The post Constitutional Lawyer Maxwell L. Stearns appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Convince me,” Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith told Maxwell L. Stearns, the author of the forthcoming book Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, at last week’s public program “Would Parliamentary America Have More Fun?” at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Calling herself the “resident cynic” about the future of America’s democracy, Smith asked Stearns to make the case for why a multi-party parliamentary system would make America’s government more functional and civic-minded. By the time the conversation had wrapped, Smith seemed to have come around to Stearns’ proposal.

Stearns said he decided to write Parliamentary America because he saw that the country’s democracy was in danger, and was convinced that current proposals—such as ranked choice voting and eliminating the Electoral College—wouldn’t solve the fundamental democratic crisis facing the nation. “I never envisioned myself writing a book on how to fix American democracy, but I had to write the book on how to fix American democracy,” he said.

He modeled his proposal laid out in the book on the successes and failures of political systems around the world in places like England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela. In England, he found that there weren’t enough parties; in Brazil, however, there were too many. Stearns’ big takeaway: America needs to seek out the “Goldilocks principle,” which he cites as somewhere between four to eight political parties, all of which have vital roles in governance.

It’s possible, he said. All it would take are three amendments to the current Constitution: doubling the size of the House of Representatives by having citizens vote by district and by party, having a House majority coalition to elect the president, and allowing a super-majority of the House to remove a president from office with a no-confidence vote.

“What I propose is radical,” he said. But nodding to the subtitle of his book, he argued that it was the “least radical” way forward. This creates a path that leaves “many foundational American institutions intact—even things that a lot of people aren’t going to like.”

My goal here isn’t to make people happy, Stearns continued. It’s to make democracy functional.

Stearns posits that America is currently facing its third constitutional crisis. (He dates the previous two to the period under the Articles of Confederation and the lead-up to the Civil War to the period of Reconstruction.) America’s two-party system, “which we endured for a couple of hundred years,” is the culprit this time around. The system has made politics so divisive that people believe that people who disagree with them “lack basic intelligence or are evil,” which has rendered government and society dysfunctional, he said. “We need to recognize we’re in crisis, and have to come together to find a solution.”

“A lot of what you’re talking about depends on Americans actually wanting functioning government,” Smith pointed out.

“I don’t believe that the vast majority of Americans believe we thrive in a dysfunctional system,” Stearns said. During multiple times in the night, he called on the audience to be optimistic. It’s too important to give up, he said. By passing these three amendments, it would make it possible for people to vote for someone they’re really happy to vote for and not be punished for that vote.

That would end the “third-party dilemma” Americans currently face, he said. Right now, if you vote outside of the two major candidates, you’re either benefiting the major party candidate you favor the least or pulling votes from both sides, making whoever wins into a “roll of the dice.”

During the Q&A, in-person and online chatroom audience members asked Stearns to speak about various aspects of his proposed system. One in-person member from Berlin asked Stearns if he could speak about the downside of Germany’s mixed‐member electoral system, which combines majority voting with proportional representation. “We’re completely stuck because of the number of parties we have in our coalition at this point,” she said referring to the current Bundestag, the German federal parliament, which some say is “bursting at the seams.”

“I’m proposing a very American adaptation of the German system,” Stearns answered. “We don’t need pure party proportionality. We need ‘good enough’ proportionality, so no party can win on its own.”

Before the conversation wrapped, Smith asked Stearns what American democracy could look like in his wildest dreams, if these three amendments were passed.

“I’m not suggesting we sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Stearns, “but we can have functional politics.”

The alternative, he said, is the danger of collapse or autocracy. “We want to make sure we’re not in one of those democracies that die. That’s why I wrote this book, which is dedicated to my children and yours.”

“We can leave future generations a better democracy,” he said.

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After April 1861, Webster’s discourse on nationhood took on added meaning as its horrific premonition of disunion came true, and four years of civil war left the nation’s soil “drenched in fraternal blood.” To Americans of the late 19th century and well through the 20th century, Webster’s words became one of America’s defining texts on nationalism, a call to embrace national unity and cast aside petty sectional differences.

Even though the speech is no longer taught in schools, there’s much to be gained from reexamining Webster’s and Hayne’s words today—as well as the speeches that followed their forensic battle on the Senate floor. A close read offers us crucial insight into the state of our Union, and how it is that the nation is still divided over shifting notions of nationalism and sectionalism, states’ rights, and robust federal power.

Then and now, Webster’s dazzling oratory tends to overshadow the underlying meanings behind the Webster-Hayne debate. The 48-year-old lawyer and statesman had served two stints in the House of Representatives, one from New Hampshire and the other from Massachusetts, and his oratorical skills, honed in the courtroom and on the floor of Congress, had already gained him national recognition. His eulogy for John Adams, delivered in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, solidified his reputation as America’s finest public speaker.

What gets less attention is the evolution of Webster’s thoughts on the nation itself. By 1830, Webster believed that the United States was a nation created by the people and held together by a single, strong national government actively working for the common good. Individual states composed the Union, but Webster saw them as subordinate. Webster’s definition of union fit perfectly with the political and economic outlook of New England of that time. During the 1820s and 1830s, the Northeastern states had become a commercial powerhouse as manufacturing transformed the region and its economy. The New England manufacturers who devised the American conception of corporations needed and demanded that the national government protect their economic interests. Only a powerful, centralized government, they and Webster believed, could build the American economy and keep the Union alive. Webster’s ideas at this time bear close similarity to those of Alexander Hamilton, who would have heartily agreed with all that Webster endorsed.

Yet Daniel Webster and his New England constituents had not always endorsed this neo-Hamiltonian economic program and the expansive definition of federal power. In fact, during Webster’s first period in the House of Representatives, which coincided with the War of 1812, the young congressman had spoken harshly of the war and the federal government that supported it. By 1814-15, when they met for the Hartford Convention, the New Englanders endorsed sweeping changes to the Constitution that would have curtailed federal power. A few voices even spoke of secession—though the convention rejected any notion of the idea of disunion. But in the context of the war’s close and the triumph at the Battle of New Orleans, the Hartford Convention’s states’ rights and anti-nationalist proposals, appeared extreme—even disloyal. The Federalist Party, which had drawn its greatest strength from New England, died after the war as a wave of nationalism spread across the nation. For a decade thereafter, New England Federalists, Webster among them, faced a backlash from the Hartford Convention and their dissent against the War of 1812.

But by the mid-1820s New England had undergone an economic and political metamorphosis. So, on the eve of the Webster-Hayne debate, Webster, now a senator from Massachusetts, had transformed into an ardent nationalist.

