Why this election won’t change anything in America (and what we can do about that).
Trump, Sanders and the Would-Be Revolutionaries of Both Parties Aren’t Radical Enough
It’s obvious that Americans are unhappy with the political and economic establishment. This frustration, anger — call it what you will — has propelled the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Yet while both are vessels for these frustrations, neither is likely to resolve them. Indeed, no matter who wins in November, this election won’t change anything substantial in America. That’s right: you can be certain that in four years’ time we will be having the same debates about an under-performing economy, a fractured society, stubborn poverty, rising inequality, declining quality of life — and, underpinning it all, a corrupt political system.
Why? Because the fundamental problem at the heart of America’s malaise goes deeper than any candidate, party or set of policies. It’s this. The structures and systems we’ve built to run the modern world have become too big, bureaucratic, and distant from the human scale. You can see it in the way we run government; the way we address problems like poverty; the way we think about services like education and healthcare…and throughout the private sector too, in the way corporations treat their workers, customers and wider society.
The truth is, we live in a world run by bankers, bureaucrats and accountants who, for the last few decades (and regardless of which party has been in power) have successfully pushed a technocratic agenda that favors big business over small, that prioritizes ‘efficiency’ at any cost, and that is callous about the real-life consequences of this dehumanized world.
Changing it requires a wholesale departure in the way our government is organized and our country is managed. And I don’t see any of the presidential candidates talking about that.
It’s why I wrote my book, More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First. My aim was to take Americans’ anger and turn it into an agenda: a plan for fundamental reform of our economy, society and government to make our world more human. It’s based in part on the work I undertook for David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, who took a flailing political party, modernized it, and restored it to national leadership.
But I live in America now, and have been out of government for four years, teaching at Stanford and building a political tech startup, Crowdpac. So my analysis benefits from a certain amount of detachment, and is based just as much on what we failed to do in government as our successes. I saw at first hand, from the epicenter of British political power in 10 Downing Street, how the powerful established interests of big business and big bureaucracy, defended by an insular ruling elite of technocrats and bureaucrats (in the private sector as much as the public) can overcome the best of intentions.
And now I see from my new vantage point in California how in America today, the inhuman technocratic takeover is holding back our economy, crushing our efforts to fight poverty, increasing inequality, and making daily life a grim, joyless struggle for millions. Not to mention driving support for Bernie Sander’s “revolution” and Donald Trump’s kick-over-the-table populism.
We are no longer living in a human-focused economy. We don’t know where our products come from or how they are created. The effects of our decisions seem less and less important because we don’t really know what they are. We “love a bargain” but don’t see the appalling conditions endured by the people who produce a product or service that can be sold so cheaply. We troop to the supermarket but don’t see the small businesses and farmers whose livelihoods are wrecked by “everyday low prices.” The human consequences of our choices are felt by people separated from us by time, space, and class.
In government, we continue to live with a system that is a relic of the past. We are no longer in the age of sail and steamships, so why are we still governed as if we were? Many of the services that government provides or underwrites — education, social services, welfare — are well established and no longer require centralized bureaucratic systems, whether at the federal, state, or even local level, to run them. Simply put, the raisons d’être of centralized government no longer justify it. But its costs remain. Twentieth-century factory-style approaches — standardization, automation, mechanization — infect intrinsically human areas like education, healthcare, food, and housing.
We used to think factories equaled progress. They were sanitary, standardized, and quality controlled. They took urchins off the street while providing the middle and working classes with once-only-dreamt-of luxuries. Having tens of thousands of cows or chickens on a single farm seemed like the modern thing to do. But that vision is now out of date.
Where I live now, in Silicon Valley, the goal is to be bigger, faster, cheaper. Does that equate to better? Much of the time it does. But too often the “progress” we are offered is not an improvement; it’s just more “efficient” — which usually means more efficient for the producer, not the user. Astronauts used to consume Tang, a powdered orange drink, because it is compact and nutritious (a requirement on space missions). But should we substitute it for actual orange juice? Or oranges? Just because something is more “efficient” doesn’t mean it’s better.
The misguided quest for efficiency has led to negative side effects that are only now being understood. A world programmed to perfection is no longer a human world: without problems to solve and imperfection to inspire us, we would become complacent. We would not only lose our ability to innovate and be creative but, worse, our world would become sterile. If we never get lost, we will never go to unexpected new places. If we never have to repair things, we will cease to tinker and make anew. Without the spontaneous discoveries — and mistakes — that so enrich us, humanity stagnates.
Human beings are both individual and social creatures. We work better in communities, families, social networks — with human-to-human, or human scale, interactions. How then have we allowed the institutions that shape our lives to become so dehumanized?
