Why We Should and Can Get Much Better at State and Local Politics and Government

Permanent progress in any of these aspirations would end the quarter-millennium “American experiment” with representative democracy. In the meantime, the present administration’s incompetence and cruelty are destroying much human life, the natural world, science, essential data, the rule of law, our national reputation, and an almost unfathomably large amount of national wealth and power.

Nobody knows how far this will go and when or how it will end. Already, and well before the consequences of the administration’s actions are anywhere near fully felt, increasingly frequent and often massive protests by ordinary citizens are spreading throughout the nation. As Bernie Sanders remarked after one 35,000-plus-person rally on a Fighting Oligarchy Tour through mostly red states, “It may just be possible this country is on the brink of the political revolution we have been talking about for a long time.”

Maybe. In the buyer’s-remorse swings in party fortunes that have become routine in our dysfunctional “two-party doom loop”—with evenly matched, hyperpolarized parties, fully nationalized in brand and behavior, repeatedly not cooperating in governance—the current odds appear to favor the Democrats retaking the House next year.

But until then, or whenever this catastrophe ends, much damage will be done.

Confusion and uncertainty accepted, at least three things now seem obviously true and relevant to future action. First, this could easily get even worse—by continued self-inflicted destruction, or reaction to the administration’s bad behavior by others, or some catastrophic (perhaps fatal) mistake of the sort that confusion and uncertainty always make more likely. Second, building back from the carnage of Trump redux will take longer than it took to inflict. What this administration is tearing down took decades, even centuries, to establish, and we all know it takes less time to burn a barn than build and raise one. Third, excepting shared progress toward a more perfect union made before this administration arrived, and the basics of democratic constitutional design, we cannot and should not go back to the way things were. Trump’s election and re-election owed to very broad and ultimately majority discontent with our government’s role in our lives and how those lives were going. Even before the present destruction, I believed that America had a genuine polycrisis on its hands—stagnation of living standards and rising inequality of results and opportunity; environmental disasters of diverse kinds; democratic failure and recession; deep confusion about our place in the world; and, from destructively unattended changes in social roles and status, pervasive social disintegration, alienation and anomie, loneliness, and self-harm: a genuine crisis of community and meaning.

We must do better and can.

I believe our best bet is on some version of productive democracy (PD). This is a public philosophy—grounded in the popular and still transpartisan values of individual and social freedom, opportunity, and responsibility—that differs sharply from both the corporate neoliberalism that’s ravaged us these past 50 years and the welfare-state liberalism nobody really believes in anymore.

Productive democracy is more ambitious than the latter in both its commitments to social equality and to sustainable and shared prosperity. With antecedents in “property-owning democracy,” it advances equality less by redistributive patching of a “safety net” for those losing under unfair terms than by pre-distribution of income- and capability-producing assets, an approach we know to be both more popular and more effective. In increasing sustainable prosperity, PD emphasizes the importance of building and maintaining a productive infrastructure of high-road effective supply, not just the macroeconomic policies of assuring stable and non-inflationary effective demand. It centers this infrastructure in actual communities and also allows those communities more freedom and power through a more democratic federalism. That would take a “floors-not-ceilings” (minima, not maxima) approach to preemption by the federal government of states, and by states of local governments. It would also offer help to lower levels of government in crafting their varied, location-specific experiments aiming to improve their high-road efforts through regulatory relief, finance, and technical assistance. 

Productive democracy deals with democratic failure not by retreating from democratic ideals but by investing vigorously in what is needed to make democracy work. Among other things, that would mean massively increasing public education and training in effective citizen action; rooting out and dissolving concentrated private power (think public funding of elections and the breakup of private monopolies); breaking up the two-party duopoly by moving to proportional representation (or at least restoring the “fusion” option that long permitted minor party supporters to vote their values without wasting their votes or spoiling); and improving the wisdom, transparency, legitimacy, and speed of all public decision-making by opening more efficient channels of expert review and direct citizen engagement in those decisions, using any appropriate values-aligned civic technology (e.g., peer review, citizen assemblies or deliberative polling, iPolis, Loomio, Polco, etc.) to do so.

This raucously cheerful run at a serious democracy—which I believe would almost immediately produce a more equal, rich, diverse, and free, and less violent society—is, of course, not now on the table of American national politics. But it can be an illuminating north star. And it is already informing hundreds of state and local efforts.

The high-road approach to value generation—which sees a functioning democracy as the ultimate “factor of production,” on a par with or even greater than financial, human, and natural capital—is making gains everywhere. It benefits from the intellectual and political discrediting of neoliberalism. It benefits from the near-universal applicability of its basic prudential maxim: Reduce waste, add value, capture and fairly share the benefits of doing both. Repeat. It benefits from having been validated by professional economists, as evidenced by steady progress in mechanism design and its many practical applications, including Harberger taxes, quadratic voting, and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auctions.