Still, strong divisions over federal power persisted in the nation: At the very moment that New England found nationalism, the South lost it. Though Southerners had supported the War of 1812 and the wave of nationalism that followed its conclusion, the year 1819 marked the beginning of the end for Southern nationalism. The economic panic of that year depressed agricultural markets and destroyed the postwar land boom that had fueled explosive growth in the South and West. Rural Southerners found blame in many places, but reserved special wrath for the Bank of the United States, a sort of precursor to today’s Federal Reserve. When in 1819 the Supreme Court decision in McCulloch v. Maryland upheld the federal government’s right to charter a national bank, Southerners became incensed at what they defined as an abuse of federal power. Finally, 1819 also saw the beginning of the Missouri controversy over slavery in the territories. To defend slavery and the economy based upon it, Southerners slowly abandoned nationalism in favor of states’ rights.

Though history has all but forgotten Webster’s debate partner, South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, he represents well the Southern shift away from nationalism and toward states’ rights. With a mindset forged in the South’s growing consciousness as a persecuted minority, Hayne clung to states’ rights, believing that the Union was a confederation of sovereign states, with each delegating only a few specific powers to the national government. A disciple of John C. Calhoun, Hayne abhorred the exercise of federal power, which by 1828 had centered on a tariff that Southerners argued protected those burgeoning New England manufacturers, all at the expense of the Southern cotton planters. By then, Hayne had arrived at the conclusion that an individual state could nullify any federal law that infringed on state sovereignty. If nullification did not produce the desired result, secession became an option. By 1830, Hayne and his followers, the Nullifier Party, believed that Daniel Webster and the North’s vision of union posed a long-term threat to the South and its slaveholding regime based on cotton.

Webster and Hayne’s senatorial battle came in January 1830 amid a debate on Western lands. Hayne sensed an opportunity to ally the West with the South against New England and took to the podium to lecture the Senate on Northern oppression of the agricultural South and the Western frontier. Westerners, he argued, “had some cause for complaint” over the stifling regulations imposed upon them by New England. The South, too, had suffered oppression by the “meddling statesmen” of the North, as tariffs filled the pockets of New England manufacturers. Nationalism, which Hayne labeled as “consolidation,” came at the expense of the “independence of the states.”

Webster, for his part, responded with a crushing rebuttal that portrayed New England as the defender of true American nationalism. “Consolidation!—that perpetual cry of both terror and delusion—consolidation!” he argued, conveniently ignored the role that federal power had played in the settlement of the West, and even the entire nation. In chastising Hayne’s view of the federal government as an agent of consolidation and oppression, Webster portrayed it as an agent of positive power that could benefit the public.

Which senator had defined American nationhood correctly? The closest attempt at a satisfactory answer emerged after Webster and Hayne had concluded their remarks. Webster and Hayne had staked out two visions of the Union that seemed like polar opposites, but that was not the end of the discussion. Between January and May 1830, 21 of the 48 senators delivered 65 speeches on competing ideas of nationalism and states’ rights. Most are forgettable, to put it charitably. One Louisiana senator, however, offered an original contribution on the fundamental contradiction in American nationalism. Edward Livingston, a veteran politician and associate of President Andrew Jackson, argued that the United States was a federal union, a unique creation in which Americans had divided sovereignty between the states and the national government. The drafters of the Constitution of 1787—the failure of the Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitution, fresh on their minds—brokered a compromise in which states and the federal government shared power. “Let the partisans on either side of the argument,” Livingston concluded, “be assured that the people will not submit to consolidation, nor suffer disunion; and that their good sense will detect the fallacy of arguments which lead to either.” The compromise worked, as Livingston suggested, but the debate over how to divide power has persisted throughout American history.

On nullification and disunion, however, Livingston took sides decisively with Daniel Webster against Robert Hayne. A state could not nullify a federal law or dissolve the Union. The American constitutional system did not allow for either option. Livingston’s ideas followed those of his boss, Andrew Jackson, who denied nullification during the course of the Webster-Hayne debate with his memorable toast to Calhoun, Hayne, and the Nullifiers, “Our federal union: it must be preserved!”

Livingston’s words more accurately define American nationhood than those of the debate’s two protagonists. In modern times the United States probably leans more toward Webster’s vision of union, but Americans still argue about states’ rights and nationalism and how we divide sovereignty. The Webster-Hayne debate, read anew in its entirety, shows modern Americans that nationhood has always been complicated.

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The world was a very different place in the first decades of the 20th century. Notably, there was no real joined-up thinking when it came to healthcare. Throughout the industrialized world, most doctors either worked for themselves or were funded by charities or religious institutions, and many people had no access to them at all.

Public health policies—like immigration policies—were colored by eugenics. It was common for privileged elites to look down on workers and the poor as inferior categories of human being, whose natural degeneracy predisposed them to disease and deformity. It didn’t occur to those elites to look for the causes of illness in the often abject living conditions of the lower classes: crowded tenements, long working hours, poor diet. If they sickened and died from typhus, cholera, and other killer diseases, the eugenicists argued, then it was their own fault, because they lacked the drive to achieve a better quality of life. In the context of an epidemic, public health generally referred to a suite of measures designed to protect those elites from the contaminating influence of the disease-ridden rabble.

The first wave of the Spanish flu struck in the spring of 1918. There was nothing particularly Spanish about it. It attracted that name, unfairly, because the press in neutral Spain tracked its progress in that country, unlike newspapers in warring nations that were censored. But it was flu, and flu as we know is transmitted on the breath—by coughs and sneezes. It is highly contagious and spreads most easily when people are packed together at high densities—in favelas, for example, or trenches. Hence it is sometimes referred to as a “crowd disease.”

Policemen in Seattle wearing masks made by the Red Cross during the influenza epidemic, December 1918. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

That first wave was relatively mild, not much worse than seasonal flu, but when the second and most deadly phase of the pandemic erupted in the autumn of 1918, people could hardly believe that it was the same disease. An alarmingly high proportion of patients died—25 times as many as in previous flu pandemics. Though initially they reported the classic symptoms of flu—fever, sore throat, headache—soon they were turning blue in the face, having difficulty breathing, even bleeding from their noses and mouths. If blue turned to black, they were unlikely to recover. Their congested lungs were simply too full of fluid to process air, and death usually followed within hours or days. The second wave receded towards the end of the year, but there was a third and final wave—intermediate in virulence between the other two—in early 1919.

