Toward an All-American Affairs

We need to find a way forward together. By we I mean Americans, all Americans in our splendid and difficult diversity. We need new ideas, including the kinds of ideas that are being put forward on these pages. But we are no longer in the eighteenth century, when a small group of propertied white men can provide the ideas, doctrines, and laws to guide the nation. The America of 2076 will be unrecognizable to our forefathers. Not because of the actual make up of our population but because of who is in charge. If we are still to be America, still bound by our founding documents and a shared history of trying to live up to the values we proclaimed in them, we will have to find ways of interpreting those documents and renewing our identity that are genuinely American—created by all of us.

Let me begin with praise for the endeavor of this journal. I agree with its opening premise: “The conventional party platforms no longer address or even comprehend the most pressing challenges facing American institutions.” The “endless calls for new New Deals and another Reagan Revolution,” have proved fruitless; we face a deep crisis in our institutions and our physical and moral infrastructure. “[O]ur intellectuals as well as our politicians . . . view the ideologies of the last few decades as the only alternatives and their policies as the only solutions.”¹ American Affairs seeks to break new ground.

I see many pitfalls ahead, however. I offer a critique in good faith, in the spirit that I would see American politics conducted on both sides of the aisle or indeed in a forum that dispenses with that aisle altogether. I will avoid invective and engage in the way that I would be engaged with in my turn. But I will put forward truths as I see them, respectfully but honestly. I try to come not from the Left, but from the America I see and seek.

Provocative Ideas

The first issue of American Affairs, which I have had a chance to digest at length, delivered on its promise to provide food for fresh thought. In my reading, a number of ideas and proposals stood out. Had I read these ideas without knowing their provenance, I would not have been able to guess whether the author was writing from the Right or the Left.

In his article on “A Renewed Republican Party,” Joshua Mitchell advances an argument similar to the thesis of British thinker David Goodhart in his book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. Goodhart describes the major fault line between supporters and opponents of Brexit as the line between citizens from “somewhere” and citizens from “anywhere,” defined more precisely as citizens typically without higher education who are rooted in their communities and citizens with higher education who construct their communities wherever they go.

Mitchell similarly recasts Trumpian populism as a “revolt in the name of national sovereignty,” a rooted nationalism versus a cosmopolitan globalism. He turns to Alexis de Tocqueville to combat the dangers of the disembodied cosmopolitan mindset. “Tocqueville’s ideas about voluntary associations, about family, about religion, and about federalism, point to the need to bring the soul down to earth, to connect it to others,” Mitchell writes. “The embodied soul formed through these institutions is hardly irrational, as the cosmopolitan would insist; the embodied soul, on the contrary, is the healthy soul, whose interests are formed in and through relations with others.”²

I reject Mitchell’s characterization of cosmopolitanism; it is perfectly possible to be both a rooted patriot and a believer in universal human values across cultures. But my own writing on the value of care, understood as investment in others rather than in ourselves, and the power and necessity of strong human relationships, is quite consistent with a conception of the embodied soul.³ Assuming that the purpose of Mitchell’s writing is more than a polemic supporting a reimagined right against an imagined left, we might fruitfully explore common ground here. Similarly, Mitchell’s critique of crony capitalism, “the close alliance between growing state bureaucracies and large corporations,” resonates across party lines and can help create new political alliances.⁴

Julius Krein offers a detailed analysis of James Burnham’s critique of managerialism, to which I return below. “Despite the universal extension of capitalist appetites and ambitions,” he writes, “bourgeois institutions must rely upon and maintain a certain decentralization and localization through which individual property owners can exercise their independence.” The essence of managerialism is that the owners cede control to the managers to increase production beyond what the owners can consume, ultimately separating production and consumption. Instead of an owner-producer, as small business or even large factories would presume, “the typical shareholder of a large corporation today is a fund manager who receives capital from a manager of a ‘fund of funds,’ which in turn receives its capital from a pension fund or endowment that is ultimately managed by its own managers under the auspices of the state.”⁵ These distortions of capitalism are ultimately incompatible with democracy.

