Porter and Kendall argue that our mistrust of—and dread of—interacting with government could be mollified by a system that allows people to see what government actually does for them throughout their lives. This system, called iGov, would take advantage of the power of the Internet and social media to aggregate a wealth of data across agencies and provide a full and accurate picture of government’s role:

We believe that iGov would serve at least two functions. It would make clear the extent to which government plays a foundational role in all our lives. Call this the illustrative function. At the same time, iGov would emphasize that, despite our myriad political divisions, we still have government itself in common. Call this the commonality function. The two functions would work together to identify the stake each of us have in government and its operations…Via technology already widely available, iGov would outline the way in which our overlapping communities sustain the government services that we often take for granted but without which we could not lead our everyday lives.

iGov's launch comes on the one-year anniversary of the taxpayer receipt, proposed in Democracy’s Spring 2011 issue ["Seeing Where the Money Went", Issue #20] by the same authors. The taxpayer receipt has since been embraced by politicians from both sides of the aisle, and the Obama Administration has set up a version of it online.

You can read "Introducing iGov" here. The Politico adaptation is here.

Dear Mr. President: This is just to tell you that everything is all right now. The man you sent found our house all right, and we went down to the bank with him and the mortgage can go on for a while longer. You remember I wrote you about losing the furniture too. Well, your man got it back for us. I never heard of a President like you.

Other letters were streaming into the White House at the time, many expressing similar notes of gratitude—and intimacy; relations between citizens and the Administration were on close, personal terms. As the White House fulfilled a request to intervene directly in securing a house and furniture for one specific family, so too did it receive pictures from proud children. “Look how big I am,” they proclaimed. Other letters addressed the president as one would a father or grandfather. The top White House mail clerk had to expand his staff from two to 23.

Think of it: a government human enough for people to feel as if they were friends with it, and helpful enough to be grateful toward. Some 80 years later, we live in a different world, one in which government has become, at best, a hulking shadow in the distance. As government has exploded in size and grown more distant from our everyday lives, we have become ever more dissatisfied with it. This past summer, Gallup reported that among 25 major industries, the federal government ranked dead last in public approval, below even oil companies and lawyers. Only 17 percent of respondents had anything positive to say about government. The main reason for this, of course, is the constant government-bashing we’ve been hearing from the right for decades. But it’s also because people can’t be expected to like something they know little about. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, even the majority of those who receive direct cash benefits from the government, in the forms of Social Security and unemployment, do not know to identify the government as the source of those benefits.

This is a problem for our politics—even a crisis. It’s our central unifying belief that government can be used to do good and to help solve shared problems. But if 83 percent of the people don’t see the government in a positive light, we’ve got trouble. We need to think about this, and we need to do something about it.

There is another aspect to the problem of how government is perceived. Consider: Most citizens’ interactions with government are negative. This is not all the government’s fault. Citizens often contact the government under duress—when a tax deadline looms, when a parent or spouse is sick or has died. But the government doesn’t usually make those difficult interactions any easier. The federal government as we know it is mostly in the business of saying “no”—or at best, explaining to citizens under what complicated X number of conditions, after waiting Y number of weeks, they can finally get to yes. All of us, even committed liberals, dread having to deal with the IRS or applying for a passport. We may think of these as minor inconveniences, but multiply them by many millions and they become a way of life—a way of life that tells people, “Government is not your friend.”

In response, we posit a set of rarely considered questions: What if government were conceived in a radically different fashion? What if government didn’t wait to hear from people in crisis, but reached out to them affirmatively—even sometimes with (gasp!) good news? What if government were in the business of saying yes? And what if the federal government devised methods to let people know—and the vast, vast majority of them have no idea—the ways in which they are already benefiting from government intervention and assistance in their daily lives, from their earliest years on earth to their very last?

It is with these questions in mind that we’ve conceived of “iGov,” a set of principles and practices, which we will outline below, that will make government more accessible, more comprehensible, and—harkening back to Roosevelt’s day—more human. Last year, in the pages of this journal [“Seeing Where the Money Went,” Issue #20] and in The Washington Post, we proposed a “taxpayer receipt,” a one-stop way for citizens to know exactly where their tax money goes. We were pleased to see the idea widely embraced. Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in the House and Senate, and the White House released its own version of the receipt online.

That was a promising start. But “iGov” will take the concept several steps further. Over the long term, we need a system that presents an accurate, comprehensive picture of the tangled relationship among government, individual citizens, and their communities. Such a system would line up costs (taxes, fees, and the like) and benefits (Social Security, Medicare, subsidized school loans, etc.) side-by-side, giving all Americans a personalized peek into the bureaucracy they both finance and depend on over the course of their lives. The result, we hope, would be a better-informed citizenry—and a citizenry less hostile to government, since it would now be informed about what government really does.

iGov: What Government Is Doing for Me

iGov would offer citizens a simple and reliable way to track their relationship with the federal government over their lifetimes. Each citizen would have his or her own iGov account, through which the federal government would be able to present the accumulation of the benefits that a person has ever received from across the government. A single click would reveal what the government has meant in a person’s life, in the most concrete terms.

Specifically, iGov would offer all Americans the chance to see their income, taxes paid on that income, and their personal benefits received. In this system, benefits listed would include Social Security, student loans, farm subsidies, unemployment insurance, veterans’ benefits, earned-income tax credit, Medicaid/Medicare, and deductions such as those for home mortgage interest, health care, child care, and retirement savings. These benefits are alike in their directness, making them relatively easy to track and straightforward enough to represent. Whether or not other material advantages, such as the low tax rate afforded capital gains in comparison to income, would count for our purposes is a matter for political debate. But the largest benefits, those that form the core of social policy, must be included.

Costs, meanwhile, would be reflected via a longitudinal version of the taxpayer receipt we proposed in our earlier articles. You would see not only where your tax dollars went one year, but where they had gone in previous years, too. As we discussed in our articles proposing the receipt, we believe that it’s possible to display costs by aggregating different functions of federal spending into useful categories, such as “defense,” “transportation” and “health.” The direct benefits you’ve received throughout your life would be enumerated. Moreover, benefits to your community—town, county, state—would be specifically identified. Costs and benefits wouldn’t line up exactly, nor would they be expected to. The point is only to offer a portrait of your lifetime relationship with government.

All the information iGov would display is currently collected, but strewn across a maze of federal agencies. When the FBI performs a background check, it accesses some of it. Our system would comprehensively present, to every American who wishes to see it, what the government already knows about him or her. Participation would be entirely voluntary. Citizens would be asked if they wished to sign up for an iGov account whenever they have business with the federal government—for example, when renewing a passport or filing taxes online. Your Social Security number would help iGov identify your information in the computers of various government agencies.

Today, information about costs and benefits for many key government programs is virtually missing from the Internet. For example, neither Medicare nor Medicaid informs beneficiaries about how much their coverage is worth each year. In contrast, the Affordable Care Act requires employers to show employees the value of their benefits starting in 2012, making employees more aware of the cost of their private coverage. It seems obvious that beneficiaries of public health-care programs like Medicare and Medicaid should be just as well informed.

The problem of absent or deficient transaction information is not limited to the public health realm. In the current recession, one out of four Americans has been receiving food stamps or some other kind of nutrition assistance. Yet beneficiaries will never see an accounting of how much they received. That helps explain why 25 percent of people who receive food stamps claim that they have never used a government program, according to political scientist Suzanne Mettler with the Cornell Survey Research Institute. Recipients of most other government social programs are even less likely to acknowledge they benefited from a government program. Contrast this with Amazon.com, where with a few quick clicks you can call up a list of every transaction you’ve ever had with the company.

Although progressives have more reason to be concerned about the lack of knowledge over the benefits of government, it is a problem for conservatives, too. For example, reforming entitlements is made all the more difficult by the beneficiaries’ perception that they are only getting what they put in. A personalized accounting of lifetime benefits and taxes paid would show the significant gap that is contributing to the long-term structural deficit. More generally, an increase in public information is not bound to lead to greater support for progressive policies. Indeed, as research has shown, even a perfectly well-informed public would still be deeply skeptical about the estate tax.

