The Next Deal

—WOODROW WILSON, 1912

PREFACE

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the White House, not a creature was stirring—except for me. Actually, it was the afternoon before Christmas, but the White House really was practically deserted with the exception of this then 22-year-old speech-writer. Just about everyone who worked there had gone home to spend the day with their loved ones. Not having family in town or much else better to do, I had volunteered to write President Clinton’s Saturday radio address for that week. It was a stirring and epic oration on expanded Medicare benefits for colorectal cancer screenings. You might remember it.

The plan had been to tape the speech in the early afternoon for delivery a few days later. I was supposed to be on hand in case Clinton had any questions. (As it would turn out, my only role was holding his dogj Buddy, so that he wouldn’t bark during the taping.) But, as was his annual habit, Clinton had gone off to do last-minute Christmas shopping. So I sat alone in my office and waited and waited and waited. Finally, bored beyond belief, I left the building and wandered around downtown Washington, It was just about as empty. The Mall was barren—the malls were where the action was that day, I ended up in a local bookstore and there my eye caught a book that I had read several years earlier: the 1949 classic The Vital Center, Half a century ago, when Arthur Schlesinger wrote The Vital Center, it was an exposition on his age. Tempered by the despondence of the Great Depression, energized by the hope of the New Deal, and finally formed in the crucible of the Second World War, Schlesinger’s generation came of age at a moment when the world was consumed by a global ideological struggle. In The Vital Center, Schlesinger held out a revitalized liberal democracy as an alternative to totalitarian communism on onesidc and absolutist fascism on the other.

At that moment, Schlcsingcr’s book seemed like much more than a reminder of a former era. In fact, President Clinton and those of us who worked in his administration were attempting to create a domestic version of this vital center—an alternative to the morally and intellectually exhausted options of New Deal liberalism and Reagan Revolution conservatism. Clinton himself had been saying this with various degrees of explicitness since before he began running for president. But what occurred to me as I saw The Vital Center sitting there on the shelf was that this was not going to work. The vision of a “Third Way” somewhere between—or beyond—traditional liberalism and conservatism would have to be more daring and iarsighted if it were going to be a long-run solution and nor just a short-term alternative. Events outside of Washington—particularly the rise of the Information Age with its different ways of working and living—would require a whole new set of ideas about what government does and why it does it. That moment in the Washington bookstore was when I first thought about trying to write a book that would explain clearly why today’s America—and my generation in particular—is looking for a new role for government that is radically different from the one we had in the twentieth century.

In the months and years to come, I thought about but shelved that notion numerous times. But one thing kept on prodding me to return to thinking about this project: conversations I had with some of the brightest, most deservedly respected, visionary people in Washington. Nearly to a person, they all said the same thing: in this time of peace, prosperity, and the convergence of the two parries’ policy positions, the great issues are gone in American politics, the debates are settled, the battles over.

If there is one central idea in this book, it is this: that there is, in fact, a big battle yet to be waged—remaking American government and community life so that they can reflect the values of the new Information Age. This is neither about broadband regulation nor computers in the classrooms nor putting government services on-line. It is about the bigger picture: completely rethinking government’s mission, just as we have rethought the way business works over the past decade. New Economy companies find success to the extent that they can do something that was unthinkable for corporations a generation and a century ago—giving their customers a larger universe of choices, putting decision-making power into customers’ hands, and personalizing services to fit the needs and desires of each individual. However, government still largely runs on the old business model.—one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter programs. We have an assembly line government in an Internet age. This disconnect is the big issue facing American politics—an issue that will only grow in importance as the Information Age takes root and those who were reared in it grow up. This book is about how to bridge that disconnect, about how to move America’s public life from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.

The book starts with two introductory chapters that serve as the background to the books main argument. In What I Saw at the Devolution, I discuss the politics of the 1990s—what President Clinton tried to accomplish, where he succeeded, and where he ultimately fell short. I believe history will give him a great deal of credit for realizing that Industrial Age ideas about government no longer fit the times. However, while Clinton ended the old debate about government, he failed to enunciate a compelling new vision for government’s role. Left with no alternatives, Washington—a city whose swamps have been filled but whose morass grows ever deeper—now increasingly revolves around obsolete orthodoxies, purblind partisanship, and powerful interest groups with a vested dependence on the status quo. American politics today runs on the vapors of scandal and soundbites because its governing ideologies have run out of fuel.

