When President Obama gave his sixth
State of the Union address earlier this month, he noted that the times called
not for a shopping list of proposed legislation and policy. Instead, he discussed the broad issues
that the United States must address in the coming years. “ . . .what I offer
tonight,” the President said, “is a set of concrete, practical proposals to
speed up growth, strengthen the middle class and build new ladders of
opportunity into the middle class.”
The goals he went on to describe included:
·
Building a sustainable economy. Opportunities for innovation in this
area include closing tax loopholes for businesses, rebuilding the nation’s
infrastructure, improving the connection between high tech businesses and
research, supporting entrepreneurs, and building what he described as a “middle
class economy.”
·
Focusing on the Environment by ensuring American
energy independence and dealing decisively with global climate change.
·
Fixing the immigration system.
·
Rebuilding the American educational system to be
effective in the new global information society by reforming job training,
guaranteeing access to education, and repositioning K-12 and higher education.
·
Improving the economic position of America’s
workforce, by ensuring equal pay for equal work for women, increasing wages,
and improving retirement savings.
·
Expanding civic engagement domestically and
internationally through expanding voter rights, ending the “permanent war
footing” and emphasizing intelligence and diplomacy, promoting international
understanding, and improving veteran benefits.
It was pretty clear, even during
the speech itself, that it would be difficult for the U.S. government to
develop a successful legislative agenda around this—or any other—list of social
goals. For the past six years, the
Republican Party has clearly demonstrated that it has no intention of partnering
with President Obama on legislative initiatives. Now that the Republicans control Congress, we can anticipate
almost complete stalemate at the top of our government.
It has also become clear that our
federal government is no longer in the hands of the people. In 1941, Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote this
about the national government:
The state is not an end in itself,
but a means to the virtue and intelligence, that is the happiness, of the
citizens. It is held together by justice, through which it cares for the common
good.
Today, however, many elected
officials too often owe their allegiance not to the voters who they were
elected to represent but to the corporations and other moneyed sources that
fund their election campaigns.
Robert Reich reports that, in 2012, a record $6.3 billion was spent on
Congressional and Presidential campaigns.
The 2016 election is likely to set an even higher record, with most of
that money not coming from individual voter donations but from major investments
by corporations, interest groups, and the very rich. The system, quite simply, has lost the moral high ground.
So, what can we do? If we cannot rely on top-down government
to serve the needs of the American people, then we need to work from the bottom
up. How can we crowd-source the development of a
legislative and policy agenda to support the critical areas that President
Obama laid before the federal government in the State of the Union?
Ideally, consideration of a
legislative/policy agenda would begin at the neighborhood level. People—citizens, voters—would gather,
identify one or more of the major areas identified in the State of the Union,
and discuss what the government should do to realize the vision for that area. The results from neighborhood
discussions could then be taken to a community discussion and then to a
statewide discussion, etc. At each
level, it would be important to have truly representative samplings of the
population so that we get a true sense of what the real community believe. The sampling model of the General
Social Survey might provide a good model.
The goal would be to directly involve voters in the process of
identifying legislative and policy priorities in specific areas of civic life
and taking the results to elected officials who would then be asked to
represent the voters wishes in Congress or to tell the voters why they are
wrong.
Who would organize such a
process? It would require an
organization that can operate effectively at all levels—neighborhood,
community, state, national.
It could be managed by the political parties, perhaps, or by an existing
civil society organization—the League of Women Voters, the Rotary, etc.—or by a
foundation. The challenge would be
to keep big moneyed interests out of the process entirely. It might take some time for a sustainable process to emerge,
but it is worth the effort to re-empower American citizens to guide their
democracy.
President Obama closed his speech
with a call to action. “And
finally,” he said, “let’s remember that our leadership is defined not just by
our defense against threats but by the enormous opportunities to do good and
promote understanding around the globe, to forge greater cooperation, to expand
new markets, to free people from fear and want. And no one is better positioned
to take advantage of those opportunities than America.” Perhaps one of the things we need to do
in this era of innovation, is to find new ways to empower citizens to directly
participate in their government.
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