Finally, Adam Adatto Sandel contributes an article called “Putting Work in Its Place: Lessons from Hegel.” In all my own writing on work and family, it never occurred to me to turn to Hegel. Yet I certainly agree with Sandel’s opening: “We allow the realm of work to infiltrate every aspect of our lives. . . . we find it difficult to disentangle family life from the seemingly ubiquitous demands of our job. What is needed is a way of appreciating the distinctiveness of work and the way it contributes to our identities, while at the same time figuring out a way to keep work in its place.” Beyond work and family, Sandel also seeks to value multiple kinds of work, “to recognize and honor the substantive merit of making and building things of concrete use to our fellow citizens.”⁶

Pitfalls Ahead

I take these ideas seriously, as concepts and principles that might help us address important public problems. I am aware as I write those words that many of my friends and companions on the Left will think me naive at best and traitorous at worst. The Politico article announcing American Affairs described it as trying to lay an intellectual foundation for Trumpism, which is not an endeavor I have any interest in being part of. Yet Julius Krein is quoted as saying something quite different: “Our goal is to provide a forum for people who believe that the conventional ideological categories and policy prescriptions of recent decades are no longer relevant to the most pressing problems and debates facing our country.”⁷ That is needed, in my view, from the Left as well as from the Right.

The problem is that a forum like American Affairs cannot possibly work to develop and spread ideas beyond a tiny slice of the nation’s intellectual elite. If the goal is to create a set of ideas to provide an intellectual foundation and policy agenda for the Trump political coalition—working-class white families, evangelical Christians, rural conservatives, and small business owners—then perhaps these ideas need not spread beyond Republican strategists and political operatives. But if we are to take the journal’s mission at face value, then the first two issues reveal that it is bound to fail.

For new ideas to gain traction, they must be transposed to the twenty-first century through a process of far broader authorship. They must be trusted as genuine ideas rather than as mere blinds for traditional conservative or liberal orthodoxy. And they must actually be tested on the ground, in communities, towns, cities and states. Here is what each of these processes would require.

Transposition

It is impossible to read the first two issues of American Affairs, or indeed to have attended the opening event in New York in February, without being bowled over by the whiteness and maleness of the authors and the audience. All but one of the articles in the first two issues are by men, all of them white. The opening was 90 percent men, roughly 95 percent white. The editors may not have intended that result; they may well have invited a more diverse set of authors to write and a more diverse audience to attend. But the facts remain.

I am well aware that to call out these facts is to commit the sin of “identity politics” and hence “not to get” what the journal is trying to achieve. But bear with me. Imagine that a group only of women, African Americans, Asian Americans, or Hispanic Americans launched a journal called American Affairs and called for ideas to move the country forward. Accusations of identity politics would fly. But how then is it different if the identity of the group is white men? How can we quilt our wonderfully diverse nation together with squares that are all the same?

It is as if the editors, funders, and contributors still believe we are living in eighteenth-century America, when the founders and framers were all propertied white men. I am a great admirer of those men, believing that the ideals they enshrined in our founding documents have enabled the steady transformation of American society for the better, a social as well as political revolution, whether they intended it or not. The way forward is not to ignore those social and demographic changes, but instead to learn to see our past and our present through different and more complex lenses.

Consider the transformation of Thomas Jefferson. I am a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, which means that I grew up referring to “Mr. Jefferson,” as if he might stroll down the street at any moment. The University of Virginia is his university; we made regular school pilgrimages to Monticello to see his inventions and collections and to pay homage to the Declaration of Independence.

Plenty of reverence remains. Today, however, a trip to Monticello paints a very different picture—a more complex and challenging picture—of Jefferson the man and the realities of plantation life. It is now apparent, through the renovation of Mulberry Row and the descriptions of cooks, carpenters, masons, and overseers, that Jefferson’s ability to be the intellectual, author, politician, and collector was dependent on the people he enslaved. He fathered children with his wife’s half-sister—half-sister because his father-in-law had had sexual relations with one of his slaves. These facts are presented side-by-side with Jefferson’s achievements—neither side cancels out the other, but both must be acknowledged and integrated to understand his legacy.