In The New Generation of Choice, I describe the generation of Americans who will come to have the responsibility of leading the nation into the new century. They were born after the moral revolutions of the 1960s radically expanded their lifestyle choices and came of age at a time when technological revolutions give them a plethora of choices to make when they shop, work, learn, and play. Since the ability to make their own choices is a fundamental expectation, I call these young people the Choice Generation. As with previous generations, government will come to adapt to their outlook.

Having introduced the politics and the people that will shape the new century, I move to the main part of the book Parts I, II, and III deal with the economy, government, and community respectively. The three parts tell parallel stories. In each area, they trace America’s Journey from the individualistic Agricultural, Age of the nineteenth century to the hierarchical Industrial Age of the twentieth century to the decentralized Information Age of the twenty-first century. Part I: The Fall and Rise of the Individual analyzes the economy, following Americans’ voyage from farms to factories to the technologically-based, empowering workplaces of today and tomorrow. During this long, strange trip the belief that individuals should be at the heart of the economy was lost—and now has been found again.

Part II: The Choice Revolution tells the story of how American leaders have responded to the times throughout the nations history by adapting government to new conditions. The goal of those who have believed in progress has remained remarkably constant: working toward equality of opportunity. Yet, different moments have called for different ways to accomplish this. Thomas Jefferson promoted a bottom-up belief that would open the doors of democracy by expanding suffrage and protect the open frontier of the independent farmer from the encroaching power of the landed aristocracy and new manufacturers. In the Progressive Era, Woodrow Wilson sought to update this vision, breaking up the concentrated power of the new industrial corporations and giving more power to individuals. But in the battle of ideas, he was defeated by Theodore Roosevelt who advocated a different view—a top-down theory that built up centralized government programs to give workers security and to stand up to big businesses on behalf of the people. This was the view that dominated twentieth-century conceptions of government—in both Democratic and Republican administrations. I argue that the time has come for another big change; returning to the spirit of Jefferson and Wilson and the bottom-up philosophy that animated their woridview. A Choice Revolution in government entails expanding democracy by taking decision-making power out of the hands of bureaucrats and powerful interests and giving it to ordinary Americans. I argue that all Americans should have the ability to make choices for themselves and their families now reserved for only the wealthiest: the privilege to choose schools for their kids, choose their own health care plans, choose how to save for their retirement.

Finally, Part III: The New Responsibility reminds us that more individual power doesn’t mean more selfish individualism. With more choices, Americans—as the community involvement of the Choice Generation demonstrates—will be more likely to do more for their neighbors. Government should provide an extra push in this direction. The New Responsibility will ask Americans to adopt a greater burden in caring for their community and doing what Franklin Roosevelt said we’d all have to do so long ago: “shoulder our common load.”

The philosopher George Santayana famously wrote that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This book rests on the premise that the opposite holds true as well. Those who cannot remember the past might not be able to repeat it. The task for today’s young people—the Choice Generation—is to replicate in our day the accomplishment of the Progressive Generation of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, They rethought the rules of public life to fit the contours of a new America, Our job is to do the same.

This is a book about America’s future, not a work of history. Although it does look at America’s past through a particular prism, it does so in seeking to answer the desperate need for an understanding of where America now finds herself. Like ships lost in a fog, the more confused our leaders grow the louder they blare and bleat. Most are frantically searching for a roadniap in a world where too much of our politics is divorced from the past and from, the story of American life.

Any attempt to retell history is, at its heart, an exercise in simplification. No canvass could ever be big enough to hold the thousand contradictory details and shadows of human life. Thus history is little more than myths backed up by evidence. But the myths a people tell, and the memories they hold true, can never be separated from “facts.” Daniel Boorstin wrote that “Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present.” By listening to yesterday—its history and its myths—perhaps we can gain a greater understanding of where we are today. And in listening to those dim, faint echoes of voices from, a bygone world, perhaps we will hear their whisper in the wind, their directions on how to move forward.

The New Deal and the idea of government it embodied was a signal achievement of the twentieth century. Its basic parameters have long been accepted by both parties and it has become part of the fabric of American life. Personally, I am the product of the public school system (in fact, my junior high was built by the New Deal Works Progress Administration), I went to college with federal student loans and grants, my family relied on food stamps to get by when I was a child, my grandmother awaits her Social Security check every month. But the New Deal was created as a response to the America of the last century. As the economy and society changes, Americans want more: a new mission for government that responds to today’s America. They are waiting for the next deal.