What makes a country great?

Great cities.

That is a lesson the United Kingdom once knew well. Britain reached its imperial heights in the late 19th century in part because its municipalities were growing into some of the world’s most productive cities.

None better symbolized British greatness than Birmingham, a manufacturing powerhouse in the West Midlands. In 1890, Harper’s Magazine called it the “best-governed city in the world,” and with good reason. Birmingham provided novel services for its people, including free libraries and museums, free education for all children, modern sanitation and affordable housing, street lighting, a municipal bank, and support for the poor.

The spirit of Birmingham was often expressed by the popular nonconformist preacher George Dawson, and two of his parishioners who became mayor—Joseph Chamberlain and his son Neville, who is better remembered for his later failures as a prime minister. The preacher and the Chamberlains evangelized for urban reform, advancing a philosophy called “The Civic Gospel,” the idea that great municipalities offer the best chance for human flourishing.

“A town,” Dawson once said, “is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s moral nature.”

Today, the Civic Gospel is preached by city leaders worldwide, especially in the globally ambitious metros of Vienna, Mexico City, Seoul, and Tokyo, where governments pride themselves on pursuing cutting-edge, humanity-advancing improvements in democratic participation, environmentalism, the arts, and social policy.

But these days you won’t hear the Civic Gospel in its home city—or home country. When you ask municipal experts what the world’s best governed cities are today, you’ll get an earful about Barcelona and Bogota, but you’ll hear nothing about Britain. U.K. cities are too busy struggling just to survive.

Birmingham, still the second most populous U.K. city, with more than 1.1 million people, now draws notice as a cautionary tale. In September 2023, it became yet another British city to declare fiscal insolvency—one of eight in the past six years. Birmingham’s bankruptcy is blamed on cuts in national budgets, economic struggles, and two massive governance mistakes: an IT project that went £80 million over budget, and a failure to respond to equal pay claims by female city workers now totaling more than £700m. Unable to pay its bills, Birmingham has suspended spending on arts, youth services, and assistance to families in crisis.

The sorry state of local self-governance is not often mentioned in reports about the upcoming July 4 elections in the U.K., which are widely expected to see the current Tory government replaced by Labour. But local stagnation is at the heart of the sense of frustration and crisis that prevails in Britain.

In the face of national failures—declining life expectancy, dropping real wages, and fiscal austerity—Britons are unable to turn to their local governments for solutions, because those local governments are too weak.

After the Second World War, Whitehall (the nickname for U.K.’s national government) stripped local governments of responsibilities, in areas from utilities to hospitals, and nationalized services in new ministries and institutions. Whitehall also repeatedly reorganized local governments and their jurisdiction, thus fragmenting local power and reducing local control in fiscal matters. The resulting centralization made London a global goliath, but diminished the wealth, influence, and public services of the country’s small and mid-size cities.

The imbalance has not gone unnoticed. Over the past 15 years, British governments have sought to boost regions and localities via various strategies—like “rebalancing the economy” and “Northern Powerhouse.” In 2019, the Tories running Britain announced a plan for “Levelling Up” weaker cities and regions and their people with greater aid, and even established a ministry to pursue it.

But these efforts have failed, because the approaches are top-down, directed by the national government. Indeed, the national “Levelling Up” department has dispensed cash for projects through a slow bidding process, orchestrated by consultants who charge local governments large fees for their assistance. The Economist, in calling the process “scattershot,” noted that 60 of the first 71 projects funded through Levelling Up were behind schedule.

Since “Levelling Up” became policy five years ago, economic disparities between rich and poor regions have actually widened. British cities and counties, have become beggars, asking for bailouts for in-demand services like homeless programs, child care, and adult care that they no longer can afford.

The challenge will get worse for the new government post-election. Of the 300-plus local governments in England alone, more than half say they will be in severe financial distress by next year. It’s not clear that any help is on the way. Labour has made vague promises to “Level Up” better than the Tories.

For now, Birmingham and other insolvent cities feel stuck.

The most promising path forward is for the national government to restore the local autonomy that once made Birmingham and other U.K. cities great. There have been small moves in this direction, with so-called “trailblazer” deals that allow some metro regions to establish their own elected chief executives.

But such devolution deals are full of limits on local control that are nutty as anything in the classic British government comedy, “Yes, Minister.” Among the ludicrous documents of so-called devolution are a “scrutiny protocol” listing all the ways the national government will watch over cities, and a 2022 Levelling Up White Paper laying out a complex four-tier regime for devolving power to cities.

What’s really needed, but so far not on offer, is a restoration of the fiscal autonomy and local freedom that allowed Birmingham to build a city so great it had its own gospel.

The post Why the U.K. Can’t ‘Level Up’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I, Cedar, may be as dead as the narrator of the film Sunset Boulevard. But from my warm and dry pen in caprine heaven, I can still hand down a hard lesson for my fellow Californians:

Never, ever, let the government get your goat.

I’m not one to brag, but the story of my short life is a parable of these head-spinning times, when cruel is the rule, and mercy is as rare as affordable housing. The circumstances of my death, still the subject of legal inquiry, also raise questions about the responsibilities of children, the harsh realities of animal husbandry, and the excesses of law enforcement.

But the hardest question about me is the most straightforward:

Who killed me?

There are many suspects in this hiricide.

Did I die because of the young child who raised me?

Until shortly before my death, I was under the care of a 9-year-old girl in Shasta County, who decided to enter me in last year’s Shasta County Fair. What she didn’t seem to understand was that county fairs aren’t all and fun and games and fried dough. Entering me into the fair put my life at risk, because it meant I could be auctioned off for slaughter.

And that’s what happened. I looked so meaty that I was purchased, for $902, by State Sen. Brian Dahle, a Lassen County rancher who was the Republican candidate for governor in 2022. When it was time to hand me over, the 9 year old started to cry and held onto me, refusing to let me be taken away.

Was my death the fault of fair officials and their inflexibilty?

Sen. Dahle, as purchaser, was willing to cancel the sale—he knows what it’s like to get slaughtered, having lost to Gavin Newsom by 19 points. And my former owner’s mother begged for my life, saying she was willing to buy me back.

But fair officials insisted that rules were rules, that farm animals aren’t pets, and that I had to be carved up. My death, they insisted, would also teach that little girl, and all children, life lessons. In an e-mail, the fair’s CEO said that “making an exception for you would only teach youth that they do not have to abide by the rules that are set up for all participants.”

