In 1981, Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that “of a sudden, the GOP has become the party of ideas,” thereby coining a powerful phrase that has resonated through American politics ever since—the “party of ideas.”1 The Democrats were a party of ideas during the 1930s through the 1960s, offering America a constant stream of big new plans, from the New Deal through the Great Society. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, the Republican Party was a party of ideas, conceiving one after another paradigm-shifting reform: welfare reform, tax policy restructuring, empowerment zones, school choice, term limits, community policing, and entitlement reform. Both parties today, however, offer essentially the same policies they developed decades ago, served with a generous helping of platitudes and boilerplate. It's been two decades since either party was spitting out a stream of reforms, groundbreaking policies, bold experiments, and innovative new ideas. Hardly anyone would call either party a true party of ideas.
Our present moment looks a lot like the last days before every realignment. One of the signs of declining parties is just this kind of political stagnation and drift. It's hard for people in public life to admit this, but everything is changing and nobody knows exactly what to do. Not only do we face a flurry of new and unfamiliar problems, we frequently lack a solid framework that allows us to even think about or understand our changing world. The old formulas are no longer working, yet no one has developed new ones we think might work. America desperately needs innovation and ideas so it can develop new policies, solve challenging new problems, and renew its politics around a compelling vision of tomorrow. Yet our national political culture no longer values substance, governing, or ideas much at all. This situation is both dangerous and unsustainable. As we know from history, if our leaders refuse to take this moment seriously, lunging into new problems with innovation and ideas, it's only a matter of time until someone or something comes along who will.
THE END OF INDUSTRIAL-ERA AMERICA
Imagine you're the chief of a tribe of hunter gatherers. You spend your days worrying about the problems of your known universe, like whether the herds are thinning in your hunting grounds, whether a rain ritual is needed to please the spirits, or whether your brother might be plotting against your rule. One day a nuclear submarine pops up on your shores and strange men with laser rifles get out looking to trade iPads for squash, and asking whether your people would like to work in the factory they've opened further up the coastline. Understandably, you have no conceptual framework to deal with these demands because the entire situation is completely outside your understanding of reality. Until that moment, your universe didn't include nuclear submarines, laser rifles, iPads, or factories. Your response to this threat or opportunity is bound to be disastrous because you can't really comprehend what's happening, given your mental picture of the world.
As the world changes, it often moves faster than our mental picture of the universe can adjust. The French court of Louis XVI found it difficult to understand a world in which wealth and power no longer came from heritable land worked by peasants but from enterprises owned by untitled commoners. Turn-of-the-century farmers found it difficult adjusting to a world in which agricultural prices were falling while better wages were now on offer in cities. The music industry found it impossible to adjust to quick and cheap digital distribution. The first instinct of people when faced with this sort of disruption to the traditional order is normally inaction and an angry resistance to change they don't want but can't prevent. It takes people time to reorder their thinking and then reorder their affairs to adjust. The end of the industrial era is a similar disruption to the traditional order in America.
Once upon a time, we Americans lived in an industrial-age economy in which one high-school educated worker could support a family in a middle-class lifestyle with a skilled manufacturing job. That worker's paycheck (usually a husband's) could buy a house in the suburbs, a car or perhaps two, a television, and new appliances, while his nonworking spouse stayed home to raise the family full-time. He likely belonged to an industrial union, and his workplace was probably highly regulated. The America he lived in was not only the strongest nation in the world and the greatest military superpower on earth but, for a time, the only fully functioning modern economy on the planet. Europe and Asia were in rubble after a devastating war, and the remainder of the earth was divided between the inefficient command-and-control economies of the Soviet bloc and the developing “third world.” The United States disproportionately supplied the economic and cultural output of the entire globe.2 It invented and exported the world's automobiles, its appliances, its music, and its movies. It was spectacularly rich, with a middle and lower class that often lived better and consumed more than wealthy people elsewhere.3 It was secure both economically and militarily. Its culture was the world's culture, its values the world's values, its currency the world's currency, and its economy the world's economy. For many of us, this is what America is supposed to look like.
