Between the devil and the deep blue sea...
A blog about being trapped in bad politics and our journey to reclaiming our own agency and destiny
I’m ok, you’re ok, and we’re all pretty #$%#&*
Hopefully there are parts of your life that, like mine, are going great. Family, friends, hobbies, whatever it is. This blog is about the parts that are probably not going great for most of us — the politics and public policy part.
1. Who am I?
I’m Nathan Lockwood, part of a rapidly growing group of people that see the outdated ways we choose to do elections as the source of broken politics and government.
2. Isn’t that a weirdly specific group identity?
At a glance, sure. On closer look, though, explains a lot. Elections are a cornerstone of democracy. Democracy is the thing that makes a republic a republic — the whole “of the people, by the people, for the people…” thing.
Bottom line, if the elections are not setup to empower the people, government might in some sense function, but not as a republic doing things for we the people… Which most of us would call not functioning…
3. What’s your conventional bio
I’m a husband and father, live in Massachusetts, and was a mid-level worker in the tech industry for 25 years. After our kids went to college I joined a couple groups that work on strengthening democracy, and in 2020, I co-founded Rank the Vote, where I still work today.
4. Who are you speaking for?
I belong to various groups but in this blog, I’m just speaking for myself, Nathan Lockwood. I needed a place to rant a bit without getting my associations in trouble. They at least need plausible deniability.
5. Are you right or left?
I’m honestly not totally sure anymore and I don’t love the labels. But I think most people would say pretty left, except progressives, who would probably say, not very progressive (though I might disagree depending on the context and how I’m feeling that day). Whatever I am, the intent is that this blog will talk about things that really transcend partisanship, even where in reality, they may have been made very partisan.
6. Why is this blog called “Between the devil and the deep blue sea”?
Our elections reinforce a rigid two party system. See Rank the Vote (overview), FairVote, Protect Democracy, or Fix Our House for more info on this.
Those two parties are increasingly unpopular. They have fans. Many of them are good people. There are many good ideas between the two, but there could be a lot more. The problem is that these parties are not just free associations of people engaged in developing and sharing ideas about policies.
The two major parties are themselves institutions to be captured by powerful interest groups, and between the two of them, they have more control than anyone or anything else of our state and federal governments, which means controlling the laws and trillions in budget (our tax money). So they are pretty attractive to capture. And it turns out, pretty vulnerable to capture, in no small part due to how they are elected.
And a big part of the secret sauce of control is there only being two viable parties. We the people can have free speech, free association, free internet, whatever… If the only avenue to public policy control is two captured parties, and we the people don’t control those, and they don’t have competition — all that free stuff doesn’t matter (well, it’s better than not having it, but) — we don’t have power. If both the two major parties don’t want to do something, they don’t have to do it, and there is little we can quickly do about it. And if they both want to do something most of us don’t want, there isn’t much we can do about that either. And, unlike one party rule, with these two parties, each can pretend to want to do the thing they actually refuse to do, while blaming the other party for preventing them.
So these two parties don’t get along… by design. And they argue a lot… by design. And they divide us in pretty toxic ways… by design. And for most things that are good for us, they refuse to work together… by design. As Katherine Gehl says, they are united in one thing — to preserve themselves as the only two parties with power.
I’ll repeat. All this bad stuff I’m saying about the parties does not mean I think the party members are bad. Like any group of people, there is a mix of trying hard to do good or could be trying harder, even the elected officials, who themselves are more often than not hostages to this system of control, doing what they can under exceptionally constrained circumstances.
We absolutely need to work with the good people of these parties if we are to change the system that prevents the parties from serving the people. Together, we need to bring more parties to the party. Until then, we the people, whether we love one of the major parties or not, are trapped between:
The MAGA movement (today’s Republican Party) - that seeks to disenfranchise, deport, or detain all who disagree with them and accelerate the trend of fewer and fewer people having more and more wealth and power and
The Democratic Party - that has proven great at not delivering on their promises, and are for a blue party, very fond of red tape, as well as lawyers, big money, and bureaucracy.
In other words, Between the devil and the deep blue sea…