For programs harder to quantify on a per-citizen basis, such as roads and education, agencies could show costs and benefits via Google maps. The model here would be the way in which the Obama Administration highlighted the benefits of the Recovery Act using a map that breaks down costs at the level of state or ZIP code. With iGov, the benefits disbursed from each agency could be displayed and separated out. Want to know how much highway money your neighborhood took in? What about the amount of block grant money your city received? What about all the businesses in your town that are government contractors or vendors—how much do they get? Or public amenities like convention halls and senior centers and nature areas—how reliant are they on Washington? You could look at any one of these, or all at once. Of course, these benefits would have to be displayed at the appropriate level of municipality, dependent on the specifics of the spending. In this way, you could learn the degree to which the federal government spends money—not only on you but on the community of which you’re a part. After all, this spending is already occurring. The technology that could display it is already available. We ought to make use of it.

The Functions of iGov

We believe that iGov would serve at least two functions. It would make clear the extent to which government plays a foundational role in all our lives. Call this the illustrative function. At the same time, iGov would emphasize that, despite our myriad political divisions, we still have government itself in common. Call this the commonality function. The two functions would work together to identify the stake each of us have in government and its operations.

To say that iGov would serve an illustrative function is to say that it would illustrate, as clearly and accurately as possible, the role that government plays in the lives of citizens and their communities. In so doing, it would act as a bulwark against the steady flow of misinformation about government. Misinformation tends to manifest itself in two ways. The first relates to misinformation about the sheer fact of government itself; people do not know what it is doing when it is doing it. The second relates to the kinds of activities that government actually does undertake; people ascribe to it behaviors and attributes that it plainly does not engage in or possess. For an example of the second type, think only of the recent uproar over “death panels,” which showed exactly how pernicious policy myths can become.

The first type, meanwhile, has been explored best in Suzanne Mettler’s research. Mettler has documented at great length the degree to which even beneficiaries of government services are not aware that it is the government providing them. In 2008, Mettler and her colleagues conducted a poll in which 57 percent of respondents claimed not to have received any government benefits such as Medicare or Social Security. In fact, 94 percent of them had done so—they simply didn’t credit the government as the source of the benefits. For most of the people whom Mettler surveyed, government does not even rise to the level of necessary evil. It might as well not exist.

And it would seem the problem may very well be greater than Mettler let on. Her study focused on those citizens who were already receiving benefits but did not know government was the source. Yet what about those who are eligible for certain benefits and services but do not know it? For example, 4.3 million children are eligible for but not enrolled in federal health care programs. The government website Benefits.gov has begun an effort to try to match eligible recipients to services. But so far, not enough people know about Benefits.gov to make the site widely effective. Moreover, as it doesn’t list benefits already received, display community benefits, or attempt to show costs, it’s a far more static and restrained model than we’re proposing.

It’s undeniably the case that government has failed to use the tools of the twenty-first century, choosing either to depend on the increasingly outmoded postal service, or the media, or even more naïvely, on the wish that, on their own, citizens will easily draw sophisticated conclusions about the work they are paying government to do for them. In reality, instances of formal communication have occurred haphazardly, when they occur at all. Any great optimism about citizens’ abilities to have high levels of accurate knowledge about their government flies in the face of an enormous volume of social-science research. People are busy. People have demands on their time that make knowing the contours of government a difficult luxury to afford. Government surely does little to make it easy. Yet citizens deserve to be equipped with the tools to cut through the fog of rumors and half-truths, and have some facts at their disposal.

Mettler and her colleagues are interested in identifying the contours of the “submerged state”—the array of government goods and benefits that, for whatever reason, have remained hidden. This is a worthy goal, one that iGov is intended to help meet. Instead of a small number of universal experiences such as getting a Social Security number at birth or receiving Social Security benefits in retirement, iGov would give all citizens constant updates about their relationship with their government. It would represent a commitment by government to keep up with innovation in the name of keeping its citizens informed. Unlike the taxpayer receipt, which portrayed a one-dimensional relationship between citizens and government with an emphasis on the cost, iGov would capture the full scope of costs and benefits—not only for individuals, but for communities as well.

Although showing citizens the costs and benefits of government is critical, it is not all that iGov should do. As America is a large country, teeming with diverse terrains and populations imported from all over the world, rifts have been ubiquitous since the Revolution. We now seem to live in more divided times than ever; splintered deeply along partisan and ideological lines, and clustering ourselves more than ever into like-minded neighborhoods and states, we have more or less abandoned the idea of the common project, undertaken for the common good. At best, we agree to disagree; more realistically, we agree that we’ll never agree at all. Control of Congress is changing at a whiplash pace, and if President Obama is re-elected, it will mean that since 1976—the first election to follow Watergate—the two parties will have occupied the White House for equal amounts of time.

iGov will not resolve passionate political arguments. What it can do, however, is emphasize the common ground on which they occur. Basically, this common ground is the national government itself, which provides the interstate highways, military, and welfare services that make such arguments possible. Common-interest arguments are a dime a dozen and usually end up grounded in some form of national mythmaking. What iGov emphasizes is much more humble. As a common project uniting a disparate people, the government itself is a tie that binds. To be an American may mean one thing to someone and something entirely different to someone else, but surely for all it means having responsibility for stewardship of the government.

What does this stewardship mean? At some points, it means making good use of benefits such as unemployment insurance and Pell grants. On other occasions, it means paying taxes so those programs can exist. But it also means contributing to governmental systems and functions that cannot realistically be conceived of on a per-capita basis. We are thinking here of services such as roads, national defense, and education, which could not exist without the implicit participation of the entire body politic. To attempt to exempt oneself would be to try to live a hermit’s life.

Via technology already widely available, iGov would outline the way in which our overlapping communities sustain the government services that we often take for granted but without which we could not lead our everyday lives. Of course, not every benefit of government can be quantified. Even benefits displayed at the community level would not comprehensively define that community. But we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Similar worries were expressed during the creation of the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). Proponents insisted that despite the limitations of approaching HDI from a quantitative perspective, numbers have a way of capturing the public imagination. We agree. Data, while far from perfect, are useful for their universal descriptive power.

We now see how the two functions are related. The illustrative function shows what government does and does not do, while the commonality function clarifies that, if nothing else, government is what we have in common. The former helps arguments about the latter conform to factual reality.

Beyond iGov

Designing and implementing iGov would surely take years. We think of the longitudinal, dynamic display of costs and benefits as iGov 1.0. Ultimately, however, we would hope that such a project goes beyond that, to fundamentally transform the relationship between government and information technology. All too often, people associate government service with inconvenience and inefficiency. iGov can be the first step in an overhaul of how government does business, one that could mitigate, if not eliminate, that long-standing impression.

An iGov account, universally available at birth via your Social Security number, could be a single repository of all government-citizen interactions. Getting a passport, applying for Social Security, purchasing a National Park pass, and much more could all be done through this account. If that sounds far-fetched, it shouldn’t; states like Michigan and Montana already use a single login name and password for services across agencies. The federal government should replicate and improve upon their efforts.

We recently examined 40 federal websites with downloadable forms for services and benefits, and identified only six that let users submit completed forms online. Of those six, only two offer a way to track the transactions online. One of those two websites is for student loans. Under the auspices of the Department of Education, myFSA (Financial Student Aid) provides students with an online account for financial aid applications, financial aid calculators, and links to college applications. In a separate account through StudentLoans.gov, students can manage their loan documents and see their financial aid history. The site provides a solid set of informational tools for college-bound students. But it is the exception that proves the rule.

Citizens could also use the account to receive customized information, as is frequently done on many websites, often automatically. As it stands today, the federal government is largely passive about disseminating information. Although all federal agencies have websites on which they place some vital information, much less effort goes into actually getting that information to people who could use it. When a federal agency does want to actively push out information, it typically follows the standard routine of sending a press release to the media. At one time, that was an effective method. But given the lower costs and greater effectiveness of online services and social media, it makes sense to move much more of the provision of information from a wholesale to a retail operation.

Ideally, the flow of information between citizen and government would start at birth. Nothing like that happens today. Currently, among other pieces of paperwork, newborns receive a birth certificate and a Social Security card. That’s basically it—for 60 years. Thanks to recent budget cuts, the federal government does not follow up with every citizen individually until their sixtieth birthday, which is the new age for receiving a Social Security statement (before the budget cuts, statements had been sent to workers starting at age 25). In an age when customized sources of information are at our fingertips, the federal government could fill that vast gap with ideas and information about the services already provided by government agencies.

