We have entered a new political era in which it is obvious that the prevailing laissez-faire approaches to education, economics, and democracy have failed. Common sense says we need a more unified and structured approach aimed at the national interest and the common good. In economics the monikers of an outdated paradigm are familiar: trickle-down; supply-side; neoclassical; Reaganomics; free-market. Less familiar is the term for both governance and economics that characterizes this period: neoliberalism.
Epitomized by the triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, neoliberalism was characterized by market deregulation, trade liberalization, and divestment from the public sector and civic education. An host of familiar national and global problems ensued, including the politically catastrophic rural-urban divide, skyrocketing wealth inequality, and “invisible trillions” disappearing into global tax havens. While I agree Fukuyama was right that liberal democracy and capitalism are the best systems in the world, they still need far more work than neoliberals previously thought. The progressive rejoinder to Fukuyama is, therefore, somewhat paradoxically an argument about why the political center of liberal democracy needs to be strengthened in ways that are almost as conservative as they are progressive. The constitutionalisms, institutions, norms, and civic practices of liberal democracy are fundamentally incomplete. Evidence for this is so obvious as to be common sense across the prevailing debates of constitutionalism, economics, democracy, and education.
Regarding constitutionalism, the originary debate between originalism and living constitutionalism is at a stalemate (still essentially the same debate that took place between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton). Both approaches are necessary, yet nobody knows how to moderate between them. Dual constitutionalism is my answer, since common sense says democracy should decide constitutional interpretation when the various versions of originalism are inadequate to guide us. Governments require constitutions, as nearly everyone agrees, but so also does democracy; distinct regimes require distinct constitutions. This is equivalent to saying both sides of the “Great Debate” between Edmund Burke on one side, and Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine on the other, need a constitution of their own. Liberal democracy requires two very different constitutional documents, therefore, to serve very different purposes, a real(ist) constitution for the Burkeans and an ideal constitution for the democrats. Producing an ideal constitution should be the primary focus of civic education and civic engagement (of “deliberative democracy,” as academics call it), and that is the way to reunite urban and rural voters in a common national enterprise. Again, this is the new common sense.
In the discipline of economics there is finally recognition that the neoclassical paradigm has been profoundly blinkered, in the grip of a needlessly narrow, supply-side ideological view. For this reason, the first-of-its-kind Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Economics explicitly decenters the field with “new material” (Preface). With a more behavioral approach to economics in mind, the populist voters on the right and left are correct—that is to say, they exhibit economic common sense—in their revolt against unchecked globalization and excessive financialization of the economy. Evidence for this is currently front-page news in the Journal of Democracy (October 2023). For instance, see “How Financial Secrecy Undermines Democracy” by Charles Davidson and Ben Judah: “An expansive underworld of hidden wealth lies beneath the everyday economy. This stealth network of tax havens, secret trusts, and offshore accounts is weakening democratic institutions and fueling our worst enemies.”
Aside from economic problems, common-sense evidence that democracy is incomplete can be seen in legislative gridlock, the proliferation of fake news, plunging levels of trust in government and society, voters swinging wildly from left to right over both politicians and constitutional redraftings, and, lately (November 2023), a global explosion of anti-Semitism on both the left and right. These issues speak to the lack of a passionate centrism, weak civic understanding, and weak constitutional and liberal values. In fact, there is no theory of political centrism in liberal democracies at all. While centrism is an ideal and a value, it is only held together in practice by the divided powers of government and norms of conduct, such as allowing the peaceful transfer of power, tolerance, moderation, and compromise, the latter of which too often produces irrational results from forced compromises in parliaments and legislatures. Rational centrism, by contrast, should aim at truth as objectively as possible, through the most fully democratic, open, scientific, and deliberative means available.
Laissez-faire education has also failed. Public schools and universities are political battlegrounds even though they are devoid of any comprehensive civics agendas. Public universities are also experiencing multiple crises simultaneously involving funding, demographic change, administrative bloat, and the mission-drift battles between corporatization on one hand, and ideological capture by the social-justice left on the other. The Wisconsin Idea—the guiding philosophy of the University of Wisconsin system—was an early twentieth century attempt to create a civic university and an operating system for democracy, with the university serving as a coordinating hub between public news and radio, regular news media, professors, students and citizens, business and industry, and government. That idea really never caught on and it needs to be revisited, along with the idea of a “national” university.
“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense, February 14, 1776