If you are a reader who likes this blog, have I got a deal for you!
I have done something I never thought I would do– I have “self-published” a book with Amazon.The paperback is available now, and the ebook (cheaper still) will be available in a couple of days.
Every other book I’ve written–and there have been nine of them–has been issued by either an academic press or a trade publisher. It can be an onerous process; with academic presses, especially, there are usually lengthy times for peer review, changes demanded, etc. This time, for what I’m pretty sure will be my last book, I decided to short-circuit the process–and not so incidentally, keep the book affordable, something few publishers seem to care about.
The book is titled “Living Together: Mending a Fractured America,” and I’m sharing the introduction below. I hope some of you will be motivated to buy it, and–if you like it–tell your friends.
We’ll see how this experiment in self-promotion pans out…..
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We—by which I mean humanity, and especially citizens of the United States—find ourselves in the middle of a paradigm shift, a fundamental reconfiguring of the basic assumptions through which we view the world we inhabit. Such shifts are not unprecedented (the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution are arguably an example), but while they are occurring, people on either side of the shift find it difficult, if not impossible, to communicate with each other; they occupy different realities.
As humanity negotiates and reacts to accelerating change, individuals are faced with a rapidly morphing information environment, a reversion to overt and troubling tribalism, deepening economic inequities, and growing recognition of the inadequacies and corruption of America’s current legal and political structures. All of these elements of contemporary reality pose a challenge to previously-held worldviews.
Making this time in human history even more daunting is the fact that, while individuals are trying to make sense of the economic and social challenges they are experiencing, they are also facing the very real possibility that climate change will cause large portions of the planet to become uninhabitable—with consequences that are, for most Americans, unimaginable.
In the United States, the 2016 election and its aftermath have exposed the persistence of significant fault-lines in American society and forced recognition of the extent to which a longtime, steady erosion of the country’s democratic norms has hollowed out and corrupted this country’s governing institutions.
That erosion is one of a number of unprecedented social and economic challenges made more daunting by a splintered and constantly changing media landscape. Changes to journalism driven by the Internet have dramatically exacerbated the problems inherent in democratic decision-making. Actual news based upon verifiable fact is still available but diminishing, especially at the local level. Cable news and the Internet’s “information” environment enable and encourage confirmation bias, and are rife with spin, “fake news” and outright propaganda. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United increased public recognition of—and cynicism about– the disproportionate power wielded by corporate America through lobbying, political contributions and influence-peddling. Together with the enormous and widening gap between the rich and the rest, recognition of the outsized influence of money in America’s political system feeds suspicion of all government decision-making.
In order for democracy to function, there must be widespread trust in the integrity of electoral contests. The fundamental democratic idea is a fair fight, a contest of competing ideas, with the winners legitimized and authorized to carry out their agendas. Increasingly, however, those democratic contests have been marred by disinformation, as well as by bare-knuckled power plays and numerous mechanisms—including gerrymandering and vote suppression—through which partisans game the system. As a result, citizens’ trust in government and other social institutions has dangerously diminished. Without that trust—without a widespread belief in an American “we,” an overarching polity to which all citizens belong and in which all citizens are valued—tribalism thrives. Especially in times of rapid social change, racial resentments grow. The divide between urban and rural Americans widens, as does the gap between various “elites” and others. Economic insecurity and social dysfunction are exacerbated by the absence of an adequate social safety net, adding to resentment of both government and the “Other.”
Making matters worse, in the midst of these wrenching changes, Americans (accidentally, to be sure) elected a President incapable of recognizing, understanding or dealing with them.
Citizens in 21st Century America are facing a globalized, technocratic, increasingly complex world that poses unprecedented challenges to the goal of e pluribus unum (not to mention human understanding and survival). The existential question we face is: Can government policies create a genuine “us” out of so many different/diverse “I’s” and “we’s”? Can policymakers use law and legislative processes to create a supportive, nourishing culture that remains true to the Enlightenment’s essential insights, while modifying or discarding those that are no longer so essential? If so, how? How does this nation overcome the escalating assaults on science, reality and the rule of law and create a functioning, trustworthy democratic system?
This book was written to suggest that we can answer those questions in the affirmative, if we can muster the political will, and to suggest policies that would allow that to be accomplished.
The challenges America faces tend to fall into three (interrelated and sometimes overlapping) categories: Ignorance (defined as lack of essential information, not stupidity); Inequality (poverty, civic inequality, power and informational asymmetries among others) and Tribalism (“us versus them”—racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, the urban/rural divide, and political identity.)
An old lawyer once told me that there is really only one legal or political question: “what do we do?” How do we fashion concrete and politically tenable answers to the multitude of questions raised by social and technological change? How do we live together in what should be our brave new world?
That is the fundamental question explored in this book.
As Part I will set out in much more detail, our cultural assumptions and social institutions are in the process of being upended, and issues we’ve dealt with more or less adequately (or swept under various rugs) have suddenly become much more salient and disruptive. We face anew the age-old question: how should humans govern themselves? What institutional arrangements are most likely to be perceived as fair and just by most people, even when those people have very different desires, abilities, beliefs and needs? What sorts of governance and institutional arrangements are most likely to promote what Aristotle called “human flourishing?”
In the 18thCentury, Enlightenment philosophers answered that question by proposing a social contract based upon the issues and understandings of their times. Those philosophers and scientists challenged longtime assumptions about how a society should be constructed, how it should be governed and what it should value. In the United States, the nation’s Founders built a legal and constitutional system based upon Enlightenment insights and values and the belief that human flourishing could best be facilitated by a limited-authority government that allowed individuals to exercise personal autonomy to the greatest extent compatible with an overarching order.