For example, upon submitting the paperwork for a Social Security number, new parents could be prompted to sign up for information about giving their child a healthy start in life with visits to a pediatrician for well-baby checkups. That would help solve the problem that half of all infants receive only half of the recommended number of checkups and one of every three infants receive only one-third of the checkups. iGov could provide reminders directly into parents’ accounts using existing, but underutilized tools such as healthfinder.gov, a customized health information website based on scientific research compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services. Similarly, for a parent worried about a child getting enough of the right food, iGov could automatically file an application with the appropriate food security programs, which would take Benefits.gov to the next level of service.

In a way, iGov would be the federal, Information Age-analogue to New York City’s wildly successful 311 program. Less than ten years old, the program allows anybody to call in, speak to an operator, and learn vital information about city services, from pothole repair to school closings to snow removal. The service has handled more than 100 million calls in about 180 different languages and spawned imitators across the country. Of course, the scope of the federal government’s responsibilities is much broader than New York City’s. And we shudder to think that it took government more than a century to figure out how best to use the telephone.

The 311 service entered the lexicon gradually, until it became virtually synonymous with city government accessibility. The word “iGov” should achieve the same at the federal level, and do for government’s relationship to the Internet what 311 did for its relationship to telephones. We envision a personalized experience with each government agency’s website for users who are logged into their iGov account. Users could also choose to link their iGov account with social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter, so that they could see what their friends like on the agency’s website and find specialized news feeds. The iGov platform would expand the opportunities for targeted information sources, such as FoodSafety.gov, which is a multi-agency effort to provide consumers with information about recalls and alerts about food safety. It could also help combat inaccurate information. For example, when rumors spread last fall that the EPA was on the verge of regulating farm-dust emissions, Administrator Lisa Jackson released a statement making clear they were not based in reality. And yet the rumor continued to crop up, again and again. Agencies cannot combat rumors and falsehoods without connections to communities, which are increasingly available through social media.

iGov would help ensure that all federal agencies are fully integrated into the stream of viral information that now so strongly shapes what people think. It would build on the White House new media team’s push to use social media and other communication initiatives like the federal Plain Language Action and Information Network, which aims to make “bureaucratese” a thing of the past. It could add new tools such as online chats with service representatives from different agencies when and where demand warranted it. For those who would prefer the traditional experience of viewing a federal agency’s website anonymously, that would continue for anyone not logged into to their iGov account.

While the federal government would not start from scratch in pursuit of an iGov strategy, it would have a long way to go. Just getting up to speed with the strides taken by the private sector would be a tall order. Since the initial widespread deployment of information technology under the Reinventing Government initiative in the Clinton-Gore Administration, much has changed. Companies like Amazon, Fidelity, and Facebook have shown how to electronically manage a rich set of individual and community relationships. Relying on customized information, these companies provide easy access to what customers want and need. They connect individuals to communities with similar interests who have made similar transactions before. iGov would adopt similar techniques to deepen the relationship between citizens and government.

Fighting the Anti-Government Mindset

Americans will always be skeptical of their government. As well they should; skepticism of government is healthy, and part of our heritage. But we’ve gone beyond skepticism. An anti-government mindset has all but conquered American politics. Is it possible that the gradual implementation of iGov—the use of modern-day technology to showcase everyone’s unique, complicated relationship with the federal government—would do its part to adjust that attitude? While not naïve utopians, we think that the answer is yes. If nothing else, when the government is as despised as ours, it has no choice but to improve. As the saying goes, it has nowhere to go but up.

Of course, design and implementation would happen slowly, as an iterative process that the President could initiate via executive order or Congress could launch through legislation. Over time, different agencies would merge their efforts into iGov. Right now, many agencies are moving toward technological modernity, but there has been no coordinated effort on this central point: Citizens should know the details of their relationship with their government. They should not be in the dark about the costs they put in or the benefits they receive. iGov, understood as a unifying strategy and a lodestar for action, is meant to tell a dynamic, long-term story. As a goal, it is both alluringly straightforward and one that will require immense yet incremental efforts across Washington.

As iGov takes hold at the federal level, it will be critical for state governments to join in as well. After all, the states distribute many federal benefits such as food stamps and health care for the poor and disabled. It seems plausible, if not likely, that the states would offer their own versions. In, say, one or two decades’ time, come April 15, you’d know not only where your tax money was going—you’d know in what form it was coming back. If you had a question about Social Security, you could speak with a representative online. While paying off your student loan, you could examine the way in which federal money benefited your community. And as the states take up iGov, perhaps it would be possible to shorten the dreaded DMV wait time by instituting an online appointment process, similar to that found in Apple stores (indeed, some state DMVs have started doing this). Above all, no matter where you fell on the ideological spectrum, you’d have a better idea of that shared project, the national government.

We don’t live in the Age of Roosevelt anymore, when the White House could send its agents to help local families get by. We do, however, live in a period when modern technology has made information ubiquitous and ever more accessible. Making use of these innovations, today’s federal government could adopt a human face for the digital age.

Still, reading both Rosa Brooks’s and Tom Perriello’s contributions to Democracy’s “America and the World” symposium [Issue #23], I found Santayana’s sentence coming unbidden to mind. For rarely have two pieces illustrated what might with only slight exaggeration be called the will to forget the past, and, as in so many of America’s foreign-policy follies, both the triumph of hope over (even recent) experience and the belief that this time America’s good intentions in fostering a global democratic order should matter far more than the actual history of U.S. actions from at least Woodrow Wilson’s day to George W. Bush’s.

To put the matter even more pointedly, after all the harm the United States has done in the Arab Middle East over the course of the past decade—not least, the comparatively unremarked fact that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein seems to have led not to democracy but to a world-historical tragedy that will be remembered long after Saddam and Bush have become footnotes: the end of Christianity in Iraq, one of the oldest loci of the faith—the only sensible thing to conclude is that in fact Washington is very bad at promoting democracy, and that, desirable as democracy doubtless is, its gift is not and therefore must not be asserted by influential policy intellectuals to be within America’s grace and favor. And so, though I have no doubts about either Brooks’s or Perriello’s moral seriousness, nor that the world they would like to see would be a far better one than that which we inhabit today, when I read two former members of the U.S. government calling not for an end to democracy promotion and humanitarian military interventions by the United States, but for better forms of both, I really do want to ask them: “Have you no shame?”

Because with regard to the American empire, there is much to be ashamed about. Obviously, progressive policy intellectuals like Brooks and Perriello (and their opposite numbers at places like the Truman National Security Project, The New Republic, and other like-minded venues, and in the work of writers like Anne-Marie Slaughter, to name the best rather than the worst of them) know perfectly well that America has committed many crimes in its history—as all empires before us have done, and presumably, after us, will do as well. Brooks in her piece dwells at some length on the historical flaws and faults of American democracy. But for some reason this knowledge doesn’t seem to chasten her and her intellectual cohort in the way that it should. After mentioning the genocide of the Native American peoples, slavery, etc., etc., and frankly acknowledging that America as premier global democracy promoter must, indeed, sound more than a little grotesque to any Latin American with the slightest familiarity with her region’s history, they return to their default position, which is that America’s mistakes of the past should not be allowed to impede America’s fundamental commitment to the liberal internationalist project, which is, at its core, about the instauration of democracy everywhere in the world where it has any chance of gaining a foothold.

How is one to account for this? How, pace Santayana, do the lessons of the past seem to weigh so little? An as-yet-unshaken allegiance to a certain liberal, enlightened version of American exceptionalism—one, to its credit, leached of its triumphalism, its xenophobia, and its bellicosity—is surely part of the explanation. American democracy may not be perfect (far from it); but democracy at least does allow a people to set things right if they’ve gone off the rails, as the history of the United States is supposed to demonstrate. Doubtless, what might be called America’s Great Gatsby complex—that is, the belief that our past mistakes should not limit our future possibilities—is another. As Fitzgerald put it, there are no second acts in American lives. And because we somehow are supposed to believe this self-serving, consoling rubbish, we have our moral guilt and our interventionism too.

This allows progressive internationalists to feel entitled to note, but not be impeded by, the inconvenient truth that virtually all major U.S. interventions—from Woodrow Wilson’s adventures in Mexico to the occupations in the Caribbean in the 1920s and 1930s; to the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh and Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s; to Vietnam, and the dirty wars in Central America of the 1980s; and finally to the sanguinary folly of Iraq—were undertaken in the name of some form of democracy promotion or humanitarian or human-rights intervention. But this time it will be different, they insist! At least if done with—to use words both Brooks and Perriello emphasize—care, humility, and realism about what can and what cannot actually be achieved.