Before the Industrial Revolution, politics, government, and business were almost entirely local — because they had to be. Rulers simply did not have the information and reach to make decisions about individual people’s lives or run centralized bureaucracies. Local governors or feudal lords were delegated almost all sovereign power, answering only nominally to the far-off capital. Bureaucracies existed, but even the most sophisticated ones in China and the Ottoman Empire relied heavily on provincial officials. Corporations were limited to the most complex of commercial banks, even then often in quasi-official roles. Companies like the East India Company or the Rothschild banking empire delegated wide autonomy to local officials; superiors at the center had only the most limited strategic control. This period we could call the pre-bureaucratic age.
As with many things, war, commerce, and technology changed the dynamic. With larger armies and more sophisticated warfare, the conflicts of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars saw full-scale mobilizations that could only be managed through hierarchical and complex bureaucracies. At the same time, Napoleon applied these principles to the civilian part of his growing empire and created the first modern law code, the Code Napoléon, and an administrative state to implement it.
Meanwhile, economic trends led to similar developments in America. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 spurred a revolution in the American cotton industry, but it required scale to really be revolutionary, especially in the form of railroads to connect distant farms and merchants. Unlike maritime trading companies, the railroad companies upon which the American cotton industry relied needed centralized management to ensure safety. Bureaucracy was the only way to accomplish the logistical feat of spanning entire continents.
The new interconnected systems that enabled military and industrial growth soon spread to other aspects of life. Centralized governments were now able to build bureaucracies to run things on behalf of citizens, and government evolved into an accretion of massive hierarchies. Over the course of the twentieth century this model grew into the form of government that we have today. Along with its counterpart in the business world, it was — and is — the bureaucratic age.
Bureaucratic modernization brought a whole range of benefits, from universal schooling to a professional civil service, to social security, to the rule of law. In America it built a national infrastructure and enabled a superpower. These same centralizing mechanisms that enabled growth in the public sector eventually conquered the rest of the economy.
As commercial empires emerged, a cult of management science soon dominated, whereby businesses — and, eventually, government departments — were run by those at the top applying principles of “engineering” to the workers below. It was all about mass production, mass management, mass distribution — and as World War II mobilized the American economy on a national scale, the large corporation became a fait accompli.
Coupled with automation and other improvements in technology, the process continued unabated; vast conglomerates were commonplace by the 1960s. The age of the independent local business wasn’t over, but it was dealt a huge blow.
The inexorable growth of big business over the last century and a half has brought great benefits; in many respects someone on an average income in America today has a higher standard of living than even the very richest did a century or so ago. But the mostly national corporations of the mid-twentieth century that had at least some sense of connection to and responsibility for their local communities have given way to rootless global entities — private-sector bureaucracies — many of which have lost all sense of community, and with it their sense of perspective. The never-ending trajectory of mergers, consolidation, and growth has a cost — and not just a financial one (repeated studies have shown that corporate mergers generally destroy value for the acquiring firms’ shareholders).
Those at the top don’t see or feel the dehumanization all this has brought. The inhumanity of much of modern life — so evident in schools, in our food, in urban planning — is no concern for the elites because they (honestly, we) don’t have to experience it. Our children go to private schools, we live in the swankiest neighborhoods, and we shop at Whole Foods or the farmers’ market. When life gets rough, we go on exotic holidays or to our tastefully appointed vacation homes. When things get busy, we employ nannies, housekeepers, and delivery people to buy ourselves more time.
It’s no wonder that calls for a revolution are striking a chord. But what kind of revolution? We need to be specific.
I believe we can heal America’s malaise by putting power back in people’s hands, taking back control over the things that matter to us from the anonymous, distant bureaucrats that administer government and business. We had the pre-bureaucratic age, where everything was local. We’re experiencing the bureaucratic age, where centralization rules. But with the right ideas and the right people in charge we can now move to something better: a post-bureaucratic age, an age when things work on a comprehensible and controllable scale. The #MoreHuman message is that we can defeat the technocratic elite; fight big business and big bureaucracy; disperse power and put it where it belongs, directly in people’s hands.
In More Human, you will find a radical agenda for transforming everything from our fight against poverty to our children’s education, to our family’s healthcare — reforming and rethinking the very concept of government. As well as broad themes, there are specific proposals: from banning factory farms and children’s unsupervised access to the internet through smartphones, to establishing a universal home visiting service for every American family, so we make sure that all our children are raised in a way that helps them flourish. These recommendations are backed by the latest scientific and academic research on what it means to be human, and how people actually behave in the real world (rather than the fantasy world that policy wonks all too often ascribe to them).
This book is not a partisan argument, but this agenda — the more human agenda — rooted as it is in the notions of individual freedom and social responsibility; skeptical as it is about overweening power; confident as it is in human nature and the good that will come when individuals, families and neighborhoods work together without the need for a far-away administrator’s master-plan…this agenda naturally lends itself to a modern Republican Party that wants to redesign and rebuild the outdated systems and structures of our politics, government, economy, and society to make them more suited to the way we want to live our lives today.
To make them #MoreHuman.