Henry Luce wrote an article in Life magazine in 1941 about the beginning of what he called “The American Century.”4 That name for this extraordinary era of American prosperity and influence, the American Century, has come to represent this exceptional moment in the decades after the Second World War. The America of this age was the keystone of the world economic system. For years, it provided the world with the goods only its booming and untouched economy could produce, or produce in sufficient quantities.5 In the immediate aftermath of the war, America made up about half of the entire world's gross national product and still made up well over a quarter into the 1950s.6 Europe and Japan were in rubble, Eastern Europe was trapped behind an Iron Curtain, and the rest of the world was stuck in dysfunctional postcolonialism. When the world finally recovered from the war, it produced an economic boom in which America was perfectly positioned to flourish.7 America was the world's most productive economy by a significant margin, a position it maintained for decades—many people worried in the mid-twentieth century that Europe's economies might never again catch up.8 America faced no real competition for its cars, music, movies, refrigerators, televisions, or dollars, exporting not only its goods but also its culture to the world.9 America also benefitted from a cooperative market system with its European allies and Japan, in which it imported cheaply and exported its bounty, creating net investment abroad.10 Real medium income in America doubled in the quarter century after the war, the proportion of families with incomes above the comfortable range increased by a factor of six, and the percentage of Americans in poverty fell from 32 percent to only 11.11 There was a golden age in the growth of manufacturing wages.12 America became astonishingly rich by global historical standards, and its middle class came to take for granted unprecedented personal wealth as a middle-class birthright.
Not only was the America of this American Century historically rich and productive with a flourishing middle class, it was also the leader of one side of a worldwide ideological struggle between liberal democratic capitalism and communism in which every nation around the globe was forced to take sides. America knew who her friends and enemies were, what they wanted, and from where new threats were likely to come. Half the nations of the world came to believe their national survival depended on American success. America was expected to lead, and when she did she could trust half the world would follow. America therefore took the lead in designing and enforcing the trade regimes, financial rules, and even cultural habits of the world. The astounding advantages of getting to reshape the world for its benefit flowed back to its people and economy. This great wealth and power—wealth and power that trickled down in a comfortable lifestyle for most of its people—was in part the result of America's unique political system, institutions, and values, but also in part because of its accidental position as the planet's sole standing economic powerhouse. When we Americans picture the natural state of the world, we picture this world of middle-of-the-twentieth-century America. We picture the industrial might, devastated globe, modern industrial economy, and unquestioned and unchallenged American leadership, influence, wealth, and economic dominance of the American Century. Yet, like any historical era—Roman Europe, medieval France, or Civil War America—this version of America isn't “normal” in any historical sense. It's a snapshot of a particular time and place in world history, one in which America's fortune rested in large part not only on its own policies but also on potent forces outside its own doing or control.
It's more than just America's good fortune during the postwar boom. The vision of industrial-era America that we take for granted as “normal,” in fact, is grounded in a specific and unique economic system, cultural system, and international system unlike anything that came before or anything that will come again. Its backbone was the economic system we all take for granted but that's actually historically unique—the industrial manufacturing economy. Twentieth-century America meant massive organizations mass-producing physical objects, from automobiles to refrigerators to music records to Ovaltine to transistor radios. Americans today have a hard time even envisioning an economy that didn't mainly involve people getting hired into jobs at large corporations to perform some small part of making something to be sold to others. Yet, for most of human history, people didn't have “jobs.” They worked on little family farms or ran a little store or performed a service like medicine or law for the people in their own communities. They worked for themselves, with their families or maybe a few business partners.
When we transitioned from an agricultural to a modern industrial economy, we rearranged our entire way of life to accommodate the new economic model that supported us. Building cars or steel or television shows takes massive investments of capital that few can get, and needs specialized workers who cooperate to succeed, so we built a unique economic and social infrastructure to support it. We moved from little towns around America to sell our labor to large enterprises that mass-produced things or sometimes services. Since many of us no longer owned little family businesses, but depended instead on salaries, we needed pensions and retirement funds to support us once we aged out of the labor market. Medicine moved from small-town practitioners to impersonal hospital corporations with industrial MRI machines, so now we needed health insurance. Since we no longer depended on intergenerational family farms, we began to live in households consisting only of one immediate family. We needed bigger houses to store our new industrial inventions, particularly the cars in our garages, so we built cul-de-sacs in the suburbs where we could commute to our corporate urban jobs. We became more egalitarian with sex roles, particularly after women joined the workforce during the war, although we still mostly expected men to be breadwinners and women to get married and maintain the homestead.