That original vision and approach to governance has never been uncontested or fully realized, but it has provided the framework—the paradigm—that shaped subsequent policy argumentation. That liberal democratic framework, as it has evolved to the present, rests upon a (necessarily limited) respect for self-determination-the ability of individuals, cultures and states to determine and pursue their own ends, their own telos. Respect for the right of individuals or groups to determine their own life choices requires rejection of many legally-imposed uniformities and recognition of the fact that human diversity is both inevitable and socially desirable.
The principles that emerged from the Enlightenment and were embraced by America’s founders are not now and never have been universally held. Furthermore, even among people who do accept the general framework and stated values that undergird America’s Constitution, there are significant differences of opinion about what individual liberty should mean and when government authority may be properly exercised. Ongoing tensions between the majoritarian “popular passions” that so worried the architects of America’s constitution and Enlightenment ideas about the importance of individual autonomy have spawned a long line of academic studies and a significant body of constitutional jurisprudence.
In the 21st Century, the increasingly frenetic pace of technological, economic and cultural change has dramatically intensified the conflict between the individual’s right to self-determination and societies’ need for social cohesion and has tested the country’s purported commitments to equality and respect for human difference. Previously marginalized populations have entered both the workforce and the political arena, contending for equal social and civic status. Demographic change threatens previously entrenched social privilege, and feeds the white nationalist movement that has emerged with such ferocity in parts of Europe and the United States. That movement, together with certain strains of populism, appeals especially to people disdainful of diversity and the claims of previously marginalized groups—and for that matter, Enlightenment values—finding them not simply offensive, but existentially threatening.
The dramatic rise of economic inequality has not only exacerbated group tensions, but—as Part One will describe in much more detail–has challenged what is essentially our 18th Century understanding of the nature of both liberty and equality.
To belabor the obvious, contemporary Americans live in a rapidly changing social and economic environment. We find ourselves in a very different, and infinitely more complex and interrelated country and world than the one most of us were born into. As a result, the potential for a wide variety of conflicts has increased. Regulatory activity, both national and supra-national, has grown, due to recognition that many of today’s issues are national or global in scope and aren’t amenable to state or local remedies. National and international authorities will continue to be established, and to grow, in order to deal with environmental threats, trade issues, immigration, humanitarian crises and power conflicts; their effectiveness in mediating conflict will depend upon whether they are perceived as legitimate and fair by those over whom they assert jurisdiction.
As this is being written, fundamental and acrimonious disputes about immigration, racial equity, women’s rights, global alliances and the rule of law are being further inflamed by the daily tweets of an authoritarian President who is widely seen as corrupt, incompetent and mentally unstable. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court has been compromised by its growing politicization, and most recently by legislative tactics that allowed the unprecedented “theft” of a seat that President Obama should have filled. People are increasingly taking to the streets in protest, convinced that their grievances will not be addressed by a system they see as fatally flawed. It is not possible to predict the duration, severity or consequences of the widespread and growing civil unrest that seems likely to get much worse before it gets better.
Assuming—as hopeful people must—that a reformed democratic order will eventually emerge from the chaos and hostility we are experiencing, we urgently need to revisit our basic assumptions about governance and the social contract. We need to critically assess what has gone wrong, move to safeguard those elements that have proved their ongoing utility, and revise others. We need to learn from the country’s mistakes if we are to facilitate the building of a better, fairer and more durable society.
The questions are eternal: What do humans owe each other? What is the nature of liberty? Of equality? What is the proper role of government? What should the rules be, who should make those rules, and how should they be enforced?
The questions may be eternal, but the answers are not.
In the pages that follow, I will describe what seem to me to be among the most daunting challenges we face as a country. I will refer to and build upon current research that identifies and describes those challenges, and I will argue that they are interrelated in multiple and often convoluted ways. Indeed, those inextricable inter-relationships pose one of the thorniest of the challenges we face– how to recognize the ways in which policies interact, in order to avoid the negative, unintended consequences that so often follow well-meaning policy change.
Part One of this book will detail the threat posed by contemporary manifestations of tribalism and civic polarization; by the dramatic, accelerating changes in the economy and the nature of work; by the “brokenness” and corruption of a current American government that cronyism while rejecting science, evidence and longstanding understandings of what constitutes fair play. Chapters will also address the dangers posed by attacks on public education, by propaganda that has become ubiquitous in the age of the Internet, and by refusal to recognize the extent to which all of these challenges are likely to be dwarfed by the effects of climate change.
In Part Two, I will propose policy changes prompted by these analyses—policy changes that, taken together, would amount to the creation of a new, more expansive social contract appropriate to the age in which we live; a set of policies that would address our growing inequality and operate to moderate the hostilities that characterize current debates among America’s quarrelsome tribes. Policy changes that would facilitate our ability to live together peacefully and productively.
I am not naïve enough to expect current policymakers to embrace these proposals; certainly, a sizable number of the people serving in Congress as I write this have demonstrated neither an interest in advancing the common good nor the capacity to understand the problems America currently faces. However, if (as I hope) the increase in civic awareness and participation that followed the 2016 election and the various public demonstrations and political movements generated by the so-called “resistance” result in the election of a more thoughtful, responsive and ethical set of policymakers, perhaps some of the arguments that follow will provide grist for discussion, debate and corrective action.
If America is, as I think, on the cusp of a broad upheaval triggered by dramatic social, economic and technological changes aggravated by the broken-ness of our current governing institutions, this country’s “best and brightest” will need to explore a variety of potential changes to our governmental, economic and social systems.
This book is my contribution to those explorations, and I hope it will be useful.
