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Democracy in America Revisited—Toward a New Definition of the Public Good [Eighth and Last of a Series]

As we reached the end of our eight-hour, one-day Socrates Society Salon in San Francisco, Professor Michael Sandel pulled together many of the threads that we had discussed on the future of American Democracy. To paraphrase his concluding comments:

Liberalism in America has experienced a failure to give a convincing account of the public good or the common good. When inequality becomes as pronounced as it is today, the wealthy buy their way out of public places and exist in their own world—which is a very bad thing. Public services and public places increasingly come to be seen as a place for the poor-- witness the multi-year secular trends in American public schools, in public transportation (think NetJets), and in health care (think Concierge Medicine for those who can afford it).

You need to have people of widely ranging socio-economic backgrounds bumping into each other in civic proximity to have some meaningful deliberation about the public good.

There is a civic reason to worry about forms of inequality that lead to separate lives between the Haves and the Have Nots. This leads to the Meaning Deficit in America today. One reason why there is so much fraying of the social fabric in America in the early 21st century is because we don’t know what it means to be an American anymore—we don’t know what we belong to that matters to all of us as Americans…

We need to constitute a shared public realm so that people can at least argue about what is the public good.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Democracy in America Revisited-- Defining America’s Current Political Identity [Seventh of a Series]

You can’t stretch a shared political identity so far that it becomes overly abstract and therefore impossible for people to articulate in a way that everyone can easily understand it.

Think of this statement in the context of the Presidential debates in the current election. Why is the media obsessively focused on candidate mis-statements regarding their exposure to ‘sniper fire’ or commenting on how social alienation can lead to ‘clinging to guns and religion’. Why does it take 43 minutes into a debate for George Stephanopolous to ask the Democratic Party candidates the first substantive question on the economy, which he acknowledges as the most important issue in the election? Should candidate gaffes be defining elements of campaign momentum and qualifications for Presidential leadership? Not in my view.

American citizens span the spectrum from evangelical Christians to ardent atheists; from observant Muslims to secular and orthodox Jews. Ethnically, American citizens include Mexican Americans, African Americans, Puerto Rican Americans, European Americans, Russian Americans, and many other ethnicities. The definition of family in America now includes traditional marriages, same sex marriages, and no marriages. It is uneasy for societies to live with a complex narrative of citizenship forged from the richness of diversity that has made the melting pot of America historically great.

The rise of Evangelical Christian religious fundamentalism in America and Muslim fundamentalism in the rapidly modernizing societies of the Third World each share a reactive thread in opposition to the forced acknowledgement of diversity highlighted to all of us by the Internet. These movements, which are organized attempts to re-assert a single identity and to fight social complexity, trigger equally negative reactions form those that are left out of the picture. A complex world where differences are heightened because everyone is aware of everyone else requires nations to grapple with a complex narrative of citizenship. America's great historical achievement as a pluralistic society stems from its immigrant melting pot roots and from the strong democratic institutions that have evolved over 232 years to embrace this complexity. Let's not forget this in the 21st century.

Democracy in America Revisited-- The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism [Sixth of a Series]

I haven’t found anyone who will argue vigorously against the notion that China and Russia have thoroughly abandoned their Communist roots- but the elites who wield power in these countries certainly continue to embrace authoritarianism, only now under ‘freewheeling’ if not free market capitalism. Authoritarian behavior can be contagious. Consider the U.S. policy of unilateral military interventionism that has been in place for over five years since the Iraq invasion—does that feel a little authoritarian to you?

Authoritarian capitalism is an attempt to solve the crisis created by inadequate political institutions that have failed to forge a national citizenry. In a socio-political environment where America’s leaders define the nation’s political agenda through the fear of terrorism and consequent social disorder, convenient excuses (another terrorist attack on American soil) could easily lead to the loss of civil liberties and the rise of authoritarianism in America. Authoritarian Capitalism appears to currently be the default regime of choice for societies lacking the political will and the political institutions to empower marginalized socio-economic groups by allowing the expression of dissent.

Sarah Lacy, Silicon Valley Host of Yahoo! Finance Tech|Ticker, Interviews Pascal, Sharon Wienbar (Scale Venture Partners), and Jessica Canning (Dow Jones/VentureSource) on Current VC Industry Trends

Last Thursday I joined Sharon Wienbar, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, and Jessica Canning, Director of Global Research for Dow Jones/ VentureSource, on Yahoo! Finance's Tech|Ticker program, hosted by Business Week's Sarah Lacy. We discussed issues ranging from opportunities in Clean Tech investing and the current state of tech IPO's to the implications of recent VC industry funding statistics and how entrepreneurs should manage their companies through an economic downturn. Two of the segments were posted this morning and can be accessed at http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker

Democracy in America Revisited--Parallels Between the Election of 1912 and the Election of 2008 [Fifth of a Series]

At a time when the phenomenon of industrialization, driven by new technologies and new business and manufacturing processes, was transforming the economic landscape of America, the central debate of the 1912 presidential election revolved around two different answers to the central question of how American democracy should be preserved:

(A) Do you decentralize the economy to preserve democracy, thus preserving its local character? This position was held by Louis Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson; or

(B) Do you redesign American democracy to be national so it can have enough authority and legitimacy to regulate the entire country’s economy? This position was held by Teddy Roosevelt.