All our debates today take for granted that America is now, and always will be, industrial America as it existed between 1945 and 1995. We continue to think of work life in terms of the industrial labor relationship. We think of family life in terms of the nuclear unit, with one wage-earner and one domestic worker in charge of child care. We think of foreign policy as if America were naturally a colossus fighting for freedom and producing the output of the world. We think it right and natural that the world watch American movies, buy American cars, and use American dollars as their reserve currency. We think it right and natural that our middle class ought to be richer than the middle classes of most other nations, or even their rich. Over decades, we built our institutions, both informal and through government, assuming that these things are true because, for most of our lifetimes, they were. These assumptions quietly stand behind the Medicare system. They stand behind the Social Security system. They're the assumptions supporting America's military commitments. They're the assumptions of its education system. They're the assumptions behind America's environmental laws, its labor laws, and its health and safety laws. They're the assumptions supporting the commitments in the federal budget. They're the assumptions behind everything.
Not only are our institutions grounded in the assumptions of mid-century industrial America, but the politics of our Fifth Party System is as well. This lost world thus continues to frame the thinking of both Republicans and Democrats, who often don't even realize they're presuming the long-gone world of the middle twentieth century is America's natural order. The primary debate in the middle twentieth century was how best to manage and distribute the staggering fortune and wealth America's industrial economy was then producing. We fought over the most practical way to do it—whether the system would be more efficiently managed by a group of carefully selected experts or by markets and bottom-up choices. We disputed the fairest way to do it—whether the fruits of Americans' labors should be distributed to citizens based primarily on those who produced them or otherwise, and if so how that could be fairly accomplished. We disputed the ideological underpinnings of it—how our cultural assumptions impacted the system and how change would affect us. Using the industrial-era model of the world in our heads, we built institutions to do these things—from Social Security to Medicare to the EPA to our tax code, to family medical leave laws, and so on—dividing our political system into two camps, each taking a different side.
America's economy, culture, and position in the world, however, are increasingly different from the industrial-era models existing in our heads as “normal” because industrial-era America is almost gone, rapidly transforming into information-age America. The new economy is a fast, digital, service economy with global competition coming from places that Americans recently called the third world. One high-school educated adult no longer can expect to support a middle-class lifestyle with a factory job in Michigan. Americans no longer can expect to work at one great American industrial firm for forty years, receiving at retirement a pension, a gold watch, and the company's thanks. The new model of American life is not safe, stable, or effortlessly prosperous. It's fast, mobile, disruptive, and unstable. Workers rapidly get laid off and change jobs. New technologies emerge every few years, disrupting new economic sectors. Cultural norms change constantly. Manufacturing and industrial-era jobs are replaced with service and information jobs. Americans compete against former subsistence farmers equipped with laptop computers and mobile phones from halfway around the globe. Competition comes from everywhere—not only from China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Europe, but also from places many Americans don't think much about like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. American culture increasingly competes with other cultures. People migrate across continents for opportunity and safety. Former Cold War allies no longer feel threatened enough to unquestionably follow America's lead, and they look to rising powers everywhere who are seeking to take its place.
