Coming to you live this week from the American Political History conference at Purdue University, it’s the season finale. Will and Siva speak with three historians — Liette Gidlow, Derek Musgrove and Thomas Zimmer — about the past, present and future of government by the people. "Democracy in Danger" guests ponder the Jan. 6 hearings, D.C. statehood, social mobilization and the structural problems of the Constitution itself. Did America’s founders sign democracy’s death warrant at its birth?
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Meet the change leaders: Cynthia Richie Terrell
Sep 26, 2024
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen, is an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States.
Terrell and her husband, Rob Richie. helped to found FairVote — a nonpartisan champion of electoral reforms that give voters greater choice, a stronger voice and a more representative democracy. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy and voting system reform in the United States and has helped parliamentarians around the globe meet United Nations goals for women’s representation and leadership.
She has worked as campaign manager and field director for candidates for the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate and governor. She has also been involved in state and city-wide initiative efforts, including a state equal rights amendment.
In 2024 Terrell was named one of Washington, D.C.’s top policy experts and received a Generational Impact Award for her work on voting system reform. Terrell is a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory and was named a Brewer fellow along with a cohort of leaders in the democracy reform movement. She has a chapter on women and the presidency in the 2020 volume of “The Best Candidate: Presidential Nomination in Polarized Times.”
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Terrell writes a weekly column on women’s representation for Ms. Magazine and has been published in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Hill, Refinery29, The Nation, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The American Prospect, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun and The Christian Science Monitor. She has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” and has participated in numerous radio shows, podcasts and panel discussions on the topics of electoral reform and systems strategies to advance women’s representation and leadership.
Terrell is an avid knitter and gardener, has three children, and is active in local politics and in the Quaker community. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Swarthmore College in 1986.
I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Terrell for the CityBiz “Meet the Change Leaders” series. Watch to learn the full extent of her democracy reform work.
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How to save a democracy
Sep 19, 2024
Chaleff is a speaker, innovative thinker and the author of “To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Political Followers to Make or Brake a Toxic Leader.” This is the fourth entry in a series on political followership.
The presidential debate has come and gone. The sittingAmerican president is rattling the saber of long-range weapons for Ukraine. The sitting Russian dictator is expelling the West’s diplomatic staff. The outgoing president of Mexico has pulled off the largest-ever change of a judicial system in a substantial democracy. The prime minister of Israel defies the populace by continuing to use bludgeons to free hostages who increasingly are freed post-mortem. The presumed winner of the presidential election in Venezuela has fled the country.
This was last week. When did politics become so consequential?
Answer: It always has been.
In each of these cases an individual who has managed to make themselves the leader of their polity through outplaying rivals in the political game is now impacting millions of lives. What of their followers? Remember, there are no leaders without followers.
In my book, “To Stop a Tyrant,”I focus on the followers while everyone else is focusing on the leaders. What do followers want? Why do they follow?
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As always, the elite (who hate to view themselves as followers) act from the hubris that they can elevate and control the political leader. They do a pretty good job of this until they miscalculate, allow the leader to accrue too much power and find themselves the ones at the end of the puppet strings.
Members of the inner circle, practically drunk on the power of being able to influence the putative leader, outsmart and outmaneuver each other until the leader loses confidence in them and turns to other, more questionable confidants. Woe to the leader whose confidants stroke their fragile egos.
The vast army of bureaucrats sit warily on the sidelines, wondering who they will be answering to, calculating how much they can use the newly installed power to their advantage, or how much they can thwart threatened incursions on their well- guarded turf.
Meanwhile, the activists act. Paid or unpaid, that’s their job. More importantly, that’s their passion. Some paint their chosen person as the savior and some paint them as the destroyer of worlds.
You, dear citizen, will need to sort out which scenario is more credible.
If I were king, my one decree would be that all young people in a democracy study historic examples of how democracies die. How ruthless leaders have been elevated by people like themselves in the belief they were the answer to the country’s woes. How they missed the warning signs until it was too late and the leader had full control of the coercive power of the state. They would play simulations. Experiment with choices. See the outcomes. And prepare themselves to meet the temptations of their own era with a clear mind.