Whether you agreed with (A) or (B), both required the integration of local and national politics. Today, we face a similar integration challenge, but at a global level.

Can Democracy cope with this vastly more complex landscape? The fact is that the global scale of the economy has again outrun our political institutions, and the stress of globalization on countries that don’t have the degree of institutionalization evident in the U.S. is far more severe (a Huntingtonian concept that goes back to his early opus, Political Order in Changing Societies).

More and more reformist voices in the early 21st century have been calling for the need to create a sense of national citizenship, and now even global citizenship…

Democracy in America Revisited—What Makes America Work [Fourth of a Series]

According to the great demographer of America in the 1830’s, Alexis de Tocqueville, the local character of American Democracy is what makes it work (the New England Townships being the best example of this tendency in America). The working hypothesis behind this observation is that the microcosm of learning civic skills is transferable and makes citizens who are civically active locally into better citizens at larger levels.

However, you cannot have an effective democracy if a large gap exists between local politics and national economics.

Democracy in America Revisited—Income Inequality, Hedge Funds, and Re-Regulation [Third of a Series]

The Progressive Era vs the Internet Era-- What Straw Will Break This Camel's Back?

The Progressive Era in America was an era of social reform to address the gaps between the rich and the poor. Many State and Federal laws were passed, such as the minimum wage, the progressive income tax, and amendments to the U.S. Constitution, due to growing concerns regarding social and economic inequalities created by new industries and new technologies. The hope behind these new laws was that they would create a new sense of shared citizenship in America by forging a sense of common citizenship and shared values.

This was partly a response to economic inequality, but it was also designed to create a shared narrative that would become common ground between different socio-economic groups.

Are we at such an inflection point again today? On April 16 a front-page New York Times article by Jenny anderson, "Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Pay Days" reported:

Hedge fund managers have redefined notions of wealth in recent years. And the richest among them are redefining those notions once again. Their unprecedented and growing affluence underscores the gaping inequality between the millions of Americans facing stagnating wages and rising home foreclosures and an agile financial elite that seems to thrive in good times and bad. Such profits may also prompt more calls for regulation of the industry. Even on Wall Street, where money is the ultimate measure of success, the size of the winnings makes some uneasy. ...The richest hedge fund managers keep getting richer — fast. To make it into the top 25 of Alpha’s list, the industry standard for hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $360 million last year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year. Combined, the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29 billion. That figure represents the managers’ own pay and excludes the compensation of their employees.

A key question that we face today, beyond that of the economic divide created by massive private wealth, is-- How do you create a sense of political community in an environment that has shattered all forms of political community? In our relentless pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, America and Americans have become so involved in the instant gratification of the ‘Me’ and the ‘Now’ that any sense of the greater good of the community has been thrown under the bus of ‘Self’.

ADDENDUM: I've received a number of private comments about this post with regard to my views about regulation, taxation, and income inequality. In my view, the best way to deal with income inequality in America is to promote continued upward economic mobility, not to punish the 'winners' through higher taxes and other government mandates designed to achieve social engineering. Recent Pew Center demographic research also shows that upward mobility in the U.S. has declined considerably-- Germany has greater upward mobility than the United States today, according to this Pew research. America's central problem, in my view, is that regulations meant to correct excesses in the capitalist financial system are having unintended consequences in terms of stifling innovation, chilling entrepreneurs, and gutting the middle market for emerging public companies. This is not the case in India and China, and let's not forget that intellectual capital and risk capital are mobile....

Democracy in America Revisited—Past is Present When It Comes to Private Philanthropy [Second of a Series]

As we consider Democracy in America today, analogies emerge between the trend toward increased socio-economic inequality in our country today and the alienation felt between the wide extremes of economic privilege and poverty during the Progressive Era at the turn of the last century, during the American Industrial Revolution.

In the aftermath of the American industrialist Robber Barons that rose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, huge private foundations emerged, with names like Rockefeller and Carnegie, which dedicated substantial financial resources to building public infrastructure in the US. It is interesting to note the parallel between the Robber Barons and the Technology Titans, such as the Gates and Google.org foundations, as well as other less celebrated but equally important multi-billion dollar foundations that have been built on the great technology wealth that has been created over the past fifteen years (or less).