Just so with the nation Jefferson helped to found. To source ideas for our nation’s future from only one group in our society is to try to roll back history and deny the country we have become. It is not that wealthy white men cannot represent and even speak for other groups; to deny that possibility is to deny the possibility of a representative republic and to descend into the endless recursiveness of a nation of “I”s. “We the people” must be a whole greater than the sum of the individual citizens; it must be possible for many different Americans to speak as representatives of the “we” beyond their individual lived identity and experience.

What American Affairs appears not to understand is that representing one another requires engaging with one another. Genuinely engaging: writing for one another, reading what each other writes, responding in good faith, persuading and allowing ourselves to be persuaded. That cannot happen if only white men are in the room. And the contributors thus far seem to have little awareness of how their words will be heard or how their assertions may be interpreted differently by different audiences.

To make this point concrete, consider Adam Adatto Sandel’s analysis of Hegel’s concept of the interdependent spheres of the economy and the family. He writes:

Family members commit to each other and stick together regardless of their career aspirations and accomplishments. Hegel sees in such loyalty a kind of freedom that contrasts with the individuality of the marketplace. Unlike a producer or a consumer, who is limited by the various other professions in society and what they provide, a family member enjoys, within the family, the freedom of being unlimited by anything external or alien.⁸

Sandel goes on to take this freedom at face value, contrasting the “shared freedom of the family” with “the individual self-direction that prevails within the economy.”⁹ I have written at great length about the importance of family and the value of care, indeed the need to value care—understood as investing in others—as much as we value career—investing in ourselves. I regard a woman’s or a man’s decision to put families ahead of careers at various times in their lives as worthy individually and valuable socially. I believe that both women and men should be as free as possible, as least as far as social mores allow, to invest in their families, however those families are constructed.

Still, all I can think when I read Hegel, and Sandel’s paraphrase of Hegel, is: “a woman would never have written that.” Even the most tradition-minded of women would never—certainly not in the nineteenth century and still not today—think of the family sphere as a sphere of freedom. The family is her sphere of work—hard work—and of highly constraining expectations of the roles she must play: daughter, wife, mother, sister. It may be important, fulfilling, rewarding work; she may choose to embrace those roles. But for most of human history, and for the vast majority of women still in the world today, she had no choice about playing them.

Surely Sandel would benefit from hearing and understanding just how circumscribed his view of family is. Not necessarily wrong—for men—but sharply limited. He would benefit just as I have benefitted in coming to understand that the narrative of feminism that I grew up with—of women locked in suburban houses without the possibility of “individual self-direction” that a job or career would provide is a narrative largely limited to middle-class and upper-class white women; African American women, by contrast, had almost always worked. Or indeed, as I have benefitted in hearing after the publication of my article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All in the Atlantic in 2012, many men feel they have no choice but to accept the role of family provider and the dictates of alpha-male competition, even if they would in fact prefer to spend far more time with their families.

The starting premise for any group trying to break free of “conventional ideological categories and policy prescriptions” must be genuine diversity of thought and experience. I mean that for the Left as well as for the Right. The conventional Republican-Democrat divide has become a color divide and increasingly a gender divide. In the 2016 elections, women preferred Clinton over Trump 54 percent to 42 percent, roughly the same as Obama over Romney (55 to 44) and as Obama over McCain (56 to 43). On the flip side, 53 percent of men voted for Trump and 41 percent for Clinton—the same 12-point margin. That means that both sides can only move “beyond Right and Left” if they can pull together thinkers, writers, and supporters who align along social and economic cleavages that do not track race and gender. For those on the left, it means not assuming that African American, Latino, Asian and women conservatives are betraying their communities. For those on the right, it means rejecting tokenism and having a real debate. For both sides, it means assuming that all individuals have multiple identities and not presuming that any one of those identities automatically dictates their political views.

I can hear the immediate response of some readers on the Right. They would love to engage, if only the Left were not so intolerant! Indeed, after my debate with Peter Thiel at the opening event, several audience members came up to make the point that although they were glad to see me there, they could not resist pointing out that if one of them tried to speak at a liberal event, they would not be welcomed, but attacked. Given the physical violence against liberal Middlebury professor Allison Stanger by students outraged at her willingness to interview the conservative Charles Murray, they are not wrong.

