The problem I have with liberals in government is the same as the problem I have with conservatives: they’re human.

Allow me to explain.

I live in East Lansing, Michigan, a city so blue that our public library has a social justice reading group – for preschoolers. Our police chief is on good terms with the ACLU. Our high school recently designated all-gender bathrooms with unanimous support of the school board, and our Islamic Center hosted a citywide “Go Solar!” event. When the online news site I publish for East Lansing was considering a satire edition for April Fools’ Day, one of my reporters suggested the headline: “Last Republican in East Lansing captured, tagged, and moved to safe breeding population in Grand Rapids.”

I am not that “last Republican in East Lansing”. I consistently vote Democratic, donate only to left-of-center candidates, and work nationally on sexual and reproductive rights. So why did I bother to start a non-partisan local news organization for East Lansing? Why do I push my neighbors to use the Freedom of Information Act to look into our local government’s doings? Why do I constantly irritate my city council with investigative reporting?

About a decade ago, my historic neighborhood was facing the possibility of a giant commercial development being built just down the hill from us by a company known to have a troubled history. Worried about our way of life, the president of my neighborhood association and I started going to city council meetings.

Watching our city government came as something of a shock. While the policies were consistently liberal – in favor of the arts, the environment, and the unions – the behaviors were troubling. We saw cronyism, unmanaged conflicts of interest, and a general attitude that citizens are at best naive bores.

At that time, we had no dedicated news organization to keep the people of East Lansing informed – to provide the transparency and accountability that the press ideally does. In a one-party town like East Lansing, a “news desert” is especially dangerous. But in our town, as all over America, the internet had gutted the local news economy, leaving us thirsting.

So I did something I never thought I’d do. I used my skills as a professional historian and mainstream writer to become a local investigative reporter. Then, in 2014, I assembled a board and created a foundation to bring in donations from our community to provide news, hiring regular citizens and teaching them how to be local reporters. That neighborhood president I teamed up with a decade ago? Today, Ann Nichols is the managing editor of our organization, East Lansing Info. We’ve had 110 citizens report for us so far.

Ann is a diehard progressive, like me. Yet we both have become fierce advocates of non-partisan news. That’s because, watching our city council, Ann and I could see the same thing: when people get elected to serve in government, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, independent or Green, they tend to be human, not heroic. Liberals, like conservatives, assume they will govern differently once in power. They will drain the swamps, represent the little people, spend public money only in just and reasonable ways! What really happens?

Pattern No 1: elected officials believe in ethics until someone they like breaks the rules. We had one member of council who repeatedly advocated for her business from her council chair. That’s not only unethical, it’s illegal. She also took thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from developers and landlords and voted on their financial business without disclosing those payments before the votes, as required by a law that very council had passed. But did anyone on council hold her to the rules? Nope. We had to report on it. (She was voted out of office.)

Pattern No 2: elected officials also honestly believe, when they run for office, that they will finally bring transparency to government. But once in, they quickly discover that they’d rather not tell the people everything. Doing so – particularly when controversial decisions haven’t yet been hammered out – just complicates their lives.

Just about every week, we must use the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) to get documents that should be readily available. I recently had to make a formal Foia request to obtain a copy of a handout our city manager gave to city council. This was his draft of the city’s “strategic priorities” for the coming year. On the list of his strategic priorities: open and transparent government.

Pattern No 3: government accountability? Here again, Democrats are as Republicans. As soon as the oath of office is administered, they seem to become incapable of admitting mistakes, especially those of their own party. As we face a $200m debt (mostly pensions) in a city with only 20,000 year-round residents, our council has taken up the mantra: “Now is not the time to worry about blame; now is the time for solutions.” Me, I happen to think a little blame helps prevent more mistakes.

Pattern No 4: And then there’s the cronyism problem. True graft is relatively rare; I’ve not seen it in my city. But what we see every day is how people in power take care of the people to whom they feel some loyalty. This is where it feels impossible to bust in as an average citizen and have any meaningful say in the decisions being made. Those decisions – which in our town can involve a tax deal worth $50m arranged by the mayor for friends – are being made at tables to which we are not invited.

When Ann and I look at our city council, our state legislature, and Congress, what we see are not dramas of good and evil. What we see is the tragedy of human nature. American government is full of a lot of well-intended people making a lot of self-serving decisions. It’s no different with liberals or conservatives.

There are real policy differences between liberals and conservatives. Voting still matters. But what I’ve come to believe matters much more than my vote is giving people high-quality, non-partisan news. This is news that doesn’t take sides – that requires us to try to rise above our loyalties, to try to cancel out each other’s biases in the collaborative reporting and editing process.



Because if there is any hope of getting citizens to demand accountability, transparency, equal treatment, and ethical behavior from their governments, the way to get there is to show them whenever anyone is behaving in a troubling way. I see far too little of this in journalism today, as the internet economy rewards outraged clicks, not genuinely uncomfortable news – news that makes us doubt our assumptions and loyalties.

The founding fathers knew what they were doing when they put protections for the press in the first amendment. What we need even more than citizen participation in politics is to get people involved in non-partisan news – as readers, as donors, and as producers. It’s the only way to ensure liberals might see the problems with liberals, conservatives might see the problems with conservatives, and everyone might see we are all so annoyingly human.