The Long View
Look closely at our dilemma, and you see not decline, but leadership. We are being buffeted by the first waves of a storm spreading around the world. We’re not worst, but merely first.
Category: Future of Democracy
Democracy In An Age Of Transience
Can a democracy organized around the mediating influence of social capital survive the rise of transience? Can this system function when so few of its brightest, most talented and successful people can name a single local politician? Perhaps, but across the world the results so far don’t look promising.
How Democracies Die
Trump’s personal repulsiveness, criminality, and incompetence deliver a second chance not offered to Italians and Germans in the 30’s.
Corporate Class Consciousness
Now that the government at the center of the “Free World” has been bought off by a corrupt global kleptocrats, who is standing up for liberal democratic values? Corporations, of course. Get used to it, because this is the strange new shape of liberal democracy.
What’s “Next” After Liberal Democracy
Monarchies still exist, they just don’t matter. This is likely the fate of democratic institutions as Next takes shape.
Social Democracy Won’t Save Liberal Democracy
A pivot toward social democracy might form a bridge to a post-Trump world, a rhetorical rally point to organize short-term resistance to fascism, but it is unlikely to offer any long term solution to the weaknesses eroding liberal democracy.
Three and a Half Kinds of Power
Before throwing our weight behind one bold plan or another, it would be wise to revisit first principles. In politics, that starts by winding back to the most fundamental questions of all. What is power? And how does it work?
Markets Produce Excellent Failures
If you want to ruin the power of businesses to innovate and succeed, just insulate them from competition and protect them from failure. Likewise, if you want to see public institutions adapt some of the habits and characteristics of the best private entities, expose them to forces that weed out poor performance and open up massive new channels for decision-making and experimentation.
The Asian Alternative
Whatever succeeds, history tells us it will not be merely a continuation of what came before.
After Democracy, “Look up at this Tower”
Maybe this is good. Maybe it’s bad. But “looking up to the Tower” is definitely not how people solve public policy problems in a healthy democracy.