Curiously, the first part of both Brooks’s and Perriello’s pieces make a powerful case for such a disengagement. Brooks’s refusal to idealize democracy in the way cruder advocates of democracy promotion—Samantha Power springs instantly to mind—have so often done, her reminder of the blood that has been shed in the name of democracy, her acute sensitivities not just to the crimes and failings of the American past but to those that still mar the landscape of the American present as well, and her recognition of just how little, from a practical point of view, we actually know about which kinds of democracy promotion efforts work and which do not, could be read as a damning indictment of the whole project. But then Brooks makes a precipitous U-turn and asserts that democracy promotion should remain “a vital part” of American foreign policy, not because democracy “is perfect or because we are perfect, but because democracy remains the only political system yet devised that builds in a capacity for self-correction.” Elsewhere, Brooks calls democracy “the human fail-safe.”

Here we find ourselves lost deep in the dark forests of Fukuyamaland. Because once democracy becomes the default position of what nineteenth-century humanitarians called “the cause of humanity,” the political conversation is over, and the debate is demoted from whether—which should remain the real subject of the argument—to how. In this, Brooks is in the mainstream of the line of argument that liberals began to craft during the Bush years as an alternative to that Administration’s neoconservative Wilsonianism that sought a way not to throw out the global-democratic mission baby with the war-loving and American triumphalist bathwater. A particularly vulgar iteration of this view can be found in The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did) that the journalist James Traub published a few years ago. For Traub, it was simply a given that American security depended on the progress of freedom abroad. And because democracy had “become a near universal aspiration,” we in the United States “cannot choose” to be agnostic about it.

Brooks is smarter and subtler than that, at least, and keeps her categorical imperatives on something of a tight leash. But she still falls into the imperial trap of believing that it remains the prerogative of the United States to continue to put its heavy thumb on the global political scales to try to tip them toward democracy. To ask a question that is utterly absent from the mainstream debate in America (except, alas, for the egregious Ron Paul), what business is it of the United States to use its enormous power and, at times, its enormous military power to promote any political system on the rest of the world? Of course, advocates of democracy promotion will argue that we are not imposing anything, that people everywhere want democracy. But that is what advocates of empire have always said, and that history, which Brooks and Perriello seem so eager to dismiss, should give us pause.

There is something totalitarian in all this. For once one declares that democracy, for all its faults, is the highest form of contemporary political civilization, one is talking religion, not politics—and not just religion but monotheism at that. And the peril here is that, in such a narrative, anyone who does not jump on the democracy bandwagon is the secular equivalent of a heretic or a pirate—hostis humani generis, as the old description of pirates went: enemies of the human race. And with such enemies there can be no negotiation. They must go, or we must overthrow them—in the name of humanity, of course, and, per Perriello, according to the new humane codes of war making that we have now mastered. Improved operational capacities, Perriello instructs us, present “progressives with an opportunity—one that is too often seen as a curse—to expand the use of force to advance key values.” This claim is indistinguishable from Tony Blair’s 1999 declaration in his speech at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that in the twenty-first century, the West would fight wars in the name of its values as well as its interests. Like Blair, Perriello is explicit on wanting more interventions, which in less Orwellian language means more wars. And Perriello trumpets the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi as the vindication of this worldview, even though it is anything but clear that regime change in Libya—let’s at least call things by their right names—will lead to a more democratic future in anything but formal terms. However, given the extent to which Brooks’s and Perriello’s arguments are now the conventional wisdom in Washington, our actions on “the shores of Tripoli” (the Marine Corps hymn; the most vulgar of Marxists couldn’t make this stuff up!) are only the overture to many more such expeditions “in the name of humanity.”

Let the buyer beware. If the debate about America continuing to promote democracy abroad is a practical one, then the practical reality is that actually, as Brooks herself concedes, following democracy theorist Thomas Carothers, we don’t really know what we are doing and rarely take into account with sufficient seriousness the unintended consequences of our actions. The Arab Spring, heralded by Brooks as the legitimation for the Obama Administration’s cautious moves away from realism and back toward more involvement in global democratization, should serve as a cautionary tale here. For it is by no means clear that the overthrow of Mubarak (or, indeed, the fall of Ben Ali, Saleh, and Gadhafi, and the possible overthrow of Assad in Syria) will lead to more decent societies in the Arab Middle East, nor that these democracies (for they are indeed that; Brooks is right there) controlled by Islamist parties will be more “self-correcting” than their predecessors.

If the debate is about American interests, then Brooks, Perriello, and those who share their view need to demonstrate why a democratic world order is necessary to the security of the United States. For despite the fact that this is so regularly claimed, it is anything but obvious. At the very least, there needs to be more consideration than democracy promotion advocates and partisans of humanitarian intervention have been willing to give of the costs as well as the benefits of the American project of fostering, to the extent it can do so prudently, a systematic, universal, global change of all political systems that are not yet democratic. That would require a commitment that is actually far more radical than regime changes in a few countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. Only the belief that in fact democracy is what the world wants already, and thus, morally speaking, we are pushing on an open door, could justify such a swollen ambition.

We have been down this road before, and its name is empire. If they follow Brooks and Perriello, American policy-makers will most likely declare our actions to be taken in the name of human rights, rather than what the French empire called France’s “civilizing mission,” or what Kipling called “The White Man’s Burden.” But at the risk of sounding like Gertrude Stein, an empire is an empire is an empire. At this point in history, surely it is time to consider instead whether the moral thing for us to do would be to stand down rather than double down.

The Tea Partiers were the spoilers at the progressives’ take-back-the-government party that started in 2008. Barack Obama had been in office barely a month when the first Tea Party protests began. By the end of the Administration’s first summer, angry Tea Partiers had overwhelmed the congressional town hall meetings called to debate the new health-care reform proposals. The Tea Party-fueled midterm election was not simply a pendular swing back to the pattern of divided governance that has dominated national politics for most of the last four decades. Not even in the 1994 Republican Party victory in the House of Representatives had a midterm election so effectively canceled out the election before it. The 2010 midterms were a negation election in which Obama’s overwhelming 192 electoral-vote margin evaporated.

It wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. As the financial system’s fragile mortgages, exotic derivatives, and sheer bets fell in a heap in 2008, the collapse should have brought long-term rewards for progressives. The crash of 1929 had been an event of much the same sort: an implosion of a recklessly leveraged financial system that cascaded through the rest of the economy, destroying jobs and ruining household equity. These had been the conditions of the New Deal’s birth and of the labor movement’s rise that helped give it votes and backbone. The crash of 2008, however, has produced only a financial reform act so complex that no one yet knows whether it has any teeth at all, a cautious extension of health insurance coverage whose fate hangs on the Supreme Court, and unprecedented political deadlock.

The differences between the political circumstances of the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008 have, in retrospect, become more evident. Franklin Roosevelt’s unexpected fortune was to arrive in office after three years of futile hope that, given new confidence, business would revive itself. That gave him a virtually blank slate for policy departures that few presidents have ever possessed. Obama, in contrast, inherited the crash of 2008 at the worst possible time, when the unraveling of the assumptions of the status quo had barely begun. He had no choice but to sustain the stabilization policies handed off to him by Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the very success of which transferred the banking and mortgage systems’ massive risk and volatility to the government that rescued them. There has been barely enough time for a new labor movement to organize. Instead there has been the Tea Party, brimming over with anger, not at the banks and financial institutions that precipitated the collapse, or at the Republican Administration that inaugurated their rescue, but at the haplessly complicit Administration that finished the work.

And there is something more besides. Franklin Roosevelt inherited a Progressive Era debate over the relationship among individuals, society, and government that was already four decades old when he came into office. A sense of their interdependence had largely pushed aside the nineteenth-century conceit that each individual stood utterly alone as master of his fate. The question on the New Dealers’ minds, however naïvely they sometimes answered it, was how best to articulate social action and individual energy to promote the welfare of all. By contrast, Obama inherited four decades of public discussion in which the importance of society has steadily diminished in favor of individual choice, personal identities, markets in goods, and markets in selves. This time the ideas with the loudest megaphones came not from the solidaristic left but the libertarian right.

Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s small but densely informative The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is the best effort we have to date to make sense of the Tea Party phenomenon. Members of the Harvard program in Government and Social Policy, where Williamson is a graduate student and Skocpol is a distinguished faculty member and prominent writer on public affairs (and a member of this journal’s editorial committee), they were independently pursuing inquiries into the politics of health-care reform when the Tea Party protests erupted. Curious, they began interviewing activists in the Greater Boston Tea Party and, from there, local Tea Party activists in Virginia and Arizona. Bypassing the big rallies and the fiery placards that catch the television journalist’s eye, they visited Tea Party members in their homes and sat in on local meetings, checking their one-on-one impressions against the polls and local Tea Parties’ web presences.

These labors give us a profile of local Tea Party activists that is, in most respects, hauntingly familiar. In the early days of the Tea Party protests, journalists frequently swallowed the line that Tea Party activists were an altogether new force in politics: a bipartisan uprising of political innocents equally outraged at the banks and the Administration, a movement that was as big as the two established political parties and destined to overwhelm them. In truth, it is much smaller. A core of perhaps 200,000 people show up at the nation’s 800-odd local Tea Party groups, Skocpol and Williamson estimate. According to an aggregate of recent polls, about 13 percent of the voting age population say that they are a part of the Tea Party; a total of 20 percent to 30 percent of voters claim that they support it. That makes the size of the Tea Party movement not very distinguishable from the other conservative movements that, from the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, have risen and collapsed on the American political right.

And to a great extent, they are formed of the same people. Skocpol and Williamson’s interviews found very few political naïfs, and even fewer disillusioned Democrats. Local Tea Party members are overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, many of them with years of conservative political activism in their past. They are overwhelmingly white, disproportionately male, and disproportionately old. Reorganized, re-energized, and modestly secularized since the 1990s, they represent not something new but “the latest iteration of long-standing, hard-core conservatism in American politics.”

This remobilization of the conservative right was not triggered by the crash or the bailouts. An occasional sign at a Tea Party rally vents anger at the banks and the corporate elite, but for the most part the rank and file do not see them as the problem. In their hours of interviews, Skocpol and Williamson write, none of the Tea Party members blamed business or the super rich for the nation’s troubles. It was the Democratic sweep of the presidency and Congress in 2008, and what they feared that portended, that galvanized them into action. Like many of their right-populist predecessors, they live not so much in the present as in a swirl of nightmare scenarios of the future. They worry about tax increases. They fear that any increase in the government’s presence in the medical system will mean the end of the Medicare benefits they defend and feel entitled to. They worry that, under the pretext of a global warming crisis, the government may reach into their very homes and take control of their thermostats. When a squandering, tax-drunken government runs out of money, they are convinced that its next move will be to seize their 401(k) retirement accounts.

They detest Obama not so much for who he is (though their encoded racism is not far below the surface) but for what he represents about the changes they feel have destroyed their America and, still more, for the secret designs they are sure he harbors. “Barack Obama came right out and said he wanted to transform America,” one interviewee told the authors. “He’s actually not what he seems to be,” another insisted. A friendly Arizona couple confided that they had been stockpiling food and ammunition to carry them through the “frightening time” they were sure lay ahead. Filling in the blank slate of Obama’s “yes, we can” rhetoric with fears like these, it’s no wonder that they want so desperately to nullify the election of 2008.

If their nightmares of the future are familiar from the John Birch Society and the Armageddon scenarios of the Christian right, the moral economy of Tea Party activists also has a familiar pattern. Trying to pin down their attitudes toward “government” or worry through the apparent contradiction between their anger at government assistance for some and the ample benefits they receive themselves is to misunderstand their political universe altogether, Skocpol and Williamson insist. The Tea Partiers’ world is split by a stark moral duality between those who have earned what they have and the “moochers” who freeload on the rest. This was the chord that journalist Rick Santelli struck in the CNBC outburst that helped spark the Tea Party protests, railing against the government’s plan to bail out insolvent mortgagers at the expense of those who had been more prudent. Tea Party activists condemn illegal immigrants as law-breaking handout seekers; 15 years after the closing down of the Great Society’s most important welfare program, they are still angry at welfare recipients. “I differentiate between entitlements and welfare,” one explained: between the freeloader’s handout and the entitlements she feels certain she has earned through her Social Security and Medicare taxes. “I am not rich,” another protested, “but I am working hard to get there, and when I do, I would prefer that the moocher class not live off my hard work.” They see economic redistribution as the peril of their times, and they are certain that it has started with themselves.

How did a group imbued with this sort of moral Manichaeism get swept up by the pro-business program that now dominates the Congress that the Tea Party movement helped elect? A common charge on the left—that the Tea Party was purely an Astroturf phenomenon, centrally contrived and manipulated—does not hold up against Skocpol and Williamson’s more complex portrait. No paid organizer called the local activists and set their efforts in motion. And while the role of Fox News in trumpeting the emerging protests and shaping their slogans and message cannot be exaggerated, the work of practical organization was locally generated. These activists called one another, constructed MeetUp sites, and compiled e-mail lists. When the big, deep-pocketed institutions—Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity—together with the upstart claimants for the Tea Party brand, the Tea Party Patriots and the Tea Party Express, moved onto the scene to organize the national rallies and to dominate as the movement’s television spokespersons, they were playing catch-up to the grassroots surge.

The top-down and bottom-up dynamics of the Tea Party movement, Skocpol and Williamson suggest, were connected in a more intricate way than the Astroturfing model implies. The big business funders needed the passion of the movement’s local organizers, their paranoia, their consuming anger at establishment politics, their uncompromising sense of urgency, and their willingness to disrupt the political status quo. At the same time, they needed to keep that anger pitched at such a level of generality that they were free to write into legislation a program that mirrors not the moral accounting of the local activists but the interests of big business. “End the deficit,” “lower taxes,” “seal the borders,” “balance the budget,” “eliminate the handouts”—these are the bridgework, the open-ended slogans that allow the wealthy funders and politicos to position themselves as articulators of the sentiments and passions of the grassroots, even as they press for specifics that the activists either oppose, like Paul Ryan’s plan to transform Medicare, or do not care about, like the special-benefit riders that now routinely festoon House majority bills. Some local Tea Party members do their best to pore over the complex details of legislation, but it is an unequal game and over time, Skocpol and Williamson suggest, the locals have been losing control.

But even this shrewd insight is insufficient to explain the way in which the unprecedented political stalemate of our times was created. Part of what is missing from Skocpol and Williamson’s narrative are the millions of voters who have never ridden a Tea Party Express bus or attended a Tea Party meeting but who have enough sympathy with the cause to vote for candidates who embrace it. How has their unease at the unraveling of the economy been kept from turning upon the financial institutions whose sudden breakdown triggered the crisis in the first place?

One answer lies in the very scale of the crisis and the measures mobilized to meet it. Even before the most recent revelations of the extent of the Paulson-Bernanke bailouts, the size of the public funds and credit that were mobilized in the early months of the crisis was mind-numbing. It did not help that Dodd-Frank, the legislative response to the instabilities of finance capitalism, was in its own way so complex as to be almost equally ungraspable. The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that set the banking system on its post-New Deal course was 37 pages long; Dodd-Frank runs to almost 850 pages.

What is too large to grasp or feel is ripe for radical simplification. Rick Perry waving aloft a tax return no bigger than a postcard, the House majority refusing to budge on the debt ceiling, Michele Bachmann insisting that the rules governing a family’s household budget and those of the United States’s ought to be exactly the same—these are not economic statements but emotional-conceptual ones. A government no bigger than the moral imagination can grasp is the message today’s conservatives proclaim. That response, sharpened by the very magnitude of the post-2008 events, is central to the program and emotional intensity of the conservative revival.

