Our major political parties, both the Republicans and Democrats, are rather like the taxicab industry.
They exist to protect and expand their power and market share. They restrict competition through regulation. Along the way they’ve lost sight completely of the audiences they’re intended to serve: in the case of the political parties, citizens and the country as a whole. Just as cab companies lost site of hired-car passengers, or the airlines lost site of paying passengers, or the banks they’re depositors and debt holders.
When major party candidates communicate to us, they’re scripted, canned, “on message.” They resist giving specifics. They spin rather than fess up. They talk to us this way because their interests are not aligned with ours. Their hearts aren’t with us. Their hearts are with protecting their careers and protecting the interests of those who write the big checks. They’re loyal to the party system, not the nation and its citizens.
So like those other industries, the ultimate product that our political parties provide–governance–is crappy. Despite major health care issues, they can’t get a health care regime passed and settled upon. They’re still fighting about it. They can’t get immigration reform done. They can’t come together on a policy toward our greatest foreign threats. Shamefully, they can’t come together on improving the opportunities for our long stagnant middle class. Or on reigning in the rapid growth of income disparity, creating an economy in which only the very rich thrive, which includes of course, the big party donors. The Republicans next great initiative appears to be a plan to shut down the government–again!–this time over Planned Parenthood.
Six years ago, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp took a look at the holy mess the cab industry had made, and how it had completely lost touch with its customers. And they decided to reimagine the customer experience from the ground up, based on applying tools readily available and marshaling them toward replacing customer frustrations with customer satisfaction. What a concept.
And that, it seems to me, is what the Donald is doing. Despite his privileged, billionaire status, he’s one of us when it comes to frustration with Washington. And with what’s happening to the nation. So he doesn’t need a script, or focus-group tested language. He’s speaking as we would, calling BS on the whole broken system and the professional political class that runs it. And he’s reimagining how the party–and Washington–might work, if they realigned themselves with the interests of citizens and the nation as a whole.
Despite his obvious flaws–the overbearing ego, the popping off, the apparent lack of personal discipline in communicating, his lack of governing experience–and despite his previous support of positions anathema to the Republican base, his campaign has taken off like a rocket speeding past the party’s professional candidates.
Who knows how this will turn out. Trump has a very long way to go before convincing the nation he could run the country. But what he has given us is the beginning of a blueprint for how we the people can get the attention of our bloated, self-serving and increasingly unresponsive political system–and perhaps one day, even Uberize it.