They also seemed afraid of surrendering to criticism on social media. “This has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram,” the fair CEO wrote in an email to the mom.

OK, but it was an even more negative experience for me, I assure you.

Was it the long (and rights-violating) arm of the law?

I used to stare across the pasture and wonder about life as a sheep. After the fair, I finally went on the lamb.

Instead of handing me over for slaughter, my owner’s mom took me away, and placed me at a farm in Sonoma County that could care for me.

The fair insisted this was grand theft, and called the Shasta County authorities. Crime levels are high in that county, but somehow, the sheriff’s department managed to devote resources to getting a warrant for me, and sent two deputies well outside of their jurisdiction, more than 200 miles southwest to Sonoma, to find me.

When they located me, they didn’t read me my rights. They just grabbed me and took me back to Shasta County, without so much as an extradition hearing.

Was it another failure by Gov. Newsom to enforce his own edicts?

The governor has declared that the death penalty will no longer be carried out in his state. But his office didn’t stop my execution. When the sheriffs got me back to Shasta, they turned me over to fair officials, who had me slaughtered, without a trial, before a jury of my fellow goats. I was not given an opportunity to appeal, or ask for a commutation.

Are top state legal officials, and our dysfunctional courts, not to blame?

Not only did the courts and the attorney general fail to protect me, they’ve stood in the way of justice for my death. After my execution, the 9-year-old girl and her mom sued the fair, claiming a violation of their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights. A law firm specializing in animal cases is representing them. Their case turns on state laws that generally allow minors to change their minds about contracts.

You might think state officials, for PR reasons, would settle the case quickly, perhaps with an apology that emphasized their supposed commitments to children and to the right to choose. Instead, California Attorney General Rob Bonta—who needs to increase his name recognition in advance of an expected run for governor in 2026—recently countersued the girl’s mother, demanding that she pay all legal costs associated with the case.

When government officials are willing to treat a child and mother like that, you can’t back down. You have to be even more stubborn than a goat, and cultivate a fierce gruffness. Looking back, I wish I could have behaved like the big third goat in the children’s story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” who, when a troll tries to gobble him up, doesn’t negotiate. Instead, he pokes the troll’s eyes out with his horns.

When the authorities come for your goat, or someone else you don’t want to give up, don’t get got like me. Think of me, Cedar the Goat, and keep defending the rights of children, the rights of animals, and your right to poke the eye of anyone who would punish you for holding on to another living thing.

The post Don’t Let the Government Get Your Goat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To govern a divided city, you need to balance your remembering with some forgetting.

That was my takeaway after moderating a recent public event that used Zoom to link live audiences in two famously divided cities, on opposite sides of the world.

One city, Belfast, is a place so full of physical divisions that the differences between people can feel inescapable. The other, Los Angeles, lacks a shared historical memory and thus manages to forget the depth and persistence of its divides.

Of course, these are two very different places. The city of L.A., with a population of 4 million, has 10 times as many people as Belfast and twice as many as all of Northern Ireland. But both are fast-paced, aggressive places that produce a lot of art. L.A. is Hollywood, and Belfast is a UNESCO City of Music (thanks, Van Morrison), and a center of literature (from C.S. Lewis to Sinéad Morrissey) and TV/film production (Game of Thrones).

And they face similar predicaments.

Both cities are defined, locally and internationally, by long histories of internal unrest and violence. The whole world watched L.A.’s riots in 1965 and 1992 (the latter the largest urban riot in U.S. history). And the whole world followed news of the Troubles, one of the 20th century’s most violent and longest conflicts, between pro-United Kingdom Protestants and pro-secession Catholics.

Over the past generation, both cities have celebrated progress in bridging divides. L.A. rebuilt South L.A. after the 1992 riots, and the city has seen greater diversity among its political elites. Meanwhile in Belfast, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, disarming violent groups and creating power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics.

But in the past decade, and especially during the pandemic, both cities experienced renewed divisions—racial and ethnic in Los Angeles, sectarian in Belfast. And those divisions have paralyzed governments in both cities.

Trying to understand how each city got to this point, our event began by turning the clock back a decade, to 2013, when both cities had more hope—at least, officially. That was when departing Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that his city had gotten past its bigger problems, with “the old Los Angeles is fading in the rear-view mirror.”

That same year, leaders in Northern Ireland pledged to remove all of the physical walls and barriers separating Protestant and Catholic communities in Belfast within a decade—by the year 2023. They also promised to desegregate a city divided by religion.

Triumphalism in L.A. and Belfast did not wear well. Divisions have proved more durable than either city’s leadership anticipated.

In Belfast, stability and optimism waned after 2016’s Brexit, when Northern Ireland voted narrowly to remain in the European Union, but Britain as a whole voted to leave. A 2017 energy scandal then forced new elections, which produced a split result between the leading Protestant and Catholic parties causing persistent governmental dysfunction and inoperation. Since the 2022 elections, Northern Ireland has not had a government.

That lack, combined with Brexit-related cuts, has diminished government services, including vital health programs. And amidst the political turmoil, polls show rising sectarian divisions. This is true especially among the young, who were already too divided; less than 10% of Belfast children attend religiously integrated schools.

No wonder the walls dividing communities did not come down as promised this year, as people continue clinging to separation and the promise of security. Indeed, as I saw firsthand during a visit last year, Belfast has erected new divides—most of the “peace walls” now in place were constructed after the Good Friday Agreement.

A world away, Los Angeles also has gone backward. Racial, ethnic, and generational divisions grew more pronounced during the Trump presidency and in the pandemic, which saw more attention to high-profile local cases of police violence, as well as the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd.

Last year, a Loyola Marymount University survey found big increases in the percentage of Angelenos who say race relations are getting worse. Over two-thirds of Angelenos told pollsters that they expect to see new racial unrest, like what the city experienced in 1992.

Then came the leaked tape of Los Angeles County’s top labor official and three L.A. city councilmembers saying bigoted things about almost every major racial or ethnic group in the city—a recording that all but brought the L.A. city government to a standstill for months. Unrelated federal corruption investigations have ensnared a third of the city council, adding to the difficulty of getting anything done. Meanwhile, public anger grows at the city’s inability to handle increasing crime and homelessness.

