The Great Democracy

by Ganesh Sitaraman

  This approach makes little sense. In policing, like other areas of public policy, not everything that is constitutional is desirable. The Constitution permits a lot of policies that might be undesirable. Because our system of government values both the rule of law and democratic authorization for government actions, we choose among many permissible policies through procedures that allow for democratic input. For example, federal government agencies that regulate individuals and companies go through an extensive process of providing public notice of their proposed regulations and inviting comments from members of the public. They are then required to explain why they adopted the regulations they adopted, and courts can strike down their policies if they do not have a well-reasoned justification. In other words, we require government to engage the democratic public before regulating—and to explain their reasons for regulating the way they did.28

  If we want to bridge the divide between police and communities, one approach for doing so would be to introduce a similar system for police actions. Friedman and Ponomarenko call this “democratic policing.” Police departments or cities should have more community participation in setting the rules that the police use in those communities. This would include providing notice, an opportunity for public comment, and publicly available justifications for their policies—whether it is general surveillance of the public, policies on the use of force, or civil asset forfeiture. Communities could design the specifics of the process differently, but the general theme would be to engage the community directly. This democratic process would help break down barriers in the community while increasing the legitimacy of police activities.

  Uniting to Address Climate Change. Policing takes place at the local level, so it is possible to engage members of the community directly. Climate change, in contrast, is a global crisis that will affect everyone, everywhere, including future generations. From draughts and flooding, to famines, migration, wars, and the spread of disease, climate change will have profound and disastrous consequences for people throughout the world.

  But these consequences will not be evenly distributed. Low-lying coastal geographies will be hit hard by storm surges and rising sea levels. Areas like the rural southeastern United States will be worse off than some other areas, particularly due to rising temperatures. And within any specific geographic area, low-income people, minorities, children, and the elderly tend to be the least resilient and the most vulnerable. They generally have less access to information about how to adapt and fewer resources to be able to adapt. For example, poor people and the elderly often have fewer options if they are displaced due to hurricane-induced flooding.29

  Building a united democracy in the future will mean thinking about these uneven geographic and social impacts while designing policies to address and adapt to climate change. Part of the solution will be ensuring that vulnerable populations are more involved in the political and planning process. But the other part of the solution is considering equity as a goal in designing policy on climate change. A good example of this approach at work is in the embryonic proposals for a Green New Deal. The general premise of the Green New Deal is that the scope of the climate challenge is so great that it will require a New Deal–like effort—a national endeavor and a transformative set of policies across multiple economic and social arenas. Far from proscribing a single piece of legislation, the Green New Deal is an organizing principle under which many policies can fall—from upgrading infrastructure and adopting a smart electrical grid to moving toward clean, renewable energy and renewing threatened ecosystems.

  From the perspective of building a united democracy, what is so striking and instructive about Green New Deal proposals is that its advocates have built questions of geographic, racial, and economic equity directly into the fabric of their thinking. They seek not just to pass legislation on clean energy or a smart grid but to ensure that when big changes come to communities, those communities are consulted and have input—and that there is a just economic transition that leaves no one behind. Advocates want to ensure that any policies, however technical, keep in mind the disproportionate effects of climate change on minorities, on the poor, and on indigenous communities. At the same time, they recognize that policy efforts to move toward a net-zero emissions society must also address these effects and the disproportionate impact on some geographies and industries. One proposal, for example, is to create a green industrial policy, including massive investments in manufacturing and deploying clean energy infrastructure. This effort would create millions of jobs in the United States while transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels. To ensure that everyone benefits from the influx of these new resources, advocates for a green industrial policy have focused on investing in all geographies and on equity across groups. The thinking behind the Green New Deal provides an example of how policy makers can infuse the values of a united democracy into a range of policies, many of which might not seem like they have anything to do with bridging our racial, geographic, economic, and cultural divides.30

  Patriot Corps. Restitching our social fabric can also be done directly—with policies that attempt to bridge differences between people and develop a democratic ethos within individuals. As a pathway to soulcraft, public and community service has been understood across time, geographies, and religions to be one of the most effective. Service is not selfish. It requires devoting yourself to others—whether individuals, a community, or the nation. Historically, the military was the central way that populations engaged in service. Militaries train their members in the importance of the unit, not the individual; service members are expected to sacrifice for each other, not simply support their own selfish interests. Distinctions of race, religion, and national origin break down; what matters is the unit. Since the end of the military draft and the rise of the all-volunteer force, however, fewer people serve in the military. But that does not mean that service can no longer be a pathway for stitching together our social fabric. Indeed, in recent years, a number of countries have reinstated mandatory national service programs. Some, like Sweden, have done so in response to the rising threat of their neighbor Russia; others, like France, have adopted mandatory service as a way to address social fracturing.31