Flu is caused by a virus, but virus was a novel concept in 1918, and most of the world’s doctors assumed they were dealing with a bacterial disease. This meant that they were almost completely helpless against the Spanish flu. They had no flu vaccine, no antiviral drugs, not even any antibiotics, which might have been effective against the secondary bacterial infections that killed most of its victims (in the form of pneumonia). Public health measures such as quarantine or the closing of public meeting places could be effective, but even when they were imposed this often happened too late, because influenza was not a reportable disease in 1918. This meant that doctors weren’t obliged to report cases to the authorities, which in turn meant that those authorities failed to see the pandemic coming.

The disease claimed between 50 and 100 million lives, according to current estimates, or between 2.5 and 5 percent of the global population. To put those numbers in perspective, World War I killed about 18 million people, World War II about 60 million. Rates of sickness and death varied dramatically across the globe, for a host of complex reasons that epidemiologists have been studying ever since. In general, the less well-off suffered worst—though not for the reasons eugenicists proposed—but the elites were by no means spared.

The lesson that health authorities took away from the catastrophe was that it was no longer reasonable to blame an individual for catching an infectious disease, nor to treat him or her in isolation. The 1920s saw many governments embracing the concept of socialized medicine—healthcare for all, delivered free at the point of delivery. Russia was the first country to put in place a centralized public healthcare system, which it funded via a state-run insurance scheme, and others in Western Europe followed suit. The United States took a different route, preferring employer-based insurance schemes, but it also took measures to consolidate healthcare in the post-flu years.

In 1924, the Soviet government laid out its vision of the physician of the future, who would have “the ability to study the occupational and social conditions which give rise to illness and not only to cure the illness but to suggest ways to prevent it.” This vision was gradually adopted across the world: The new medicine would be not only biological and experimental, but also sociological. Public health started to look more like it does today.

The cornerstone of public health is epidemiology—the study of patterns, causes, and effects in disease—and this now received full recognition as a science. Epidemiology requires data, and the gathering of health data became more systematic. By 1925, for example, all U.S. states were participating in a national disease reporting system, and the early warning apparatus that had been so lamentably lacking in 1918 began to take shape. Ten years later, reflecting the authorities’ new interest in the population’s “baseline” health, U.S. citizens were subjected to the first national health survey.

Many countries created or revamped health ministries in the 1920s. This was a direct result of the pandemic, during which public health leaders had been either left out of cabinet meetings entirely, or reduced to pleading for funds and powers from other departments. But there was also recognition of the need to coordinate public health at the international level, since clearly, contagious diseases didn’t respect borders. The year 1919 saw the opening, in Vienna, Austria, of an international bureau for fighting epidemics—a forerunner of today’s World Health Organization.

By the time the WHO came into existence, in 1946, eugenics had been disgraced and the new organization’s constitution enshrined a thoroughly egalitarian approach to health. It stated that, “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” That philosophy wouldn’t eliminate the threat of flu pandemics—the WHO has known three in its lifetime, and will surely know more—but it would transform the way human beings confronted them. And it was born of an understanding that pandemics are a social, not an individual problem.

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The evening’s discussion, which took up the question, “Do We Still Know How to Be Good Citizens?” unfolded before a large audience at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

“We are at our best as citizens when we are being critical,” said one panelist, Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M University historian of American political rhetoric. And that’s an old idea, she added, citing the early American thinker John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, which were published in the late 1760s.

Mercieca drew particular attention to a point Dickinson raised about the necessity for citizens to be vigilant in defense of their own freedom: “Ought not the people therefore to watch? To observe facts? To search into causes? To investigate designs? And have they not a right of judging from the evidence on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?”

But maintaining that steadfast watchfulness toward government in a democracy requires a difficult balancing act. The panelists discussed these dual imperatives of citizenship for Americans, who are supposed to forcefully challenge their leaders and public officials, while also cooperating with them; to engage tightly with issues while yet remaining dispassionate enough to be objective and rational.

“We have an obligation to be very forceful in speaking out when we think things are wrong,” said former Congressman Mickey Edwards, who now works on political reform and teaching political leadership.

But Edwards emphasized that it’s also vital, particularly among elected representatives, “to sit down and respectfully work out where you can work together and find the common ground.”

Turning to another theme, the panelists expressed varying degrees of concern about whether some of the necessary balances in exercising American citizenship have been breaking down, particularly in light of the bitter 2016 presidential election. Johann Neem, a Western Washington University historian of civil society and author of Creating a Nation of Joiners, noting that he was an immigrant, said that some of the abrasive language on both sides of the political divide made it “harder to have a home politically” in contemporary American society.

Edwards, the former congressman, said one reason for today’s mounting anxiety about the nation’s social cohesiveness is that the United States has become less stable and predictable. The event’s moderator, Nancy Barnes, editor and executive vice president for news at the Houston Chronicle, said she worried about growing political polarization within journalism, and asked what the deepening political split—with “media organizations that represent the right and represent the left”—might mean not only for media but for the country.

But the panelists also took heart in historical examples of how the United States met past challenges of citizenship, rising above periods of intense discord and partisan acrimony. Neem said that the country previously has managed to disagree over fundamental questions, while still retaining sufficient solidarity needed to solve its problems and reach compromise.

“The kind of trust that bridges partisan divides, that bridges ethnic divides—our whole history is figuring out how to build that trust,” Neem said.

Another panelist, The Washington Post “Civilities” columnist Steven Petrow, who is an expert on etiquette, pointed to Emily Post, who wrote about proper etiquette in the post-World War I era, a time of tremendous social dislocation and economic upheaval; and to Miss Manners, who during the turbulent post-Vietnam War years offered Americans witty but sensible advice for coping with their anxieties and stresses, while also exhorting her readers to taking responsibility for their actions and words.

Petrow said that Americans need similar help during this difficult moment. One key requirement of civil citizenship, he said, is to avoid using words as weapons to shut down conversation; better to engage respectfully with people, even when they savage you on social media.

“I love the people who agree with me, but I love my haters just as much,” he said. When he writes back to people who fire off vicious emails, about two-thirds of his correspondents write him back, apologize for the language they used, and engage in productive conversation, he said.

Mercieca, the rhetorician, said that people in politics and media prosper by dividing Americans against themselves. But what Americans really hunger for is the “language of transcendence”—making a broad appeal to everyone. Petrow jumped in to ask the audience, “Who would like to see more transcendence?” Hundreds of hands went up, and Petrow nodded. “We’re all suffering with this level of incivility. And people want to find ways to come together because there are so many ways that we’re disconnected.”

