John Dickerson, in his excellent Atlantic article, The Presidency: The Hardest Job in the World, combines historical analysis with quotes and insights from presidents and past advisers to develop both a critique of the expectations of the role of president and how to achieve better results. The analysis lands on a few recommendations including improving the on-boarding process for new presidents and simplifying the role itself. Having and trusting one’s cabinet leads to better delegation of the impossible responsibilities of the role. Maybe outsourcing the ceremonial aspects of the job to the VP or First Lady would allow the president to concentrate on policymaking and national security flare ups.
While all are reasonable suggestions, resetting expectations about the role of the executive branch should be balanced against reforming the legislative branch in parallel. If both are to be empowered to serve the public’s will with grace and intellect, they face concomitant challenges in overcoming the partisanship and influences of monied interests that have made them unresponsive to the people. Polls show that the public wants reduced health care costs, reasonable gun regulations, humane immigration policies, and an opening of rights for gays and marijuana consumers. But none of these are delivered because they are too complex or politically toxic for Congress to successfully navigate.
Maybe the methodology is wrong. Not in the sense of the Constitution being wrong or in need of updating, but in the sense of how decision making and information gathering is managed through the legislative and executive branches. I’d like to propose an alternative that I will label New Agile Governance (NAG) for simplicity. NAG is based on the simple idea that tracks what Dickerson attributes to H.R. Haldeman (insert appropriate ad hominems here, as desired):
“Nothing goes to the president that is not completely staffed out first for accuracy and form, for lateral coordination, checked for related material, reviewed by competent staff concerned with that area, and all that is essential for Presidential attention.”
But can even this be improved upon? What if we the people could propose policy ideas and they were weighted and vetted into “stories” that would be curated by policy experts in a manner similar to the classic Delphi technique developed by RAND or by using a policy prediction marketplace? Proposals for solving problems would have weighted inputs from stakeholders that would shape and refine the best solutions. These stakeholders would include individuals, groups, corporations, lobbyists, and officials. Their claims and counterclaims would receive due input on the platform and would be supplemented by operational plans of how to implement the policy, legal analysis, and economic scrutiny. National security-related concerns would exist in a separate, classified system but would follow the same process, though with potentially greater urgency for action (and with caution about the moral quandaries presented by policy analysis marketplaces in the face of decisions that involve human life).
In the end, legislators, the president, and our governing agencies would ultimately implement the curated stories. The public would, in turn, base their voting on the success of the plan and their representatives’ efforts to execute the plan, and not on their party/tribal affiliation, ideology, or the excesses of the candidate’s personality. After all, if the plan has been transparently vetted and given upward momentum by the mix of experts and public support, the politician becomes more of a functionary than a reality show contestant.
The proposed system is open to gaming, of course. Can it be designed so that the experts assigned to curation don’t fall prey to partisan manipulation? Can the identities of the public and the experts be guaranteed to avoid hacking and manipulation by antagonistic players, foreign and domestic? It becomes another institution, and Americans are wary of institutions in the early 21st century.
The transparency of a NAG system can potentially help to sustain its validity. If everyone has their say they can disagree with the outcome of funneling majority opinions through multiple lenses of professional review, but they have to admit they understand why it happened. The cloak of compromise and gridlock no longer hides away the details of massive and life-affecting bills and regulatory choices.
Finally, though, we have to admit that a system like NAG requires a new investment of human capital. Voters now choose representatives who signal a combination of virtuous identity and likability as, well, representative of their goals. Under NAG, the individual voter and the policy expert need to invest more time in reading and analyzing policy positions that might be in the brainy language of the CATOs, New Republics, National Reviews, The Nation, and, yes, The Atlantic Monthly. It requires an investment and, like John Dickerson argues, a modulation away from personality as a proxy for governing talent.
I admit that I am a technologist and believe that technology can solve problems. It seems plausible to believe that governance can be improved using similar means. If nothing else, technology supports the management of ideas and opinions better than mere mob rule or a disconnected governing class. NAG, even in its simplest form, would provide at least better memory for why policies are desirable, and better insights into all perspectives on policy choices. It would also reconnect people with the institutions that are involved in governance, because there would be a chain of responsibility from the system to the implementation of the policies. Of course, the devil is in the details, but the NAG concept is worth considering if for no other reason than our current system is listing so perilously in the currents of modern change.
And, finally, the whole project needs a better acronym.