We Can Do Better!

Are you tired of business as usual? Want to help millions of Americans learn about the real alternatives that already exist and how to be a part of them?

We know the current system does exactly what it was designed to do: line corporate pockets at the expense of real people’s health and livelihoods, destroying the environment and fueling the war machine at the same time. But we also know that another world is possible. Many models for more economically and ecologically sustainable societies exist and as the ills of the current system become more apparent to the country at large, people are hungry to know what viable alternatives exist. The Next System Teach-Ins aim to help communities and campuses across the country engage in that debate and start exploring the alternatives that work best for them.

The teach-ins can be a powerful component to a growing national debate about what this country really needs and how we get there. In a time of political stalemate, we have to take responsibility for the important conversations and build the community needed to transform this country.

Host a teach-in at your school or attend one near you to find out more. We'll provide sample curricula, agendas and workshop ideas based on existing alternatives, burgeoning initiatives and cutting edge research in order to help you create an engaging and effective teach-in that brings your community's work to the next level.

Plutodemocracy

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of "populistic" democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts... We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

Excerpts from Testing Theories Of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, And Average Citizens, April 2014