The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (15 page)

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Authors: Eric Liu,Nick Hanauer

Tags: #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Democracy, #History & Theory, #General

BOOK: The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government
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Weed relentlessly.
Evidence-based practice (and funding) sounds obvious but isn’t routinely practiced (or funded). It must be the actual method of government. When the experimentation we champion has yielded successful models—in, say, the delivery of primary care—they should be replicated. When the evidence says a program has failed or outlived its usefulness, it should end. And government should be looking continuously to end things—indeed, it should have a goal of ending a percentage of programs every year—so that those resources can be deployed, in an adaptive way, to new challenges. The Obama Administration has quietly and powerfully made evidence-based funding—and de-funding—a more common way of doing business in the federal government, in arenas like education research and health innovation. We want more. The point, as in our entire philosophy, is not to end government, but to end the way we do government. Government should be living, organic, evolving—not inert, inanimate, and unchanging.
Reclaiming Democracy
 
We note, however, that before this kind of repurposing can happen, the rules of democratic practice and governance must first change. There is one underlying issue that all Americans, whatever their politics, most confront : the creeping corruption of a campaign finance system that treats money as speech, pushes politicians to spend time courting the moneyed, enables lobbyists to become unelected lawmakers, and gives credence to the rising belief in America that our government is bought and paid for. The more the appearance and reality of such corruption reinforce one another, the more challenging it becomes to earn the buy-in of the public in
any
reimag-ining of government’s role. This is why at least in part, we applaud the citizen activism of the Tea Party: here is a group of Americans who, however misguided their view of policy and muddied their motives may be, want to reclaim ownership of government and regain the attention of our elected leaders.
This is why we as citizens—left, right, and all points otherwise—must first push through an agenda to decalcify the processes by which government in America operates:
–Reform redistricting. Modern-day gerrymandering has made districts more ideologically homogenous and our politics more polarized. Congressional districts should be drawn independently of the parties, and optimized for a mix of voter viewpoints rather than incumbent protection.
–Restrict money in politics. Most Americans think politics is a game rigged by those with money. They are right. The
Citizens United
ruling by the Supreme Court to remove restraints on corporate spending in elections is egregious, but it only underscores a longstanding truth about campaign finance in America: plenty of activity that is legal is still corrupt. It’s time for dramatic restrictions on campaign finance.
–Stop the revolving door. It is a measure of how far our national ethics have drifted when members of Congress and senior executive staff leave their jobs to work for the corporations they once regulated—and no one cares. This too is a sin of both parties and it must end.
–Reform the filibuster. The rules of the U.S. Senate, as we have seen in recent years under both Republican and Democratic control, are designed
against
adaptability. The filibuster has made the Congress essentially a supermajority-only body on most hard issues. That must end.
–Reinvigorate voting. Voting in the United States should be mandatory, so that representation of the people is a reality and not a fiction. Efforts to suppress voter turnout among voters of color and youth, fueled mainly by Republicans, are shameful and should be shamed out of existence.
These kinds of reforms are not the wish list of naïve do-gooders. They are the necessary remedies for a body politic that has succumbed to what Mancur Olson called “the logic of collective action”: a sclerotic accretion of narrowly focused interest group demands that lock up the state’s ability to move or change. Reforming the rules of governance maximizes the speed of public response to public challenges. It pushes out polarization, engages all the people, and encourages problem-solving. It redesigns government for adaptability, making it more clear-eyed in setting strategy and more nimble in executing it.
Adapt or Die
 
