Journelism

Social Innovation in America

One of the biggest constraints of social innovation is the battle between the Right and the Left in American politics. Every new idea gets parsed through each combatant’s unforgiving ideological grinder.  As a result, promising concepts get torn to pieces because they include some element odious to one side or the other.

The current debate over national health care provides only the latest example.  Rather than think through proposals on their own merits, each side is on a relentless hunt to find something wrong with what the other side proposes.  It’s not hard, because in almost every domain of national dialogue, the political economic frameworks advanced by the two countervailing parties to the dialogue have become so different that they can barely understand one another anymore.

The Ideological Grinder of the Right: The Free Market

Emerging from worship at the temples of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand, the Right’s vision of the proper role of government is limited to protecting private property, enforcing contracts, and ensuring national security.  In the Right’s view, the private markets would provide everything else needed by mankind if the government would only stop interfering and attempting to plan the future.  The Right believes that capitalism unbound would lift the poor as all boats rise in explosive economic development.  The unfettered markets would deliver a surplus of everything, driving down prices, improving quality of life in the form of inexpensive consumer goods and services.  The enormous profits created by the leading innovators would help those in need through energetic, innovative, private philanthropies led by technical and industrial titans during their retirements.  These supremely creative and productive (and wealthy) people will cure the ills of mankind out of the pure goodness of their hearts (case in point: the Gates Foundation).  Private philanthropy would be quicker and more effective than the programs wrought by a horde of tax-hungry bureaucrats beholden to special interests.  In the world view of the Right, every dollar taken from the wealthy in taxes deprives private economic development and philanthropy of their effectiveness.

The Ideological Grinder of the Left: Equality

On the other side of the aisle, steeped in the thought of philosophers and economists like Rousseau, Marcuse, Rawls, Keynes, and also Adam Smith (yes, believe it or not, Smith has a place on both the Right and the Left), the Left’s fundamental vision of the role of government is to maintain the welfare in “Welfare Capitalism.”  That’s welfare as in the “welfare” mentioned in the first line of the Constitution where it is written that “we the people” of the United States will work together to promote something called the “general welfare.”    The Left focuses not on total national productivity, nor on the miraculous innovations of the free market, but rather on inequality and on the plight of those for whom the benefits of capitalism remain out of reach.   The Left is also concerned about those at the bottom of the economic ladder who are squeezed dry, left out, or reduced to machinery in the market’s relentless pursuit of efficiency and creative destruction.  In the vision of the Left, government has a legitimate role in providing a societal playing field with some base levels of fairness and some base levels of subsistence services and benefits.  The Left perceives that when too much economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of too few, then manipulation of the state by those few is not far behind.  What emerges from unrestrained capitalism sometimes looks and feels like something feudal, complete with royalty who reduce everyone around them to serfs and who use public resources such as the military and the treasury not to advance the national security or the general welfare, but rather to advance their own parochial interests (cases in point: energy interests and the war in Iraq, the recent Wall St. bailouts).  For this reason, while the Left embraces government in its role as the protector of the disadvantaged, it remains suspicious of governmental police and military power.   Mr. Hayek, says the Left, there is also a road to serfdom through unrestrained capitalism.   After all, when one can command the military power of the state to protect their private kingdom, hasn’t one become a sort of king?

Different Destinations, Different Roads

The argument between the Right and the Left concerns not only the vision of what is good for people but also about the vision of how progress should unfold and the consequences of choosing one road over another.   To the Right, engaging the government in solving social problems necessarily entails redistributing resources that could be used more effectively if they were programmed by Smith’s invisible hand.  Profits are merely signals calling forth entrepreneurs to solve problems.  Restraining profits simply stops hyper-efficient market mechanisms from functioning.  Leave that process alone, says the Right, and the market will perform its magic.  Government interference leads at best to waste and at worst, down the road toward socialism, communism, and eventually to totalitarianism.  The Right sees government as an evil and destructive beast to be kept in chains lest it devour the master who feeds it.  This is the world view held by people who come to health care rallies depicting Obama as Lenin or even Hitler!  In the view of the Right, the time that the market requires to respond to human needs is nothing less than the price of liberty itself.

In contrast, the Left sees the market’s inequities and the time required for the market to respond as the very problems that the government is called upon to address.  Excessive profits are not signs of the market at work, they are inefficiencies and symptoms of market failure.   Taking to heart Keynes’ stark reminder that “[i]n the long run we are all dead,” the Left has no patience to await market solutions that require perhaps decades of rampant inequality along the pathway to serving the needs of mankind.  If the market is so good at providing health care, says the Left, and if rationing health care is so bad, why should we tolerate a market that leaves so many unserved?   Isn’t that just another form of rationing employed by market forces?  What good is “the best healthcare in the world” to the person who can’t afford it?  The Left remains cynical and circumspect about the alleged efficiencies of the free market.  It sees the ways in which runaway profits empower market operators to manipulate the government in order to erect barriers to market competition, some subtle and some painfully obvious.   In the view of the Left, the Right likes a free market as long as it doesn’t get too free.

The Future Hangs in the Balance

In this divided political culture that finds itself nearly in perfect equipoise, the future of the nation rests in the hands of a tiny sliver of voters and politicians who are either very muddled in their thinking about these concepts or able to transcend them entirely.

Let’s admit that some of those in the center are just muddled in their thinking.  They vote based on emotions rising from tone, appearance, the use of words and gestures, how things look and feel.  This is politics and economics by feelings, barely rational.  It’s very hard to predict what these people will do.  One day they prefer chocolate, the next, vanilla.  People who make decisions on the basis of intangible feelings can be manipulated by figures like Willie Horton or the specter of a man with too many houses.  They observe body language and closely inspect images.  Does the Obama poster make him look like Che Guevara, they wonder?  They make judgments supposedly based on intangible qualities like “character” and “leadership,” but actually the process is more like selecting cheese for a dinner party.

Now, let’s also admit that there are some thinkers out there truly able to rise above and transcend these rigid paradigms of thinking on the Right and the Left.  These are not your normal swing voters.  It’s possible that the roots of a true “third way” in American politics can be found in thinking that transcends the old categories. If innovative strategies and approaches are going to take root in our communities, they are going to need some breathing room—more than the current political culture will allow.