A recent event linked the struggles of the two cities, organized by Imagine! Belfast (a democracy and ideas festival) and the Huntington Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California. Panelists and audiences in both cities (one audience sat in Belfast’s Accidental Theater, the other at a USC library) lamented their divides but also offered ideas for progress that involved leaving some parts of the past behind but keeping those that might serve communities in the future.

Belfast’s many walls make divisions seems permanent and unchangeable, said Duncan Morrow, a lecturer and conflict mediator at Ulster University. But how can Belfast remove barriers that some people believe keep them safe? Perhaps, if walls can’t be removed, new integrated spaces and institutions can be built on top of them, Morrow suggested.

Los Angeles panelist Joumana Silyan-Saba, director of policy and enforcement at L.A. Civil Rights, said that divisions in L.A. are usually covert, and not confronted, until they “manifest as intercommunal divides, intracommunal divides, and—in the worst forms—they also manifest in civil unrest and violence.”

That argues for memorializing more of the city’s past conflicts, and making L.A. divisions more visible so that Angelenos must reckon more directly with them. Forgetting divisions in the name of getting along can sometimes make it harder to get things done. Silyan-Saba recounted how many conversations it took to gain widespread community support for the Expo Line through South L.A. and the large, ongoing expansion of L.A.’s Metro rail system.

Panelists and audience members in both Belfast and Los Angeles seemed most pessimistic about the ability of local governments to transcend divides (though Southern Californians were upbeat about L.A.’s new mayor Karen Bass and her devotion to getting Angelenos to “lock arms together”).

To a remarkable degree, Belfast and Los Angeles participants agreed that making progress in divided cities is unlikely to come from politicians. Instead, people themselves, through their institutions and organizations and movements, must lead the change. Belfast artist and photographer Stephen Wilson said that it was still important for divided governments to provide long-term resources to neighborhoods and promising individuals. “You don’t know who will turn into leaders in the future,” he said.

“The greatest power that we have is our civil society,” said USC sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo. “These dividing lines are created. They’re created over time. They’re created historically. They’re created to make advantages for some. And because they aren’t natural, we can change them.”

The post What L.A. and Belfast Have in Common appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In this time of rising polarization, authoritarian populism, and maddening big-money politics, leaders often say that it’s up to we the people to save democracy.

But democracy costs money. And democracy—unlike the governments and special interests that seek to control it—has no budget. So how are you and I supposed to pay for all that democracy-saving?

There’s a new and practical answer to that question—called “Democratic Action Funds.”

I first heard a proposal for these from Marjan Ehsassi, a non-resident future of democracy fellow with the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, at a democracy conference I ran in Mexico City.

Ehsassi has studied some of the world’s least democratic places—Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. But in recent years she has turned her attention to backsliding democratic societies, including the United States, where big majorities of people tell pollsters that they have no real voice or power in government. As a result of feeling powerless, more of us are disengaging from political processes and civic life.

To get people reconnected, Ehsassi and other experts have embraced innovations to give everyday people consequential voice. Among the most promising are innovative deliberative bodies that empower regular people—rather than elected officials—to study an issue and make consensus policy proposals. These bodies are sometimes called citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies, or reference panels. I met Ehsassi last summer in Petaluma, in Sonoma County, where she was evaluating the first-ever citizens’ assembly in California.

There have been hundreds of such assemblies around the world—examining everything from snowmobile use in Finland to land-use decisions in Japan. And they’ve often produced significant changes—from the legalization of abortion in Ireland, to new urban plans in cities from Bogota to Brussels. But the practice is still rare, and growth of any democratic innovation is slow—mainly due to the cost of trying something new.

Which is where Democratic Action Funds would come in.

The idea—from Ehsassi and her colleague Peter MacLeod, founder of a Toronto-based public participation organization called MASS LBP—is straightforward: set aside a small slice of the billions of dollars that mature democracies now spend on things like elections and legislative operations, and use that money to fund the democratic efforts of regular people.

Under Ehsassi and MacLeod’s proposal, as offered in Mexico, any jurisdiction that conducts elections would allot 5% of the money it spends on elections and legislative operations to the new funds. Why 5%? That’s about what most industries spend on research and development.

Democratic governments at any level—local, regional, national—could establish such funds.  Each fund would be a trust, with monies collected from the government but administered by an independent secretariat.

Most of the fund’s money would go out in grants, for which governments, agencies, companies, NGOs, or others would apply. Under Ehsassi’s plan, a randomly selected group of citizens, not the fund’s administrators, would evaluate and choose which proposals get funded.

The money would be used to support citizens’ assemblies and other “high-quality participatory and deliberative initiatives” that directly involve everyday people in policy reform and addressing public questions. The fund would also set aside a slice of the money for training people involved in these processes, for monitoring and evaluation, and for research and development of best practices in the field.

In the United States, the total cost of the fall 2022 election was $16.7 billion. Five percent would give the country a modest, but significant, Democratic Action Fund of $835 million, enough to inspire a range of democratic innovations in every state.

In California, where an election can cost $300 million to run, a state-level Democratic Action Fund would receive $15 million annually. Such a fund could offer 60 grants of $250,000 every year. Ehsassi anticipates the funds sharing costs with the jurisdictions in which projects take place.

A program like this would involve thousands of Californians directly in democratic innovation and government decision-making. Research shows that such participation improves civic and democratic skills, and engagement, of the everyday people who participate. People learn that complex issues don’t have easy answers, and that the democracy work of representing your fellow citizens is quite difficult, and deserves respect.

Ehsassi stresses that these public participation platforms “are not progressive or conservative. Citizens’ assemblies are citizen-centric, put the public back in policy, and are healthy complements to our representative systems of government.”

In other words, Democratic Action Funds could make people, and our culture, more democratic—and an inexpensive way to help us, the people, save democracy.

The post Saving Democracy Costs Money. How Do We Pay for It? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All four of you can see that the American and Mexican governments are playing politics with the border. Both nations at the federal level refuse to govern the borderlands with the respect and responsibility that the place and its people deserve.

If you work together, you can establish a new body with the power and legitimacy to represent your constituents on both sides of the border. In the process, you could help end the sense of crisis at the border—and advance popular rule across North America and the world.

How do you do this? Let borderlands residents govern themselves, by creating a citizens’ assembly.