In my book, I use the term “prototyrant” to describe the political leader with the characteristics who, given the chance, can morph into a full blown tyrant. I asked a friend of mine who supports a candidate with too many of these characteristics why he is not worried about them achieving office. His answer seemed simple. The military in our country would never go along with a dictator. It sounded good. I want to believe the same thing.
Yet, the belief is almost childlike. History offers no proof that this would be the outcome. If it were, the result would just as likely be civil war or chaos. The time to interrupt the progression of a prototyrant is before they control the coercive levers of the state. If they have fooled us into giving them access to the levers, slam the brakes hard as soon as they begin to misuse those levers.
No prototyrant gets better when in power.
“Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We were told that in 1907 when it was published in a collection of Lord Acton’s letters and essays. It seems a hundred years hasn’t been enough time for us to digest this crucial observation.
I have examined the rare instances when enough individuals in the five circles of political followers work together to stop a prototyrant while they can. It may be time to consider these examples and do a bit of make-up study for the class we never took on how to keep democracies alive.
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Meet the Faces of Democracy: Bill Gates
Sep 18, 2024
Minkin is a research associate at Issue One. Clapp is the campaign manager for election protection at Issue One. Assefa is a research intern at Issue One.
Bill Gates, a registered Republican, was re-elected to the Maricopa County (Ariz.) Board of Supervisors in 2020 after first being elected in 2016. Before joining the board, he served on the Phoenix City Council for seven years, from 2009 to 2016, including a term as vice mayor in 2013.
Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, is the fourth-largest county in the United States, and it has the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country, with about 2.5 million active, registered voters and about 4.5 million residents. Gates represents roughly 900,000 residents as a supervisor for the 3rd district.
Maricopa County became a hotspot for election conspiracies after President Donald Trump lost the county to Joe Biden by about 45,000 votes, or 2 percent of the votes cast. The scrutiny of the vote count included official post-election audits as well as a partisan review of the results by an outside firm known as the Cyber Ninjas, which was hired by pro-Trump Republicans in the Arizona Senate. Each of the reviews confirmed Biden’s victory. Throughout it all, Gates weathered threats and harassment, later admitting he developed post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences.
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For decades, Gates has been an active Republican. In high school, he founded the Teenage Republican Club, and later he was an officer in the Iowa Federation of College Republicans. In the early 2000s, he served as a legislative district chair for the Arizona Republican Party and as the secretary of the Maricopa County Republican Committee. In 2006 and 2008, he led the Arizona Republican Party’s election integrity efforts, organizing groups of poll watchers and attorneys.
Outside of work, Gates is deeply involved in his community. With a law degree from Harvard Law School, he has been particularly active in law-related education, serving as a regional coordinator and attorney coach at both the high school and intercollegiate levels. Additionally, he is helping to organize the 2025 National High School Mock Trial Championship in Phoenix.
Gates has received various awards for his leadership and service, including the Maricopa County Bar Association's 2023 Public Lawyer of the Year award, the Ed Pastor 2023 Public Servant Award and the Truman Foundation's Joseph E. Stevens Public Service Award in 2022.
Since 2022, he has been part of Issue One’s Faces of Democracy campaign advocating for protections for election workers and for regular, predictable and sufficient federal funding of elections.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Issue One: How did you end up in this profession?
Bill Gates: I initially got involved about 20 years ago as a volunteer lawyer for the Republican Party. I would help to organize poll observers on Election Day. I first started in Navajo County, which is in northeastern Arizona, and then by 2006 and 2008, I was serving in this role for the Arizona Republican Party statewide.
