— Political Theorist — Mail Carrier — Green Bay Politics —
I live in Green Bay, Wisconsin and work for the USPS. I’ve got a B.S. in natural resources and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and an M.A. in English literature from Washington State University. My master’s thesis was on John Milton’s political theology as expressed primarily in Paradise Lost, drawing secondarily on his prose. A simplistic way of explaining my interest in Milton’s political theology is that Milton had a religious method for deciding the common good and the good life, as well as the best political arrangements to pursue those goods; I think liberal democracies need a secular, democratic way of doing those things today. It’s time for liberal democracies to get serious about deciding and legislating for the common good.
After finishing graduate school in 2010, I continued studying politics and the problems of democracy informally while working a series of driving jobs in the transportation industry. I drove semis on and off for years and drove a city bus for Green Bay Metro throughout most of 2023. After working for UPS through the peak holiday season of 2023-24, I decided to become a mail carrier for the US Postal Service. I still retain a Wisconsin Class A CDL and I’m also currently applying for a seat on the City of Green Bay’s Transit Commission (June 2024).
I intend to do much more writing in the future, since I would like to become a systematic theorist of deliberative democracy, as well as an advocate for a profoundly more civically engaged, participatory type of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is in crisis globally (V-Dem now says the world is back to 1985 levels). The crisis, at least in the United States, was obvious to me long before I started studying politics seriously. As a young environmentalist, I only needed to follow current events and politics in an oblique way to realize that our society was incapable of having a serious conversation about environmental problems, particularly with regard to climate change, water shortages, and toxic pollution. It is equally obvious today that the solution to the crisis of liberal democracy requires both a systematic political theory, and a popular movement for change, including a better way of doing democracy; hence, my interest in political theology for the former and deliberative democracy for the latter.
Rather than a figment of the past, the type of religious political theology Milton was engaged in is still alive and well and coming from Ivy League professors, no less, under the banner of Common Good Constitutionalism. While even Milton might have been less authoritarian than today’s right-wing theocrats, the conservatives are absolutely correct that liberal democracies need to get serious about community-building and the common good as a matter of their survival. As opposed to a religious vision for the common good, however, I’d like to show that liberal democracies now have a secular, scientific, transparent, and fully democratic method for deciding the common good. To do this, they must combine what I am calling dual, real-ideal constitutionalism with the pioneering methods of deliberative democracy.
Deliberative democracy is about building a new system for open government and public deliberation that is radically participatory and focused on solving our common problems. The only hope liberal democracy has is to reach more people where they are in order to build a more exciting, progressive type of centrism that pulls voters back from the epistemological dead-ends of right and left extremism.
My interest in serving on Green Bay’s Transit Commission stems from several sources, one of which is the opportunity it provides to engage with the public on the issue of public transportation. There’s a major component of public deliberation involved in service on City commissions, which is what deliberative democracy is all about. Here’s the situation: public transportation is in decline in the United States along with the rest of the public sector. The bus system in Green Bay—the third largest metropolitan area in the state of Wisconsin—is planned to shrink to half the size of what it was in roughly ten years, a timeframe that is already half over. This transition mirrors a national phenomenon where public services are being increasingly privatized, often with public subsidies going into private hands. In Green Bay, the bus system is getting converted into Microtransit, a publicly subsidized, private taxi service. Perhaps American citizens are fine with this sort of thing, but polling suggests that a clear majority of them usually are not. I would like to see the question of public transportation put directly to citizens across the Green Bay area in the context of a broader discussion of the economics of public transportation and public investment. Although voters generally support the public sector, they still persist in the backward thinking that the right is better for the economy than the left and that taxes are a drag on the economy. When voters are this confused about economics, it is not hard to see how we end up with so much corporate rent-seeking, corruption, and political decay.