I take it to be obvious that, even in the near term, those opposed to the current national carnage should not only be acting in opposition but should also be arguing for the society they wish to build, and why it will be better than this one, and identifying and beginning to develop the skills and conventions needed to organize and operate it.

What may be less obvious is that doing either of those things requires that we get much better at state and local politics and government.

Why?

Most immediately, of course, because our national government is in bad hands, and until it is replaced, state and local government is our only source of civilized order. Along with making it possible for everyday life to function reasonably well and safely under this administration’s reign, that order includes doing whatever’s needed to protect the innocent from lawless attacks and permit the growth of democratic resistance to it.

Even after Donald Trump is gone, however, the imperative to do better at state and local politics and government will remain. Clearly, the overwhelming share of people calling themselves Americans live outside of Washington, D.C. That’s also where most public governing happens, and on matters that most affect the quality of their lives. Those still captured by the pervasive myth that our federal government actually runs this country commonly miss this fact. They should learn it.

To be sure, our federal government, with powers limited to those enumerated in our constitution, controls many public functions. Most of these—macroeconomic policy, interstate commerce, currency and its value, collection of federal income tax, war and foreign policy—it controls uniquely. These are hugely important activities that affect our daily lives. And where the federal government acts, its law is supreme.

But the 10th Amendment unequivocally reserves all other powers to the states. Outside of enumerated federal functions, states are basically free to do whatever they want. And even in areas where the feds have acted, state and local governments play an active, functionally dispositive role in interpretation and enforcement of the law.

Consider the numbers. Our national government is essentially a big insurance company, debtor, and gigantic military. After you take away nondiscretionary payments to individuals, net interest on debt, and national defense, its 2023 spending was only 0.9% of GDP; its total investment and consumption was only $760 billion; and its total nondefense civilian employment was only 1.5 million. By comparison, in that same year, states and local governments spent 9.9% of GDP, did $2.95 trillion of investment and consumption, and employed 19.9 million people—respectively, nine, four, and 13 times as much as the feds.

And then consider substance. Far more than the feds, state and local governments make choices in areas of common concern: public safety; housing; energy; sewers; telecommunications; sidewalks, roads, transit, and other key infrastructure; insurance; local air, water and other environmental concerns; healthcare (and the more impactful “social determinants of health”); K-12 public education; jobs; parks and other public places; cultural life; and, most critically, and falling within their core plenary powers, control of voting rights and election administration. That’s an awful lot of what’s involved in living a good life. If the basic purpose of any democratic politics is to make the choice of a good life more easily available to all, state and local politics demand the focus of any democrat.

Getting more involved in state and local politics and government isn’t just an imperative, however. It’s a wide-open invitation to civic action.

Very few Americans take that invitation now. Participation in state and local politics, electoral or otherwise, is at or near an all-time low. Voter turnout in these elections is vastly lower than in national ones. And most of our more than 500,000 elective offices in America (only 542 of which are federal) aren’t even contested.

But our current national disaster, and the popular response to it, may be weighty enough to turn that around. If and when success in replacing Trump becomes certain, perhaps the many groups now organizing against him will collectively decide to recruit and train—at the scale and quality technology now affords—tens of thousands of people to run for office on a common popular program whose planks have for years been endorsed by supermajorities, including among many who just voted for Trump.

Let’s have these candidates, borrowing from our founders, publicly swear “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” to enacting those planks into law: a higher minimum wage for all; a public option for campaign finance; a declaration that the wealthy shouldn’t pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than poorer people do; the restoration of community rights to decide their own fate (aka “home rule”); and wider choice in party politics via proportional representation or recovery of a plural-nomination, or “fusion,” option for parties, allowing their supporters to vote their values without wasting their votes or supporting a spoiler.

Even partial success in this happy collective democratic exercise would whet the appetite for more.

Consider the vast sweep of state and local powers, and their accessible use in high-road ways in state and local government. Consider our ability now, as never before, to see just how our communities are doing relative to others, on virtually all measures of what’s needed for a good life, suggesting a natural focus for constructive action. And accept the fact that a world of mass flourishing, aided and defended by a competent democratic government, is in fact available now, for the act of construction, in every state and community in this country.

The opposite of love isn’t hate but fear or indifference. Democracy vanquishes both by making us stronger by working together. Democracy is the form love takes in society. We should all fall in love with state and local politics and government and love them well.