After that, I ran for the Phoenix City Council and served there for seven years. And in 2016, I ran for the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. In 2019, when I was the chair of the Board of Supervisors, we negotiated with the county recorder at that time, Adrian Fontes, to take back all of our statutory responsibilities. So now we have a collaborative effort in Maricopa County for how we run elections. With the 2020 and 2022 elections, I became fully involved in some fairly famous elections here and just had an incredible opportunity to work closely with everybody on the team. This really is my life's work.
IO: What part of the election administration story in Arizona do you think is not told or widely understood enough?
BG: I think that people do not understand the size of Maricopa County and the breadth of the effort to run an election here. We are actually the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country. We have about 2.5 million registered voters, so every time we run a countywide election, it involves thousands of individuals, including thousands of temporary employees.
People don’t understand that the people running these elections are your neighbors. It is your aunt. It is your uncle. It is your mother. That human element is really important.
IO: In your job, how have you worked to bring more transparency to the world of election administration?
BG: I would like to think that is something that we have excelled at in Maricopa County. Following the 2020 election, we could have gone in two different directions. We could have hidden in the corner and said we are just going to do our jobs and let the world go by. Or we could swing the doors open and shine a light on everything we have done, which is exactly what we have done.
We have absolutely transformed our communications system. In the 2022 election, working with the recorder, we held 16 press conferences before and after the election. As far as I know, that is the most election officials here have ever done. We knew the attention that was on us because we had a lot of high-profile statewide offices, and we had many candidates that had questioned the results of the 2020 election.
After the 2021 Cyber Ninja audit that the Arizona Senate started, they would share updates from the Cyber Ninjas, and for the most part, they were simply spewing misinformation. So we decided to transform our social media to live tweet as these statements were being made. We were live tweeting our responses and debunking the misinformation.
Also, we have swung the doors open to the community. We have held numerous tours of Maricopa County’s tabulation center. We bring people in here — and not just those who feel very comfortable with our election system and have no questions. We have opened it up to everyone, and that has been incredibly helpful in getting the word out. Finally, we have livestream cameras on our tabulation center running 24/7 so if people have questions about what is going on, they can sit in their house and watch it on their laptops. These are just some of the measures that we have made to expand that transparency. We are very fortunate in Maricopa County to have the resources to do those sorts of things.
IO: Why do you think that voters should have trust in election processes and results, specifically in Arizona?
BG: In the past few election cycles, it has taken approximately 10 to 13 days to complete the count. There are other states that take that long, but they do not have the close elections that we do. Our races may take several days because they are close and because of the processes. To dig into that a little bit more, people should have faith because we have eyes on everything — Republican eyes and Democratic eyes. If you are a Republican, you need to know there are advocates on behalf of your party, on behalf of your candidates, who are watching everything.
A lot of people think a hand count would be a solution to strengthen confidence. A hand count is not a feasible approach in a jurisdiction like ours with 2.5 million registered voters. A lot of people do not realize that we do hand counts as a part of the audit process in Maricopa County. We select a small but a statistically significant percentage of votes to hand count and if we see variances between the hand count and the machine count, then we expand the universe of votes that get hand counted. We just had a hand count audit in our primary election, and guess what? It came out exactly the same.
Various other transparency measures that we have, including the livestream cameras, make people feel good about our election results. I would argue that the 2020 and the 2022 elections were the most examined elections in our country's history, especially in Maricopa County. If there was something going on, we would know about it. Everyone would know about it.
If voters want to have more confidence in the process, take us up on our offer and come take a tour of our election facility. I’ve never had anybody walk out of that and say, “I feel worse about things than I did when I walked in this building.”
IO: In the United States, election administration is not centralized. Instead, 50 states have 50 different systems. In Arizona, both the county recorder and the director of elections play essential roles in administering elections. What are some key differences between the two roles? And how does the Board of Supervisors fit in?
BG: The county recorder is responsible for voter registration and vote by mail. Vote by mail now in Arizona is running around 85 percent in every election. A county’s director of elections, who reports to the Board of Supervisors, is responsible for all in-person voting, both in-person early voting and in-person on Election Day. In addition, the director of elections is responsible for the tabulation of votes. Finally, the Board of Supervisors is responsible for certifying the results of the election.