Blaming political problems on voters, or corruption, for that matter, is too facile an excuse when the experts have also been confused about economics and democracy. Now that populist voters on the right and left have decisively rejected free-market economics in favor of limited protectionism and a more robust industrial policy—e.g. Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK, experts are beginning to do the same. Bidenomics clearly demonstrates a shift away from neoliberal economics, and the UK’s Labour Party is taking bold post-Brexit steps in the direction of what economist Mariana Mazzucato calls a "mission economy." The message deliberative democrats need to get across to voters is that voters need to stop focusing so much on political parties of right or left, and instead take the responsibility for their national economies upon themselves. Economies are too dynamic, subjective, and nation-specific to be adequately managed through a narrow, right-or-left ideological orientation. Only better democracy can produce a better economy or respond appropriately to the changes thereof. And voters, for that matter, shouldn’t be forced to swing wildly from left to right in order to ram through changes in a self-serving status quo, such as the one that prevailed through the neoliberal era.
In short, the demise of the public sector, including public transportation in Green Bay, is a result of outdated views on economics and democracy that can only be addressed by instituting a new system for deliberative democracy. We need what amounts to a civic, fourth branch of government. Since most of the institutions for a civic branch of government already exist, we’re talking about making a limited up-front investment for massive political and economic returns. In fact, the only really difficult part of creating a civic branch of government is to change people’s thinking about what liberal-democratic centrism requires to thrive in challenging times, which brings me to another interesting development in Green Bay.
On The Green Bay Clean Energy Plan and Political Theory
The City of Green Bay recently enacted a Clean Energy Plan to take advantage of renewable energy incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as to encourage other actions toward making Green Bay more carbon neutral. It is a very moderately ambitious plan that nonetheless has a clear connection to cutting-edge, big-picture political theory. As noted above, the crisis of liberal democracy must be met with both a theory and a movement, a political theory powerful enough to permanently alter the way we think about democracy, which can also serve as a roadmap for change, and a popular movement for change, which includes a new deliberative proceduralism based around existing democratic institutions. Green Bay’s Clean Energy Plan actually exemplifies what deliberative democracy needs to do on a grand scale, and it demonstrates the epistemological shortfall in liberal-democratic centrism as we currently understand it.
The environmental provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act aim at making a number of structural economic changes to modernize our production, utilities, and public infrastructure at the same time that we improve our national security, save taxpayers and utility users money over time, and move toward a more environmentally sustainable economy. All of this was even more true of the original Build Back Better Act, of which the IRA is a corrupted, weakened version—a product of “centrism” and “bipartisanship” as we practice them in the United States.
At any rate, the IRA is a big-picture piece of public policy aimed at an ultimately utopian ideal: sustainability. National security, conceived broadly, is also an utopian ideal, particularly in that it includes aspects of long-term thinking and foreign policy aimed at making-the-world-safe-for-democracy. Maintaining our NATO alliance and funding Ukraine against the Russians are examples of how practical such “utopian,” national-security thinking can be. Here we are hitting upon an aspect of the core political theory of liberal democracy that is still poorly understood, as well as the debate between “realism” and “idealism” in Western philosophy stretching back to the ancient Greeks. Realism simply cannot function without idealism; like yin and yang, they depend upon and mutually presuppose each other. Strategic thought itself cannot proceed without idealism. Even the scientific method is aimed at an utopian ideal: objectivity. Complete objectivity, as in full knowledge of the nature of reality (epitomized by the Theory of Everything idea), is an impossible utopian goal that nonetheless structures the scientific method.
Utopian thinking is, thus, both practical and powerfully efficacious when practiced with a rigorously peer-reviewed, deliberative scientific method. Serious, disciplined utopianism can do things like land spaceships on the moon. The scientific method is actually the ideal deliberative method of liberal democracy, as well. Science relies upon both utopianism and deliberative democracy (peer review and testing-of-hypotheses) in the scientific method, a method which is also the gist of how deliberative bodies determine the common good and the national interest. Thus, the deliberative, scientific method is actually the epistemological core of liberal-democratic civilization and politics; and, this is merely obvious. If you look up The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Science, for example, there are multiple essays on scientific “realism” and “aiming.” Timothy D. Lyons’s essay, “Scientific Realism,” describes the scientific method as “Socratic Scientific Realism” (page 580), the “Socratic” aspect meaning deliberative democracy in the style of Socrates. The Socratic Method is at the core of both science and liberal-democratic reason because it involves an attempt to get at the facts of the matter in an open, democratic, conversational-but-argumentative way.