Of course, in the meantime, there is great opportunity to shift the country’s understanding of what government is for. Our theory of government cannot be put in a box. It’s not left or right or in-between. It’s “conservative” in that it values local practical knowledge and it wants to put markets and competition to good use to radically increase adaptability and accountability. It’s “liberal” in that it proposes a strong meliorist role for the national government to set ambitious goals, level the playing field, equip everyone to compete fairly and fully, and identify great failures of the commons that need to be addressed by shared action. It’s about national identity
and
local power. It’s about networked localism. Most of all, it’s about effectiveness.
The Big What, Small How approach to governing ourselves is not an excuse to slash public spending. It is not a call for a bossier nanny state. It is, quite simply, a framework for
owning
government in every sense: taking title to it and taking responsibility for it. Big What, Small How is just how a savvy gardener operates. A gardener does not make the vine climb or the rose bloom. But he does decide whether it will be vegetables or flowers. He does plant accordingly. He does distinguish between good growth and bad, between a wanted tomato and an unwanted weed. Most of all, he knows that if he doesn’t do the work in the garden, no one else will.
When John Adams was a young man, his father died, leaving him title to property in Braintree, Massachusetts. Adams learned that he had inherited not only a house but also a set of duties. The elders of Braintree informed Adams that he was now responsible for managing roads and other public works and in particular was now charged with the building of a much-needed bridge. Adams protested that he knew nothing of bridge construction. The elders told him, in essence,
Figure it out.
And Adams did, hiring the experts and supervising them on behalf of the town. Our theory of government, like our theory of citizenship, expects each of us to be more like young John Adams: more responsible than we had ever realized for figuring it out.
Government is what a society creates to solve common problems that each of us alone could not solve. We agree with the right that the job of government is to maximize individual opportunity. We just believe that the way to do that is to maximize the trust, cooperation, and equal opportunity that frames up each individual’s starting prospects. We agree with the left that the job of government is to ensure fairness and justice. We just believe that the way to do that is to put more responsibility on people to govern themselves by using more local, less distant, and more responsive means.
By binding us together to pursue broad national ends and equipping us to develop our own means, our Big What, Small How approach can fundamentally reorient how most Americans see government: not as them, but as
us.
We are government. We own it—if, to echo Franklin, we can keep it.
Will our new theory of government, if implemented, create new problems? Of course. It will create its own unintended consequences and its own patterns of turf, faction, and short-termism. It will force new trade-offs. But it addresses the underlying problems of our politics today, and it does so by making government fundamentally more adaptive and accountable than it is today. A practice of continuous and cold-eyed
evolution
can replace the passionate rhetoric of perpetual but never requited
revolution.
It is not enough, as we said at the outset, to defend government reflexively—or even thoughtfully. It is not enough to triangulate or buy time by cherry-picking a few ideas from anti-government activists. It is time, rather, for all of us to engage in sincerity the debate that the right opened in cynicism. It is time to set in motion a repurposing and a rebalancing of the roles that state and citizen play in the quest for true liberty and enduring justice. Big What, Small How represents our best opportunity for an adaptive form of progressive self-government. It is time to put it into practice.
VI. Harvest
 
We Reap What We Sow
 
Review of the argument—Democracy’s gardens—The true meaning of liberty—The test of pragmatism—The freedom of responsibility, and vice versa
 
 
IN OUR LAST BOOK,
The True Patriot
, we made a moral argument that in order for freedom to be meaningful, actionable, and equitable across a society, free individuals must curb their appetites, limit their hoarding, and share both bounty and sacrifice: in every sense of the word,
govern
themselves.
In these pages, we have been making the practical analogue to that moral argument, fueled by the latest teachings of science and the oldest lessons of experience.
Our view is framed by the need to move from a 19th-century Machinebrain to a 21st-century Gardenbrain. Only if we replace the obsolete and limiting metaphors of yesterday can we hope to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
We began with self-interest, that propulsive force of human activity, and described a new narrative in which
true self-interest is mutual interest.
That is not just our personal view; it is the view afforded by a second scientific Enlightenment that shows us to be strongly reciprocal, networked, and interdependent instead of purely selfish, atomized, and independent. We laid out, upon this foundation of enlightened self-interest, a new conception of citizenship that takes into account the contagious nature of all behavior and the responsibility in a democratic republic that each of us bears to act as if
society becomes how you behave
—because it
does.
From there, we considered the price we have paid for imagining the economy to be a machine, always self-correcting to equilibrium, rather than a garden, always blooming in forms that can be glorious or cancerous. The power of this metaphor shift—from machine to garden—is best appreciated in its necessary empirical consequences. In a complex adaptive system like a garden or a market economy, it turns out that we cannot let others wither while we blossom, for in the end their blight is ours and so
we are all better off if we are all better off.
Finally, we asked what this all means for the role of government. A complex adaptive systems worldview—a vision of the world as contingent, connected, and continually in flux—reveals the folly of both Machinebrain centralized bureaucratic government and the libertarian fantasy of limited government. What we need now, more than ever, is not big or small government but government that is
big on the what and small on the how
: government that sees the world as networks, systems, and cascading contagions and operates to harness what it can, toward a shared notion of the common good—and get out of the way of what it cannot. It should focus more on what to grow and less on how to grow it.
Throughout, we have understood and depicted our democracy as an array of gardens. The garden of our civic and community life. The garden of our markets and economy. The garden of our government, from local to national. In every variation, the theme is simple. We are more connected than we know. We and our systems follow the laws not of the clockmaker but of the gardener. Our imperatives are not to let things be once they are set in motion but rather to
tend.
The gardener understands the dynamics of the natural systems around him and has the humility to know he does not
make
nature. But he understands equally that it is his active hand that
shapes
it; that separates the garden from the wild.

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