IO: Many people are surprised to learn that the federal government doesn’t routinely fund the costs of running elections. Why do you think the federal government should routinely contribute to election administration costs?
BG: In the United States, as opposed to many other countries, we run elections at the local level. This is a strength of our system, that those who are the closest to the people are running elections. For those who are concerned about alleged conspiracies to rig elections, it makes it a lot harder when you literally have thousands of jurisdictions.
For those of us who are in elections, like me in Maricopa County, where we are in 50 lines of business as the Board of Supervisors, that means our residents count on us for lots of services. It is unfair, and I would argue it is undemocratic to force us at the local level to make choices between things such as addressing the housing affordability issue, or making sure our elections are run efficiently, or making sure that our citizens are safe. In the end, this is a federal responsibility. The federal government should be providing sufficient resources so that elections can be run safely and accurately, and frankly so that the local jurisdictions can respond to all that misinformation that is out there.
IO: What is the price tag of running an election in your jurisdiction, and where does funding for election administration in your jurisdiction come from?
BG: Our residents in Maricopa County help fund our elections through taxes. We do also get some funding from the state. And sometimes, there will be funding that will come down from the federal government, but it is not something that we can rely upon.
While my colleagues and I always say that you cannot put a price tag on democracy, the price tag can run into the tens of millions of dollars to run an election here in Maricopa County.
IO: If your jurisdiction had extra funding, how would you spend it?
BG: We have needs from a capital perspective that we would spend it on. We have been in the same building now for decades. We are going to be building a new facility as our county continues to grow. We have been one of the fastest-growing counties in the country for years. Not only is it important that we have good facilities for our workers, but it’s also important that we have the space that we need.
We need a lot of space to run elections because we have a lot of people who are involved in all steps of the election process. We also need to build a facility that is built with transparency in mind. People who go into election administration do not do it to get rich, that is for sure, but we want to make sure that we can compensate these people who are doing such important jobs to a level that we can get the best and the brightest. So, I would use additional funding on capital, I would use it on people, and I would also, unfortunately, need to continue to invest in security for our facilities, our workers and our voters.
IO: Last year, you came to Washington, D.C., to meet with lawmakers and policymakers as a part of a bipartisan advocacy push organized by Issue One. What was that experience like for you and why was it so important to speak with members of Congress about issues like increased election funding and protections for election workers?
BG: I was very grateful to join other elections officials from across the country. That was one of the best parts, getting to meet people, and share experiences, best practices and challenges that we have faced in the past few years. There is nothing like being able to talk through that. It is very healthy and very informative to learn best practices from other election officials.
Going to Congress was a great experience. Our representatives in Congress are focused on so many issues every day. To have folks come in — particularly members of their own party, so for me, meeting with my fellow Republicans on the Hill — and telling them the experiences that we have had, the challenges we face, and for them to look us in the eyes and and see the passion that we have for elections, and for our workers, was extremely helpful, especially for Arizona.
You know, if you live in Delaware or something, it is just a short train ride to Washington, D.C., but for those of us in Arizona, it takes us a day to get to D.C. To be able to have that opportunity and the partnership of Issue One, we are so grateful for that. I certainly hope that down the road, this will make a difference and help members of Congress understand just how important that federal investment in local elections is.
IO: What’s your elevator pitch for why someone should work as a poll worker this year?
BG: There is no more important time to be a poll worker than right now, when we have folks who are raising questions — some legitimate, some illegitimate — about how our elections run. We need you to go out and evangelize in your community about what it means to work on elections, to be able to respond to a lot of the unfair criticisms out there.
If you have questions about elections, then I absolutely want you to volunteer as a poll worker, because then you can have those questions answered! And I am confident that you will have those questions answered!
And if you care about this election and feel strongly about one side or the other, I definitely want you to be involved, because if you have been involved, then you can have confidence that the results are accurate and that the election was run in a way that all of us as Americans can feel good about.