Mercieca said that citizens can withdraw consent from political systems that don’t serve them. Edwards argued that political reforms that move people away from partisanship and parties—he mentioned nonpartisan legislative redistricting efforts in several states, as well as the top-two-vote-getter primary system in California—can create more spaces for citizens to engage in politics. “Washington, Adams, and Jefferson all said, ‘Don’t create political parties.’ And we did it. And we’re paying the price, and if we don’t fix it, they’re going to drag us down.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, panelists fielded queries on topics ranging from the case for mandatory voting; to how white privilege has compromised citizenship and representation; to how the panelists themselves would attempt to engage more young voters.

All of the panelists expressed pride in their American citizenship, and stories. Mercieca said that she’s a child of an immigrant—her father grew up in Malta during World War II, when it was the target of bombing—and America represents opportunity and safety to her.

Edwards echoed that, noting that his father grew up in an orphanage. Petrow reiterated the American credo of e pluribus unum—a Latin phrase meaning, “out of many, one,” which expresses an ideal of how the citizen relates to the larger society and nation.

Neem said that even the disagreements we have among ourselves, and over ideas about citizenship, reveal something essential about the national character. “Those disagreements remind us that being American is not genetic,” he said. “It’s something that can be argued over. It’s something that people can become.”

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Don’t we all?

Many of us are struggling to manage our emotions since the inauguration, with collective exhaustion mounting. Sudden swings in policy, ranging from immigration to environmental regulation, have caused great emotional turmoil for many Americans watching from the sidelines, and unimaginable hardship for those under imminent threat of losing their homes and jobs, or having family members deported. The suffering of the intended targets of such bureaucratic measures is palpable. The cascading harmful effects on the overburdened government workers now tasked with implementing these policies—edicts that they may feel uneasy about, or outright opposed to—have received less attention.

Federal workers stand on the frontlines of dizzying shake-ups in every branch of government and face the additional stress of looming budget cuts, hiring freezes, and increasing workloads. Many career civil servants find themselves now working for departments headed by leaders with little to no direct experience serving these agencies, such as HUD secretary Ben Carson and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. In some cases, leaders fundamentally oppose the agency’s mission, as with Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general attempted to block EPA regulations in 14 lawsuits and has rejected scientific evidence of human contribution to climate change, contradicting the EPA’s own website.

Continued upheaval of the type we have experienced in the last few months has the potential to drastically alter federal workplaces, increasing emotional burdens and stress on workers and their families. White House press secretary Sean Spicer offered his own solution to this predicament after a dissent memo made the rounds at the State Department in response to January’s travel ban: “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it? They should either get with the program or they can go.”

Federal employees often work through political changes in administrations, but dramatic shifts in policy can spur widespread resistance and large-scale departures, as lifelong civil servants experience ideological whiplash. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found significant numbers of departures in the year after elections, especially at senior executive levels when a conflict existed between the agency’s mission and the incoming administration. Another survey of 3,500 federal managers conducted during the Obama administration revealed a workforce already under stress. Managers cited difficulties recruiting and retaining the best employees as a major hurdle to fulfilling their agencies’ core missions. As one of the study’s authors, Vanderbilt professor of political science David E. Lewis, cautioned, problems attracting human capital have larger long-term ramifications. “If government workers fail, the president fails,” he said.

The exit of senior civil servants results in a profound loss of expertise, as the recent departure of Mustafa Ali, head of the environmental justice program at the EPA, demonstrates. Ali left after a 24-year career at the EPA in advance of deep cuts and the dismantling of the office he had helped found. A small group of employees at the agency have begun using encrypted messaging apps and old-fashioned face-to-face meetings to express their dissent and to organize; federal employees at the State and Labor Departments have started taking similar measures.

Still, despite turnover, the vast majority of federal workers stay—and research offers clues to the ill effects of this ever-shifting ground on those who remain. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” in The Managed Heart, her 1980s study of TWA flight attendants. She defined this type of work as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and observable display.” Flight attendants received intensive training to smile incessantly and manufacture an upbeat friendliness even when passengers disrespected them. Public servants such as immigration enforcement officers face inverse pressures to project steely authority and an unflappable “poker face.”

Any job requirement to suppress emotions may serve a company’s or a bureaucracy’s goals, but it also ignites a process whereby workers can become estranged from their own feelings, with harmful consequences for workers’ physical and mental health. A raft of studies shows that workers with high public contact and intense pressure to keep their cool, from bus drivers to border patrol agents, face higher stress and greater risk of exhaustion, insomnia, problems at home, divorce, burnout, elevated blood pressure, and suicide.

To cite one relevant current example, the Trump administration’s hyper-aggressive stance on immigration will make the work of immigration enforcement more grueling and potentially unattractive. Border Patrol agents often enter the profession for economic reasons and the relatively good pay, but face dangerous and uncertain 24/7 on-call work in remote locations. Rescuing abandoned children in the desert, and arresting drug smugglers, boosts agents’ self-esteem. But emotionally draining parts of the job, like deporting children and breaking up families, will become the norm rather than the exception under the current crackdown.

Contrary to stereotypes of trigger-happy officers, most immigration agents are ordinary men and women straining to take care of themselves and their families. They want to engage in work that makes them feel good. Many agents also have deep immigrant ties, and about half of all border patrol agents are Latino. Aaron Hockman’s study of Mexican-American Border Patrol agents reveals agents’ deep empathy for migrants and a complex web of feelings tied to emotional labor and identity.

An agent named Tanya spoke of the internal conflicts she faced between her duty to apprehend and the plight of migrants: “I remember talking to one lady and she was just crying and it really hit home to me, it really bothered me because she reminded me a lot of my mom.” Another agent, Felipe, spoke of his challenges enforcing policies he didn’t always agree with: “I’ll guarantee you right now if I was in Mexico, if I was poor, if I had mouths to feed and I didn’t have a job, I would try crossing illegally,” he said. “Situations where you stop the vehicle and maybe it’s a family, and dad out of the whole family is the only one that’s illegal and everyone else is fine, and that’s difficult. Especially when you have the kids crying …”

Emotions give us important feedback about how we feel, and warn of potential danger. They can help signal when something is wrong. Expending energy managing the fear, anger, and uncertainty provoked by the Trump administration’s wide-ranging policy shifts is not a long-term strategy for building a healthy or functioning government or society. Learning to tune out these internal messages hurts everyone, including the growing army of federal workers and their families who will bear the brunt of this emotionally taxing work. 

The post Tired of Working for Uncle Sam? Maybe You’ve Got “Ideological Whiplash” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and professor of political science at Stanford University, and Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington.

Margaret Levi. Photo by Nikki Ritcher Photography.

A condensed and edited transcript follows:

Q: How did you first get interested in studying government legitimacy?