Still, in this instance, the onus is on American Affairs to invite a far broader array of contributors. Asking me is a start, as is being willing to publish my critique. But it is not the same as real engagement with representatives of the America we actually live in. If the editors do reach out, on the other hand, I encourage authors who may disagree with much that has been written thus far to engage rather than turn their backs.

Trust

The genuine embrace of diversity is also essential to combat the cynicism and distrust that plagues any effort on either side of the political divide to find a way forward that would scramble current ideological categories—precisely the mission that American Affairs advances. In an age of spin, demonization, and rampant conspiracy theory, every sentence by an ideological adversary is scrutinized for the keys to the hidden party code. If the presumption is that conservatives favor the rich and do not care about the poor, or seek to shrink government and strengthen markets no matter what, or really want to preserve a white Christian America, then any statement they make about helping the poor, or helping government work better, or helping immigrants assimilate and flourish is heard as either hypocrisy or deception.

On the flip side, if the presumption is that liberals hate the rich and are willing to foment class warfare, or favor outsourcing care of our fellow citizens to government rather than weaving the social fabric necessary to take on those obligations ourselves, or want a multicultural America that will vote for Democrats forever at the expense of white Americans, then any effort they make to push past classic liberal orthodoxy is similarly suspect. Support for equal opportunity is heard as code for equal outcomes. Outrage at the cost and bureaucratic nightmare of American healthcare masks a desire to lock voters into yet another big government entitlement. And celebration of the richness and strength of the American tapestry of race, religion, and ethnicity rejects any notion of a core American identity in favor of unmoored globalism.

Disrupting distrust requires countering expectations in bold and unexpected ways. Readers and viewers must see something surprising and different enough to jolt them out of their preconceptions. Franklin Foer writes about Barack Obama’s decision to reach out to white rural voters, not expecting to win them over but respecting them enough to address their concerns.¹⁰ Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia during his first presidential campaign in March 2008, entitled “A More Perfect Union,” had a similar effect. His willingness to take on a tough subject honestly and emotionally built trust even with those who disagreed with him.

Donald Trump has been a master of this kind of disruptive trust-building, albeit in ways that many of us find repulsive and dangerous. His entire assault on political correctness convinced many voters that he was real, a quality they valued more than his positions or behavior. As he continually poked the establishment bear, the ensuing outrage from both Democrat and Republican elites strengthened this trust by eliciting the very condescension, disdain, and indifference that alienate and activate his supporters in the first place and that further convinced them he could be trusted to represent them.

The only way for a journal to break through the “Washington Wall” of presumed ideological allegiance is to foil expectations with regard to authors as much as content. Only unexpected people saying unexpected things will work. The practical consequence reinforces the point above: the need for dramatic diversification of the contributors to American Affairs, but with a more strategic aim.

To take an example, Joshua Mitchell writes in the first issue about how the Republicans “must now turn their attention to the inward calling of covenantal nationalism.” This is a new term, at least to me, and intriguing. He continues: “Identity politics . . . has betrayed African Americans and undermined the covenantal tropes that have given the African American churches (still the best hope within the African American community) the strength to perdure.”¹¹ Here my antennae go up, and not in a good way. Critique of “identity politics” by white men is immediately suspect, as white men never seem to understand how their politics is also identity politics—not always, but often. Not that they seek to advance the supremacy of white males explicitly or even deliberately, but that they are so often completely oblivious to how the laws and policies they promote will affect people other than white men.

Second, the parenthetical phrase “still the best hope within the African American community” strikes me as extraordinarily patronizing. Would Mitchell actually write those words if he expected his readers to include African Americans? I admire the religious faith of some of my African American colleagues; scholars like Stephen Carter have also opened my eyes to the ways that liberal assumptions of broad atheism or agnosticism are often both wrong and offensive.¹² Recognition that religion is not simply the purview of the right, or from a conservative point of view, that broader religious coalitions could and should be built around specific issues, much as some liberals have reached out to Christian evangelicals on environmental issues, could indeed represent new thinking. But to write about it in a way that is bound to offend the very constituency that Mitchell purportedly seeks to reach out to is blind at best and hypocritical at worst.