Citizens’ assemblies are bodies of everyday people—often chosen by lot, or randomized processes to make them representative—that gather together to study a particular place or problem. After collecting information, taking testimony, and deliberating among themselves, participants in citizens’ assemblies make recommendations to the government—or, if they have the power, adopt laws or regulations themselves.

Such a body would be novel for California and Baja, but citizens’ assemblies are being used in other parts of the world. Ireland created a citizens’ assembly to resolve thorny social issues—making possible the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage. France used citizens’ assemblies to tackle climate change. Finland even convened a citizens’ assembly to address the hottest issue in that very cold place: snowmobile regulation. One part of Belgium has established citizens’ assemblies as a permanent feature of governance, rather than just temporary gatherings.

The promise of such assemblies is that everyday citizens, who aren’t compromised by the need to win elections, have more freedom and incentive to work together and find new ways forward.

“Once you force people into a context where they have to get past the posturing and commitment to ideas, where they have to address real-life problems with people like them—even if they think differently—you solve a lot of issues,” explains Yale political scientist Hélène Landemore, author of the fascinating 2020 book, Open Democracy, about non-electoral democratic systems.

Citizens’ assemblies can be effective at addressing difficult issues that governments have failed to address, resulting in dangerous levels of social conflict. The U.S.–Mexico border, and the now generations-long political fights over who crosses it and how, certainly qualifies.

As you all know, the U.S. government’s failures over the past three presidential administrations are legion. There have been mass deportations, child migrant concentration camps, systematic violations of human rights and laws, and rampant abuses by unaccountable federal agencies—to name a few. As a result, the U.S. no longer qualifies as a legitimate governor of its own southern border. The Mexican government, by acquiescing to American policies and also sanctioning abuse of migrants by its own police and military, is similarly compromised.

Border residents are living with the consequences of their nations’ mismanagement of their region. They endure intrusive searches, harassment, and violence from authorities on both sides of the border; intrusions on their land and property; and sanitation, traffic, and crime problems associated with the queuing and confinement of migrants near the border. More prosaically, excessive security and bureaucracy makes it harder for residents to make the routine border crossings that are essential to living a full life in the region.

Since national politicians have so long failed your constituents on both sides of the border, it’s high time that you give the people the chance to govern the place themselves.

A citizens’ assembly should be divided 50-50 between residents of California and Baja living within 20 kilometers of the border. The assembly members would be selected by lot and would meet in person—in both countries—and digitally. There should be some representation for migrants who are temporarily, or not so temporarily, stuck at the border.

And the assembly should have real legislative and oversight power.

It’s too much to hope, given the widespread ignorance of border realities in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., that such an assembly could make federal policy. But you should work to make sure that the assemblies have subpoena power to compel testimony from federal officials, and the ability to recommend changes in federal law. All four of you might have the clout to make this happen, since you are members of the same political parties as your countries’ respective presidents.

And at the state and local levels, you should empower the citizens’ assembly to act directly.

Governors del Pilar Ávila and Newsom, you should push legislation to give this assembly lawmaking powers in border matters—subject to override by your state legislative bodies. And Mayors Gloria and Caballero, you and your councils should commit to a similar delegation for city ordinances in San Diego and Tijuana.

With such powers, an assembly might solve many thorny problems. It could devise ways to house migrants left to fend for themselves, and to protect migrants who, when stuck at the border, become easy prey for criminals. The assembly could work to make legal border crossings easier and faster, and to encourage further cross-border exchange and cooperation. And it could enact policies to protect local residents from illegal searches and seizures, especially via the highly intrusive, high-tech tracking tools both national governments use with little oversight.

All four of you are pragmatists, but your hopes and expectations for such cross-border policymaking should be high. After all, the governments of California and Baja California have long records of productive cooperation on education, environment, trade, and law enforcement. And Tijuana and San Diego have become as thick as thieves, sharing a border airport, fighting together to open more border crossings, and co-hosting events.

Indeed, the current effort by Tijuana and San Diego to be jointly designated the 2024 World Design Capital—which would allow them to host 2024’s “Olympics of Design and Innovation”—could actually be a platform to design such a citizens’ assembly.

Mayor Caballero, you certainly must remember that, in endorsing this design bid, you celebrated cooperation between ordinary people on both sides of the border and called for more of it. “Especially unique to our region are the ways that grassroots groups—networks, communities and extended families—create support systems for culture, business and public transformation,” you wrote. I also saw your inaugural address, in which you called yourself a migrant (you’re originally from Oaxaca) and promised “a new stage of political, cultural, and economic transformation.”

A citizens’ assembly would represent such transformation and make real history, but that shouldn’t scare any of the four of you. Mayor Caballero and Governor de Pilar Ávila, you are both history-makers, as the first women elected to your posts. And Mayor Gloria and Governor Newsom, you are both energetic technocrats who never stop talking about changing paradigms.

So, why not cross one more border—and give both sides a shot at self-government?

The post Let Local Residents Govern the California–Baja Border appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The short answer is that Section 230, part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, is the legal underpinning for one of the largest and most consequential experiments in American history.

Since the birth of Big Tech Media 15 years ago—let’s drop the friendly-sounding misnomer “social” media—our nearly 250-year-old republic has become a test case. Can a nation’s news and information infrastructure, the lifeblood of any democracy, be dependent on digital media technologies that allow a global free speech zone of unlimited audience size, combined with algorithmic (non-human) curation of massive volumes of disinformation that can be spread with unprecedented ease?

This experiment has been possible because Section 230 grants Big Tech Media immunity from responsibility for the mass content that is published and broadcast across their platforms. A mere 26 words in the bipartisan law were originally intended to protect “interactive computer services” from being sued over what their users post, just like telephone companies can’t be sued over any gossip told by Aunt Mabel to every busybody in town.

But as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services scaled over time to an unimaginable size, the platforms’ lack of human editors has resulted in a gushing firehose of mis- and disinformation where scandals and conspiracies are prioritized over real news for mass distribution. Facebook alone sees more than 100 billion pieces of content posted each day, a deluge that its small corps of human monitors cannot realistically contain.

As the gripping videos and photos of a pro-Trump mob storming the Capitol make clear, this experiment has veered frighteningly off course. The protesters earnestly believed that they were trying to stop a stolen election, having been fed this false information by their political leaders for over two months since the November 3 election. Millions of people are now living inside their own “disinformation ghettos” where they do not hear contrary viewpoints. So, President Biden has called for ending Section 230 immunity in order to stop the Frankenstein’s monster this law helped create.