And it is the supply of radically simplified answers that has been libertarianism’s gift to the present moment. In the 1930s, the labor movement’s all-for-one and one-for-all understanding of the realities of an individual worker’s lot in industrial society helped give a social frame to the New Deal’s experiments. Now, in a post-mass-production age, the mental mindset of self-made oil tycoons and free-market economists sets the course. Here, too, one wishes that Skocpol and Williamson had framed their research project more broadly. The Koch brothers, whose group Americans for Prosperity has played such a key role in sustaining and channeling the Tea Party’s outrage, have been pressing libertarian ideas on the polity, with mixed success, since the 1970s. What enabled them to leap so successfully into the opening the Tea Party provided was not just the scale of the government response to the crash. It was the steady shrinkage through the 1980s and 1990s of the progressive vocabulary for a society made up of something bigger than private selves and private choices. It was an “age of fracture,” I have argued elsewhere, in which the very words for social relationships were recast around micro, market models. Notions that were politically marginal in the Reagan years—privatization of Medicare and Social Security, wholesale charterization of public schools, the return of public responsibility for the poor to the efforts of private charity, employment of for-profit soldiers in the public army, fully self-correcting markets—are all live ideas now. The contraction of the public imagination preceded the Tea Party and opened the way for its political effects.

In the face of this, Skocpol and Williamson remain relatively sanguine about the political future. Civic engagement, they insist, cannot in itself be an unworthy thing. Tea Party activists are old, and the passions they represent are much more firmly lodged in older than in younger voters. Fox News voters are disproportionately old as well. Ultimately, they remind us, they must pass from the scene.

But nothing guarantees the return of the stronger, denser progressive vocabulary that was once common in political discourse. In the crisis to date, progressives have rallied vigorously in the face of cutbacks to benefits and union rights. But without a larger rationale than preservation of the status quo, the battle between the progressives’ and conservatives’ senses of moral entitlements can only intensify the current stalemate. The Occupy Wall Street outcry against the extraordinary privileges of the 1 percent carries important traction, but the underlying economic and moral philosophy behind progressive taxation goes almost wholly unarticulated. Social Security persists, but in most Americans’ minds its benefits have become almost completely unhinged from the risk-pooling, social insurance arguments that framed it. Franklin Roosevelt talked about the interdependence of individuals’ economic fates in the face of collective crisis. Obama’s “we,” by contrast, has been much less clearly defined. He talks about “fairness,” a “fair shot,” and a “make or break” moment for the middle class. They are important terms. With luck they may help inch the marginal tax rate of the wealthiest Americans back to its 2001 level. But if progressives cannot find a language of more concrete and encompassing interdependence than this, if they cannot explain more articulately and persuasively how our economic lives are entangled, from the poorest and most marginalized to the very top of society, they will exhaust the moral and intellectual capital that early twentieth-century Progressives bequeathed to them without replenishing it.

While progressives struggle to defend benefits, business conservatives refigure the corporation as a great altruism machine, a cornucopia of endless job creation if only regulatory meddlers got out of the way. That, too, is an illusion—but one that has a magnetic pull in a society that has forgotten what it once knew about the business cycle. We wait for Obama to give a fireside chat on macroeconomic fundamentals that begins to match the clarity and simple honesty of his 2008 Philadelphia speech on race. So scared are Obama’s handlers of the image of an elite university professor that they have run away from one of his largest natural advantages. Glenn Beck played the professor’s role to terrific advantage. He made sense of the world to millions of Tea Partiers, mapping on his blackboard how absolutely everything fit together. Ross Perot did the same. Obama does not need Beck’s blackboard or Perot’s charts, but he needs to explain more. He needs to be fed fewer slogans and sound bites. He needs to start giving lessons in how a modern, interdependent economy and society actually work, why market competition does not always produce a fair outcome, why public goods and public regulation matter, and why the fate of the 1 percent, the poor, and the Tea Partiers who feel themselves squeezed in between are, in sober fact, dependent on each other.

In the material that Obama’s speechwriters prepare for him, phrases that were once a common part of progressive politics still surface. “We have a stake in each other’s success,” Obama declared in Osawatomie, Kansas. That’s a powerful moral-intellectual claim that even frightened persons can get their heads around. But if it is not articulated more effectively than it has been in the crisis so far, the privatized nightmares that the Tea Party promotes will continue to haunt our politics.

But it is a mistake to equate federalism’s past with its future. State and local governments have become sites of empowerment for racial minorities and dissenters, the groups that progressives believe have the most to fear from decentralization. In fact, racial minorities and dissenters can wield more electoral power at the local level than they do at the national. And while minorities cannot dictate policy outcomes at the national level, they can rule at the state and local level. Racial minorities and dissenters are using that electoral muscle to protect themselves from marginalization and promote their own agendas.

Progressives have long looked to the realm of rights to shield racial minorities and dissenters from unfriendly majorities. Iconic measures like the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act all offer rights-based protections for minorities. But reliance on rights requires that racial minorities and dissenters look to the courts to shield them from the majority. If rights are the only protections afforded to racial minorities and dissenters, we risk treating both groups merely as what Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan calls “objects of judicial solicitude rather than efficacious political actors in their own right.”

Minority rule, by contrast, allows racial minorities and dissenters to act as efficacious political actors, just as members of the majority do. Think, for example, about where groups we would normally call a “minority” now actually constitute a majority: a mostly African-American city like Atlanta, a city such as San Francisco where the majority favors same-sex marriage, or a state like California or Texas where Latinos will soon be in the majority. In each of those cases, minority rule—where national minorities constitute local majorities—allows minorities to protect themselves rather than look to courts as their source of solace. It empowers racial minorities and dissenters not by shielding them from the majority, but by turning them into one.

Why should we care? We should care because the success of our democracy depends on two projects. The first is integration—ensuring that our fractious polity remains a polity. The second is dialogue—ensuring a healthy amount of debate and disagreement within our democracy. We have made progress on both fronts, but there is a great deal more work to do. Our social, political, and economic life still reflects racial divides. Our political system is immobilized; the issues that matter to everyday citizens are stuck in the frozen political tundra we call Washington. We have long looked to deeply rooted rights as tools for promoting equality and protecting dissent. But everyday politics can be just as important for pursuing these goals. We should look to minority rule, not just minority rights, as we build a better democracy.

An emphasis on minority rule isn’t intended to denigrate the importance of minority rights. It is simply to insist that while rights are a necessary condition for equality, they may not be a sufficient one. Too often we assume in the context of race that rights alone will suffice, as if the path to equality moves straight from civic inclusion to full integration. We miss the possibility that there is an intermediary stage: empowerment. Such a strategy would be impossible without the hard-won battles of the civil rights movement. But it’s possible to believe in, even revere, the work of that movement and still wonder whether rights, standing alone, will bring us to full equality. Civic inclusion was the hardest fight. But it turns out that discrimination is a protean monster and more resistant to change than one might think. We may require new, even unexpected tools to combat discrimination before we reach genuine integration.

Similarly, while the First Amendment has long been thought of as part of the bedrock of our democracy, it does not represent the only tool for furthering dialogue and nurturing dissent. Decentralization gives political outliers one of the most important powers a dissenter can enjoy—the power to force the majority to engage. It thus helps generate the deliberative froth needed to prevent national politics from becoming ossified or frozen by political elites uninterested in debating the hard questions that matter most to everyday voters.

Federalism and Race

Advocates of racial justice have long been skeptical of federalism. It is not hard to figure out why. The most important guarantors of racial equality—the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act—were passed at the national level and resisted at the local level. And it’s not just history that blinds us to the possibilities associated with decentralization and minority rule; our very idea of equality inspires wariness. We have a firm sense of what “integration” or “diversity” looks like: a statistical mirror. “Diversity” is a much-revered term for the idea that institutions should look like the community from which they are drawn—that they should “look like America,” to use one of Bill Clinton’s favorite phrases.

We are thus quite dubious about institutions that depart from statistical mirroring, including those where racial minorities dominate. That skepticism runs so deep that it is inscribed in our very vocabulary. Our terminology is bimodal. We classify institutions as either “diverse” or “segregated.” The former is in all cases good, the latter in all cases bad. Thus, when racial minorities constitute statistical majorities, we call those institutions “segregated” and condemn them as such.

Consider an example from the mainstream media. In 2006, The New York Times wrote a story on Nebraska’s decision to address school failures in Omaha by dividing the city into “three racially identifiable” school districts. Each district was racially heterogeneous, but one was predominantly black, one predominantly Latino, and one predominantly white. What made the story unusual was that the plan’s author was Ernie Chambers, the only African American in Nebraska’s legislature and a long-time civil rights advocate.