Mitchell goes on to equate identity politics with “Democratic Party racism,” arguing that “the only way African Americans (and indeed any other ethnic groups) can gain acceptance in the Democratic Party is to abjure or mask their religious sentiments and learn the language of identity politics.”¹³ This is absurd. Barack Obama delivered a stirring eulogy at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston after the Dylan Roof massacre. Speaking in the cadences of a sermon, he quoted scripture and sang “Amazing Grace.” He openly talked about his own religious faith and prayed in public. His organization for African American men is called My Brother’s Keeper.

My point is not to take down Mitchell. On the contrary, the only way forward is to abjure polemics, no matter how psychologically satisfying they may be. It is rather to show how the current incarnation of American Affairs cannot possibly build trust beyond the circle of the conservative converted. A serious effort to shake up the old order would ask someone like Eddie Glaude, professor of religion and director of African American studies at Princeton, to write about the place of the black church in African American politics. Or Lydia Bean, executive director of Faith in Texas, which describes itself as a “multi-racial, multi-faith movement for the common good,” to write on the extent to which the movement includes meaningful conservative participation or whether a similar movement could be built from a conservative perspective.

The axiom “be the change you want to see” applies here. If the goal is genuinely to move beyond today’s Right and Left, to create the possibility of new coalitions or perhaps even new parties to meet a set of challenges that our current political system simply cannot address, then drawing from and writing for possible members of those new coalitions is essential. If the goal is instead to forge an ideology that will hold the present Trump coalition together—an almost entirely white coalition embracing traditional gender roles—then say so.

Testing

The third problem with American Affairs thus far applies to all journals of political ideas and opinion, on both left and right. National Affairs, National Review, National Interest, American Prospect, Democracy Journal, American Interest, Commentary, Dissent—they are all based in either Washington or New York. They are all fora for debates about political theory, ideology, human nature, the role of government, and the ideas and principles that ultimately translate into party platforms. Most of the articles are unencumbered by the complexities and contradictions of empirical research.

As someone who spent twenty years of my career as an academic at some of the world’s great universities, I believe strongly in the necessity of unfettered thought and the value of theory. Politicians and policymakers often jeer at academics; indeed the word “academic” in policy debates means irrelevant. I also often hear the gentle jibe that “something works in practice but not in theory.” Yet the work of theorizing means trying to find patterns and principles that provide conceptual coherence, pushing forward debates through hard dialogical reasoning and deliberation. We need it, all the more in a time of rapid and profound change where a number of our richest and most powerful business leaders think that humans and machines will actually merge.

Theory can no longer become policy, however, without testing. The process of diagnosing a problem; researching solutions; proposing a law, regulation, or course of government action; convincing government officials to enact that proposal; and then implementing the result is far too uncertain, slow, and cumbersome to work. We have long understood the shortfalls of this approach; a great deal of what we call policy studies is actually the examination of unintended consequences. Social engineering schemes gone wrong, economic theories that worked beautifully on the back of a napkin, urban designs, tax incentives, criminal prohibitions all producing results very far from what their authors hoped and planned.

We can no longer afford such grand mistakes, and no longer do we need to take the risk of making them. Evidence-based policymaking has been in vogue for almost a decade; it is increasingly buttressed by big data and the possibility of rapid—indeed almost instant—evaluation. If a law, regulation, or policy—or the removal of a law, regulation, or policy—is not having its intended effect, we will be able to know within weeks and months, not years and decades, and make adjustments as we go. Laws, regulations, and policies will have to be rethought and reframed to allow—indeed to require—such processes of continuous adjustment, just as a corporation continually adjusts and improves a product. The collection and analysis of data about impact on intended and unintended beneficiaries or victims of a course of action must be built into the design of that course of action at the outset.

Better still, we should be experimenting before we ever get to the policy stage. Thousands of towns, cities, counties and communities across the United States are trying out different solutions to public problems such as education, workforce training, addiction, punishment and rehabilitation, wellness and prevention, and housing. The innovation around these solutions, as James and Deborah Fallows have documented on their blog American Futures, is the expansion of Brandeis’s concept of the states as “laboratories of democracy.”¹⁴ The expansion is a matter not just of degree, but also in kind, in that the implementation precedes the actual policy. Local experimenters can tinker and adjust and even go back to the drawing board faster and more freely than federal or even state government officials could ever imagine. Adoption of the solution—the beginning of the traditional policy process—comes only after both testing and scaling.

