The 2016 election of Donald Trump showed, sooner than I expected, that voters are so fed up with overbearing government that they were ready for change at almost any price. But the tepid response by both parties surprised me more. After continuing to work through 2017 with the new administration and Congress to try to unstick the gears, I realized that persuading Washington is hopeless. The political parties just continue to sow partisan distrust instead of dealing with the root causes of voter anger. They compete by dividing society, and rely on the lack of credible political alternatives to take turns in power without actually taking responsibility to fix things. Their duopoly has settled into a predictable pattern: First you fail, then I fail.
Fixing Washington requires more than new leaders and new variations on partisan orthodoxies. It requires a new governing vision, propelled by public demand, for a basic overhaul of how government works. Reforming the current system will not be sufficient. Pretty much everything run by government is broken—schools are bad, health-care costs are out of control, regulation is impractical, infrastructure is decrepit, Washington is a feeding trough, . . . and neither Congress nor the president has a coherent vision of how to deal with any of these problems.
What’s needed is a governing philosophy that re-empowers people to make practical choices. The parties argue about ideological abstractions when voter anger stems mainly from the stifling of sensible decisions throughout society.
Most people want to be practical in their daily encounters. We want the teacher or principal to listen to us, and have the ability to make a decision. We want elected leaders to deal with problems, and to try something else if the first solution doesn’t work. We want a workplace where people want to pitch in and expect others to do the same. Letting people make practical choices is not a radical idea, of course. The Framers embraced this practical ideal and created a framework in which Americans could pursue their dreams and live their values.
Practicality requires one essential element: people must be free to take responsibility. Only a person on the spot, not a bureaucratic rulebook, can make choices that are practical and fair. That’s not possible in modern government, which is organized to dictate correct choices in advance.
In this book I propose a new governing philosophy built on the bedrock of human responsibility and accountability. Law should set goals and governing principles, and leave implementation to people on the ground. To get things done, and feel good about themselves, people need to have more ownership of their daily choices. Their choices can be judged, but they can’t be dictated in advance without causing alienation and failure. This requires a radical simplification of government, area by area.
Under this new governing philosophy, choices can be practical. People are empowered to take into account all the circumstances. Instead of uniformity, it encourages local differences. Instead of aspiring to avoid disagreement with “clear rules” set out in advance, it encourages argument over what’s right. Instead of legal entitlements, it aspires to balance different interests. Instead of requiring objective proof, it allows people to make judgments based on their perceptions and values. Instead of judging people by legalistic compliance, it judges them by the results they achieve and their good faith.
America’s current governing philosophy, created after the 1960s, dictates governing choices out of a huge legal machine, programmed with about 150 million words for federal law. Its one virtue, at least to people in Washington, is that it absolves them from having to take responsibility for how things actually work. What keeps it in place, despite its failure, is distrust.
America’s two political parties are mighty engines of distrust. They draw ideological lines in the sand and thrive on polarization. Their solutions are either negative (Stop the regulator!) or self-interested (Give me my rights!). What they share is a governing philosophy grounded in distrust of people taking responsibility. The worse things work, the more reluctant we are to let anyone make decisions. Just imagine the abuses if teachers, inspectors, managers, and citizens were able to work out disagreements, and be accountable for how they did.
The decline of responsibility in Washington over the past fifty years has been accompanied by a rise in apathy and selfishness in the broader culture. Working for the common good seems naïve. Why bother to get involved? You can’t make a difference anyway. A culture not tethered to responsible individuals is soon dominated by self-interested demands. The common good? Just kick that can down the road.
There’s a lot to talk about here, but the first hurdle is to convince you that proposing a practical governing philosophy is itself a practical exercise. Washington, we all know, is not exactly responsive to voter needs. It can barely pass a budget, much less overhaul its governing structure. Its defective approach to governing is compounded by a vacuum of leadership. It is unlikely to fix this problem. Change will only come from the outside. Historic shifts in our governing structure always require overwhelming public pressure—as, for example, in the Great Depression or the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Public demand for a new governing philosophy can impact the culture long before the structures collapse of their own weight. Values have their own power. Having a principled basis for practical decisions may inspire people to make them. It will provide a vocabulary for dealing with daily idiocies in schools, hospitals, and government. Today people are awash in endless rules and legalisms, without any principled basis for getting to a reasonable solution.