A: It well predates my being a trained social scientist. My mother was taking us on marches for civil rights when I was just a little teeny girl. I think the issue of when government is serving its populations—and which part of its populations—has always been a question that fascinated me. That morphed into studying the question of under what conditions people will resist government and under what conditions do they find it legitimate.

Q: You did research on how soldiers go to war for a government. When we talk about government legitimacy we have this idea that it’s a big monolithic thing, but in many ways it’s a very intimate thing between each individual and the government.

A: The research was on young men who were choosing whether or not to volunteer for military service at the beginning of World Wars I and II in the U.S., Australia, Canada, England, and France. Some of them were also deciding whether to allow themselves to be conscripted when it was no longer a question of volunteering. That’s a time when the population is being mobilized to pay a very high price to show their allegiance to the government.

Yes, it is an individual decision but … it is one very much informed by one’s social network and the community in which one lives. If we go back to my interest in [the] civil rights [movement], parts of the population were happy with the status quo and thought everything was hunky-dory, and parts of the population were literally oppressed and suppressed and didn’t think things were good at all.

You see a huge difference, for example, between how Francophones in Canada reacted to the request for volunteers and how Anglophone Canadians responded. The Anglophones were far more likely to respond positively and the Francophones were more likely to respond negatively. The reason had to do with their feelings about how well the federal Canadian government was serving them and how trustworthy it was. The Francophones had been promised bi-lingual education and general respect for their language, but in some provinces that didn’t occur. Francophones were also worried—and reasonably so—that military orders would only be given in English, which not all of them spoke.

We can see this kind of problem occurring all over the world: Some part of a population feels like they are not getting what they were promised by the national government. We can see that in some of the midwestern and southern towns that supported Trump, where white populations feel let down by the federal government. We can see that in some black populations and some urban areas, where people have gotten promises for many, many, many decades about fair police treatment and fair access and equality of opportunity that they don’t feel have been delivered.

Before I looked at conscription I looked at taxation. Of Rule and Revenue (published in 1988) started with trying to understand why tax systems look so different across countries and across eras. I started in ancient Rome and ended in contemporary Australia. I thought my answer was going to have to do with economic transaction costs. But it turns out that the major issue was political transaction costs. That is, no ruler can really force everyone to pay up. They can’t have a fed under every bed, and it doesn’t matter how much they use the military or the police. They need to get what I call “quasi-voluntary compliance,” where people feel like they have some obligation to pay but they will do so only under certain conditions. Those conditions include the trustworthiness or reliability of the government. There has to be some confidence that the government is trying to keep its promises. There has to be some belief that the process by which the policy was made is fair according to the norms of the place, which can vary a lot. And people have to believe that government will enforce the rules against those who don’t comply; no one wants to be a sucker, one of the few paying taxes or signing up for military service in a full-blown war.

One example from Australia in the 1960s and ‘70s was that the tax system began to fray in part because of a supreme court justice who’d been a tax lawyer. He began to create all sorts of loopholes for all kinds of relatively well-off people. As a result, the government allowed rich people to get away with not paying taxes, and they faced a tax revolt from everyone else. The whole system had to be reconstituted to be more trustworthy: first to be more equitable and secondly to ensure that everyone paid their share given a better set rules.

Australian men at the Town Hall in Melbourne enlisting for service in World War I.

Q: It’s an interesting thing: We might think that democracy happens by dropping off a ballot, but it actually happens in these struggles over taxation and conscription. Your research suggests that one of the hallmarks of democracy is this ongoing struggle.

A: That’s right. That’s what democracy involves: an ongoing struggle, ongoing conversation—that reconfiguration of norms and ethics and values, who is included, what the government’s responsibilities are, what the processes are. You want to feel the government is actually trustworthy and fair and that you are, as a citizen, contributing. And that you’re not going to be alone.

I really do think that the feeling of being a sucker is part of what’s going on in the U.S. Feeling betrayed or feeling suckered and feeling like you’re doing your share and others are not. When that begins to get too rampant, whether it’s right or wrong, it is really important.

Q: One of the points you’ve made is that mudslinging and skepticism are pretty much hallmarks of democracy. The fact that there’s a lot of noise doesn’t necessarily mean that the government is suffering a crisis of legitimacy. Where are we now?

A: That’s the question. Before the election we were seeing people claiming in surveys and on media that they distrusted government, and we read and heard analysts arguing about how important that distrust would be in affecting votes. But there wasn’t evidence of much non-compliance or demonstrations against government; people weren’t really taking to the streets. What we’re seeing now is something quite different. We’re seeing a lot of people mobilizing in ways that go well beyond the vote. We’re seeing big demonstrations. They’re anti-Trump, but I think it’s democratic, with a small “d.” It seems to be from people who want certain kinds of government action. It’s a pro-government, but anti-this-particular-administration, mobilization.

That raises a lot of questions about legitimacy for me. I think that there is a real feeling among a large number of people in the current population of the U.S. that Trump is in many ways an illegitimate president. He may or may not have been elected illegitimately. But his practices and policies have raised real alarms about whether he is engaging in legitimate democratic practice. There’s concern about this particular administration in an effort to ensure that government continues to be democratic, with a small “d.”

That’s why it’s really not the Tea Party. The protests have some similarities in form, but the substantive concerns are vastly different. These protestors are really talking about what our education system is going to look like, what social security is going to look like, what health is going to look like. We want to protect government; we believe in climate change and want the government to act to do something about it. There’s a lot of government in it. It’s not anti-government as an institution.

Q: You said in one of your interviews that we’re still governed by institutions designed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and then tweaked some in the 20th century. Now we’re at an inflection point where we must outline better economic and political practices that suit the world of the 21st century. Are we experiencing the spasms of the inflection point right now?

A: Yeah, I’m in a lot of discussions of exactly that … There’s a set of short-term questions that have to be confronted as well as some really significant long-term questions—which is frankly where I’m putting most of my energy because of my own particular capacities. The short-term issue about our democratic institutions is to make sure that they hold and that, depending on your partisanship, we change this particular administration or make it ineffective as soon as we can. Those are the short-term goals.

The long-term ones are really big. I don’t think we can take our eye off [them]. Trump and Brexit didn’t happen in a vacuum. They are reflections of some fundamental flaws in the way in which democracy has evolved and our institutions have not. There really needs to be some rethinking about how a democracy is affected in a world that no longer is a group of white patrician men basically running the show.

