Accelerating Abundance in America
A new series exploring how the United States can start building again.
Just so you know: In addition to this column, Francis Fukuyama also writes for the main Persuasion mailing list. That means that if you don’t subscribe to Persuasion, you might miss out on receiving some of his essays!
Click here to manage your account and toggle on the button to receive emails for Persuasion. And as ever, thank you for supporting our community.
With this post, I’m beginning a series on concrete ways in which we could implement an abundance agenda in the United States. The abundance movement seeks a new political model that focuses on getting the country to build things again, particularly housing and public infrastructure. The inability to get things done has undermined the government’s legitimacy and fueled the Trumpian drive to undermine existing institutions.
The inability to build things is particularly apparent in blue states like California where I live, which promised high-speed rail service between LA and San Francisco back in the 1990s, and may complete a small segment in the Central Valley by the end of the decade. California has seen the accumulation of generations of rules that make the completion of projects extremely difficult. There are many potential targets by which the process could be simplified, but I want to start with the problem of public participation. Both normatively and practically, this is one of the thorniest issues with which modern democracies need to deal.
The formal rules of American democracy state that the people express their will by voting every two or four years for representatives, who will then deliberate, pass laws, and instruct the executive to implement them. While these basic electoral institutions remain foundational in any democracy, it has been a long time since anyone believed that they were by themselves adequate to create a healthy democracy. There are several reasons for this.
First, a voting citizen is sending a very weak signal to his or her representatives regarding preferences, a signal that gets mixed with a lot of noise by the time it is received and hopefully implemented. Most modern democracies for that reason have sought to create numerous other channels by which citizens can indicate preferences. These include public hearings, town halls, referenda, recalls, notice-and-comment, and many others.
Second, legislatures themselves are very imperfect; they can be highly partisan, captured by interest groups, or corrupted outright. In California, progressives like Governor Hiram Johnson in the early 20th century inserted initiatives, recalls, and referenda into the state constitution precisely to allow citizens to bypass the state legislature, which many regarded as hopelessly in the pockets of corporations.
Third, there is a tradition in American politics that believes that human beings are by nature political animals who flourish only if they can govern themselves. As in ancient Athens, they are not passive recipients of benefits given them by their rulers. This is sometimes referred to as a small-R republican tradition that believes that democracy needs to promote public-spirited and virtuous citizens.
Many Americans seem to have a vestigial memory of the New England town meeting praised by Alexis de Tocqueville as one of the great schools of American democracy. Such town hall meetings continue to exist, and continue to play important roles in local governance in small towns dealing with local issues.
The problem today, of course, begins with the problem of scale. Very few Americans live in small towns, and the policies that affect them are more often made at much higher levels—municipal, state, and federal. It is impossible to apply the town hall paradigm at the scale of a democracy of some 340 million people. Those larger institutions are today dominated by two highly polarized political parties that have ceased deliberating; the old description of the Senate as the “world’s greatest deliberative body” is today a cruel joke.
There have been many efforts to inject higher levels of direct citizen participation into American democracy. One of the earliest efforts was the creation of a notice-and-comment process in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (APA). In recognition that very many decisions affecting citizens were being taken by an expanding administrative state, the APA allowed any citizen to comment on a rule change by a federal agency, and required the agency to respond and, if necessary, to modify the rule in response.
In addition to notice-and-comment, legislatures at all levels solicit public participation by holding public hearings in which outside groups are invited to present their views. But here we run into what might be called the fundamental defect of modern public participation. American civil society is itself highly organized; in fact, one might argue that it is over-organized. Societal interests are represented by highly professionalized and well-funded interest groups, whose main purpose is to show up at hearings and lobby Congress and the public on behalf of favored policies. They are for the most part not interested in deliberating about whether these policies will benefit the community as a whole. While their interaction may lead to compromise outcomes, those outcomes are often defined by the narrow interests of multiple organized groups. Ordinary citizens often don’t have the time, motivation, or resources to express their views in such hearings, and end up being under-represented.
We see this phenomenon occurring all the time in public hearings over new housing or infrastructure projects. Many blue states like California confront a severe housing crisis, driven by the lack of availability of affordable housing or the necessary infrastructure to support denser populations. A public hearing on a new building project will typically attract participation from developers, labor unions, existing homeowners, and environmental activists, who often take polarized and highly predictable positions. The people who are not represented at such meetings are, for example, young people who are unable to buy their first home, homeowners locked into their current houses because of exorbitant prices, or workers who might be well served by better public transportation. The latter groups may encompass a majority of citizens, but they are typically not organized or represented in the public discussion.
The over-organization of civil society is what weakened the initiative process in California, which as noted above was a populist innovation designed to bypass legacy democratic institutions. Within a decade or two of their introduction, the same well-funded interest groups that dominated the legislature learned how to manipulate the initiative process. In a large state like California, getting the necessary signatures to place an initiative on the ballot, and then to have the initiative passed, requires a high degree of organization and millions of dollars in funding for television advertising. It is easy to disguise the real source or implications of an initiative, and to manipulate low-information citizens.
An over-organized civil society has also distorted the notice-and-comment process. While the latter provides agencies with useful feedback, this channel today has become highly dysfunctional. Scale is once again at fault: with major rule changes, an agency can receive well over a million comments, requiring huge expenditures of time by agency staff to respond. The process can be gamed by interest groups that flood the zone with comments, or else slow the process by suing the agency over failures to respond adequately to individual comments.
A final problem with existing forms of public participation has been pointed out by my Stanford colleague Jim Fishkin, director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Since the time of the Greeks, the ideal of democracy has been a group of citizens who could rationally debate a common course of action. Technology has in many ways undermined the possibility of genuine political deliberation in the U.S. Congress. Many older members note that deliberation ended when C-SPAN began televising Congressional hearings. Members began speaking not to fellow legislators, but to TV audiences at home. Various reform initiatives with the well-meaning intention of increasing transparency decreased opportunities for members to actually hold discussions with one another on a face-to-face basis. To the extent that deliberation happens, it now occurs in back-room negotiations over omnibus spending bills.
The problem of public participation can thus be stated as follows. Public input to democratic decision-making is absolutely necessary. It is inevitable that organized interest groups will play a big role in any open process. But it is important to structure that process in such a way that:
It can operate at a sufficiently large scale;
It cannot be easily captured by well-resourced and well-organized interest groups;
It can occur over a much shorter time period to facilitate efficient public decision-making;
And that participation be at least minimally deliberative.
So how do we design new participatory institutions to meet these conditions? That will be the subject of subsequent blog posts.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
Mr. FF, this sounds like a good opening perspective on the issue. I definitely found it worth the read.
With regard to your referencing Tocqueville’s admiration for the New England town hall: we no longer live in villages, but many aspects of our lives are based on neighborhoods. We have neighborhood schools, neighborhood parks, and neighborhood concerns regarding infrastructure maintenance. In Japan there are neighborhood police boxes. There might be local administration of these governmental functions. Clearly, small subdivisions of cities cannot be allowed to make policy, since such power would only yield chaos. But allowing the management of one’s neighborhood would give citizens training in making the trade-offs that governing requires as well as a sense of empowerment.