through this digital world, and thus the institutions end up in a kind of a like a… like a… the same sort of back and forth, slightly wild oscillation quality.

And Jäger responds that an institution without an agenda, a program, doesn’t provide any point of purchase for its active participants (politicians in a political party) or its potential supporters:

And this is important for the institutional side of the story. There isn’t a sort of program to which you can tie yourself. And across the twentieth century, I mean, political parties always had leaders or certain charismatic figures that led them forward. They always had people that were more individualized as a member of their party than others. But at the same time, there was a program around which everyone could orient themselves, and this means that changing or breaking on some of those aspects of that program came with costs.

The interview goes on, but to sum up: An individual needs to engage with like-minded others to effect change.

Political Parties and Agendas #

The Trump-era Republican Party has foregone platforms and agendas: the platform is whatever Trump declares, at the moment he so declares, and until he declares otherwise. (It does have a deniable platform, Project 2025, that provides guidance where Trump has not issued a proclamation.)

The Democratic Party has a Platform, Roadmaps, Leadership Agendas, and more. If it controls the house and senate in 2026, it can pass its legislative agenda, though it’s doubtful that Trump will sign on. Congress can hold hearings, it can use must-pass funding bills as leverage, it can withhold judicial and executive nominations, and perhaps pass some bipartisan legislation. But in general its actions will signal what, coupled with a Democratic president, changes it might deliver in 2028. None of that offers much of an engagement model for supporters (other than soliciting donations).

Next up: thoughts on how to align personal and institutional agendas.