Facebook is no longer simply a “social networking” website—it is the largest media giant in the history of the world, a combination publisher and broadcaster, with approximately 2.6 billion regular users, and billions more on the Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Instagram. One study found that 104 pieces of COVID-19 misinformation on Facebook were shared 1.7 million times and had 117 million views. That’s far more than the number of daily viewers on the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, Fox News, CNN, and other major networks combined.

Traditional news organizations are subject to certain laws and regulations, including a degree of liability over what they broadcast. While there is much to criticize about mainstream media, at least they use humans to pick and choose what’s in and out of the newsstream. That results in a degree of accountability, including legal liability.

But Facebook-Google-Twitter’s robot algorithm curators are on automatic pilot, much like killer drones for which no human bears responsibility or liability. Non-human curation, when combined with unlimited audience size and frictionless amplification, has clearly failed as a foundation for our democracy’s media infrastructure.

So, it is time to hit reset in a major way, not only to save our republic, but also to provide the best chance to redesign these digital media technologies so that we can retain their promise and decrease their dangers.

Revoking Section 230 by an act of Congress would be a good start. That’s not a perfect solution, but it would make Big Tech Media more responsible, deliberative, and potentially liable for the worst of its toxic content, including illegal content (like child pornography), especially when their algorithms automatically amplify such content.

But there is also a great deal of reckless online content that would likely not be impacted by 230’s revocation. For example, Trump’s posts on Twitter and Facebook claiming the presidential election was stolen, and his inflammatory speech that YouTube broadcast the morning of the Capitol attack, were false and provocative—but it would be difficult to legally prove that any individuals or institutions were harmed or incited directly by the president’s many outrageous statements. Any number of traditional media outlets also have published untrue nonsense without the protections of Section 230, yet they were never held liable.

The revocation of Section 230 also wouldn’t have stopped the use of Big Tech Media for disinformation campaigns that undermined elections in more than 70 countries, even helping to elect a quasi-dictator in the Philippines; or for widely amplifying and even livestreaming child abusers, pornographers and the Christchurch mass murderer of Muslims, who broadcast his carnage over Facebook (a video then seen on YouTube by millions). And losing Section 230 immunity wouldn’t impact the fact that a majority of YouTube climate change videos denies the science, and 70 percent of what YouTube’s 2 billion users watch comes from its recommendation algorithm.

So revoking Section 230 likely would not be as impactful as its proponents wish, or its critics fear. What needs to be done instead?

The federal government must intervene to change the way Big Tech Media operates. Facebook-Google-Twitter’s “engagement algorithms” recommend and amplify sensationalized, conspiracy-ridden user content for one reason—to maximize profits by increasing users’ screen time and exposure to more ads. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook executives scaled back a successful effort to make the site less divisive when they found that it was decreasing their audience share. Recently implemented warning labels are weak substitutes for actual curation. These greedy companies have purposely weaponized their platforms, and enabled the dividing, distracting, and outraging of people to the point where society is now plagued by a fractured basis for shared truths, sensemaking, and common ground.

In the face of such practices, our government must impose a whole new business model on these corporations—just as the United States did, in years past, with telephone, railroad, and power companies.

The government should treat these companies more like investor-owned utilities, which would be guided by a digital license. Just like traditional brick-and-mortar companies must apply for various licenses and permits, the digital license would define the rules and regulations of the business model (Mark Zuckerberg himself has suggested such an approach).

To begin with, such a license would require platforms to obtain users’ permission before collecting anyone’s personal data—i.e., opt-in rather than opt-out. When you signed up for a Facebook account, you probably didn’t imagine that 10 or 15 years on, you were unknowingly agreeing to allow the company to suck up your private data or track your physical locations, or mass collect every “like,” “share,” and “follow” into a psychographic profile that can be used by advertisers and political operatives to target you. Facebook and its fellow outlets started this data grab secretly, forging their destructive brand of “surveillance capitalism.” Now that we know, should society continue to allow this?

The new model also should encourage more competition by limiting the mega-scale audience size of these media machines; nearly 250 million Americans, about 80 percent of the population, have a profile on one of these platforms. Smaller user pools could be accomplished either through an anti-trust breakup of the companies, or through incentives to shift to a revenue model based more on monthly subscribers rather than on hyper-targeted advertising, which would cause a decline in users. The utility model also should restrain the use of specific engagement techniques, such as hyper-targeting of content, automated recommendations, and addictive behavioral nudges (like autoplay and pop-up screens).

We also should update existing laws to ensure they apply to the online world. Google’s YouTube/YouTube Kids have been violating the Children’s Television Act—which restricts violence and advertising—for many years, resulting in online lawlessness that the Federal Communications Commission should examine. Similarly, the Federal Elections Commission should rein in the quasi-lawless world of online political ads and donor reporting, which has far fewer rules and less transparency than ads in TV and radio broadcasting.

Like many other people, I have benefited from the internet and its revolution in communications. These businesses are creating the new infrastructure of the digital age, including search engines; global portals for news and networking; web-based movies, music, and live streaming; GPS-based navigation apps; online commercial marketplaces; and digital labor market platforms—services and technologies that are being interwoven into the very fabric of our societies.

I believe we can retain what is good about the internet without the toxicities. Like the promise of the internet itself, Facebook-Google-Twitter started out small, and then blew up into monopolistic giants that have established their own greedy and destructive rules that threaten our democracy. It is crucial that regulation evolves in order to shape this new digital infrastructure—and the future of our societies—in the right way.

The post Can We Tame the Wild West of Big Tech Media? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Democracy is under stress around the world from authoritarians and dictatorships—even as citizens make steady and historic progress in advancing newer forms of participatory and direct democracy, said a panel of democracy scholars and practitioners at a Zócalo/Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy event, titled “Should Global Democracy Become More Direct?”

The four panelists appeared together via live-stream from their home countries, all touching the Pacific Ocean—Chile, Mexico, Taiwan, and the U.S.—and told stories of democratic setbacks and advances from Brazil to Switzerland, and from Turkey to Latvia. But they focused on tools of participatory and direct democracy that allow citizens themselves to set budgets, determine government spending, enact laws, and amend constitutions.

