What Elizabeth Warren Needs To Do…

I hate the “this is what ….. needs to do now to win the election articles” yet I want to add to the garbage piles that these articles belong on. Because what I would love to see Elizabeth Warren do is raise the level of her candidacy by talking about how and why government works to address issues.
Beyond simply offering plan after plan of policies that the government could enact to address problems I think what lies behind Warren’s myriad plans is the idea that government can and should be a force for good in people’s lives. That is what I agree with, that underlying principle. And while I think that general idea is actually what separates the parties right now, I think Warren’s campaign, by offering credible plans for almost any issue you can think of, has demonstrated that the problem is that we are failing in thinking about how government can be a force for good in society.
In my endless reading of books about how to fix politics I recently read The Narrow Corridorand I came across this passage[1](emphasis mine):
…cooperation with a powerful society can greatly increase the capacity of the state. Once the leviathan is shackled, society may choose to give it a long leash and allow it to increase its reach so that the state uses its capacity for things that its citizens want and need. It is a strategy of “trust and verify” — trust the state to acquire more powers but at the same time increase your control over it. When it works, as it has to some degree in the United States and Western Europe, the outcome is an ongoing process of both state and society becoming more powerful, and expanding in a balanced way, so that neither dominates the other. When this fine balance works, the Shackled Leviathan not only ends Warre but also becomes an instrument for the political and social development of society, for the blossoming of civic engagement, institutions, and capabilities, for the dismantling of the cage of norms, and for economic prosperity.But only if we manage to keep it shackled. Only if we succeed in preventing the messy Red Queen effect from getting out of control. No easy feat. ….
There in bold is the goal, the vision for the relationship between society and the state. That is what we want, a Shackled Leviathan “both state and society becoming more powerful, and expanding in a balanced way, so that neither dominates the other”. Warren proposals are basically all about the policy that a powerful shackled leviathan should institute along with mechanisms to create verification on government and corporate action.
The real center of the coming general election is a debate between whether the US is still capable of having a government that works toward the vision of a blossoming society, or whether all we have left is the inevitable decline toward one of the many ways that society fails to keep the leviathan[2]shackled; by letting the leviathan become either too strong (despotic, eg China) or too weak (paper, eg Bangladesh[3]).
So What Elizabeth Warren needs to do is talk about shackling the Leviathan. Or you know maybe find better more approachable language that gets at the same issue…
[1]The Narrow Corridor, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, 2019, pg 72–73
[2]Leviathan is the phrase Thomas Hobbes used to describe the federal government or “state”