A New Era in Politics: Time for Governance

It has become a cliché in the last week to state that we are now entering a bold new era in American politics, for reasons either racial (our first black president) or partisan (a progressive agenda finally ascendant in the federal government). I agree that we are on the cusp of a new political era, but I attribute it to neither of the two reasons just given. It does have something to do with Barack Obama, but it has nothing to do with the color of his skin or his ideological persuasion. It has to do with his intelligence and the fact that he grasps at an intuitive level the more profound truth about this new era: We are entering a phase of our national evolution, and indeed of world civilization, in which we have to rethink and redefine the very idea of what government is for. The old debates of "big government versus small government" and "conservative versus liberal" are tired remnants of the past, no longer relevant to a world vastly more complex than the age in which they first surfaced. And ironically, the best lens through which to see the nature of this new era is not any iconic speech by Mr. Obama or his acolytes, but rather the desperate fulminations of the right in the wake of the election.

The second post-election cliché is that the conservative movement is being split in two by a heated internal debate. On one side are the moderate Republicans, many of whom found Obama to be a reasonable and nonthreatening candidate, and some of whom even voted for him (the list of big-name conservative defectors is impressively long and has been dissected many times in the media). In this wing the mood is conciliatory and cooperative -- a recognition that their party is in dire straits and their interests would best be served by reaching out across the aisle rather than building a wall and hurling hot oil.

On the other side is the far right, the "true" conservatives by their own assessment, the unrepentant, unbowed, and unwilling witnesses to a landslide. I have had a chance to listen to several right-wing radio hosts since election night, and their manner of dealing with Obama's victory is at once pathetic and comical. They seem like lonely souls trudging through an echo chamber of cognitive dissonance. All they can muster are infuriated whines that Rahm Emanuel gives the lie to Obama's pledge of bipartisanship, and a pitbull-like insistence that Obama is a left-wing radical now savoring the chance to spring his revolutionary platform on an unsuspecting public. That he has duped the populace and will now commence his term as an underground Marxist. More stealing from the rich. More social programs. More big, bloated government.

It is certainly beyond question that the Republican party is battered and bruised. It is also undeniable that it is being roiled by in-fighting at the moment. But let this not mislead you into believing that they are on the verge of some great transformation. Pay close attention to both factions within the party and you'll see that the fundamental message is the same: let's regroup, let's rearticulate our identity, and let's reassert ourselves on the national stage. They want to reclaim the mantle as the party of ideas. The problem is, the world has moved on and their ideas are no longer relevant.

One of the chief sources of George W. Bush's disastrousness as a president was his extraordinarily simplistic view of the world. There were no nuances or complexities or contexts. There was us and them. Good and evil. Freedom-loving people and terrorists. Free markets and socialism. Everything is a zero sum game and the world exists in 1950s black-and-white clarity. And Bush's worldview is simply a distillation of the conservative ideology that dates back to the early 1960s, when the likes of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley first gave it form and respectability. Now, you can build a number of reasonable arguments against that philosophy, but at least it had a certain amount of relevance at the time it was first articulated. Even when Nixon schlepped it into the 1970s and Reagan resurrected it in the 1980s, it was still a worldview that addressed the context of those times. But. . . those times have changed. So when you hear the same refrain still being repeated nearly 30 years after Reagan took office by both the AM mouthpieces and even the once-respectable John McCain, the arguments and their arguers appear like dusty anachronisms.

The very dichotomous terms that the right casts the argument in, desperately trying to get the American public to go along, are hopelessly out of date. Big versus small government. More social programs versus cutting spending. "Spreading the wealth" versus "spreading opportunity." The world today is vastly more complex than the one these trite, empty platitudes originally addressed themselves to. What does it mean to speak of "small government" in a world where military threats are multiplying, health care costs are spiraling beyond the means of all but the wealthy, and environmental crisis threatens the very foundation of civilization? What does it mean to speak of "cutting spending" when a financial meltdown is bringing the global economy to its knees? What does it mean to speak of "spreading opportunity" when the end of the fossil-fuel economy is in sight, the manufacturing sector is feeble, and at times the entire industrial edifice seems in danger of crumbling? I'm not arguing that modern times call for more government or higher deficits or less opportunity. What I'm saying is that these arguments are just too simplistic, they no longer address themselves to the realities of a highly complex and interdependent global society. It's like believing that the entire emotional, psychological, and logistical complexity of a modern-day family can be captured by how many times they eat dinner together. It's not that this isn't important -- it's just that it represents only one tiny part of the overall phenomenon.

What I believe the Obama victory represents is a shift from the age-old focus on government to a new focus on governance. That is the new era we have entered. To simply think in terms of government and how big or small, how involved or relaxed it should be, is to lock ourselves into a box and shut off other possibilities for fresh, creative, innovative policy making. Governance is not just about the power of the state, it is about creating synergies between government, business, and civil society to find real solutions to real-world problems -- not sloganeering aimed at cartoon problems. Governance has more to do with the decision-making process than the decisions themselves. Its keywords are transparency, accountability, responsiveness, and equitability. It stems from a recognition that a crucial ingredient for a healthy, progressive, peaceful society is not just economic or military or political outcomes, but the social relationships that shape and give rise to those outcomes.

The right does not seem to get this. In fact, it does not seem interested in process-oriented governance at all. It seems to prefer lobbing hate-filled bombs at some straw man called government. I believe that Obama does get it, and this is what his ascent to the presidency heralds. Damn right we need change, but it's not just about dissociating ourselves from the last eight years -- it's about preparing for the next one hundred.