If you are on the edge, trying to decide whether to work as a poll worker, do it. It is not too late to get involved. Call your local elections office. [Editor’s note: Or visit PowerThePolls.org/IssueOne.]
The other thing to note is there are many types of jobs. Everyone thinks you are just checking in voters and handing them a ballot. But there are so many different jobs. Maybe you like to drive. In Maricopa County, we are really spread out. We have drivers who take supplies out to our vote centers.
IO: In 2023, you announced that you would not be running for reelection. Can you tell us how you came to this decision and what is next for you?
BG: Some people will say that I ran from this because of all the harassment, the death threats and things like that. That is absolutely not the case. This was a decision that I spent a lot of time making with my wife and our daughters. At the end of this year, it will be 15 years in elected office for me, between the Phoenix City Council and the Board of Supervisors. It felt like the right time to move on from this and to give someone else the opportunity to work on the Board of Supervisors, which by the way, is the best job in the world. I want people to understand I am not running away from elections or what has happened here. I have loved every minute of it.
I am moving on to Arizona State University, where I will be a professor in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. I will also be the executive director of the Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, so I am going to continue in this space and work with my colleagues to help train the next generation of election administrators and to help provide continuing education to those who are already in election administration. We look forward to convening experts both here in Arizona as well as at our Los Angeles and D.C. campuses, to have discussions about best practices, do research and help push back on misinformation. I am really excited about this next chapter.
IO: Outside of being passionate about running safe and secure elections, what are your hobbies, or what is a fun fact that most people might not know about you?
BG: I play golf. I love to hike here in Maricopa County on all of our beautiful trails. I love to watch movies with my wife and our girls. And I love listening to music. People probably do not know that I have a very wide range of musical tastes going from yacht rock to hip hop.
IO: What is your favorite book or movie?
BG: My favorite movie is “Somewhere In Time.” It is from the 1980s, and it is the story of Christopher Reeve going to the Grand Hotel in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and he falls in love with a woman in a picture from the early 20th century [played by Jane Seymour]. He must then travel through time to meet her. I am really into time travel.
IO: Which historical figure would you have most liked to have had an opportunity to meet?
BG: I am fascinated by the French Revolution. I would have loved to have met Robespierre and talked with him about that whole experience, the uplifting power of democracy and also its very ugly side.
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Call them ‘representatives,’ because that’s what they are − not ‘congressmen’ or ‘congresswomen’
Sep 05, 2024
Wirls is a professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
For most of the nation’s history, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have been addressed as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” By contrast, a senator is referred to as, well, “Senator.”
These gendered terms for House members dominate in journalism, everyday conversation and among members of Congress.
The name Congress refers to the entire national legislature, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Gender identity aside, congressman and congresswoman are fundamentally inaccurate terms.
In the Constitution, Congress refers to the legislative branch as a whole. When discussing the membership of Congress, the Constitution uses “Representatives” and “Senators,” but also “Members” in reference to both. “Congressman” is nowhere in that founding document.
One of the foremost scholars of Congress, the late Richard Fenno, wrote, “a House member’s designation, as prescribed in the U.S. Constitution, is not Congressman, it is Representative.”
As a scholar of Congress and particularly the Senate, I am interested in the differences between the two chambers and how that affects American politics. In my investigation of the origins and evolution of congressman and congresswoman, I combed the records of colonial and state legislatures, as well as records related to the country’s founding and newspapers from the end of the 1700s to the mid-1900s.
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Even if the current era were not one of justified sensitivity to gender neutrality and diversity, these two terms for House members are not just dated, they are wrong. Representative is the correct but rarely used term.
Historical use
How did this terminological oddity come to be?
Congressman was used as early as 1780 in a poem by a British loyalist to refer to members, formally known as delegates, of the single-chamber and Senate-like national legislatures that preceded the Constitution’s establishment of a two-chamber legislature.
From 1788 onward, the gendered term was sometimes applied to members of Congress in general but increasingly to representatives in particular.