Although we're not sure what it all means for the future, we know the industrial-era economy is gone. We'll always manufacture things, but the world is no longer organized around mass-producing industrial goods. The economy is now organized around a mix of manufacturing, services, and information. Workers no longer expect to spend lifetimes at one firm, acting instead as free agents of their own careers. Digital upstarts have disrupted traditional industries. Robots and algorithms have replaced jobs with routine components. National markets are now international markets. New technologies are reordering the basic underpinnings of society, from how we communicate to our expectations of privacy to the capabilities of firms and governments to sift through troves of data that would have been unimaginable a mere generation ago. It's common, if not expected, for couples to both work outside the home and share domestic duties. Nontraditional families are becoming traditional families. Changing attitudes are redefining basic questions like what a family is, how we parent, how we separate home from work, and what our spouse and children expect from us. Just as disruptively, America faces the rise of the rest of the world. Europe recovered from war by the 1960s, and Japan followed soon after.13 Just as America was adjusting to competition from the resulting Mercedes and Toyotas, the Cold War ended, freeing Eastern Europe. Soon thereafter, the former “third world” began to adopt a more market-oriented economic model, adding massive nations like Brazil, India, and China to the global economy. People from every corner of the globe now compete with Americans for jobs, sales, and economic innovations. What started with manufacturing jobs moving to Mexico turned into computer programming jobs moving to Bangalore. Gone are the days where America stood alone as the only working modern economy, exporting its bounty to the world.
America faces new and daunting challenges well outside the scope of the New Deal framework. We face new friction with our European allies. We face the rising power of China, which would like to push American influence out of its Asian backyard. In certain parts of the world, we face a complete backlash against capitalist democracy, reversing a long global trend away from autocracy. We face additional disruption from ever-evolving information-age technologies, creating new capabilities and threats among both friends and enemies. We face asymmetric foreign policy threats, from Islamic extremist groups to aggressive dictatorships armed with nuclear weapons. In addition, we confront countless unsolved political questions inside America's healthcare system, its national resources and environment, its budget and priorities, its national infrastructure, its education system, its immigration laws, and its culture. Those are just the most dramatic changes, and this new era has barely begun.
What's more, even more disruptive changes are surely waiting for us in the coming years, which we can no more imagine now than a nineteenth-century farmer looking at a cotton gin could appreciate the long-term economic implication of the technological breakthrough it represented—the coming world of trains, motors, factories, telegraphs, steam engines, and booming urban populations. We don't yet fully understand the future we're already living in, much less where things are headed. The only thing we can say for certain is that the world for which we designed our institutions and politics no longer exists. The world of the early twentieth century is as similar to our world as the world of agricultural Civil War America was to the world of the Roaring Twenties. Our entire political party system is organized around a program that becomes more irrelevant with each year to the problems Americans want and need addressed. Our parties' ordinary toolkits simply aren't designed for our new concerns. Citizens become angrier with a political system that seems trapped in stale old debates, unable to address the most important questions about their lives. With each passing year, the glue that once bound our parties together becomes weaker, leaving the parties dependent on inertia and rhetoric to sustain them as relevant political forces.
One of the harbingers of a coming realignment is the rise of urgent, compelling, and dangerous new issues that America's parties can't or won't address. Our parties remain stuck in the New Deal debate we created them to resolve, but we no longer live in that New Deal era world. The American Century is over. The world has changed. We're facing unfamiliar new challenges in the middle of an economic and cultural revolution. Yet all of our national policy remains rooted in a world that no longer exists. Worse, our politics is unable to even conceive of the new world up ahead. As that new world brings greater and greater change, with a political system trapped farther and farther in the past, eventually something has to snap. Ask yourself this: If, for some reason, our two major parties collapsed tomorrow, would we choose to reinvent them in the same way? If we were to recreate our parties today, at this historical moment, with this set of challenges, would we create two political parties divided by this particular set of issues? Would we reconstruct two parties tailor-made to argue the policies of Franklin Roosevelt?
THE DECLINE OF SUBSTANCE IN POLITICS
It's become a common complaint that America's political culture is broken. It often seems America's government is wholly incapable of getting even the most basic and noncontroversial things done. The American government has implemented only a handful of significant new initiatives in over a generation, and even those pale when compared to the groundbreaking ideas of the previous era like Social Security, Medicare, moon rockets, and welfare reform. It's been years since America's parties were offering innovative and bold ideas, and we've come to take for granted as a nation that governing is just an extension of campaigning and that federal policy is a campaign promise in a stump speech. Our political culture is obsessed with shaping narratives, embarrassing the opposition, campaigning, and winning without regard for the actual purpose of holding public office. We've come to accept that every legislative fight is a carefully selected wedge issue meant to energize one party's base while dividing the coalition of its rival. We accept that high officials mainly focus on the mechanics of politics, such as raising money to position themselves for the next election. It's considered naive to take seriously that democratic government should primarily focus on ideas and governing. We live in a permanent election campaign in which the actions of government serve the interests of elections, instead of elections serving the interest of getting difficult agendas enacted. It's comforting to think politics in America has always been this way. In fact, it's reasonable to be alarmed.
