Explainers Don’t Explain Chicago Politics

The only way to stop Mark Ruffalo Movie Crying when it comes to Chicago Politics is to understand power.

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The last line of the UIC report on corruption, the one that names Chicago as the most corrupt city in the country, is as follows:

“Illinois needs to foster a cultural campaign against corruption with civic and public engagement. Communicating how Illinois’ often byzantine systems of government work is a meaningful first step in creating an empowered citizenry. Empowered citizens who stand up to crooked politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople will ultimately determine if Illinois’s governing institutions operate with integrity, honesty, and decency.”

This line bothered me so much that I whacked my computer screen a little bit.

(Don’t do that, by the way. It’s bad for your computer.)

Since Brandon Johnson was inaugurated, I’ve heard many people push civic education as the solution to Chicago’s political problems. The idea behind this, I think, is something I hear a lot in Chicago and in politics generally: the idea that more people just need to know things.

But I’ve wasted years of my life trying to write “good explainers” based on the idea that civic education was the solution to what’s wrong with Chicago politics. It didn’t work — and that’s because more people needing to know things isn’t the problem.

Explainers Don’t Explain Things

There’s nothing wrong with more political education. This shit is confusing, by design. It’s so confusing that the judge in the trial of Alder Ed Burke ordered a “civics” expert to speak to the jury about what it is exactly that an alderman does.

When I was obsessive about civic engagement, I did my best to build out political education, tools, and training that would help make everything in Chicago easier to understand.

I tried to make visually appealing content, though that is not my strong suit. I tried to tie Chicago politics to exciting things with strong SEO, like Queer reality TV. I even made Reels, yikes. I say this not to complain about all of my bad ideas for civic engagement content (similar to this newsletter, no one is making me do this).

Instead, I’m describing all of my bad content to demonstrate the sheer breadth of ways I attempted to make *good* explainers.

And I found that every single time I tried to write a *fun* civics explainer, I would immediately find myself in an emotional and intellectual hole, that I can only describe as “Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness.”

Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness

Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness describes a particular type of movie where Mark Ruffalo pursues relentless inquiry into The Truth at any cost. These movies tend to tell the stories of investigative journalists, lawyers, and other muck-racking nerds.

In these types of films, Mark Ruffalo is Dedicated to The Truth. He’s so dedicated to The Truth, he usually ends up losing his wife and his children and his job and other assorted Important Non-Truth Things.

These losses symbolize his inability to actually get at The Truth he’s been pursuing, and the ways that the People With Power are determined to keep The Truth hidden. As a result, by the end of the Second Act, Mark Ruffalo inevitably ends up crying alone, in a room full of file folders and fluorescent lighting.

That’s Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness — and Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness is how writing Chicago Civics Explainers made me feel for many years.

The picture above is from “The Normal Heart.” This is technically not a Mark Ruffalo crying file folder movie (I’m thinking of Dark Waters or Spotlight or Zodiac) But the lighting is perfect so I’m leaving it here. You get the vibe, right?

I’m honestly not particularly interested in The Truth in the way that Mark Ruffalo tends to be when it comes to Chicago Politics. I’m especially not interested in the kind of Truth that ruins your life and makes you cry over file cabinets.

So because I’m not that interested in the Truth At All Costs, the fact that writing all these freaking explainers made me feel Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness was really annoying. I couldn’t figure out why something so theoretically innocuous was making me cry.

To me, Investigation has always felt less urgent and important than getting people to feel empowered toward useful action. I’m not a journalist: I really just want people to be strategic in their choices in organizing, man.

But after a number of years Googling “How a Bill Becomes a Law,” I realized there’s one very specific reason it feels almost impossible to make a Reel about aldermanic prerogative, or why one zoning law can pass while tons of others were still stuck in the Zoning Committee.

Because what actually explains what happens in Chicago city government is power.

Who Built This Bridge?

One of my old white dude heroes is journalist Robert Caro, who obsessively wrote about power in context.

Caro is also a phenomenal candidate for a Mark Ruffalo Sadness Movie. Caro wrote eight books about Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert Moses, and other powerful politicians, and most of these books took him decades to write because he is so meticulous about understanding power. Caro is a million years old and still writing his series about Lyndon B. Johnson, and almost all of his books are thousands of pages long.

When Caro wrote about Lyndon B. Johnson, he went to Johnson’s Texas hometown and lived there for eight years, asking people questions like, “What was the color of this carpet on the night LBJ insulted your mother that one time?” Or he had people show him the rope they used to haul up buckets of water when they were a child in the same era that Lyndon B. Johnson was a child.

