What’s Wrong With The Business Of Politics And How To Fix It with Katherine Gehl

Jun 24, 2020

Katherine Gehl, a business leader and political innovation activist, dives deep into the dysfunction of today's political landscape. She discusses how historical voting patterns have shifted, leading to increased polarization and ineffective governance. Gehl advocates for bold reforms like the 'final five voting' system to empower voters and eliminate the influence of special interests. With a call for grassroots initiatives, she highlights the urgent need for systemic changes that prioritize citizen engagement and enhance accountability in politics.

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INSIGHT

Politics: A System Designed for Dysfunction

The current political system isn't broken, it's working as designed, incentivizing politicians to prioritize reelection over public interest.
Traditional political involvement like electing candidates or advocating for policies often fails to create meaningful change.

INSIGHT

The Rise of Political Polarization

Political polarization has increased dramatically since the 1960s, hindering bipartisan efforts and progress on public health issues.
Voting patterns used to be blended, enabling bipartisan accomplishments, but now they are increasingly divided.

INSIGHT

Misaligned Incentives in Politics

In the current political system, politicians are rewarded for prioritizing reelection over serving the public interest.
This creates a conflict where doing what's right for the country can cost politicians their jobs.

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What’s Wrong With The Business Of Politics And How To Fix It with Katherine Gehl | This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic and Thrive Market

Politics is Big Business, there’s no way around it. We’re in an extremely divisive time, and we used to be able to get things done with a much more bipartisan approach. In the 60s, voting patterns were greatly blended, but they’ve only continued to move further apart since then. This hinders things like improvements to public health in favor of private gain. You know I always want to find the space for positive change, though, so I was excited to sit down and talk about solutions for improving our current political system on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy with Katherine Gehl.

Katherine is a business leader, writer, speaker, and political innovation activist. She was president and CEO of Gehl Foods, a $250 million, high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin with approximately 350 employees. Prior to joining Gehl Foods in 2007, Gehl held a range of positions in industry and government. Katherine recently authored The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy.

This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic and Thrive Market.

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Here are more of the details from our interview:

Katherine’s realization that our political system is not broken, it’s working exactly as it was designed to work (8:46)

The disconnection between elected officials acting in the public interest and getting elected (or re-elected) (13:33)

How party primaries keep us from seeing results in Congress (15:28)

How Democrats and Republicans effectively work together to rig the rules of the game and prevent new competition from entering our political industrial complex (21:49)

Why increasing the power of the vote would be more impactful than reducing money in politics (24:30)

Getting new competition into our political industrial system (27:34)

Changing our voting rules to empower voters and get more results in Congress (34:17)

How “Final Five Voting” can fix our troubled political system (45:53)

Why The Hastert Rule is problematic (53:52)

Creating incentives for elected officials to change the rules of Congress to get more done (58:01)

Learn more and order your copy of “The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy” at gehlporter.com

Find Katherine online at katherinegehl.com and follow her on Facebook @KatherineMGehl and on Twitter @katherinegehl