Heads in the Sand
Do you feel comfortable about our society, or the state of the world? Most Americans don’t. Nor do they trust the institutions of society, and especially not government. What’s most unsettling is that people in charge don’t actually seem to be in charge. Bad schools stay bad; transmission lines languish on the drawing boards; public agencies are run by the unions, for the unions.
An overwhelming sense of futility helps explain the popularity of populist candidates. You can practically feel the ground shaking, but Washington insiders stare wide-eyed at the failures—at the border, on urban streets, on the coastline, in the classroom—and stay the course. Political insiders literally can’t imagine any other governing framework.
Former Indiana Governor and Purdue University President Mitch Daniels has a well-deserved reputation for practical and effective leadership. In a column this week, Daniels suggests that a “major crisis seems inevitable” because “Washington will not face up to its duty” to sweep away “encrusted bureaucracies and vested interests.” So here we are, in a social and political free-for-all, not knowing how to pull out and create a framework for a flourishing society.
The first step, we think, is to embrace a new governing principle: Choices should be made by humans taking responsibility, not by mindless bureaucracy. Nothing will work sensibly, or fairly, until Americans can roll up their sleeves and get things done. Our protection against poor choices should be individual accountability of the people in charge, not individual rights by disgruntled people to block transmission lines and entrench lousy teachers and rogue cops.
Re-empowering human responsibility will require a kind of bureaucratic revolution—area by area, simplifying legal structures and drawing clear lines of authority and accountability. As Philip Howard argues in his forthcoming book, Everyday Freedom, the current tangle of red tape and self-interested rights is doomed to fail. Indeed, by replacing human responsibility with legal bickering, it was designed to fail. American democracy cannot work, as James Madison put it, without “the highest possible degree of responsibility” by people in charge.
The other alternative to the status quo is some form of autocracy. In her essay this week about Everyday Freedom, Mary Williams Walsh of News Items draws a straight line from America’s bureaucratic and legal failures to the resentment that keeps many voters clinging to a would-be strongman.
The current system will not change itself. We think it’s time for Americans to decide which way our country ought to go. We’re organizing events around the country around the general theme of system failure and overhaul. Let us know if you’d like to help, and please forward this note to friends who might help.
Philip discussed Not Accountable with Glenn Loury on his podcast, The Glenn Show.
Adrian Wooldridge cites our work in his recent column for Bloomberg: “The problem in the West is a combination of politics and legal rights. Politicians must wage an unforgiving war against activists who challenge their every decision and threaten to kick them out of their jobs. ‘Democratic debate is a cacophony of horns honking without any way to dislodge the traffic jam,’ as Philip K. Howard,…founder of Common Good, puts it.”
Robert Whitcomb discusses Everyday Freedom in his column for GoLocalProv News, writing: “Reading this book, which is rich with observations by a wide range of experts, might wake up people to how American life can be made considerably more humane, fairer and more prosperous by loosening the bonds of rigid rules and letting people, especially those in authority, exercise their judgment within broad, common-sensical parameters.”