Moving on from Trump

Staying in the Trenches of Democracy Renovation

Recently, friends have been saying to me that they feel the zeitgeist moving beyond Trump and beyond this moment. There’s a growing appetite and curiosity for what comes next.

Journalist and podcaster Astead Herndon has launched a new show, “America, Actually,” whose purpose is to probe “the first steps of a new story for a changing nation.” As Herndon puts it, “The question of ‘who do we want to be?’ is open, and answering it will require the type of journalism that prioritizes the messy over the clean.” Claire Atkin, the CEO of Check My Ads, which tracks digital advertising, recently posted about her own growing appetite for “realistic, but positive depictions of the future.”

That’s what we’re here to deliver at The Renovator. But here’s the challenge:

Many people don’t have an appetite for the realistic and the messy. Our toxic politics thrives on promises of total transformations that are actually impossible fever dreams. All undocumented immigrants will be gone! Everyone will get a universal basic income that will make not having work no problem at all! We can create a national health care system that means you’ll never wait for an appointment, you’ll always have the doctor you want and you’ll never lack access to meds you depend on! We can solve the problem of too-expensive higher ed with a stroke of a student-debt absolving pen!

We’ve gotten addicted to the chocolate cake of politics — the idea that one person can almost instantly rewire social systems to give us what we want.

I’m afraid that actually renovating our democracy is more like eating your vegetables. It takes work in the trenches in state and local politics. It requires healthy civic habits day after day after day.

Now, for real, I actually enjoy vegetables — specifically lettuce, broccoli, bok choy, sugar snap peas, beets. Lots of veggies. (I’m not so hot on carrots.) Eating vegetables can be exceptionally enjoyable. But it does seem that many of us may need to detox from the thickly frosted, sugar-soaked politics of the past decade.

Let’s retrain our tastes to savor renovation successes that mark real progress. Some real stories: In Maryland and Utah, the governors and state legislatures have a new approach to fighting child poverty. It doesn’t involve new centralized and top-down programs. Instead, it empowers cross-sector leadership networks at the local level that take on responsibility for diagnosing child poverty in their own communities, map out a plan to address it, and hold themselves accountable to the plan. The model is Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. The two state governments are investing in these local leadership and action structures.

In other words, Maryland and Utah are investing in civic infrastructure. They are also driving a mindset shift away from government as default problem-solver. Instead, they are empowering citizens to solve their own problems by providing tools and building blocks needed to make it doable. This mindset shift is a really big deal — a change from chocolate cake to vegetables.

I recently had policy-makers from both states visit my class to talk about this state-level policy agenda. My students asked: “Who opposes this?” It turned out there wasn’t much opposition. The legislation passed in both states with strong, bipartisan support. In both places, there is a real sense of positive motivation and engagement moving the work forward.

Another story about the same policy approach, this one taken locally in Spartanburg, S.C. In Spartanburg, a neighborhood resident leadership group known as the Voyagers has collaborated with a nonprofit mixed-income developer, as well as a set of local educational leaders, to drive one of the most exciting neighborhood turnarounds in the country. The initiative involves some $150 million in capital investments, including a brand-new community center, an early learning center, and more than 500 units of new or renovated housing. Some results: Violent crime has dropped by 84 percent; third-grade reading proficiency has jumped from 6 percent to 51 percent.

How’s that for protopian? To learn more, watch this short video about Spartanburg leader Dr. Russell Booker. A longer video telling the story is coming out soon. I’ve seen it, and it’s powerful stuff!

The hard part is a new aspect of policy work: network governance. These initiatives will work if and when local leaders are able to self-govern through network structures effectively and states get good supporting networks to govern themselves. The people in any given municipality working on these place-based initiatives aren’t integrated into a single hierarchical organization. Instead, they are partners and collaborators — peers learning to work in egalitarian horizontal relationships.

That takes the skills of self-government, which is the hard and messy part. But I’ll send out a link to the Spartanburg documentary when it’s publicly available. When you watch it, you’ll see how good it feels to eat your vegetables.