One of my oldest bureaucrat friends and I -- we go back a full half-century -- have looked again at David Brooks pronouncement (in his New York Times column) that the United States will remain a dominant power only if "... we can figure out how to build a decent future for the working class people in this region". (The region he is referring to runs from central New York and Pennsylvania into the Midwest and South to Arkansas.)
My friend and I have close knowledge of the region that Brooks is talking about. We both grew up in "working class" Kentucky, and we have lots of relatives who migrated to Ohio and Michigan (and other points north) to work in places like automobile plants. Those folks -- "us folks" would be close to accurate -- see evidence all around that Brooks is right -- that things might be badly broken. And because of what they're seeing they want something done; that's the basic message they were attempting to send on election day.
We're convinced -- my friend and I -- that the people Brooks is talking about will stay the course -- they won't back down from demanding that something be done. But my friend and I see no evidence that the political establishment has heard those working-class people. What we hear coming out of Washington is more of the same -- politics as usual, with the Republicans saying that the job ahead is to beat the Democrats and the Democrats saying that the job is to beat the Republicans. In Kentucky, we've just endured the ugliest political campaign I've ever seen.
My friend and I agree, also, that the core unanswered question is where the people will look for solutions. As of now, I'm hearing demands that "they" -- the big people in government and business -- do the fixing. But I'm also hearing some people who are looking far ahead -- they tend to be more worried about their grandchildren than about themselves. I believe I know, from my many years around governments, that the political establishment will continue on the present course -- the course that is manipulating rather than hearing the citizens -- for as long as it is allowed to do so. The political mess can be fixed only if the people -- those people that David Brooks is talking about (and others like them) -- send the message that we're all in this together: "We the People" have to do this fixing job. (It goes almost without saying that people who know each other can collaborate more readily than can strangers—and this means that communities are better able to support collaboration than are political/bureaucratic hierarchies).
Will we citizens do what we need to do? Will we, to use words from David Mathews of the Kettering Foundation, "reclaim our democracy"? I don't know for sure, but I think I do know that we cannot separate our problems into compartments to be "outsourced". We cannot allow professional political handlers to exclude citizens from our democratic processes. And we can't allow professional bureaucrats to exclude communities from children and their learning. We simply cannot, if we care about America's future, look for "up there" to fix either our economy, our democracy, our communities, or our schools. We the People have to look to each other to do this fixing.
My own answer to David Brooks is yes, we can -- we can figure out how to build a decent future for the working-class people in this region. But I'm prejudiced-- and I don't have a coherent strategy as to how to get from here to there.
I’ll be in Battle Creek, Michigan, and in Detroit for a few days. Good things are happening up there.
Bob Cornett
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