All administrations care about winning elections and shaping opinion. Even America's most celebrated statesmen were also politicians who gave their historic speeches with an eye on manipulating public opinion, who threw nasty mud at each other through partisan campaigning, and whose greatest policy achievements were meant to help their authors win elections. Since the republic's earliest years, politics has incorporated parades, slogans, patronage networks, campaign finance, soundbites, and political cheerleading as if government was a sport. Yet for most of the Fifth Party System, the politicians who ran America's government also took substance and ideas deadly seriously. Franklin Roosevelt organized his presidency around a collection of brilliant minds from Columbia and Harvard Universities, a brain trust who constructed the meat of the New Deal from nothing. The most powerful advisers in Roosevelt's administration whose roots were in the hurly-burly of politics, like Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins, were also people of deep substance who personally rolled up their sleeves to design and implement ideas. Eisenhower administered the details of government as he administered the army that won the Second World War. John Kennedy assembled the whiz kid advisers of Camelot who asked what they could do for America. Lyndon Johnson, a crude master of political hardball, empowered deeply political men and tough operators like Bill Moyers, Jack Valenti, and Joe Califano, who all also knew and cared about actual policy. The biggest stars in the Nixon administration included Henry Kissinger, a controversial champion of realpolitik but also a deep substantive thinker, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an academic and Democrat whose role in crafting major domestic policy ultimately landed him in the Senate. Ronald Reagan brought the entire conservative movement's intellectual shop into government, where it rolled up its collective sleeves to reverse the direction of federal policy. Their accomplishments weren't simply symbolic stands and signals meant to endear themselves to swing voters or the base. They were real achievements that affected people's lives, like the New Deal, like Medicare, like civil rights legislation, like new infrastructure, like important treaties, like landing a rocket on the moon, like paring back regulation, and like tax reform.
The more recent Washington experience of White House adviser John DiIulio, the original head of the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives during the George W. Bush administration, offers a sad contrast. Professor DiIulio, a well-respected scholar, one of the most creative minds working in public policy, and a font of new ideas, resigned in frustration after less than a year in Washington after meeting a policy caste more interested in communications and spin than ideas. As he wrote in a well-publicized letter to journalist Ron Suskind for an article in Esquire magazine:
In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical, nonstop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but, on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking—discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue.14
At the highest level of government, DiIulio found innovation and policy ideas simply weren't valued by the political operatives running the nation. Nor is DiIulio's experience somehow unique to the Bush administration, as similar complaints could be lodged at every other recent administration, Democratic or Republican, for over twenty years.
Our current era is increasingly looking as empty, if not perhaps worse, than the Era of Good Feelings or the Gilded Age. This decline in substance is about far more than just our government officials. It's everywhere throughout our political culture. It's in the media. It's our public debate. It's in how we, the American people, discuss and participate in our nation's politics. It's in us all. If you want a shock, go to a place like YouTube that archives old media. Watch a few political speeches, interviews, or even network talk shows from just a few decades back. Watch Reagan debate Carter or Mondale, or Bush debate Dukakis, or even the famously political Clinton debate Bush. Watch pundit-focused television shows like Firing Line, or even popular network talk shows like the Dick Cavett Show, in which pundits, scholars, and Hollywood celebrities discuss policy issues. The modern viewer will be startled at the serious discussions of national policy at a level of detail far beyond anything on television today. Even the celebrities talked politics in a way that was smarter, more substantive, and more interesting than most high government officials do now. America's political culture really has declined.
