It's Not The Time for Policy

America isn’t fighting over policy. In fact, it shouldn’t be.

We have an expectation that politics means competing tax plans, health insurance policies, and funding levels for programs. It’s about long lists of priorities ticked off in State of the Union addresses. It’s speeches with lots of statistics. That’s what we expect from our politicians and public officials. It’s what we expect from think tanks and advocacy organizations. For most of our lives, it’s the core of what politics was.

It isn’t any more. Not right now. Not yet.

This isn’t the time for policy. That hurts me to say because I’m by nature a wonk. I love policy. I believe government is about doing real things that make lives better. When I worked in politics, it was as a policy guy. One of my dream jobs would be the head of the Domestic Policy Council under an ambitious and innovative president where I’m given free reign to reform anything I want.

It’s not that we aren’t desperate for smart policy. America is facing a horrifying competence crisis. Everywhere you look, in every sector public and private, things don’t work. Our institutions don’t deliver. Public trust has collapsed. The products we rely on have degraded. The economy isn’t delivering what most Americans expect in security or quality of life. Americans are angry. Society is splintering. Not only do our leaders have no solutions, most times they’re making everything worse. This isn’t the time to leave America on autopilot. Autopilot is driving us off a cliff.

If we’re going to get out of this disruptive era, we’re going to need innovative policy. To repair our national crisis of competency, we must carefully reform nearly everything. It will take serious, ambitious, and well-considered ideas and reforms.

The problem is we aren’t there yet. We haven’t done the work.

Policy isn’t the totality of politics. It’s just the third and final step of a much longer process. Policy is about implementing things. It’s the details. Tax plans, manufacturing programs, social programs, health care reforms, and everything else politicians put on their campaign web sites and list off in debates is about implementing a vision. Before you can form that vision, you first must understand the problem you’re trying to solve.

In other words, there are three steps to effective politics:

• Step One: A Theory of the Problem

• Step Two: Your Vision

• Step Three: Policies Implementing Your Vision

You can’t skip to step three. You have to do the other two steps first.

The hardest step is the first one, forming a solid theory of the problem. We all can point to a lot of individual problems. These problems, however, aren’t random and unrelated. Societies don’t suddenly go into decline and turmoil for no reason. Most of what worries Americans during times of crisis stems from some common structural or cultural causes. Before you can solve a problem, you have to identify and understand it.

This isn’t just important theoretically. It’s critical politically. Nobody is going to let you tinker with society unless they’re convinced you know what it is you’re doing. Nobody lets a doctor just start cutting into them without a convincing diagnosis of their illness.

When Franklin Roosevelt faced the Great Depression, he didn’t just start throwing random policies at the wall. First, he and his New Dealers developed a solid theory about what broke the American economy. The New Dealers believed the economy imploded because of too little national coordination. They believed the emerging industrial economy required more planning than an American system built for an agricultural world allowed. They thought America needed new programs and institutions to better plan and manage the economy and society, which would fix the problem.

They presented this theory to America. The American people believed them. Therefore, they trusted FDR and his Brain Trust to implement a flurry of radical new policies that changed America’s trajectory.

Decades later, Ronald Reagan and his conservative movement supporters did a similar thing. They took the White House during another moment of discontent. The 1970s were a nightmare with social instability and stagflation—a stagnating economy combined with runaway inflation. The conservatives believed this array of problems had a common cause—too much regulation and administration choking the economy, limiting opportunity, and undercutting national stability. They thought if they unwound the regulatory burden, reduced taxes, and employed market incentives, America would come back to life.

They presented their theory to America. The American people believed them. Therefore, they trusted Reagan and his movement to implement a flurry of radical new policies that changed America’s trajectory.

Only after you have a theory and Americans buy in can you move onto the second step of proposing a better vision for America. A vision means the map of where you want to take us. What does this new version of America look like? How does it actually work? What sort of priorities does it have? What sort of institutions? What are you going to change? What new things will you build? How does your vision of America look different from the version of America you hope to leave behind?

The New Dealers had a vision of a more coordinated America with a host of new agencies and powers they believed would bring the economic and social coordination a flourishing industrial economy required. Reagan’s conservatives had a vision of a more decentralized America without as many administrative rules and burdens, one more reliant on market incentives to flourish.

Only after these movements had a theory and a vision did they start proposing policies to bring their visions about.

Their policies weren’t just ad hoc arrays of unrelated ideas wonks cooked up inside some think tank. They weren’t just pet projects of certain interests or answers to isolated pet peeves. They weren’t even lists of ideas leaders thought might make America a little better. They were concrete ways to bring about a common vision, coordinated parts of a coherent whole.

Our political establishment still thinks politics starts and finishes with the last step, policy, because for their entire careers that was the only thing that mattered. The theories and visions were already in place. Everybody knew what Republicans and Democrats stood for, what they believed the problems were, and what visions they offered to solve them. All we needed was the details. They offered programs, tax plans, administrative tweaks, and laws. They offered fifty-point agendas and ran campaigns around the idea of “I have a plan for that.” Since the thinking was already done, all that was left to do was implementing.

Today, nobody agrees on what the problems are, much less what caused them. When somebody claims they “have a plan for that,” America thinks with good reason, “No, you don’t.” Nobody believes you have any idea what to do. If you did, nobody thinks you would actually be able to do it. Until you have a theory and a vision and America buys in, you aren’t ready for the details. Nobody wants to hear your focus-grouped ad hoc policies to implement the vision you don’t have to solve a crisis you can’t identify.

This is why so much of politics is so frustrating to watch. Candidates make up dumb proposals some consultant or advocacy group fed them. Think tanks create books of ideas to push America into unknown directions. Advocates attempt to cram their personal obsessions into the agendas of candidates and parties sure that it will make things better since they think that’s what making policy is. People who want to fix America engineer well-meaning packs of isolated policies they dream up without a theory of the problem, a vision, or a plan because they don’t understand what policy is for.

Policy is about implementing a vision. A vision is a plan to navigate a crisis. A theory is an understanding of what the majority of Americans believe has gone wrong. If you want to build and sustain a new majority, you need half of America to buy into your theory and your vision. Only then will they allow you to experiment with policy ideas to bring about your vision. Only then do your policy ideas have any chance to work.

Everybody needs to realize we’re no longer ready for policy because we’re no longer at step three. We’re back at step one. Focus on that first.

What’s your theory of the problem? What do you think is causing this crisis in competency? Comment and let’s talk about it here.