Today we began our Summer 2008 Aspen Institute Socrates Society seminars. My session, moderated by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, addresses Media and Our Conflicting Values. And plenty of conflicting values emerged in our lively four hour discussion.

My takeaways after Day 1:

* The function of the FCC as public trustee, or steward, of the content broadcast by licensed content creators in America has been made largely irrelevant by the Internet. Historical approaches to media regulation in America are not useful in addressing the challenges of today and of the future, in my opinion.

* We live in a many-to-many world of content generation and broadcasting. The super-empowered individual on the Web wields disproportionate power over groups ranging from a small affinity circle to an entire society.

*Large media organizations also continue to wield huge power in disseminating information and in ’spinning’ or biasing content. While the Founding Fathers saw Government control of media/propaganda as the primary threat to free speech, we now live in a brave new world where any fanatic can wrap him or herself in the mantle of truth and spread lies unchecked.

* Defining regulatory boundaries is infinitely more complex when you have a multiplicity of transport mechanisms for different forms of protected free speech from a First Amendment perspective: for example, traditional linear over the air broadcast television, cable television, user-generated content on the web, and newly emerging forms of time-shifting content distribution (what I want when I want it on any device).

* Regulation of speech in any way raises fundamental societal challenges to open, democratic societies.

* The social contract of any democracy faces a basic tension between freedom and maintaining social order.

* Technology combined with human innovation in the media are exacerbating this tension in ways considered impossible just fifteen years ago.

So after Day 1 I have a lot of questions:

When it comes to regulating media and the web, how are we to decide the mechanisms for regulation?
Are we to expect the market to self-regulate? How do we distinguish between content that the market should self-regulate (various forms of entertainment) from content that debases and violates basic human rights (sexual slavery and child pornography on the Web)? How do we stop groups that re-write history (such as Holocaust deniers) from simply opening up shop on the Web and perpetuating lies? How do we prevent false stories about political candidates from being seen and accepted as fact by millions of people prior to elections?

Maybe I’ll have some answers, and certainly more questions, after Day 2. This is why we love the Socratic method. For another perspective on the Socrates Seminars, check out Sam Perry’s post on Conferenza.

Zeke Emanuel is known for having Big Ideas. His short, easy to read new book, “Healthcare, Guaranteed“, is a must-read.

I first met Zeke several years ago at the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Society, and Zeke has been one of the most popular Socrates seminar leaders on the topic of bioethics. An oncologist and currently the chair of the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, Zeke is a penetrating, deep thinker who knows how to cut to the core element of difficult issues. I have previously posted about Zeke when he remarked at our last Socrates gathering that our society is robbing posterity to live today. His new book is no less profound in its approach to simplifying the American health care system by gutting its core ’sacred cows’:

According to Newsweek’s review of “Healthcare, Guaranteed”, written by Mary Carmichael:

In place of all these institutions, Emanuel says, the government should offer every American a voucher for health insurance—one that covers the same benefits that members of Congress get. Insurance companies would have to accept the vouchers, and each person could choose from a variety of private networks of docs, hospitals and health plans. A National Health Board would oversee it all. And that’s pretty much it. Now the big question: how do we pay for it? Emanuel’s plan lowers some taxes by gutting costly programs, but it also adds a new fixed tax on some goods and services to pay for the vouchers. “Americans will come out revenue-neutral on average,” he says. “The poor will pay less.” And the rich will probably pay a lot more. Sweeping changes are one thing, but sweeping changes and a new tax? Even if the plan could save health care, it’ll be a hard sell.

Clearly not a layup, but also a very interesting and possibly a compelling solution to the broken healthcare financial reimbursement system in our country. So read this book– and let me know what you think by commenting on this blog post.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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…

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.

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….

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.

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.