Political commentators blame various boogeymen for this alarming decline in substance. Today's elected officials do squander an absurd amount of time on tedious fundraising, making it almost impossible for them to properly focus on their actual job governing America. Donors do have great influence on what actually happens in government. Cable news, and now social media, have created a vast media machine constantly looking for political stories, rewarding the silly, the trivial, the divisive, and the bombastic. None of that, however, is as new as we pretend. Money has been part of politics since Mark Hanna built his epic war chest for McKinley because campaigns are expensive and government affects people with money, and not so long ago nearly every major town in America had at least two partisan newspapers chasing readers and smearing opponents. The problem isn't structural. It's cultural. The American political system is operating on autopilot. Its parties continue fighting over power so politicians can advance their careers, and the nation must continue holding elections because we have to have a government, but since our parties no longer have fresh visions to sell, the only things that remain are campaigns and power. The Democratic and Republican Parties are no longer parties of ideas.
RENEWING OUR PARTIES WITH IDEAS
In his masterwork On War, written after Napoleon humiliated the best European militaries of his era, Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously explained the difference between tactics and strategy. Before Napoleon, too many generals wrongly believed their job was to win battles and take cities. Napoleon taught them that the real point of war is to strategically use battles to force the enemy to capitulate to your nation's demands.15 It's a lesson as important to the boardroom and campaign trail as the battlefield, and one leaders too often fail to learn, mistaking tactical thinking for strategy. Winning battles, like winning elections, is just tactics. Choosing the right battles to achieve your objectives, like shaping parties with agendas and ideologies, is strategy.16 We often misleadingly label the political tacticians who think in terms of winning news cycles, constructing wedge issues, raising money, and breaking down the electorate with math as “political strategists.” Real political strategists, however, are the people who construct political parties out of raw ideas from the vast symphony of factions and principles at play in a society. Like Henry Clay, Franklin Roosevelt, or William F. Buckley, they understand America's current political divides aren't permanent or stable, that “Democrat” and “Republican” are temporary categories that can change, and then they set out to change them.
It's a dirty secret of American politics that ideas don't help much to win elections. During the long stable era of a party system, most votes are cast before the election even starts. The vast majority of voters already identify as a Republican or a Democrat, or strongly lean that way while claiming to be independent, and nothing that happens during the campaign can ever change their mind.17 Those votes that are up for grabs in an election, moreover, are rarely cast based on detailed policy pronouncements from candidates—few believe half those promises will ever come to fruition anyway. They're cast because voters come to believe that a candidate and party shares their principles. Voters select candidates and parties who they believe see the world as they do, trusting them to get right the details of all the policies those voters lack the time, the inclination, or the expertise to understand themselves. So that's what tactically minded campaign operatives supply—symbolism that communicates to voters that the candidate and party shares their view of the world.
Real policy ideas are terrible for campaigning. They often require highly technical scientific, legal, and industry knowledge. They inevitably force tough choices and hard compromises. Even the best ideas disrupt someone's expectations. Political opponents can easily take new and unfamiliar proposals, twist them, and make them sound radical and dangerous. The media, operating on tight deadlines and usually lacking the means to understand the details of complicated policies much better than any other group of Americans, has an incentive to focus on the entertaining sparks of political conflict rather than informing people of the substance of debates. When politicians do take on the hard work of wrestling with knotty problems and devising complicated and messy real solutions, they're more likely to get punished than rewarded for it politically. So candidates and parties craft symbolic “policy solutions” that are simple, easy to understand, represent clear values, and are vague enough in their details to not create an easy target for opponents. They sound like policy, but they're in reality communication efforts to signal priorities, factional loyalties, and how a candidate might approach problems—empty proposals for “change,” pledges to “create jobs” without a plan to do it, pledges to “strengthen education” without proposing real changes, “50-point economic plans,” sweeping reform proposals no one would ever dare implement, tiny pilot initiatives, and unrealistic proposed constitutional amendments no one will ever seriously push.
That doesn't mean, however, that policy substance is a luxury or waste of time. Ideas are the only thing that hold the multitude of people within a party together in the first place. People aren't born Democrats or Republicans, but rather choose to become Democrats or Republicans because they believe those parties will advance an agenda of ideas they like. The sole purpose of a political party is to carry out an orderly debate about solving the most pressing issues in America. A political party that can't produce a useful agenda of ideas about how it intends to fix the problems of its members is useless. Without its ideas to bind them around a common agenda, a party's fractious factions would eventually desert it and the party would fall apart. It's just that we take the importance of those ideas for granted because we all already know before the campaign starts what agenda Republicans favor and what agenda Democrats favor, based on each party's well-known identity and brand. Nobody has to listen to hours of candidate speeches or wade through fifty-point economic plans to roughly understand what ideas each party hopes to implement. The only reason ideas don't seem to matter to individual election outcomes is because people factor them in before the election starts.