Care to venture a guess as to The New York Times headline? “Law to Segregate Omaha Schools Divides Nebraska.” The Times condemned majority-minority school districts as segregated simply because of their racial make-up. And if Omaha is segregating its schools, who wants to be on the wrong side of that fight? School quality matters, of course. But the shorthand the Times was using wasn’t about school quality; it was about which group dominates the student body and the school committee. And we forget that it is perfectly plausible to centralize some things and not others; if you are worried about economic inequality, you can run your schools at the local level without funding them there. That’s precisely what Ernie Chambers wanted to do; he thought the new arrangement would ensure that school quality would not suffer.

Or consider the Supreme Court’s equality jurisprudence. The Court has condemned majority-minority electoral districts as “political apartheid.” A conservative majority also held in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989) that a minority set-aside program is more constitutionally suspect because it was enacted by a black-majority city council. Nor is it only the color-blindness camp that views minority-dominated institutions with skepticism. The same majority-minority electoral districts damned by the Court’s conservatives as “balkaniz[ing]” were termed “the politics of the second best” by its liberals. Consistent with the view of many progressives, the liberal justices treat the creation of such districts as a mildly distasteful strategy for ensuring a diverse legislature. Indeed, in the most recent schools case, every Supreme Court opinion—those penned by liberals and conservatives alike—condemned heterogeneous schools where minorities dominated as “segregated.”

Critical distinctions get lost when we treat these issues as debates about segregation versus integration. The most obvious is that these institutions may be different from the racial enclaves of Jim Crow. The less obvious is that, viewed through the lens of federalism, we might imagine these sites as opportunities for empowering racial minorities rather than oppressing them.

It’s hard to see the case for majority-minority institutions because the diversity paradigm offers such a deeply intuitive vision of fairness. We laud diversity on the grounds that racial minorities bring a distinctive view or experience to democratic decision-making. Those who favor it wax eloquent about the dignity associated with voice and participation. Given its many virtues, one might wonder why anyone would quarrel with the notion that democratic bodies should look like America.

But the oddity of this theory for “empowering” racial minorities is that it relentlessly reproduces the same inequalities in governance that racial minorities experience everywhere else. Diversity guarantees that racial minorities are always in the minority for every decision where people divide along racial lines.

Federalism and localism, in contrast, depend on—even glory in—the idea of minority rule. Neither theory requires you to like every policy passed at the local or state level any more than a nationalist has to agree with everything that Congress passes. But our current system rests on the assumption that decentralization can produce a healthier democracy in the long term. Ours is a world in which decision-making bodies of every sort (school committees, juries, city councils) are dominated by groups of every sort (Italians and Irish, Catholics and Jews, Greens and libertarians). We don’t worry about this representational kaleidoscope—let alone condemn it as “segregated”—merely because one group or another is taking its turn standing in for the whole. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry when it is a racial minority group in that position.

Minority rule can promote both the economic and political integration of racial minorities. We have long understood minority rights as furthering those goals, which is why we care so much about them. But minority rule can further these goals as well. Often when we talk about democratic equality, we focus on its symbolic benefits rather than its material ones. We talk about the dignity of political participation but wrinkle our noses at the idea of political patronage. But history suggests a more muscular account of what a democracy can do for minorities. Politics can play an important role in promoting economic integration, and economics can play an important role in promoting political integration.

Pam Karlan and New York University Law Professor Sam Issacharoff, for example, have argued that the economic progress of African Americans has turned not on the vindication of civil rights, but on business set-asides, affirmative action, and government employment. In their view, these programs came about precisely because blacks were able to elect their candidates of choice in majority-minority districts. “[T]he creation of a black middle class,” they write, “has depended on the vigilance of a black political class.” A group of economists at George Mason University found that black employment rates, for instance, rise during the tenure of black mayors, an effect that is particularly pronounced for municipal jobs. One might even argue that this was the story of integration for white ethnics, as Justice David Souter once argued. In Souter’s view, the Lithuanian and Polish wards of Chicago and the Irish and Italian political machines in Boston helped empower these groups. That power, in turn, “cooled” ethnicity’s “talismanic force.” In these examples, political power didn’t just facilitate economic integration. The economic advantages associated with political power exerted a gravitational pull on outsiders, bringing them into the system and giving them a stake in its success.

Admittedly, this argument involves a more rough-and-tumble account of democracy than we read in our civics textbooks. And it certainly offers a less pristine view of integration than the one we associate with the rights model. But while we have long recognized the dignity conferred by the rights afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment or civil-rights statutes, we should also acknowledge the dignity involved in groups’ protecting themselves rather than looking to the courts for help. Indeed, this notion resonates entirely with the lesson of the civil rights movement. Rights were not “conferred” upon African Americans. They fought for them, pushing reluctant national leaders to do the right thing.

Those who favor racial integration might also value minority rule for reasons that have nothing to do with its material benefits. We have long believed that political participation matters for equality. But we typically think of participation in highly idealistic and individualistic terms while ignoring crass concerns like who wins and who loses. Academics thus praise diverse democratic bodies because they involve the “politics of recognition”; they grant racial minorities the “dignity” of voice, ensuring that they play a role in any decision-making process.

However, when one turns to the question of winners and losers, the limits of the diversity paradigm are clear. While the diversity paradigm guarantees racial minorities a vote or voice on every decision-making body, it also ensures that they will be the political losers on any issue on which people divide along racial lines. Racial minorities are thus destined to be the junior partner or dissenting gadfly in the democratic process. So much for dignity.

Minority rule, in sharp contrast, turns the tables. It allows the usual winners to lose and the usual losers to win. It gives racial minorities the chance to shed the role of influencer or gadfly and stand in the shoes of the majority. Local institutions offer racial minorities the chance to enjoy the same sense of efficacy—and deal with the same types of problems—as the usual members of the majority. Minorities get a chance to forge consensus and to fend off dissenters. They get a chance to get something done and to experience the need for compromise, as dissenting from the margins normally comes with the luxury of ideological purity. And as with members of the majority, racial minorities don’t just have a chance to represent their own group—they have a chance to take their turn to stand in for the whole, which Princeton Professor George Kateb describes as a key feature of representative democracy.

If the “politics of recognition” theorists are correct that the diversity paradigm—granting racial minorities a voice on every decision-making body—represents an acknowledgment of equal status, then federalism and localism acknowledge the ability of racial minorities not just to participate, but to rule. In place of what some call the “politics of presence,” we have the politics of power. In place of the dignity of voice, we have the dignity of decisions.

The effects of turning the tables are not, of course, confined to racial minorities. It also deprives whites of the comfort and power associated with their majority status. The notion of turning the tables thus taps into a deeply intuitive idea of democratic fairness. Democracy works better when the usual losers sometimes win and the usual winners sometimes lose. Everyone ought to experience, in the words of President Bush, a good “thumpin’.”

We have long thought that minority rights further economic and political integration. We have long associated minority rights with material advancement and expressive dignity for people of color. But we have ignored the possibility that minority rule might promote a similar set of aims, and thus offer another tool for helping us transition from a world of racial oppression to one of genuine equality.

Dissenting by Deciding

Progressives, of course, care a good deal about nurturing and protecting dissent. Perhaps it reflects their sympathy for the underdog. Perhaps it’s because progressives often are the underdogs. But dissent matters to progressives even when they think they can build a majority for their positions. That’s because it’s hard for progressive issues to get traction these days. It’s harder still to get something—anything—done in Washington. Dissent helps create the deliberative churn necessary for an ossified political system to move forward.

The problem is that progressive views on dissent exhibit the same shortcomings as our discourse on race. The statistical integration model dominates here as well, albeit in a less explicit form. Consistent with the diversity paradigm, we typically assume that dissenters should be represented in rough proportion to their share of the population—one lone skeptic among twelve angry men. While we romanticize the solitary dissenter, we have no celebratory term for what happens when local dissenters join together to put their policies into place. Instead, we condemn governing bodies dominated by dissenters as “lawless” or “parochial,” as Fordham Law School Professor Nestor Davidson and University of Virginia Law Professor Richard Schragger have both found in their studies of the discourse surrounding local power.

Here again, critical distinctions get lost when we focus on minority rights and neglect minority rule in thinking about dissent. We miss the possibility that governance can be a vehicle for dissent. For example, we typically don’t use the word “dissent” to describe San Francisco’s decision to issue same-sex marriage licenses or the efforts of the Texas school board to rewrite its history curriculum. Yet the people involved in these decisions subscribe to the same commitments as those whom we would in other contexts unthinkingly term “dissenters.” They simply dissented not through a blog or a protest or an editorial, but by offering a real-life instantiation of their views. They were dissenting by deciding. And yet the very idea of a dissenter who decides seems like a contradiction in terms. Even though our highly decentralized system offers numerous examples of dissenters wielding local power, our basic understanding of dissent is built around the assumption that dissenters don’t have the votes to win. We expect dissenters to speak truth to power, not with it.