“Direct democracy is a real opportunity to move away from, and imagine bigger, than the status quo,” said panelist Shari Davis, the California-based executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, which works across the U.S. and around the world to help communities make democratic decisions in the times between elections.

The evening’s moderator, Noēma Magazine executive editor Kathleen Miles, pressed the panelists on ways that direct democracy—which can refer broadly to popular votes on issues—can be used both for good and for ill.

Davis, the Participatory Budgeting Project leader, said that communities and nations, in trying to democratize and move past previous traumas, “are up against really oppressive systems … and those systems defend themselves very well.” Nevertheless, she noted that participatory budgeting had advanced rapidly from its beginnings in Brazil 30 years ago. Today, participatory budgeting, which refers to processes in which everyday people decide budgets for their communities’ regions, is practiced around the United States and the world. As people participate directly in democratic decision-making, they learn and make advances, Davis said, pointing to a current project in the Phoenix public schools where students themselves reimagine and redesign the policies and budgets for their school safety.

When evaluating direct democracy, it’s important to remember that different countries do direct democracy differently, said the Uruguayan political scientist David Altman, another panelist, who teaches at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, and is a leading scholar of direct democracy globally. The details of the process—from how money influences the voting to how courts protect minority rights when people vote on issues—matter greatly.

It’s especially important to be aware of the source of a proposal for a law or budget or constitution for direct democratic vote. “Does it come from the citizens from a process of signature gathering? Or does it come from the authorities?” Altman asked, pointing to recent troubling votes, from Russia to Guinea, in which leaders used referenda to lift limits on their own terms.

It’s common to experience both democratic progress and regression at the same time and place, said panelist Greta Rios, founder of Mexico City-based youth participation group Ollín. She noted that Mexico City was supposed to enact a new participatory democracy law, but that she had to sue when the local congress failed to act and also stripped away the existing law. Rios won the lawsuit. “One of the lessons I learned is that powerful citizenship can really help us,” she said.

But Rios also noted that, under the label of direct democracy, leaders can do very anti-democratic things. She criticized the way Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses “consultas” that don’t meet democratic standards to advance his populist agenda. Recently, he’s been demanding a referendum on whether to prosecute his presidential predecessors.

In response to a question from Miles about whether direct democracy represented tyranny of the majority, Rios quipped, “I would love to feel under the danger of the tyranny of the majority.” Even as politicians try to use participatory processes, too few everyday citizens are participating. Greater citizen participation in direct democracy is the way to improve the process, she suggested.

The fourth panelist, Michael Kau, a former Taiwanese diplomat and Brown University professor who founded the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, talked about Taiwan’s uneven progress in advancing democracy over the past 30 years. The process can be frustrating, he said. A 2003 law establishing the referendum in Taiwan was so weak that it was dubbed “The Bird’s Cage,” with real democracy being the confined bird.

A 2018 update of the law opened up direct democracy and occasioned nationwide votes on multiple measures. But there have also been setbacks, including Chinese interference in democratic politics. “In some ways we are making progress,” he said. “In some ways there is still a lot of confusion.”

“We are still debating a lot how the law can be more liberalized, and reasonable,” Kau added.

The event closed with a wide range of questions from the moderator and from the online audience, who tuned in from around the world. In response to a question about whether the U.S., which has never had a national referendum, should allow such votes, Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project said that the public’s desire to make decisions is clear, but that the country also needs to change its systems and culture to make sure democratic votes on issues are accessible to all, and advance equality and inclusion.

“We can’t get it right unless those voices that have historically been excluded are centered,” Davis said.

Other questions involved how to keep direct democracy from infringing on human rights (Altman pointed to a pre-vote check on measures in Bolivia), about internet signature gathering for petitions (Kau said there was progress in Taiwan), direct democracy’s growth at the local level, and how to create more space and time for people with difficult jobs and caregiving obligations to participate (Davis said that the best ideas for including more people come from listening to communities).

A final question involved the global problem of climate change, and whether direct and participatory process could create a global democratic process for collective action and legislation.

In response, Altman, author of two leading books on direct democracy worldwide, said “it’s absolutely something that sounds cool,” but that it’s impossible at the moment because the world lacks global institutions to make such a process fruitful.

In democracy, Altman concluded, “there is no silver bullet. Representation has its problems. Direct democracy has its problems. Every aspect of democracy has its problems.”

The post For Global Democracy, These Are the Worst of Times, but Also the Best of Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Liechtenstein’s constitution of 1921 first established the principle that is still valid today: namely that the authority of the state is anchored in the Prince and the People. The demand was based on the growing democracy movement in Liechtenstein. With the new constitution of 1921, the tradition of the monarchy was continued, and at the same time, the power of the people was strengthened. Therefore, in the future and up to the present time, a consensus between the reigning prince and the people on relevant issues was necessary. This division of power has contributed to the stability of the political system and balanced political decisions.

The people gained significant rights in 1921. The prince could no longer unilaterally appoint the government, and he lost his three appointments to the then 15-member parliament (it now has 25 members). All members of parliament would be elected. Prior to 1921, the prince relied on foreign civil servants to run Liechtenstein. The new constitution, on contrary, mandated that government ministers be Liechtenstein citizens who were proposed by parliament and then appointed by the reigning prince.

Liechtenstein’s new direct democratic instruments included the popular initiative, which allowed the people to amend the constitution or laws by collecting signatures and putting their ideas to a vote. Another tool was the referendum against constitutional, legislative and financial decisions of parliament. Parliament also gained the power, on its own initiative, to submit decisions to the vote of the people. The people could also decide to dissolve parliament and thus trigger new elections.

The people of Liechtenstein have used these tools frequently. More than 100 popular votes have been held at the national level in the past century. And there has never been a restriction of these democratic rights. On the contrary, new rights have been added and the hurdles for using the tools have gradually been lowered. In 1992, the direct democratic instruments were expanded to permit the holding of a referendum on international treaties. The people were then able to vote on whether Liechtenstein could join the European Economic Area (EEA).

Within the princely house, according to the family statute, succession is governed by the principle of male primogeniture, i.e. the eldest son of the reigning prince is the designated successor. Reigning Prince Hans-Adam II and the hereditary prince are among those who also use direct democracy. In 2003, they triggered a popular initiative to revise the constitution which met with clear approval at the ballot box. This already shows that the princely house and Prince Hans-Adam II cannot be committed to a purely passive role in politics.