The ideas supporting America's two major parties, however, are now staggeringly old, haven't been adjusted for the better part of a century, and were designed to address a completely different world. America's parties haven't simply failed to develop answers to our new problems. They lack even the framework to think about those problems. Nothing in New Deal liberalism or fighting big government tells you how to approach the rise of China. Nothing in that debate explains how to address the disruption to the economy and society of mass automation and artificial intelligence. Nothing in the New Deal fight explains what to do about the disruptions of globalism. Nothing tells you how to properly respond to an increase in migration. You can't take either New Deal liberalism or modern conservatism as a starting point and develop a coherent and comprehensive answer to these or any other of the vast new problems America faces as a nation. The New Deal debate provides no instructions for how to address the problems of today. No wonder everything has stagnated.
If America hopes to break out of this stagnation and to begin to address the new challenges of a changing world, it needs to restore a political culture of innovation and ideas. Politics isn't just an entertaining spectator sport, nor is it a place to validate our identity. It's the way we work together to solve the problems of our republic. If we're going to move confidently into the next era, we need political leaders advancing new and exciting agendas that speak directly to Americans' greatest hopes and most terrible worries. We need political activists as interested in concrete plans for change as they are in winning rhetorical battles and gaining influence. We need a national media fascinated by the details of what America's parties do as much as whether it's likely to be popular or attract votes. Perhaps most important, we need to put our policy entrepreneurs back in charge. Many of the stars of politics today—people like James Carville, Karl Rove, and David Axelrod—are pure political operatives. Their expertise and interest aren't in crafting innovative policy ideas to better govern America but in winning elections and power for their party machines, with policy important only to the extent it provides deliverables to influential factions that will generate enthusiasm and thus deliver votes. Policy entrepreneurs are the people who actually discover and implement new policies, people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John DiIulio. Policy entrepreneurs, not communicators, are the core function of government, and they're supposed to be the highest-status members of government and the most important people in any room. Communications staff and campaign operatives are supposed to be helpers communicating to others whatever the policy entrepreneurs decide.
Delegating so much real government power to campaign operatives is abnormal. Traditionally, campaign operatives like Lee Atwater weren't also influential people in White Houses but supporting players, people important during campaign season to help secure elections who then faded back into the woodwork of politics. Not so long ago, even presidential campaign managers tended to be respected policy figures moonlighting in election campaigns, not the other way around. Reagan's campaign manager William Casey became the director of the CIA. George Bush's campaign manager was James Baker, a treasury secretary and secretary of state. Letting communications people run a White House is like Goldman Sachs putting its human resources department in charge of proprietary Wall Street trading. What the political operatives and communicators know and care about—winning elections on the back of established ideologies and platforms—is tactics. What America needs now is true strategic thinking to redefine those ideologies and platforms for the future out of raw ideas. We need a William Jennings Bryan or Franklin Roosevelt, who will develop a new innovative agenda not around the problems of yesterday but the problems of tomorrow.
If our existing parties can't or won't address the new problems America faces, it's simply a matter of time before others come along who can and will. If we want our parties to transform themselves in a renewal, instead of simply waiting for a collapse, we need them to throw off their tactical obsessions and reembrace a culture of substance and ideas. They need more than crafty communications plans, clever wedge issues, better fundraising, or more likeable candidates. They need wholesale innovation and reform, building new political coalitions with fresh ideologies capable of solving new problems looking forward instead of back. Our parties have to once again become true parties of substance and ideas. Each election cycle they fail to deliver competent and substantive government loosens the bonds that hold their factions together. Eventually, something will strike the system hard enough and those floundering parties will crack. If our parties don't embrace the ethic of a Bryan or a Roosevelt, refreshing their agendas around the new problems of America, it's only time until they collapse in disaster like the Whigs.