  Patriot Corps would be a new national service program that links service and schooling. As part of a plan for economic democracy, as we shall see, the United States should offer up to four years of free public education after high school for anyone who wishes to attend. Patriot Corps would provide an additional benefit: members of Patriot Corps would get up to four years of education or training at a public or private college, university, or community college debt-free—tuition, fees, room and board, and books—through a combination of a Patriot Corps scholarship and need-based aid from the college. In return, they would serve the country for four years. Any person of any age would be eligible to participate, including retirees interested in a second (or third) career.

  The model is the military, which covers students during the college years in return for military service. Patriot Corps would be similar, but members would serve in a variety of nonmilitary capacities: addressing the impacts of climate change as part of the Green New Deal; working for states or nonprofit organizations; installing new infrastructure from bridges to broadband; modernizing government services through the application of new technologies; serving as teachers, childcare providers, and home health care workers, and more. They would emerge from Patriot Corps with an education and real work experience.

  The benefits to the country would be significant. Patriot Corps members would help address some of the country’s biggest challenges, keeping the United States on the frontiers of the world. The country would not only guarantee that millions of Americans, young and old, get further education and training, but it would also help address the student debt crisis for new students. Currently, students have $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt. Not only does this massive debt burden weigh on students psychologically and financially, it harms the econo
my. A generation of debtors is a generation that can’t put a down payment on a new house or start a small business. Finally, and most importantly, Patriot Corps would build an ethic of service and help create a more united democracy. Members would not only serve others but would also be part of a diverse community. As with the military, most members would be assigned to a different region of the country, where they would interact with different people and see the diversity of America in all its forms. Patriot Corps would also make private colleges accessible to those who otherwise could not afford them, helping to bring a more regionally, economically, and racially diverse student body to those institutions. The overall result would be to make Americans less isolated from each other.32

  Patriot Corps would also merge all of the existing service programs—the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, VISTA—under one single banner. This would help with recruiting and give the program a brand that everyone would recognize. The program would not be mandatory, but the benefit of a debt-free education at a private institution would be significant. Although the very wealthiest kids might opt out of Patriot Corps, over time, norms would change. As more and more people participated, eventually there would be an expectation of participation. The question “Where did you serve?” might even become an icebreaker that wouldn’t just apply to members of the military.

  Patriot Corps isn’t a pie-in-the-sky idea. During the New Deal, Americans across the country were mobilized by the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and other alphabet-soup agencies. These agencies built public works, brought mobile libraries to rural areas, and made national parks usable. And after World War II, the GI Bill helped 2.2 million veterans become scientists, business people, engineers, and artists, sending a generation to college. For every dollar spent on the program, the country gained five dollars in productivity and taxes. But more importantly, these programs engaged Americans as members of their country, of our national community. They helped stitch us together as one people, aiming for a more perfect union.33

  Fixing the Media. Over the past few decades—and particularly in the last decade—it has become clear that the changing nature of media has contributed to our social fracturing. In the mid-twentieth century, the sources of media were limited. There were only a few TV channels, and TV executives decided the content. Today, TV channels have proliferated, as have internet news sources. Gatekeepers like news producers no longer determine the content available to us; any individual can write up a story, post a photo, or make a video. Media now also tailor content to an individual’s tastes and preferences. One result has been an explosion in the sources and content available to us. The other is that we are no longer part of a single, shared conversation. At the same time, the media has also become harder to trust. Social media and personalization mean that foreign governments, bots, and even individuals can make fake news go viral without any checks or balances. Powerful media conglomerates, like Sinclair, now push ideological content to their reporters, using their huge scale for what is effectively corporate propaganda. And in the midst of all that, local newspapers and investigative journalism—both critical to the functioning of democracy—have been under severe threat.

  At the broadest, structural level, reinvigorating antitrust enforcement and regulating technology platforms form the foundation for addressing the crisis in our media environment. Antitrust enforcers need to block mergers that create massive media conglomerates that have power across geographies, types of media, and both content and distribution. This would prevent the Sinclair problem, by which one ideological company can buy up TV stations in hundreds of markets around the country and force news anchors to deliver centrally drafted messages. It would also prevent content producers (like Time Warner) from merging with distributors (like AT&T). Those kinds of mergers risk preventing customers of other distributors from gaining access to content. We will discuss these reforms more in the next chapter.