The utopianism of science is an incredible fact that must be better understood, because we cannot construct coherent theories of liberal democracy, or of concepts like the “national interest” or “international law” without it. Sustainability and objectivity are utopian ideals necessary to aim at in constructing a theory of the national interest, of which national security is a part; this is actually self-evidently obvious, and yet it only exists as a merely academic discussion in the cannon of Western political philosophy. Beyond its environmental connotations, the concept of sustainability applies to all major policy areas because nations need to be sustainable. The utopianism of public policy is really that obvious. The political topic of realism, idealism, democratic deliberation, and aiming needs urgent philosophical and public attention.
So, to return to the example at hand, the Green Bay Clean Energy Plan encourages citizens to voluntarily make use of the provisions of the IRA that are available to them. Whereas the IRA is a piece of public policy aimed at an utopian ideal (sustainability), the GBCEP aims (in the near-term) to encourage locals to make use of the IRA. To that end, the GBCEP has hired an Energy Educator to educate the public about their options, whether they may wish to renovate their homes or businesses for improved efficiency, add solar or wind generation, purchase an electric vehicle, and more. Thus, the GBCEP encourages citizens to take practical steps toward an utopian ideal that can save utility users and taxpayers money over time. The GBCEP embodies the realistic possibilities of a utopian goal that voters actually want—and we know what voters want because the Plan was generated using local voter survey data; as such, the Plan represents accurately the “will of the people” in Green Bay.
Regarding the theme of public subsidies mentioned above, it is disingenuous to criticize the Clean Energy Plan, as some people did, on the grounds that it encourages people in Green Bay to spend federal taxpayer money—money which comes from all taxpayers, including the minority who are flatly opposed to any type of Clean Energy Plan anywhere. This argument overlooks the fact that federal money is not all tax money, since the federal government prints its own money and the value of the US dollar is created largely as an epiphenomenon out of the nexus of stable government, strong rule of law, a robust national economy, and high levels of social trust. A robust system of taxes actually increases the value of the money in our pockets and the strength of the economy overall.
In short, taxes are good and the Green Bay Clean Energy Plan makes use of them by encouraging homeowners in neighborhoods across Green Bay to utilize the financial incentives the Biden administration has made available through the Inflation Reduction Act. There are numerous reasons why citizens should get on-board with a renewable energy agenda including saving money, acknowledging our moral responsibility to the young, modernizing much of our economy, improving our electrical grid and the efficiency of our built infrastructure, and taking a proactive approach toward public problems in general. As I witnessed first-hand, probably the main selling-point of the Green Bay Clean Energy Plan was its potential to save homeowners, local taxpayers, and utility users money over the long run. Renewable energy requires upfront investment for long-term savings; deliberative democracy is similar in that improving the democratic system will have massive long-term benefits.
In both cases, deliberative democracy and going green involve an effort to maximize the potential of government and capitalism simultaneously; thus, they perfectly exemplify Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission economy.” Improving the economy requires improving democracy and vice versa. So, it is finally time for voters to take more responsibility for their own political and economic outcomes.
On No Labels, Third Parties, and Radical Centrism
Think of the No Labels political movement, if it can be called that, which has recently nose-dived in yet another presidential bid. With so many voters claiming to be dissatisfied with both parties, a third party seems at first glance to be the obvious alternative. No Labels may be politically clueless, but it is intuitively correct about liberal democracy, and it is correct in the way that the on-again-off-again populist push for “radical centrism” is correct, as well. The deliberative core of liberal democracy should aim at truth in both the objective-scientific sense of getting at the facts of the matter, and in the moral sense of truth. The core of liberal democracy, in other words, should be a radically “no-labels,” trans-ideological and trans-partisan deliberative proceduralism. Considering this, it may seem diplomatic to say that political parties are the problem with democracy, as though all parties are equally to blame; however, Robert Kuttner is right that we already have a radical centrist party in the United States—it’s the Democrats, and too many voters simply don’t get it.