Less than half of the eligible population voted in this last election. I have my own doubts whether this election was about populism. There is a population that felt left out and voted for Trump and are very angry. But that portion may not even be half of the people who voted for Trump. We’re talking about a very small portion of the population. We’re not talking about the mass movements that created Perón or created Hitler. Populism is an issue that we have to interrogate. We have to really think where the populations of various countries are, why they have the beliefs they have.

The media, our sources of information, the kinds of civic education we need to provide: All of those things are really up for grabs. The false news issue is not really the issue. The issue is how people come to believe the things they believe and under what conditions those things can be changed. How do we get to a world in which people can agree on some basic facts? And create institutional arrangements that allow people to find their commonalities and to argue about their differences—learning from each other and agreeing to disagree, in some cases.

Student protesters marching down Langdon Street at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the Vietnam War era. Photo courtesy of UW Digital Collections.

Q: If you were thinking ahead, maybe 40 or 50 years, can you describe one institution that could be really dramatically changed?

A: One thing that we really need to rethink is our education system. I don’t mean just making sure everyone can read and write. We have to find ways to enable people to think critically, to be nimble, to acquire certain skills. We have to give people the kind of information that enables them to make government work for them. We don’t need to know absolutely everything that all of the various agencies do, but we should know how to find out what’s going on when we need to. That would be part of creating a population that is able to argue about policies but not think that those who disagree are bad people. To have an actual discussion and recognize facts. That’s one institution that I would change … It might be a really major overhaul rather than a reform.

And you know that Congress is not working very well … We need to create a set of incentives, positive or negative, to get people to be our representatives—to serve the interests of their constituents, but also to be focused on the national interest. And to make those tradeoffs at the appropriate moment. There were all these little rules that turned out to have huge consequences. Pork barreling and earmarking actually served a purpose of enabling representatives to serve their districts. We have to redesign the ways of Congress so that they really can represent their constituencies and be part of a national conversation that serves the larger general interest.

The Senate was designed to solve a problem in creating democracy—how to get states to buy in if they’re tiny. So it’s a problematic institution in terms of representativeness. Whether we can ever change the Senate is a very open question, but if we raised these issues we may be able to find ways … institutionalizing new norms, new rules, new procedures, that bring people together rather than constantly push them into camps.

This relates to a book I wrote with John Ahlquist, In the Interest of Others. What we’re really struggling with is, how do you create an expanded community of fate? What kind of institutional arrangements bring out people’s willingness to recognize others, strangers, as part of their community? We know about the ways in which people resort to sort of tribal communities. We wanted to think about the ways in which you get people to think in broader communities. John and I established proof of concept that it can happen by looking at labor unions, which are in fact mini-governments … We found how rule changes made a difference, how different constitutions made a difference.

Looking at longshore unions is not exactly looking at the U.S. government, but it’s still a proof of concept, showing that it’s actually possible to build a democratic set of institutions that can evoke from people their best selves.

Q: Yeah. If institutions are hitting this inflection point—in a different kind of capitalism, a different kind of political culture—we’ll be searching for new structures and new recipes.

A: We really need to put our heads together and do that. There might be people out there with some of the answers but we have to get them together in the same room and start figuring it out. I don’t think this is something that will be done at Davos. We need a lot of different voices in that room. It cannot be just corporate leadership and it can’t be just government leadership. It has to be serious academics; it has to be journalists who have been in the trenches; it has to be folks from various communities. There are a lot of voices that need to be heard as we think through what institutions we need to have a democracy that really thrives and a political economy that really thrives.

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But that choice was accompanied by a healthy skepticism of the role of money in the halls of government. As the years went by, recurrent scandals prompted rounds of reform, fostering an intricate system of rules to promote ethical conduct.

The result is a daunting interface between private and public life, the line marked by financial investigation, disclosure, and divestiture. Still, from the early 20th century, U.S. presidents began to routinely call on leaders from business and industry to head key agencies of the government. And despite nagging public suspicion, the moguls drafted into service were consistently free of accusations—let alone outright findings—of corruption or misconduct.

Keep in mind, the sort of corruption threatened by the rich and powerful is quite distinct from the more garden-variety graft usually associated with public officials—bribery, principally; or undue allegiance to one political party or another. Such concerns were addressed in the late 19th century by the institution of the civil service, when federal employees were subjected for the first time to entrance exams, and protected from political removal. It marked the advent of a new kind of entity: the career civil servant.

Reckoning with the threat posed by wealthy appointees—that they might place their private interests ahead of the public’s, using their positions to help their friends or augment their fortunes—came later, and required more elaborate safeguards.

It was the onset of the first World War and the attendant task of retooling the nation’s industrial economy for wartime production that brought a surge of business executives into the government. Drafted by President Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1917, they signed on for service in new government bureaus at the nominal salary of a dollar a year.

First among these wartime stalwarts was Bernard Baruch, a financier and speculator known in his day as “the lone wolf of Wall Street.” Appointed head of the new War Industries Board, Baruch recruited a bevy of his tycoon chums and together they put the peacetime economy on footing to produce uniforms, tanks, and ammunition.

Another Wilson appointee was Herbert Hoover. A mining executive then based in London, Hoover emerged on the public stage by leading humanitarian war relief efforts for neutral Belgium. Calling Hoover back to the U.S., Wilson named him Food Administrator, and charged him with limiting domestic consumption and keeping the U.S. Army and its allies fed in the field.

Both of these men—and the dozens of other businessmen drafted to assist them—performed capably. Though these appointments came at the height of the Progressive Era, and the wary view of wealth that went with it, the American public came to accept these appointments as legitimate without audible objection.

Skip forward a decade, to 1929, and wealthy office-holders had become a routine feature in the federal government. More than that, it was a non-partisan phenomenon. Bernard Baruch had become the titular head and chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party, while Hoover, after a brief dalliance with the Democrats, won the presidency as a Republican. When Hoover became president, he decided to continue the dollar-a-year tradition, donating his salary to charity.

During Hoover’s tenure the crisis was not war but the Great Depression, and he again turned to men of wealth. One of Hoover’s principal innovations was to launch the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would channel bailout funds to foundering banks and railroads. Selected to lead the new agency was Charles Dawes, a Chicago banker with a history of moonlighting for the government—he was the nation’s first Comptroller of the Currency, under President William McKinley, and later elected vice president with Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his adroit management of postwar international debts.

Dawes immersed himself in launching the RFC until the bank owned by his family, the Central Republic Bank of Chicago, began to founder. Despite Hoover’s protest, in June 1932 Dawes resigned his post and rushed home to wrestle with panicked creditors. Soon after, now against Dawes’ private protest (he feared, rightly, political blowback), Central Republic was named recipient of the largest loan yet issued by the RFC. Though the bank ultimately closed, the bailout made for an orderly transition and the loans were repaid. But public resentment over what appeared to be an in-house deal damaged the reputation of Hoover and of the relief agency.