  The second shift, as part of regulating technology platforms, should be to revisit Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law has been called “the most important law in tech” and “the law that gave us the modern internet.” Section 230 shields internet platforms from liability for the content that others put on the platform. What that means is that if someone posts defamatory, libelous, hateful, criminal, or violence-inducing content, the platform isn’t responsible. This is a special rule that doesn’t apply to other media companies. If the New York Times printed revenge porn or criminal incitements in its classified section, it would be held responsible. Although many people celebrate Section 230’s libertarian consequences, the law wasn’t designed for this purpose—in fact, quite the opposite. The goal was to protect providers who were trying to block obscene and offensive material from lawsuits in the event they weren’t completely successful in removing that material.34

  The perverse result, however, is that platforms have too little incentive to police who their users are or what they are posting—even when the users are bots or foreign governments and the posts are harassing, fake news, or indecent. In fact, some have business models that depend on precisely that kind of behavior. Instead of offering blanket immunity, Section 230 should be revised in line with its original purpose of providing immunity to platforms that are trying to be responsible. Platforms should get this immunity only if they verify their users and have a program to police their content. This would go a long way in preventing bots and trolls, in addition to fake news and problematic content. Platforms that seek to benefit from Section 230 immunity would also have to pay a tax because they allow for the sharing of news without any compensation. The proceeds of this tax would go toward funding the final aspect of media reform: the creation of a National Endowment for Journalism.

  Right now, we face a crisis in journalism. Amid the talk of fake news and Russian bots, the news business has been under severe pressure for decades. Most frequently, the internet is fingered as the culprit, and to a great extent that is true. Eyeballs have moved to the internet, and aggregators and social media platforms repost news sources without paying the news organizations that produced them. But there have been other factors as well. Private equity firms have bought up, consolidated, and in some cases stripped and bankrupted local newspapers. And perhaps most surprisingly, government subsidies for news have plummeted. One of the biggest news subsidies began at the very start of the republic, in 1792. That year, Congress passed the Post Office Act, which subsidized sending newspapers through the mail. Washington, Madison, and the other founders of the country supported this policy as essential to ensuring that citizens of the fledgling democratic republic had access to the news. One hundred and eighty years later, starting with Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, Congress decided otherwise. It shrank the subsidy from covering 75 percent of periodical mailings in the late 1960s (about $2 billion in 2010 dollars) to only 11 percent of mailing costs (or $288 million) in 2010.35

  The decline in subsidies is important because the journalism that is most critical to the functioning of a democracy isn’t necessarily going to be produced through the market. The market can support writing about sports and entertainment and about clickbait stories about the most recent outlandish statement by a public figure. But the most important stories for sustaining democracy aren’t on those topics. They are the local issues that might not have a huge national audience, the international coverage that is expensive and distant, and the dogged investigatory reporting that takes months—or even years—to come to fruition. The economic case for these stories is tough because once written, everyone knows the story, and the news organization can’t capture the financial benefits of the hard work they’ve put into the reporting. This is a classic case for government action because the market fails to produce enough of this kind of journalism. But the case is broader than basic economics. Without serious reporting and journalism, it’s much harder for a democratic public to hold accountable corrupt government officials or to d
iscover and regulate fraudulent corporate behavior. It’s much harder for citizens to discuss how to fix the problems in our local communities and in the country if we don’t know what those problems are. And it’s much harder to build public support to defend democracy from our enemies if we have no idea what’s happening in the rest of the world.

  The National Endowment for Journalism (NEJ) would give financial grants to news organizations and individuals who are reporting on issues of local or international importance or on investigatory matters. The NEJ would consist of thirteen members, with the Librarian of Congress serving in an ex officio capacity. All members would need a minimum ten years of experience as full-time working journalists, with representation in local, international, and investigatory news. These requirements would ensure that professionals from a diverse set of backgrounds would make decisions on how to allocate the NEJ’s funds. The NEJ would give grants through a competitive application process, akin to how the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and the National Institutes of Health give grants currently. They would also give a preference to nonprofits, cooperatives, and for-profit entities with employee unions or with half the board comprising employees. The funds would be less likely, as a result, to subsidize already profitable corporate media.36

  Funding for the NEJ would come from two sources. First would be a small tax on technology platforms. The tax would apply to any internet company that seeks to benefit from liability protection under Section 230; in effect, any online intermediary that hosts, publishes, or republishes third-party content would have to pay a progressive tax on their annual revenue based on their size. The tax would be a condition for receiving the legal privilege of Section 230 immunity, upon which online publishers that feature third-party content rely heavily.