Among other things, this constitutional revision of 2003 introduced new direct democratic procedures. Thus, the people can express their distrust of the reigning prince in a referendum, although it is then up to the male members of the princely house entitled to vote to decide whether any measures should be taken against the reigning prince. In extreme cases, he can be deposed. The people also have the right under the constitution to take an initiative to abolish the monarchy. If this were ever approved by a majority at the ballot box, parliament would be charged with drawing up a republican draft constitution. In the end, the people would decide whether the existing constitution should continue to be valid, or if the Republican constitution should be adopted, or an additional draft constitution submitted by the reigning prince.

However, as long as the existing constitution is in force, the reigning prince retains far-reaching powers, including the right to dismiss the Government. In everyday political life, the prince maintains the right to veto legal and financial decisions; laws and treaties cannot achieve full force without his consent. The strong position of the monarchy enjoys great support among the population, as it is seen as an important pillar of Liechtenstein’s success and stability.

This therefore requires communication, and the development of consensus, between the people or the elected representatives and the reigning prince. It is rare for the prince to refuse to sanction an act of the parliament or the voters. The only time the prince overruled the people after a referendum vote came in 1961, when they approved a hunting law the prince opposed. However, the prince can often get what he wants merely by threatening the veto. A refusal to sanction was announced in a referendum on the liberalization of abortion in 2011 and in a popular initiative to limit the prince’s veto right in 2012. Both proposals failed at the ballot box, however, and the veto was unnecessary.

The Liechtenstein political system has managed to combine, creatively, the contradictory elements of representative democracy, direct democracy, and monarchy. The veto power of the prince and the people—together with control mechanism based on the rule of law and the binding nature of treaties (such as the European Convention on Human Rights)—ensures broadly supported and balanced decisions. The Liechtenstein system has produced very high levels of acceptance of political decisions and a high degree of satisfaction with the political system itself, as numerous surveys show.

As a result, the monarchy itself, as only one part of the government, is generally held in high esteem. The country’s enormous economic upswing since the 1940s has helped reinforce the good feeling. In Liechtenstein, the widespread view is that anchoring state power both in the reigning prince and in the people is not to the disadvantage of either side, but rather to their mutual advantage.

The post In Liechtenstein, Power to the People—And the Prince appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cicero set De Re publica in the year 129 BC, a dramatic moment when Romans, for the first time in centuries, had begun to confront the consequences of political violence. In 133 BC, a mob had killed the tribune Tiberius Gracchus after he used a combination of threats and extra constitutional measures to push through a series of land reforms. Four years later, the damage from Tiberius’s recklessness had become clear, but Rome still had a chance to mitigate it. So Cicero chose this moment to stage a dialogue in which the age’s most prominent politicians, jurists, and thinkers debated the nature of an ideal constitution and questioned what would become of their Republic after “the death of Tiberius Gracchus had divided one people into two factions.”

Cicero emphasized that Tiberius’s tactics of intimidation and his willingness to disregard law set Rome on a very dangerous course. “If this habit of lawlessness begins to spread,” he explained, it “changes our rule from one of justice to one of force.” This made Cicero “anxious for our descendants and for the permanence of our Republic.”

Cicero’s fear grew in part out of what he believed the Republic to be: community property of Romans, who were bound together not by race or ethnicity but by a shared sense of justice and fidelity to law. Law, Cicero wrote, provided the foundations for just interaction between citizens. It established the channels through which political decisions passed. And, because Rome was a representative democracy in which citizens elected leaders and voted on the legislation they proposed, Cicero argued that the Roman Republic could last forever if it remained governed by law and administered vigorously by its citizens.

A state governed by violence had much dimmer prospects. At best, such a state might sometimes “seem as if it was at peace” because “men feared each other … but no one was confident enough in his own strength” to challenge his adversaries. A sort of stable anarchy emerged, and a balance of fear was the only thing that held back citizen violence. Such a polity was no longer governed by laws. It could not be considered a republic.

Cicero’s Rome “may retain the name Republic, but we have long since lost the actual thing,” he wrote in De Re publica. By 54 BC, the Republic “was like a beautiful painting whose colors were beginning to fade.” Romans have “neglected to refresh it by renewing the original colors” and “have not even taken care to preserve its shape.” In other words, complacency was undermining the Republic.

During the three years it took Cicero to finish his De Re publica, Rome degenerated into something that looked a lot like the republic of violence the work described. “Murders happened every day,” the historian Cassius Dio later observed, “and [Romans] could not even hold elections” as regular street fighting between factions paralyzed political life. The most notorious of these, a battle on the Appian Way between gangs loyal to the politician Milo and his rival Clodius, led to Clodius’s death in January of 52. Clodius’s supporters then carried his body into the Roman senate house, heaped the chamber’s benches into a pyre, and incinerated both the corpse and the structure.

Cicero hated Clodius so much that, in the midst of writing De Re publica, he agreed to serve as an advocate for Milo at his trial. Constant threats and heckling from Clodius’s supporters interrupted Cicero’s planned remarks. He later published what he wished he would have said, a speech in which Cicero asserted that violence had to be used against Clodius because he was a “man whom we were unable to restrain by any laws.” In the heat of the moment, even Cicero defended vigilante justice.

Order returned to Rome in 52, only after the Senate called upon the powerful general Pompey the Great to secure the city. They granted him an “army and levy of troops,” a force that made Pompey more frightening than any of the petty leaders of Rome’s political gangs. It is hard to imagine more compelling evidence that Rome had descended from a Republic of laws and become a city stabilized by fear.

But, as Cicero understood, all it takes to destroy the balance of fear is a figure who is willing to try.

And, in Rome, Julius Caesar was that figure.

Caesar had spent much of the 50s conquering Gaul with a powerful and loyal army. But his command was due to expire at the end of the year 50. Caesar and his allies in the capital tried to negotiate an agreement that would protect him from politically motivated prosecution if he dismissed his troops, but the leaders of the Republic lacked the will to come to an agreement with him.

More importantly, the Republic’s leaders also lacked the capacity to reassure Caesar that any agreement he made would be observed. “Compelled by its terror at the presence of Pompey’s army and the threats from his friends,” the Senate ordered Caesar to disband his army or be declared an enemy of Rome.