Here was just the sort of misconduct that critics had feared from the outset—men of wealth protecting their personal interests. But the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt later that year seemed to clear the air.

Roosevelt was more sparing in his reliance on the men of industry and finance—and yes, all were men—but utilize them he did, especially when faced with a new World War. As the crisis loomed, like President Wilson before him, Roosevelt called on the dollar-a-year crowd. Leading this troop of civilians was Bill Knudsen, then-president of General Motors. An expert in mass production, Knudsen was appointed in 1940 chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, at a salary of $1 a year.

As production ramped up, Knudsen brought with him executives from car companies, AT&T, and U.S. Steel. New Deal bureaucrats and labor activists denounced the appointments, but despite all the procurement contracts, all the millions spent, there was hardly a whiff of scandal.

By 1942, when Knudsen was awarded with a formal commission as Lieutenant General in the Army, the worst his critics could say was that he had been too slow in converting from peaceful industrial production to a war footing. “We are beginning to pay a heavy price for leaving the mobilization of industry in the hands of business men,” the Nation warned in 1942. Steel makers, in particular, were fighting expanded production “as a menace to monopolistic practices and stable prices,” argued an editorial. It was “Dollar-a-Year Sabotage,” The New Republic headlined.

But those criticisms were drowned out by the din of factory production, the great outpouring of armament that yielded an “arsenal of democracy,” as Knudsen phrased it, that carried the Allies to victory. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production,” Knudsen remarked later. For all the fears of conflicted interest, the businessmen had proved their worth.

The dollar-a-year appointment routine went out with World War II, but presidents continued to tap the moneyed elite for advice and expertise, a practice that became the source of a growing thicket of regulations designed to forestall malfeasance. Roosevelt broke first ground here, in 1937, with an order barring purchase or sale of stock by government employees “for speculative purpose.” Later, his War Production Administration required its dollar-a-year men to disclose financial holdings and undergo background checks.

From there, safeguards advanced by stages. John F. Kennedy, during his aspirational 1960 campaign, called for a new standard, by which “no officer or employee of the executive branch shall use his official position for financial profit or personal gain.” Upon his election, he followed up with an executive order barring any “use of public office for private gain,” and then lobbied Congress for parallel laws. The result was new criminal statutes covering bribery and conflict of interest.

Lyndon Johnson was never an exemplar of disinterested politics, but early scandal in his administration, involving influence peddling by Johnson intimate Bobby Baker, a businessman and Democratic party organizer, prompted a new round of rulemaking. Each federal agency should have its own ethics code, Johnson ordered, and all presidential appointees were now required to file financial disclosure statements. In the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate scandal, together with the troubles of presidential chum and advisor Burt Lance, prompted a new round of reform from President Jimmy Carter.

As with so many things, the status of ethics in an administration tends to reflect the character of the chief executive, regardless of the rules in place at the time. Consider the following exchange, in 1934, between Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and presidential aide Ray Moley, prior to Kennedy’s appointment at the SEC.

As recounted by Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, Kennedy warned Roosevelt that he had “done plenty of things that people could find fault with.” At that point, Moley interjected: “Joe, I know you want this job. But if there is anything in your business career that could injure the president, this is the time to spill it.”

Kennedy’s reaction was quick and sharp. “With a burst of profanity he defied anyone to question his devotion to public interest or to point to a single shady act in his whole life. The president did not need to worry about that, he said. What was more, he would give his critics—and here again the profanity flowed freely—an administration of the SEC that would be a credit to his country, the president, himself and his family.”

After an exchange like that, codes and rules might seem superfluous. To outsiders, the Kennedy appointment appeared rash; “setting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep,” one critic charged. But Roosevelt was unfazed. Asked why he’d named such a notorious crook as Kennedy, Roosevelt quipped, “Takes one to catch one.” In the event, while nobody ever proposed Joe Kennedy for sainthood, he was never accused of misconduct or self-dealing while presiding at the SEC.

The post When the President’s Best and Brightest Were Also the Richest appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Wednesday night, a standing-room-only crowd gathered to mull that possibility and other, sometimes dire scenarios, past and present, at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. The frame topic for the Zócalo/UCLA event, presented in partnership with the Japanese American National Museum, was “What Does the Japanese American Experience Tell Us About the Proposed Muslim Registry?”

And although the panel discussion touched on the many ways in which America’s social and political landscape in 2017 is vastly more diverse and open than it was 75 years ago, the three panelists also noted that the government’s powers of surveillance also have grown exponentially in the post-Sept. 11 world, in ways that should set off civil liberties alarms. Today, multiple government agencies collaborate, and sometimes compete, to vacuum up as much information as possible.

“I would bet dimes to donuts that there are already plenty of ‘registries’ looking at people coming in, looking at people from Middle Eastern countries,” said Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, a sociocultural anthropologist in UCLA’s Department of Asian American Studies, where he is also the inaugural chair in Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.

Just as troubling, Hirabayashi suggested, is that much of this name-compiling isn’t being revealed to the public. “I think the citizenry can’t have a debate about what’s going on because we’re not being told what’s going on,” he said.

Yet a national debate has been in full force for months, intensified after then-candidate Trump revealed his plans to impose a freeze on Muslim immigrants to the United States and by a subsequent proposal to launch a registry of Muslim American citizens.

Nowhere has that debate resonated more deeply than in coastal California. The Golden State was home to many of the Japanese Americans who were deported, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order, to concentration camps during World War II, the panelists noted. Today it is a liberal bastion, with several cities whose mayors have vowed to resist a possible Trump administration crackdown on undocumented workers or other sweeping actions targeting particular ethnic or religious groups.

“On the one hand you think you’re in a bubble, but on the other hand you’re at the epicenter,” said Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA School of Law scholar of immigration and citizenship law.

Indeed, Motomura pointed out, California has been at the epicenter of previous, heated debates surrounding immigration and citizenship rights, including the violent reprisals against migrant Chinese workers in the 1800s and the Prop 187 movement in the early 1990s.

Discussion moderator Ann Burroughs, the museum’s interim president and CEO, noted that it was “no accident” that the evening’s program was taking place in Little Tokyo, a spot from where some Japanese Americans had been rounded up and turned into exiles and non-citizens in their own country.

“We’re here on the site of the museum which stands as a sentinel,” she said, citing “war hysteria, prejudice and poor political leadership” as the main factors that led to an episode that most Americans later came to view as a national disgrace, and for which President Ronald Reagan eventually formally apologized.