Find any good public program, or, indeed, any successful enterprise, and you will see people who make choices based on what they think is right and sensible—not rote compliance. Embracing a public philosophy of practical responsibility will bring these outlaws out of the shadows and up on a pedestal of legitimacy and honor. It will encourage others to follow their lead. Americans can act like Americans again.
A new philosophy will also inspire a new generation of political leaders with a clear vision for change. Today, no leader has any credible way of explaining public failures, much less fixing them.
Am I just tilting at windmills? I’ve written about the failures of modern government in my prior books, and, in The Rule of Nobody (2014), described how a rigid conception of the Rule of Law removes the human authority needed to make common choices. The unintended effect is gridlock throughout society. I wrote that a voter backlash against the overbearing and mindless bureaucracy was inevitable.
Now that the backlash has started, America needs a new vision of how to govern. The time is now. The parties have left behind a vacuum that will be filled by something. Waiting for someone else to fill that vacuum is perilous. Unreliable leaders and bad ideas emerge when the public feels frustrated and marginalized. Unless they see a responsible path to a better future, people will grab hold of almost any alternative to the current chaos.
America may be prosperous, but not evenly, and many Americans are fearful. The employment base of communities can disappear overnight, replaced by robots or cheap labor overseas. What’s left in the service sector are, increasingly, dead-end jobs that often don’t get a worker past the poverty line. After a century of economic advancement, many Americans feel they are back in the fields again, meeting production quotas in mindless jobs. Many Americans don’t find meaning in their work, or in their community. They are losing hope of a better future for their children. Americans are largely alienated from democratic governance. They don’t matter to Washington, and they know it.
In his 1939 book, The End of Economic Man, Peter Drucker argued that the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy was fueled by absence of a governing vision that might counteract the impersonal forces of the depression. The “old order has ceased to have validity and reality. . . . But there has emerged no new order which would have brought a new basis of belief.”
Hitler and Mussolini offered a vision of totalitarian organization. The trains ran on time. Power became “its own justification.” The establishment didn’t like the fanaticism, but went along because they had no better idea. Sure, as Drucker parodied the German establishment, the fascists “occasionally ‘go too far’ in revolutionary zeal,” but they were bringing people together and providing employment. Never mind that the jobs were for rearmament, and that the togetherness was achieved by whipping people into a frenzy against Jews.
Facts no longer matter when people are consumed with hatred or fear. Drucker observed that it was “useless to point out that Mr. Roosevelt’s name was not originally Rosenfeld” or that an official inquiry concluded that the communists did not set fire to the Reichstag. “All these lies must remain the official truth in Germany.”
A movement built on hatred was doomed to fail, Drucker argued, because it has no positive governing vision for a healthy society. Appeasement and peace were also impossible because Hitler’s only reason for existence was to attack an enemy.
Drucker’s book was reviewed in England by a washed-up politician who concluded that Drucker “successfully links the dictatorships . . . with that absence of a working philosophy” elsewhere. People “seek refuge in [dictatorships] not because they believe in them but because anything is better than the present chaos.” As the war escalated from 1939 to 1940, the columnist kept referring to Drucker’s book while arguing for a principled vision of a free society that must oppose the evil fanaticism of Hitler and Mussolini.
The washed-up columnist was Winston Churchill. When Hitler invaded the Low Countries, Parliament asked Churchill, then sixty-five years old, to lead the nation. What Winston Churchill provided, Drucker wrote thirty years later, was “moral authority, belief in values, and faith in the rightness of rational action.”
Europe in 1939 is not America in 2019. Our stock market is booming, unemployment is low, and American culture is resilient. But it’s hard not to notice a few similarities. Facts have lost their moral force. Can you prove Obama was born in the United States? Political leaders stir up public support not with visions of hope, but by attacking people and institutions that, until yesterday, were pillars of society. Is the FBI really corrupt? Americans, fearful of the future, retreat into echo chambers of paranoia and escalating hatred.
“Every organized society,” Drucker wrote, “is built upon a concept of the nature of man and of his function and place in society.” Americans feel increasingly isolated and powerless. That’s dangerous.