Just as it is odd that we affix the dreaded label “segregation” to institutions where racial minorities dominate, so too it is strange that we condemn decisions as parochial simply because political outliers make them. Just as the right to free speech has played an important role in shaping national debates, so too has minority rule. Consider the way the debate over same-sex marriage has unfolded during the last decade. Supporters of same-sex marriage spent many years exercising their First Amendment rights. They wrote editorials, marched in parades, and argued with their neighbors. That work played a crucial role in fueling a national debate on the question.

But so, too, did the decisions of San Francisco and Massachusetts to issue same-sex marriage licenses to gay couples. Note, for instance, how different these instances of minority rule looked from the bread-and-butter activities of other proponents of same-sex marriage. The people who put these policies in place made the case for same-sex marriage in a way that abstract debate never could achieve. Beamed into our living rooms were pictures of happy families that looked utterly conventional save for the presence of two tuxedos or two wedding dresses. By taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by minority rule rather than relying on minority rights, proponents of same-sex marriage remapped the politics of the possible.

If one is debating something in the abstract after all, the hardest argument to defeat is the parade of horribles. How exactly will you prove they won’t occur? Think, for instance, of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s claim that there would be rioting in the streets in response to San Francisco’s decision. It’s easy to dismiss this allegation in hindsight, but I must confess that when I was in Cambridge on the day that Massachusetts began marrying same-sex couples, I assumed that thousands of protestors would be bussed into the city. Instead, we saw a peaceful if slightly carnival-like atmosphere, with the only source of excitement being the Gay Men’s Choir.

The decisions issued in San Francisco and Massachusetts didn’t just put to rest a variety of dire arguments about what would happen if same-sex couples were allowed to marry. They helped reveal something about where same-sex marriage fell on people’s priority lists. To be sure, when asked, “yes or no to same-sex marriage?” most people continued to say no. But same-sex marriage was not enough to motivate protesters to flock to California or Massachusetts, and that is something we could not possibly have learned from an abstract debate or opinion poll.

Minority rule also lets dissenters engage in what political scientists term “agenda setting.” It’s one of the most powerful—and volatile—tools any minority enjoys. That’s because when a minority dissents by deciding, the majority can’t just ignore the dissenters, as majorities are wont to do. That option is simply unavailable when dissenters use local power to issue a decision. In that situation, the majority must do something to get the policy overturned. Minority rule shifts the burden of inertia and thus enables dissenters to force the majority to engage.

Why does this matter? Our national system is notoriously sclerotic. There are issues that matter quite a lot to people on the ground but never make it onto the national agenda because elites have no interest in debating them. Some issues are highly salient to everyday people, which is precisely why those in power don’t want to go anywhere near them. Gay rights is one of those issues. Immigration is another. Note, for instance, that both sides of the debate on immigration have struggled to get the federal government to act on this question. But Arizona’s recently enacted immigration law has galvanized national debate and forced elites to engage.

It is important here to note that even when states and localities pass policies that progressives dislike, getting the issue on the national agenda is what’s of value. With the issue on the national agenda, progressives, of course, still need to win the fight in Washington, as I discuss below. But that’s just as true of the nationalist model that progressives favor. The lesson that progressives often miss is the way that these two models interact. Local decisions can serve as a much-needed catalyst for national debates. Local politics don’t undermine national politics; they fuel it.

There are others ways in which minority rule can serve the same ends as minority rights. As in the context of race, we often laud minority rights because they can knit political outliers into the polity. But the odd thing about a rights strategy for protecting dissent is that it pushes dissenters outside of the project of governance. They have a right to speak their mind, but only when they speak for themselves. Minority rule, by contrast, pulls dissenters into the project of governance. When dissenters wield local power, they can no longer jeer from the sideline. Instead, they have to suit up and get in the game. Minority rule thus requires dissenters to do just what the majority is accustomed to doing: deal with criticism, engage in compromise, figure out how to translate broad principles into workable policies. Abstraction and ideological purity are the luxuries enjoyed by policy-making outsiders. When dissenters have an opportunity to govern, however, they must figure out how to pour their arguments into a narrow policy space. Think about the movement to bring religion into schools. As members of the Christian right have fought to put their preferred policies into place, their positions have shifted. They have moved from teaching the creation story to merely “teaching the controversy.”

Minority rights, then, are not the only means available for protecting political outliers and integrating them into the polity. Minority rule can serve precisely the same ends. It would be useful for progressives to recognize that fostering dissent involves not just the First Amendment, but federalism; not just minority rights, but minority rule.

Racism, Parochialism, and the Costs of Local Power

One might accept all of these arguments and yet still worry about local power because of the twin problems of racism and parochialism. Local power doesn’t just empower racial minorities and dissenters, a progressive might argue. It empowers those who will oppress them. The costs seem too great.

It would be silly to argue that minority rule is without costs. But the model currently favored by progressives—a strong nationalist system—has costs as well, as the discussion above makes clear. Eliminating opportunities for local governance to protect racial minorities and dissenters also means eliminating the very sites where they are empowered to rule.

More importantly, what we have today is not your father’s federalism. The federalism that haunts our history looks quite different from the form of local power that prevails now. Federalism of old involved states’ rights, a trump card to protect instances of local oppression. Today’s federalism involves a muscular national government that makes policy in virtually every area that was once relegated to state and local governments. The states’ rights trump card has all but disappeared, which means that the national government can protect racial minorities and dissenters when it needs to while allowing local forms of power to flourish.

It would be foolish to insist that every state and local policy must be progressive for progressives to favor federalism. Decentralization will produce policies that progressives adore, and it will produce policies that they loathe. The same, of course, is true of a national system. Progressives have to make their case to the American people, just like everyone else. The point here is that progressives can fight for their causes in our current system, and they can win. Gone are the days of policy-making enclaves shielded from national power. If progressives are simply looking for guaranteed wins, it’s not decentralization that they should worry about—it’s democracy.

Moreover, progressives tend to overstate the problem of parochialism. When progressives talk about democracy, they celebrate the idiosyncratic dissenter, the nobility of resistance, the glory of getting things wrong, and the wild patchwork of views that make up the polity. When progressives turn to governance, however, they crave administrative efficiency, worry about local incompetence, and have a strong impulse to quash local rebellion. We join de Tocqueville in celebrating the eccentric charms of local democracy, but our tastes in bureaucracy run with Weber: impersonal, rationalized, and hierarchical. It should come as no surprise that de Tocqueville’s democracy fails to produce Weber’s bureaucracy. But rather than spending all of our time worrying about that failure, maybe we should acknowledge the fact that decentralization offers so many benefits that progressive nationalists can value.

Progressive nationalists have long worried that decentralized power needlessly fractures the national, exercising a centrifugal force on the polity. But ours is a system where local power can turn outsiders into insiders, integrating them into a political system and enabling them to protect themselves. It is one where the energy of outliers can serve as a catalyst for the center, allowing them to tee up issues for national debate. It is, in short, a form of federalism that progressive nationalists can celebrate.

Progressives were right to worry about federalism in the past. They are wrong to worry about it now. Minority rule and minority rights are tools for achieving the same ends. Both can help further equality and nurture dissent. Progressives have long endorsed the nationalist case for national power. Now is the time to acknowledge the nationalist case for local power.

The odd thing about the progressive case for local power is that it is utterly familiar to those on the ground. The virtues of decentralization may not play an important role in progressive thought, but these lessons haven’t eluded those involved in progressive politics. Progressives have long leveraged local population concentrations into political power. Indeed, much of the most important work on progressive issues started at the local level. Take climate change: From green building codes to cap-and-trade, the bulk of the work on the issue is being accomplished outside of Washington. And even national standards on fuel efficiency and the like have emerged largely as a result of states like California using their policy-making power to prod national regulators to move forward.

It’s time that progressive thought caught up with these realities. Even those key areas where progressives have long looked to national power—promoting equality and protecting dissent—reveal that minority rule, and not just minority rights, should be understood as a key part of any healthy democracy.