The central linguistic logic at work in early 19th century use of the term congressman stemmed from the reporting of election results. Newspapers reported the choices for governor, lieutenant governor, assemblymen, congressmen and senators. The only elections to Congress, however, were for members of the House, in contrast to senators, who were selected by state legislatures.
So, senators referred not to the occupants of the U.S. Senate but to the state senate. U.S. senators would not be directly elected by citizens for more than a century. In this and similar reporting, it was unambiguous to refer to the election of “congressmen.”
The common usage, which was firmly in place by the end of the 19th century, was bolstered by the arrival of congresswomen, starting with Jeannette Rankin in 1917. That political breakthrough ironically reinforced the gendered terminology associated with this office. The few early congresswomen were eventually joined by the first elected female senator, who was referred to as Senator.
Indeed, senators are invariably referred to by their gender-neutral and constitutional title.
Few parallels elsewhere
The use of titles that are both unnecessarily gendered and inaccurate is almost restricted to the United States Congress. There are surprisingly few parallels and no true equals at the state or international levels.
The gender-neutral term designated in the Constitution already exists. The title Representative is used in certain formal but limited circumstances by journalists and others. For example, the widely used Associated Press style guide for journalists instructs that “Rep. and U.S. Rep. are the preferred first-reference forms when a formal title is used before the name of a U.S. House member.” But the style guide also advises that “congressman and congresswoman are acceptable,” and those terms dominate in most circumstances in print and television journalism.
And the use of congressman and congresswoman dominates even among representatives and senators themselves. Some members even seem to go out of their way to avoid the constitutional term, including Sen. Mitt Romney. Romney recently referred to former President Donald Trump’s communications with “Republican senators and congresspeople.”
And the use of congressman and congresswoman is at odds with other contemporary adjustments to circumvent or replace sexist or binary language, including personal pronouns. The application of gender neutrality through the constitutional title evades neologisms like congressperson, which is as clumsy as it is unnecessary.
Reminder of civic virtue
Even as the Senate has lost some of its prestige and luster, the House is seen as a lower rung on the ladder of U.S. politics. Perhaps the inferiority complex that attaches to membership in the House versus the Senate also encourages the use of congressman. Being a member of Congress – and therefore a congressman or congresswoman – may seem more prestigious in its focus on the institution as a whole.
But it doesn’t have to be that way; the House could instead embrace its official title.
Richard Fenno, quoted earlier, can finish his point: “Whereas ‘congressman’ or ‘congresswoman’ tends to call our attention to a House member’s Capitol Hill activities and to his or her relationship with colleagues,” Fenno wrote, “‘representative’ points us toward a House member’s activities in his or her home district and to relationships with constituents.”
Members relish their connections to their districts, their constituents and the democratic virtues that role conveys. And part of this is the implicit contrast with the Senate, with its undemocratic origins and enduring elitist pretensions.
As well as being gender-neutral and institutionally accurate, the original title is a powerful reminder of the civic virtue and founding purpose of the House of Representatives. It’s not just politically correct, it’s constitutional.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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A 'just' meritocracy – the keystone to the American dream
Sep 04, 2024
Radwell is the author of "American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America. This is the 12th entry in what was intended to be a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.
I’m not sure if it is due to the recent triumph of the Paris Olympics or voters’ nascent love affair with Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, but the spirit of sports competition has taken center stage of late. Watching our young athletes reach their Olympic dreams and being introduced to Coach Walz seem connected in some mysterious but heartwarming way.
Behind every Olympic medal lies a story of young budding talent buttressed by a coterie of adults who chart the course. And in Walz, we recognize someone who has unmistakably demonstrated a profound developmental impact with kids both on the field and in the classroom.
But there is a more subtle and vital connection between the thrill of competitive sports and the concept of the American dream. In both, irrespective of background, the ingredients of raw talent, passion, perseverance, dedication and plain hard work can lead to achievement and its consequent rewards. Notably, both in sports and in society, a prerequisite to fair and impartial competition is agreement and acceptance of a set of rules and regulations. Further, the participants consent to abide by these and accept the outcome of the competition. It is this paradigm of applying one’s talents in fair competition that lies at the heart of the concept of the American dream.