“We’re facing the specter of that terrible, tragic episode in American history being repeated,” Burroughs said.

Ironically, the panelists said, one common feature both of World War II registries and of registries (known and suspected) that have been compiled since the Sept. 11 attacks is that none has been demonstrably effective in identifying criminal suspects or potential criminal actors, leading to their arrest or deportation.

“These programs have no meaning in terms of actual national security,” said panelist Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum and author of the forthcoming book There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration.

But despite the inefficiency and inefficacy of such registries, a violent terrorist incident still could be used by President Trump to justify extreme measures.

“He [Trump] is very likely to use that moment and that tragedy to polarize the country,” and many Americans might well support such a move, Noorani said. “I think the majority of Americans are supportive of immigrants and immigration, but they’re also scared. And we have to acknowledge that fear.”

So what is to be done? Several audience members posed questions asking whether or how individuals or organized groups could check an extremist effort to scapegoat targeted Americans. Patricia Takayama of the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) asked the panel how citizens might influence what sort of information government agencies are allowed to stockpile.

Motomura replied that although there’s sometimes a firewall between agencies, the public’s best ally in this effort is to enforce greater transparency, which puts pressure on the information collectors and destroys the “myths” that those agencies may be disseminating.

Noorani said that forming common cause around issues such as religious freedom can help build alliances among groups as diverse as Southern Baptist mega-churches and the American Civil Liberties Union, safeguarding the rights of more Americans.

He said that if “we can move the needle a bit on these cultural values, there’s a little more space for a policy and political debate” in the event of a trigger moment.

“I’m not sure we’ve done that,” Noorani said.

The post Could a “Trigger Moment” Imperil Civil Liberties? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not kidding. Yes, a handful of our fellow Californians—prominent citizens from Samuel L. Jackson and Bryan Cranston to Miley Cyrus and Barbra Streisand—proclaimed themselves so disgusted with the sorry state of American democracy that they pledged to depart the United States after the November elections. And yes, none of them have made actual arrangements for their exile; perhaps their Golden State digs are too swank to flee.

But I do know at least one non-celebrity Californian, whose humble abode is eminently flee-able, who is taking his frustrations with California and American-style democracy overseas. This weekend, in fact, he’s decamping for Europe, where he’ll work to figure out where his country and state are going wrong democracy-wise.

That departing Californian is yours truly.

I must confess: this is not my first such journey. Every couple of years for the past decade, I’ve helped bring together scholars, journalists, activists, election administrators, and politicians who work on participatory democracy, including the initiative and referendum processes for which California is well known. Each gathering is in a different country—South Korea, Uruguay, Tunisia, Switzerland, and even San Francisco. This time our destination is San Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque Country.

I don’t enjoy long-distance travel and would be happy never to go east of the Sierra Nevada. And I don’t particularly enjoy organizing the events, which often requires dealing by Skype and email at odd hours with prickly foreign professors or officials who speak languages I don’t.

But I do it because, by listening to people from around the world explain their challenges, I get a much clearer idea of what’s wrong with our version of democracy, and how we might improve it.

As the French realist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

I wish every American, every Californian, would do the same—travel outside the country not for business or for tourism but to grasp how other places make democratic decisions, so that we might better comprehend ourselves. Goodness knows that such understanding is lacking; surveys show big majorities of Californians know little about the most basic functions of their state and local governments.

Unfortunately, too many people here consider the very idea of looking for answers overseas as daft, even preposterous. When I give talks to Californians—from leaders to college students—and start describing how other countries tackle ballot initiatives or elections or budgeting in smarter ways than we do, the audience quickly tunes out. The singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow has been receiving fairly dismissive treatment for a petition she’s circulating urging the U.S. to limit the poison of endless electoral politics and adopt a shorter election cycle, like Canada and Great Britain. In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, Crow lamented the discounting of those foreign models:

“Yes, they’re both parliamentary systems. But really? That means we shouldn’t have the conversation about what we can learn and apply in our own system?”

The resistance to foreign ideas is especially strong in Sacramento, where political staffers and lobbyists heap ridicule on those who make such suggestions (I speak from personal experience). And heaven help an elected official who wants to go overseas to learn more about democracy—he or she is all but certain to be pilloried for taking an expensive “junket.”

I find this cynicism dispiriting—and surprising. After all, Californians can be among the most open people in the world when it comes to embracing fashion or design or entertainment or technologies from around the world. But we have the opposite attitude when it comes to democracy and governance. We are convinced that our system is so singularly distinctive that the world has little to say to us.

It’s hard to overstate just how wrong we are. Almost nothing in California government is a native invention. We borrowed our two-house legislative system from our British colonial masters, plagiarized our first constitution from Iowans and New Yorkers (and by extension, the Dutch), took our top-two-runoff election system from the French-speaking world, and established our direct democracy system explicitly on the Swiss model. California prides itself on being a leader in social advances like women’s suffrage because we were ahead of nearly all other states. But in truth, we were just following the example of New Zealanders, Aussies, and Swedes when women won the right to vote.

Our reluctance to look overseas for fixes for our many democratic problems makes little sense in the aftermath of this election. Nearly every democratic institution in this country—the presidency, Congress, law enforcement, state election officials, intelligence agencies, the media—took a beating in 2016, and finds its credibility diminished as a result. In California, our first open U.S. Senate seat in a generation produced a desultory race, and we turned direct democracy into a bludgeon, littering ballots with 17 complicated and confusing statewide initiatives (plus as many as 25 additional local measures in some places).

Despite widespread disillusionment with aspects of our democracy, there are few big ideas being advanced for reform. We’re not looking far and wide enough for them, and so our insularity embitters us. As Mark Twain famously noted in The Innocents Abroad:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

In San Sebastián this week, I’m looking forward to learning more from the world: About how Germans support grassroots groups that want to bring ideas to the ballot, how Tunisians are creating a new system of local government, how Seoul, South Korea, and Vienna, Austria have found smarter ways to engage citizens in local questions, and how Basques have built economic and governance structures around cooperatives, instead of the massive conflict-ridden systems we favor in California.

I wish I could transport a plane full of local and state officials overseas with me, so they could compare notes and learn firsthand from their counterparts elsewhere, the way American businesspeople and scholars seem more comfortable doing.

“If I cannot add to my own level of understanding, I could ill afford to try to raise that of others,” said the Basque Country’s own Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In these times of great anxiety and little understanding, leaving the country might be the most patriotic thing you could do.

The post Why We All Need to Leave the Country After This Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.