Successful democracies protect human flourishing by activating freedom, equality, and self-government. These in turn power feedback loops that help governments steer in directions that deliver security, stability, and material well-being—in short, justice. To outcompete autocracies at governing large, complex, digitally powered, and pluralistic societies, democracies must deliver responsive representation and effective decision-making. Innovation and artificial intelligence provide an unparalleled opportunity to renovate democratic governance, renew opportunity in the economy, and unleash the value and richness of cultural pluralism.

Democracy renovation requires reconnecting people to their civic experience, power, and responsibility while redesigning our political institutions so that they are effective and responsive. Voice and representation must be real. Thanks to freedom, differences among us will emerge, but through healthy democratic practices, productive negotiation in democratic institutions, and an ethos of confident pluralism, we can seek to achieve difference without domination.

Confident pluralists understand what matters to them and why, but are also able to listen to what matters to others and are committed to productive negotiation through institutions to achieve settlements and accommodations. This is what it means, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, to share power and responsibility, the ultimate goal of a pluralistic free society.

Finding the right strategies to renovate the core functions of democracy requires a new policy lens that prioritizes empowerment and designs for robust political equality, and fully inclusive, responsive institutions, broad avenues for social participation, and full integration of people in the productive economy. I call this lens power-sharing liberalism.

Any given policymaking paradigm consists of four components: the normative foundations or core values for the paradigm, the theoretical models of economy or society, some emblematic policies, and vernacular language (Carlin & Bowles). 

Take neoliberalism as an example, the policy-making paradigm that has been ascendant in the U.S. for the last four decades. Its advocates have grounded their approaches in a commitment to procedural justice and the negative liberties of freedom of conscience, religion, and property. Their economic models have put rational self-interest at the center. Emblematic policies have included a variety of techniques for privatization, such as school vouchers, and reduced barriers to the international movement of trade and capital. The approach is captured in sayings like “The government which governs best governs least” and “There is no such thing as society.”

But important new work in philosophy, economics, political science, and law has identified the flaws in this model and has now built toward an alternative, one in which not only negative liberties but also positive liberties—freedoms to vote, run for office, and in other ways participate in shaping communal decisions—deserve protection. Nothing about us without us, as it’s said.

In this alternative vision, the values that policymakers seek to realize are dignity, voice, and freedom from domination. Economists have relearned how to reincorporate power into their analyses, for instance in work on the labor market and principal-agent relations. Game theory has clarified the challenge of increasing returns and in turn required revisions to anti-monopoly theory, as well as showing how common-pool resources and public goods may be best provisioned by a triadic combination of market, public sector, and mission-driven civil society.

Policymaking shouldn’t be just a battle between whether to rely on the market or public sector, but rather a creative exercise of finding different combinations of state-market–civil society partnerships to solve collective-action problems. The history of political economy has shown how a stable and healthy democracy can steer itself toward incorporating all segments of society in production, rather than merely relying on redistribution to allocate the rewards of productivity.

From these new core values and theoretical focal points, fresh emblematic policies have begun to emerge. Leading the list are democracy renovation and a political economy for human flourishing.

Democracy renovation

Our democracy is ailing. Some influential figures on the right even argue it should be replaced with monarchy. Instead, we should renovate it. Concerned citizens need to claim their civic role—by joining a civic group—so that working with others we can direct our energies to reform. Things we can do at the state level can make a difference at the federal level. These include replacing party primaries with all-party primaries, as in Alaska; requiring ownership of our own data on social-media platforms, as in Utah; and prohibiting corporations with foreign ownership above a certain threshold from spending money on politics. All these changes would give our politicians incentives to govern for our sake, not for the sake of the elite interests of party insiders, big tech, and multinationals.

Additionally, there are opportunities to revamp the institutions of representation by drawing on new technologies. Institutions of representation are democracy’s central nervous system. Representation consists of citizen voice, decision-maker deliberation and decision-taking, and the implementation of those decisions through enforcement or government-service delivery. Experiments in Taiwan, Estonia, Switzerland, and California now show the way to improve all three of those functions of representative government. 

With the tools of digital democracy, citizens can contribute more creatively to public deliberation; decision-makers can better see policy solutions that broaden coalitions; and enforcement and implementation can be made more accountable, transparent, and efficient. 

A 21st century democracy is within reach—where we unite the goals of energy in our government and protection of our freedoms. 

A new political economy

Our economy is transforming under the pressure of technology and the Trump Trexit—a triple exit from postwar global economic and security arrangements, from effective government managed by competent civil servants, and from the engines of innovation in the nation’s universities. Housing and transportation resources are inadequate to fuel opportunity. Education policy has focused exclusively on supporting national security and global economic competitiveness, while ignoring civic strength; this has yielded a weakened democracy where the erosion of the rule of law degrades conditions for business. Finally, unstable immigration policy leads to an unstable and exploitative labor market. 

A power-sharing economic policy to reverse all this will:

• Reduce regulation for housing construction along transportation corridors
• Judiciously make public lands available to spur construction of housing and transportation nexuses
• Provide tax credits to multigenerational households
• Revive state investment in public higher education
• Maintain existing investments in STEM education; and complement these STEM investments with renewed investment in civic education
• Rebuild a trade alliance of liberal democracies
• Move forward an immigration compromise where tight border security is coupled with a plan for legalization and incorporation via sponsorship
• Launch regional and statewide citizens assemblies—modeled on California’s EngageCA—to deliberate responses to the anticipated impacts of AI on the labor market
• Empower local communities to conduct cradle-to-career and civic life-success planning for children, through multi-stakeholder children’s cabinets modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, as in Maryland’s statewide ENOUGH initiative to tackle concentrated poverty.

Beyond policy, vernacular expressions have begun to emerge to capture the policy orientation of power-sharing liberalism. Their focus is on empowering all members of a pluralistic society. The economy is supposed to be for our well-being. It is not an end in itself. Forgetting this, libertarians fail at inequality; statists fail at innovation.

 In contrast to identity politics, the work of power-sharing liberalism starts from a recognition that regardless of our backgrounds, we all need housing, transportation, education, jobs, and freedom to thrive. These aspects of infrastructure should organize policy agendas, not identity categories. Whatever our skin color, ethnicity, first language, religion, geographic origin, sex, gender, or political viewpoint, we are all better off when foundations for flourishing exist and when power is returned to us. By protecting a pluralistic, free civil society, we also spur innovation. Identity politics, in contrast, turns common purpose into zero-sum conflict and spurs division.

When we have a foundation for flourishing in access to housing, transport, education, and jobs—all geared toward empowerment—we can achieve work-life-civic balance and play our part in shaping our communities. Thus, we achieve real freedom for all. We humans are a cooperative species, as well as a competitive species. We can channel both these features through democratic institutions. We each need a seat at the table, lest we be the meat on the table. 

Where do we go from here?

This has been an abbreviated and rapid tour through new ideas intended to equip American democracy to meet a moment of crisis. They boil down to this: To achieve the safety and happiness of the American people—and to defend the American people from consolidation of an authoritarian takeover—we need to renovate our democracy, and reorient economic policy. We need to undertake this renovation to align the values of energy and republican safety (the latter is a phrase from The Federalist Papers and refers to basic protection of our rights and liberties). We need to reorient economic policy around measures that will best empower ordinary people to steer their own lives and to contribute as civic participants to steering together.

 Now as in all other eras, the best defense will be a strong offense, and it is time to get to work.