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Of course, both in sports and society, there are participants who invariably cheat, thus requiring mechanisms to root out uncompetitive behavior. Competitive sports wouldn’t be very interesting if no one followed the rules. However, in the seemingly endless fog of cynicism that clouds our thinking today, it is easy to lose sight of these principles. For this reason, as a metaphor for our civic society in the 21st century at large, Coach Walz’s mentoring and development of young minds in the classroom or young athletes on the field is so refreshing and enthralling.
As I discussed in a recent article, the same idea of rule-based fair competition buttresses the principles of the free market economy envisioned by Adam Smith centuries ago. As a producer vies for her own individual achievement and rewards, she simultaneously benefits all of society by producing products and services that consumers value.
But imagine a market-based economy where everyone cheats. This game is rigged in favor of those market participants who have been permitted to leverage their economic power to wield political power. Accordingly, they get to write the rules of the game and construct barriers to true competition. This is how Martin Wolf describes our current state of affairs in his compelling recent book, “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” He argues that this rentier economy has resulted from decades of government neglect promulgated under the guise of laissez faire deregulation. In recent years, there has been an outpouring of writings that assail the inevitable widening gaps of wealth which result from such an economy.
But there is a related casualty, namely the stifling of upward mobility and the very crumbling of the modern meritocracy that rests as the bedrock of the American dream. While the concept of meritocracy has been harshly criticized recently, I have yet to be shown a better system for recognizing achievement and distributing rewards in society. The meritocratic system encourages the pursuit of individual success, while concurrently allowing society as a whole to reap tremendous benefits. The competition for novel ideas, products and services that consumers value lifts all proverbial boats.
In my book, “American Schism,” I articulate how this concept of meritocracy is rooted in Enlightenment ideals. As Condorcet, the great French philosopher stressed, the study of reason and empirical sciences as well as civic responsibilities were all fundamental to unleashing human capacity within the social contract. Whether Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” or Diderot and d’Alembert’s “Encyclopédie,” the wide promulgation of information became the Enlightenment’s machine de guerre. The resulting broad access to knowledge charted the paths to develop one’s innate abilities, and thereby promised a new world where one could become unshackled from the birth lottery. For centuries, the quality and access to public education in the United States became the engine of the American dream and lifted prosperity to unimaginable levels. But Condorcet also said: “Inequality of education is one of the main sources of tyranny.”
Further, when reviewing the criticisms, it is not the concept of meritocracy that is the problem, but its present-day execution. Quite frankly, we no longer have a fair meritocracy. We have allowed the wealth gap of recent decades to translate into a huge education gap in which real meritocratic competition is but an illusion. Since the 1980s, entrenched mechanisms within the political economy have permitted and legitimized the very wealthy to guarantee that their elite inheritance is transferred to their children, seemingly ossifying our existing social structure. Consider this: A wealthy family provides an annual investment in private education that is six to 10 times that of the inner city kid. And this yearly investment gap compounds throughout K-12. With such unfair starting lines, is it a surprise who wins the race?
To achieve a just meritocracy, the concept of equality of opportunity must create a level playing field by encompassing not only equal access to education, but to infrastructure and public goods, job opportunities and job training. As John Rawls illustrates in his 1971 landmark work, “A Theory of Justice,” a more all-inclusive concept of equality of opportunity must include equal access to acquire qualifications. Tragically, America in the 21st century is a far cry from this Rawlsian concept.
It is not America’s hard power or technological prowess but the concept of the American dream that has allowed us to become the real envy of the world for over 100 years. But it seems we are letting it slip away. Instead of abandoning the concept of meritocracy, as some critics argue, we need to develop better strategies for its effective and measurable 21st century implementation. And after all, watching a race where one runner is given a huge lead at the start is no fun.
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