When the Senate followed through on this threat in January of 49, Caesar went before his troops and told them that political activities permitted by law were “now branded as a crime and suppressed by violence.” The soldiers responded that “they were ready to defend their commander” and his allies “from all injuries.” This declaration—that violence, not law, governed Rome—began the series of civil wars that ended the Republic.

The United States now approaches the tipping point between a republic governed by law and the polity of violence, governed by mutual fear, that Cicero described over two millennia ago. Political violence courses through our streets as groups of demonstrators fight each other. The president and his political allies express public support for a young man who shot two protestors. It might be tempting to applaud Americans we agree with when they attack those with whom we do not, as Cicero did. But the distance from Cicero’s defense of Milo’s vigilantism to Caesar’s appeal to his troops is quite short. Neither vigilante justice nor armed insurrection can exist in a Republic whose citizens share a common purpose and respect for laws.

Cicero himself said so in one of the very last things he ever wrote before soldiers loyal to Mark Antony and the future emperor Augustus killed him, hanging his hand and head on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum. “Nothing,” Cicero proclaimed, “is more destructive to civilizations, nothing is so contrary to law and justice … than governing through violence in a Republic.”

The post What Would Cicero See in American Governance Today? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the turn of the century with reports of innumerable mineral resources and a limitless agricultural potential surfacing, this little-known U.S. possession suddenly grabbed the world’s attention. As pioneers and settlers rushed into the frontier and returned during this period, Alaskans founded many of today’s cities (including the two largest, Anchorage and Fairbanks), birthed a structure of highway and railroad transportation, and established a judicial system and a rudimentary form of self-government, which led to statehood a half-century later.

All this activity took place during the Progressive Age in American politics. It was a time of social and economic reform, when Congress and federal agencies recognized the need to regulate large corporate trusts, manage extraction of natural resources, ensure some level of fairness for consumers and workers, and build much-needed infrastructure projects. At the heart of the Progressive movement was the conviction that a strong federal government could be the agent of change, because government was the only entity with power sufficient to produce broad reforms.

The swelling Alaska population benefited from the Progressive movement in a number of ways. By 1900, Congress had enacted criminal and civil codes and appointed judges to serve each of the Alaska territory’s three newly established judicial districts. In 1906, a new federal law allowed Alaska residents to elect a delegate to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in 1912, Congress responded to Alaskans’ demands for self-government by creating an elected territorial legislature.

But the greatest of all Progressive Age accomplishments for Alaska was passage of the Alaska Railroad Act in 1914.

The act provided $35 million to build and operate a railroad from an unspecified tidewater port into the Alaskan interior. President Woodrow Wilson viewed Alaska as a storehouse that should be unlocked, and a railroad was, in his words, the means of “thrusting in the key to the storehouse and throwing back the lock and opening the door.”

It was significant that it was the federal government, and not private sector enterprise, that did this job. At the time Railroad Act passed, Progressives nationwide were at war with the monopolizing power of corporate trusts.

In Alaska, two of the biggest business entities in the world had combined to form an enterprise that controlled nearly every sector of the economy. The Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, owned by New York financier J. P. Morgan along with the international Guggenheim mining company, dominated the mineral extraction and transportation infrastructure in most of the territory. The syndicate sent teams of lobbyists to Washington to block efforts to build a government railroad, which would interfere with its monopoly on transportation. The syndicate was—as James Wickersham, Alaska’s non-voting delegate to Congress, described it—the “overshadowing evil” that darkened the prospects of every struggling pioneer in the new and developing territory.

“Which shall it be?” Wickersham thundered from the floor of the US House of Representatives in arguing for the Alaska Railroad Act. “Shall the government or the Guggenheims control Alaska?”

The answer from a Progressive-minded Congress and White House was clear: it would not be the Guggenheims.

Never before in the history of the westward movement of Americans had Congress stepped in to build a transportation system where private enterprise could likely have provided comparable service. Moreover, the railroad was quite explicitly an expression of the country’s anti-trust, anti-monopoly mood.

Progressives saw Alaska as a wide-open place where their ideals could be put into practice, a model of the democracy they wanted. It would open vast areas of mineral and agricultural wealth, creating jobs and opportunities for the working public; it would demonstrate the Progressive conviction that government at its best was an agent for progress and improvement in people’s lives; and it would make a statement of the strength of federal regulatory control in the era of popular reaction against the workings of corporate trusts. It would operate in a place where the giant Alaska Syndicate threatened to monopolize every sector of the economy.

Of course, Progressive-age politics was not the singular reason why Alaska was developed. The opportunities to be had in this northern frontier were exciting enough on their own to attract multitudes of pioneers, settlers, and entrepreneurs. Infrastructure would surely have been built even without the benefits of Progressivism’s considerable influence.

Alaskans were not always happy about the federal government’s investment—or lack thereof. During the Progressive Era they complained endlessly about what they perceived as neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of the federal government. “Think of it!” a Skagway newspaper cried in 1906. “Here we are a people denied the right of self-government, taxed without representation.” The editor concluded that Alaska lived under “a system compared with which the government of the American colonies under George III was broad and liberal.”

Alaskans in that moment had good reasons for their outrage: The territory’s vast coal deposits remained off-limits to mining, and hundreds of workers sat idle for eight years starting in 1906 as Congress failed to pass legislation providing for a fair leasing system on federal coal lands. This was only one example of government delays and red tape that infuriated residents of the North.

Such treatment led Alaskans to feelings of abuse and what amounted to a split personality in regard to their relationship with the federal government. They decried the lack of assistance where they saw a need while at the same time they wanted the government off their backs, leaving them free to develop the resources without interference.

Federal help did come to Alaska, but it arrived piecemeal over the course of decades. Over time, the government responded with many projects and benefits that enriched Alaska. These included highways, national parks, systems of public education and health care, and military bases, to name just a few. From today’s point of view, we can see that Alaska as a territory and a state has been enriched far more than neglected or abused by the federal government.

By 1916, Progressivism had run its course, though in its 20 years of life it had accomplished much in the way of social, political, and economic reform. Its legacy includes antitrust legislation, regulation of interstate commerce, child labor laws, direct election of U.S. senators, conservation of natural resources, and a movement toward women’s suffrage. The forces underlying all these advances were a commitment to the rights of the masses and a belief in the power of the federal government to effect change.

The post How a Public Railroad Saved Alaska appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.