America Needs a New Vision
On the eve of a presidential election year, it feels like American democracy is a ship without a keel. Nothing much works as it should, and people in charge don’t seem able to steer towards solutions—in schools, universities, healthcare, at the border, and, worst, Washington itself. A sense of powerlessness is pervasive, pushing alienated Americans towards populist candidates.
Good leaders alone cannot fix this condition, because the powerlessness is caused by system failure. As I describe in the forthcoming Everyday Freedom, nothing can get fixed until people in charge are re-empowered to make daily choices. That requires a historic spring cleaning of Washington, replacing the legal jungle with simpler frameworks activated by human responsibility.
Common Good’s goal for next year is to work with leading experts to inject the issue of system failure into the 2024 election cycle. We have two specific initiatives:
Build the constitutional case to break the stranglehold of public employee unions over government operations. Democracy can’t deliver until elected officials can take back control and fix what’s broken—especially failing schools and grotesquely inefficient public services. In a review of Not Accountable in the January issue of The New Criterion, John Steele Gordon concludes: “Philip K. Howard has written a short, important book on an urgently needed reform that gets only more urgent with every new labor contract negotiated by governments and public-sector unions. For, as the late economist Herbert Stein noted in his famous ‘Stein’s Law,’ ‘if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.’”
Organize public forums around the country to build support for overhauling the paralytic tangle of Washington. For example, the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh is hosting a forum on system failure with prominent experts and political leaders.
We need help in both these initiatives, to fund the constitutional challenges to unions and to organize public events that highlight the imperative to clean house in Washington. Please consider a donation—Common Good is a 501(c)(3) organization. If you have ideas for potential allies or events, please contact me at phoward@commongood.org.
Thank you for your continued interest in our work, and Happy Holidays.
-- Philip