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.

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

– 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.

I was recently interviewed by Karen Salmansohn, who writes a regular column for the Huffington Post, while I was at the Aspen Institute attending a Socrates Society Forum seminar on Energy Security.  Her article, ‘The Untold Cyber War’ , comments on an area of increasing personal and professional interest for me– protecting our nation’s vulnerability to a cyber attack that could cripple our critical data and communications infrastructure.

We are engaged in a full-on cyber war right now– and the bad guys aren’t just laptop-toting 17 year-olds fueled by Red Bull in the Ukraine.  Well-funded, organized groups (translates to state-sponsored) are constantly probing for exploitable weaknesses in our data network infrastructure, and they are not discriminating between the private sector and the government.  We must collaborate and share best practices to win this war– the costs of losing it will be severe, pervasive, and will wreak havoc across our socio-economic system very quickly.

To learn more about how to promote public private partnerships and see the agenda for the second annual IT Security Entrepreneurs Forum, go to www.publicprivatepartnerships.org.

I am at the Aspen Institute to attend a Socrates Society seminar this President’s weekend, and the headline for this post is a quote by Zeke Emanuel, Chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, who is moderating a session on "Resolving Bioethical Dilemmas" (believe it or not, his session is exclusively for teenagers– see Teen Socrates).

Zeke made this comment during our opening dinner panel discussion in the context of answering the following:

"What is a key question that you believe the next President of the United States should consider upon taking office?"

This simple statement is a profound and concise rendering of the American malady.  Think about it– American society has devolved to the point where virtually everything we experience is driven by a lust for instant gratification– from the mainstreaming of pornography to celebrity-seeking reality TV shows; from hasty tax stimulus packages to hedge funds; from inscrutable financial derivatives to ignorant day traders.

The popular media is consumed with the NOW.  The basic concept of long-term stewardship in public policy, of the obligation that we have as a society to bear responsibility for our children and their children, is a novelty.  Many people debating the impact of accelerating rates of climate change on the future of the world are missing the point– it’s all about posterity.  Have we truly forgotten that we are here on earth for something more than just our brief and individually insignificant moments of existence in time? 

I come to the Aspen Institute, where I currently co-chair the Socrates Society Advisory Board with Laura Lauder, for the luxury of being able to learn, for the gift of being able to step outside the narrow hallway of thinking that governs my everyday business life.  I come to the Aspen Institute to be able to hear truly insightful observations from brilliant people like Zeke Emanuel.

Tonight, 65 of us who are participating in four different seminars were fortunate to be able to hear other answers to this question from former CIA Director Jim Woolsey, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations Isobel Coleman, former Republican congressman from Oklahoma Mickey Edwards,  and Princeton University Professor of History Sean Wilentz. 

Now what are we going to do to get more people who can impact the future to remember that posterity matters?

Babar Ahmed is a talented up-and-coming movie director ("Royal Kill") and the son of Professor Akbar Ahmed, who first taught me about the history of Islam at the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Society.  Babar recently spoke about Islam at a gathering in Palm Beach.  The Palm Beach Post reported on his remarks:

"And so why are we seeing suicide bombings if Muslim history is so good?" he asked.

Because Islam is divided into three groups, Ahmed theorized, the conservative, the moderate and the extremist, the latter of which is "growing every single day."

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan, Ahmed said, orphans were driven over the border to Pakistan, where they were taken in and educated by the most primitive tribal schools, run by illiterates who could not read or properly interpret the Koran.

"In driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan," Ahmed said, "the United States developed relationships with military dictators which continue to this day. That may have worked in the short term, but it left the orphans poor, desperate and angry, without any skills except how to use a gun."

The current movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, makes the same point, he noted.

The solution, Ahmed said, is education, because the majority of Muslims are young. In Pakistan alone, he said, 40 percent of the population is under 16, and more receptive to radicalism.

"One half of the world’s population is Muslim, Christian or Jewish," Ahmed said, "and if we don’t start finding this common ground, we are going to be heading for a very turbulent century."

Babar is right on point.  One of the few successful models of bilingual interfaith educational success in the Middle East is Hand in Hand in Israel– the madrassas have a long way to go, but there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we can act to make sure that it is not on oncoming train…

I don’t read Plato often.  In fact, I don’t even have Plato’s Republic on the bedside table.  But I’m reading Plato today, as I prepare for my upcoming seminar at the Aspen Institute’s Socrates Society.  The three-day seminar that I am taking, Humanity, Power, Leadership: Strategizing Success, moderated by Leigh Hafrey, includes extensive readings about the Rwanda genocide, all of which have been important and eye-opening for me.

The thing that I like the most about the Socrates Society, second only to the lasting friendships I have made there over the past eleven years, is the luxury of having time to engage in critical thinking and open discussion on subjects that we don’t consider every day.  Which brings me back to Plato:

"… the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. . . . you must contrive for your future rulers another and a better life than that of a ruler, and then you may have a well-ordered State; for only in the State which offers this, will they rule who are truly rich, not in silver and gold, but in virtue and wisdom, which are the true blessings of life.  Whereas if they go to the administration of public affairs, poor and hungering after their own private advantage, thinking that hence they are to snatch the chief good, order there can never be; for they will be fighting about office, and the civil and domestic broils which thus arise will be the ruin of the rulers themselves and of the whole State."

                        Plato, The Republic, 428/427 – 348/347 B.C.E.

The relevance of this text today in the United States of America, where so much of our political system is consumed by "hungering" for the advantage of special interests trying to snatch "the chief good", is striking.  As our society faces large issues concerning the common good such as global warming and the equitable allocation of increasingly scarce natural resources, we should all wish for the ruler who is not only virtuous, but who can show enlightened leadership.  Plato’s text certainly raises a lot of fundamental questions, and I hope to come back from this year’s gathering of the Socrates Society with interesting answers after rigorous debate.