The reason Robert Caro spent so much time documenting every single detail of politicians’ lives was his self-described obsession with how power actually operates.

One of my favorite stories about Robert Caro, why he dropped out of graduate school, is all about power and context.

Caro was looking out the window at a bridge during a policy class. The professor was explaining how policymakers decide to build bridges — the numerous calculations around impact, cost, and efficiency involved.

But the bridge Robert Caro was looking out the window at? 

Caro knew from his previous work as a journalist that the reason that particular bridge was built was because Robert Moses, the developer king of New York had lied, power played, and finangled to make it happen. The policy and calculations, all the things that Caro was learning about in his policy class, came later. Moses had already decided that they were going to build a bridge.

“I knew then that if I couldn’t explain to people why bridges actually got built, not why we said they got built,” Robert Caro said, “then I couldn’t do anything useful at all.” 

Caro knew that the usual stories about power, about how bridges got built, were in the way of people actually building bridges.

Why Don’t We Write More About Power in Chicago?

Power-free explainers don’t accurately represent how Chicago’s municipal government works.

They also don’t explain why power works the way it does or how to change it.

But even in Chicago’s pretty amazing world of journalism, we don’t often talk about power and how it works. This is in part because talking about power tends to violate the objectivity mandate standard for most media outlets, even as journalism evolves on power and truth generally.

I think we also don’t talk about power in Chicago politics because talking about power is awkward, especially because the world is small.

It often looks like gossip, or criticizing people who are doing their best — or, even worse, being lenient with people who have quite a lot of power and aren’t doing great with that power.

And often, talking about power tends to reveal how much of what we know about the world, even as highly critical, anti-racist anti-capitalist rabble-rousing activists, isn’t true.

Now What? I Don’t Know But I’m Going to Stop Making Procedural Infographics.

As I said earlier, Mark Ruffalo Movie Sadness is a moment in the Second Act.

It happens right before Mark Ruffalo figures out *The Key to The Truth* — which usually requires confronting power in some way.

He usually goes to a board room or yells at a group of old white men?

Honestly, it’s usually a very aesthetically uninteresting moment but the music is very loud and sort of poignantly triumphant, which is good. It’s better than crying, at any rate.

So I’m telling you all of this, writing this piece about Chicago civic education and power, as a sort of op-ed directed at myself, to kick myself out of Mark Ruffalo Crying and go to the board room or whatever.

It’s a way to tell myself to stop pursuing apolitical civic education projects over and over again to avoid writing about power.

Because even though I’m obsessive about power dynamics both structurally and interpersonally, I’m not very good at talking about (or writing) about power.

It’s hard and annoying to write about power. In many ways, it’s worse than crying around file cabinets Mark Ruffalo style because it’s scary.

People actually care if what you’re saying is wrong or right in a way that they do not care when you’re making useless YouTube videos about the City’s procurement department.

There also tends to be a correlation between how true what you’re saying is and how mad people are at you, particularly people who, you know, actually have power and can wield it. As a conflict-adverse person terrified of making errors, I really hate this correlation.

But without power analysis, making more civic explainers about Chicago is a disservice to organizers and activists (not to mention my own brain).

I don’t necessarily have a sense of HOW or IN WHAT CONTEXT I am committing to writing about power. My hope is to be able to write about power in Chicago in a way that takes fewer years and pages that Caro spent writing about power, but who knows.

For example, this would have been an excellent way to tell you I’m asking for money (on Giving Tuesday, no less) to devote myself to Writing About Power in Chicago Politics, but it’s not true (though it helps a lot).

In fact, it’s likely that I’m taking a job where I will have less time than ever to devote to this newsletter — but I will definitely be writing about power, and trying to explain things about how power shapes Chicago politics, quite a lot.

So I hope that, if nothing else, I hope this email helps you convince yourself (just like writing this helped me convince myself) that explainers don’t explain things.

Trying to understand power in Chicago, which is annoying and hard and difficult and sometimes kind of scary, is what actually explains things. And understanding this, how power actually works, is how we move toward meaningful action.

It’s the only way to stop crying like we’re in a Mark Ruffalo movie — so it’s worth doing.

There’s really no end to pictures of Ed Burke walking in a trenchcoat, so here’s one more from the Tribune.

Last **Call to Action** type note:

Again, — on this Giving Tuesday for which I have zero fundraising plan, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get live unsolicited updates as I build out the goals of this newsletter and occasional updates about annoying things Chicago politicians have done to me personally.