Although parties and experts bear some of the responsibility for our political problems, the voters are ultimately to blame, particularly those on the right or leaning to the right. We do live in a democracy, after all, and voters largely get what they want in democracies. Our hostile and dysfunctional political system is actually an accurate reflection of what voters want, so if voters want the system to improve, they will need to take responsibility for improving it. Voters and experts alike must make up their minds to build a better democratic system. The only caveat is that someone still needs to explain clearly what a better democratic system would look like, which is where the experts and universities have plainly failed.
Kuttner’s point that the Democratic Party already is a radical-centrist party, as well as my points above, are easily confirmed in the Trump era by the fact that one of our two parties has metamorphosed from being (merely) a fraud to part of an authoritarian movement generated at least as much from the grassroots as from the political elites and propagandists at the top. The evidence is overwhelming that voters actually do get what they want, and that popular opinion is as fickle as the breeze. Thus, one of our two political parties has been a fraud for literally my entire lifetime: read Stuart Stevens’ two books It Was All a Lie and The Conspiracy to End America. On the fraud of neoconservative foreign policy read The Hell of Good Intentions by Stephen M. Walt, as well as The Inheritance: America’s Military after Two Decades of War by Mara Karlin. On the fraud of neoliberal (“free-market”) economics, see the Economics page of my website or any of the relevant links on the Homepage.
If voters actually want better government and a political life that ennobles rather than demoralizes us, they will need to get serious about serious politics. Having said this, however, it is not clear that a majority of voters actually want better democracy. Such is the moment in history where we stand: voters in many of the most established democracies in the world really aren’t sure how much they want democracy. The particular truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that the illiberal right is bigger, crazier, and more violent than the illiberal left, and it is also true that the center has a toxic combination of politically self-aware greed, ideological blindness, and sheer ignorance large enough to threaten democracy as much as any illiberalism on the left ever could. The cluelessness of the center is this obvious: Biden should have won and should be winning again by a landslide, but he’s not. In a presidential race between a seasoned, dependable politician and a lunatic, the adult should win, easily, every time. Voters aren’t sure they want an adult, however, and the reason for many of them is because they aren’t sure they want democracy itself. Cluelessness counts for most of the rest.
The neocons, for their part as centrists, have a peculiarly severe ideological blindness despite their typical preponderance of privilege and education. The blindness is this obvious: neocons are fanatics for “small government” paired with a robust foreign policy in the name of national defense and making-the-world-safe-for-democracy. Do they want big government for a big foreign policy, then, or small government? Which is it? Part of the small-government ideology is an unwillingness to tax the rich and megacorporations, or to regulate financial crime and tax havens—a national security threat, under the pretense of “fiscal responsibility.” It’s actually fiscal irresponsibility. Worst of all is the neocon point of view on democracy and national defense. Like neocons I am also a defense hawk, as well as opposed to illiberalism on the left, but only ideological blindness can explain how clueless neoconservatives were to the main threat to democracy before Trump came on the scene. Neocons thought the main threat was outside the country, as well as inside on the left, but our own security agencies have for years identified the overwhelming threat to democracy as stemming from within the country and coming from the right. (I recall a book written on this subject a generation ago by Robert Kennedy called The Enemy Within. It’s a shame someone shot him and the nation simply forgot about it all. Read also Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect.)
How can neoconservatives care so much about national defense and yet fail to notice how fragile democracies are from within? Ideological blindness is the reason. For half a century now, neocons have been the useful idiots of the radical right and Wall Street.
If citizens actually want democracy, they will take notice of the fact that deliberative democracy is about building a new system for open government and public deliberation that is radically participatory and focused on solving our common problems (not unlike the No Labels Problem Solvers Caucus). Parties aren’t the problem, but they aren’t the solution, either, so starting a new party, a third party, a “no labels” party misses the point. The no-labels idea is clearly a self-contradiction in that a party will not be able to stay free of ideological commitments or self-interest consistently enough to stand for the truth and nothing but the truth. Only a system of permanent, high-quality deliberation can aim consistently at the truth. That’s the system we need to build, and the political center must do it, or it won’t be done at all.