The thinkers contributing to American Affairs and like journals will be increasingly isolated and ignorant unless they find ways to plug into these processes. America’s own founding thinkers were practitioners as well as theorists: legislators, executives, generals, lawyers, farmers, and businesspeople. They had seen firsthand the advantages and disadvantages of various governmental schemes.

Today it may be impossible for public intellectuals to have such breadth of experience, but then they need to connect to systems that continually surface practical examples. Perusing the pages of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, for instance, yields a steady stream of social innovations—as the title suggests—that are actually taking place in communities across the country. A new generation of idea journals could usefully connect with networks of organizations such as Bloomberg’s What Works Cities, the Rockefeller Foundation’s resilient cities network, or education and health networks run across the country by the Lumina and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations. Connections to networks of local journalists, such as the young people being trained to write about their communities by New America Media (no connection to my organization New America), could also be useful.

The goal is to write not only about abstract ideas of what could be, but to link those ideas to concrete solutions that are being tested. It is to create a circulation system from local to national and back, from practice to principle and back.

Tocqueville thought that such a system was necessary for the health of a democracy. In explaining why Americans “show a less lively taste than the French for general ideas,” particularly “general ideas relative to politics,” he argues that the “Americans form a democratic people that has always directed public affairs by itself,” whereas the French “are a democratic people who for a long time could only dream of a better matter of conducting them.” Because democratic institutions “force each citizen to occupy himself practically with government,” those citizens will challenge general ideas about government the same way merchants will challenge general ideas about commerce based on their own experience and their self-interested calculation of the consequences of those ideas. Anchoring political theory in practical politics thus corrects the “excessive taste for general theories in political matters that equality puts forward.”¹⁵

Rolling Back Managerialism

Julius Krein revives James Burnham’s critique of managerialism, defined as the separation of ownership from control by the rise of a managerial class dedicated to the increase of production and consumption independent of the actual owners (shareholders) or the actual consumers (customers). The financialization of the economy, spurred by the Right as well as the Left, further removes property from the real economy and expands the domain of the managerial class. Under both parties, Krein writes, “corporations, financial capital, and labor markets have decoupled from political communities.”¹⁶ The only solution is the reconnection of government—both political and corporate government—to actual political communities and “a reconnection of the economy to the particular society that underlies it.”¹⁷

Surely that is easiest to do at the local level. Lenny Mendonca and Laura Tyson prescribe “progressive federalism,” marrying a belief in progress with federalist experimentation. Conservatives might prefer the terms “democratic localism” or “democratic experimentalism,” Jefferson-style.¹⁸ Regardless of label, an emphasis on corporate civic responsibility, political engagement focused on actual outcomes rather than ideological solidarity, and concrete conception of the common good could lead to actual problem solving and improvements in quality of life.

Would-be public problem solvers should thus strive to build a new ecosystem of thinking, writing, finding, sharing, implementing, experimenting, evaluating, and circulating solutions. Just as Richard Sennett writes of the relationship of craft to thought—the movements of the hand stimulating the power of the brain—and Donald Stokes argues for use-inspired research in Pasteur’s Quadrant, so should democratic theory be tied to democratic experiment.¹⁹ American Affairs fully encompassed should include innovators and practical experimenters as well as pundits.

Debate, critique, challenge, and response: all are important and necessary. Journals like American Affairs function as a town square, where when the day’s work is done citizens can come together, argue out their differences, and imagine a better future together. Different groups of citizens occupy different tables; the hottest debates are often among the most like-minded. Tables where younger people take on their elders are essential for reinvigoration of the town’s political life and renewal of its institutions.

Cobbled town squares where the old men, at least, debate politics as well as sports at café tables still exist across Italy and in many European countries. American towns tend to be built along a main street rather than around a main square. On the other hand, town halls for us are more likely to mean a coming together of citizens than a building full of bureaucrats. But in either of those spaces it is hard to create a separate thinking and writing class. The goal of American Affairs, as a self-proclaimed journal of a new American politics, and of similar journals, should be to reconnect thinkers and writers with doers and makers, to create a forum not simply for new political debates, but a new politics.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume I, Number 3 (Fall 2017): 197–212.

Notes