Last weekend at Netroots Nation, Matt Palevsky of The Real News had a brief but(*)thoughtful interview with Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com about how much the Netroots can change American politics and the world. Stoller, as always, was militantly realistic:

The scale of what we need to do is far larger than our capacity right now. Just changing the way we relate to each other and the land around us - because we have a country and a world that is actually run by thieves - that's the problem.

The subprime mortgage crisis, Iraq, oil, any of these different problems boil down to the fact that the people that are running our culture, our elite institutions are basically stealing. And we have not solved that problem so there's that crisis of legitimacy in the leadership.

What we have to do is figure out how we displace that leadership and replace it with people who believe in social responsibility towards one another and believe in stewardship of the land - who are basically liberal - that's what we have to do.

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I agree with Stoller's diagnosis - our country and our world are run by thieves -(*)but is his prescription any good?

I'm basically a "structuralist" - when political and economic structures are in place, the people who fill those structures will basically perpetuate them, rather than change them - or use them to change the world outside them. In simpler terms, most people are paid to do a job, and they are satisfied if they get their job mostly done so they can keep it. That's what the term "9 to 5" used to mean - show up, get it done, and go home and live the rest of your life.

Using this "structuralist" analysis, changing the people who lead major institutions isn't going to produce any significant change. Ivy League universities will turn out skilled lawyers, bankers, scientists, and academics, no matter who leads them. Banks will finance businesses that appear to be profitable, no matter who leads them. And weapons manufacturers will make deadly weapons, no matter who leads them.

If we want to change our politics and our world, there's little point in changing the people who run major institutions. Instead we have to think creatively about how to change the structures themselves.

I'm surprised Stoller doesn't make that point, since he's one of the leaders of the movement for Net Neutrality, which is fighting to preserve the open architecture of the Internet - arguably the single most important structural change since the invention of the personal computer.



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