Private citizens today increasingly recognize the need to intervene directly in order to make up for Government’s failure to meet the social and civic needs of needy Americans at times of crisis. Events like Hurricane Katrina only drive the point further home. In addition, private American foundations take on global assignments to bring medical aid and basic infrastructure to refugees and citizens of other countries (these initiatives are not immune from domain experts’ criticism as misguided, such as some of the Gates Foundation medical programs in Africa) .

Why did private philanthropic efforts at the turn of the century identify the need to build public infrastructure as a high priority? Privileged donors sought to establish a common ground with the average American by literally creating a common physical social infrastructure—such as the National Parks System and the neighborhood playground—that would naturally bring people together in a neutral and shared environment. Shared experience in cherished shared civic spaces would bridge the chasm of great wealth by creating a common dialogue for all American citizens. The missions of many private foundations today are driven by this continuing perception of the need to establish common ground between highly fragmented social groups and are inspired by a renewed sense of civic duty that has been lost for many American citizens.

Democracy in America Revisited, First of a Series

Setting the Context

On Saturday, April 12, I participated in a special one-day seminar in San Francisco under the auspices of the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Society. This Socrates Society Salon, the ‘Future of American Democracy’, was led by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel. In addition to teaching “Justice, A Journey in Moral Reasoning”, one of the most popular courses at Harvard, Sandel is a highly respected contemporary political philosopher and author with an expertise on ethics.

The Internet has catalyzed the globalization of the information revolution and set in motion an irreversible march toward interconnectedness and interdependency on this planet. But interdependency, in and of itself, means nothing. What are we doing to cope with “Being Always On”, and how is this transformation of human relations transforming American democratic society?

In America, hyper-connectivity has sharpened mass awareness of the increasing social and economic inequalities that cleave the great divide between the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’. These inequities of our system raise questions of civic duty and economic empowerment that are central to the current American presidential debate. We are seeing significant increases in political participation by the young and by ethnic minorities who are traditionally uninterested in and disenfranchised from the election process. This empowerment promises to make the election of 2008 an inflection point in the evolutionary history of American democracy, although the postscript to this story has yet to be written and could take many different forms depending on who feels left out of the outcome.

I’ve titled this blog post and the related series of posts that follow ‘Democracy in America Revisited’. These brief comments capture the elements that were most important to me from the group discussion and from Professor Sandel’s comments in this outstanding seminar.

Have Prisons Become America's New Social Safety Net?

Yesterday, during a break at the Socrates Society San Francisco Salon on "The Future of American Democracy" moderated by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel, I had a conversation with one of my fellow seminar participants that shook me. She is active in helping transition convicts out of jail back into society by facilitating initial job placements in charitable organizations.

Commenting on the issues of income inequality in our country that we had just been discussing in the seminar, she asserted that, from her own personal experience working with convicts, "prison is now the safety net for low income people in San Francisco. You know where your next meal is coming from and you have greater security than out on the street."

The most profoundly disturbing thing about what she said was that it makes total sense to me. When we consider some of the root causes for this grotesque fraying of America's social contract with the less fortunate, we can start by recognizing that the decimation of the US public education system has negatively impacted upward economic mobility in this country for decades.

Today, as we approach the November election, one must recognize that America is at an inflection point in many ways. My greatest hope for our country is that we will not look back a decade from now and recognize too late the clear signposts of the beginning of the end of the American dream.

Some 2006 year-end statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs on the American prison population:

Summary findings

On December 31, 2006 —

– 2,258,983 prisoners were held in Federal or State prisons or in local jails – an increase of 2.9% from yearend 2005, less than the average annual growth of 3.4% since yearend 1995.
– 1,502,179 sentenced prisoners were under State or Federal jurisdiction.
– there were an estimated 501 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 U.S. residents – up from 411 at yearend 1995.
– the number of women under the jurisdiction of State or Federal prison authorities increased 4.5% from yearend 2005, reaching 112,498, and the number of men rose 2.7%, totaling 1,458,363.
At yearend 2006 there were 3,042 black male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,261 Hispanic male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males and 487 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males.

Our American democracy houses more prisoners than any other country in the world. Recent research from the Pew Center supports the case for a steady decline in upward mobility for the lowest segments of our society. At the multi-year prison population growth rate stated above, today we have approximately 0.77% of the American population in prisons. Is this any way to think about providing sanctuary for the poor in the American social contract? I don't think so, and I hope that we will elect political leaders who will be honest enough to not only call-out the social crisis that afflicts the poor in our country, but actually galvanize the political will that we must summon if we are to break this devastating trend.