Radical Moderation and Reform
Over the next few weeks we'll be taking an in-depth look at three public policy issues that we think demonstrate some of the worst violations of the principles of good governance we laid out in our last post. We'll do quick summaries here, but the real work is to come (hang onto your hats!).
Radical Moderation and Partisan Politics
One nice thing about Radical Moderation is that really radical moderation knows no clear partisan lines. We can be Radical Moderates and a lot of other things too. Radical Moderation doesn't have to replace our commitments to conservative or progressive or libertarian ideals. If anything, hopefully it gives those ideals a stronger grounding and a language for defending them. The real benefit of Radical Moderation is not that it supports a particular political position, but that it instead give us a lens through which to assess our different approaches to political life and how well they're working.
Radically Moderate Criminal Justice Reform
As a reminder of our principles, they consist of: consent, justice, liberty, equity, rule of law, respect for individuals, respect for communities.
Looking at that list, it seems obvious that criminal justice reform should be high on our agenda. The criminal justice system in the United States is, by most accounts, broken. Apart from the economic costs, it clearly violates all of the principles of good governance, doing an enormous amount of harm in the process.
The criminal justice system violates consent in large part because there's no way most people can or should consent to a system that targets the vulnerable, feeds off the weak, and destroys innocent lives. In fact, some of the most troubling aspects of our criminal justice system are things we never consented to at all, such as civil or qualified immunity, which is largely a creation of the courts and is not found in any other civilized country.
Our criminal justice system also violates our justice and equity requirements, precisely because it harms the most vulnerable among us to benefit a small few (a violation of justice) and the benefits of the system are unevenly spread out, with well-off people benefiting the most while the vulnerable and poor pay (a violation of equity).
Very obviously, the criminal justice system represents a serious violation of the principles of liberty, with oodles of research that shows that more than any other country, we incarcerate the innocent, jail the poor for being poor, and have excessively punitive approaches to nonviolent activities. It's a deep irony that the first country founded on the principle of freedom incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.
It's also not merely a matter of staying out of trouble. Criminal law in the United States is notoriously complex and the rules are quite different for those with money than they are for those without, both clear violations of rule of law. One law professor estimates that 70% of Americans break a law that carries criminal penalties, often without knowing it. It's simply not possible to stay out of trouble when the number of laws and the ways in which one can break the law have exploded over the last century.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our criminal justice system does enormous damage to the individuals who are ground up and spat out by the system (we highly recommend the Netflix series produced by the Innocence Project called The Innocence Files) at the same time that it destroys communities from the inside out and tears families apart.
We'll be going into more detail next week.
Radically Moderate Health Care Reform
Our principles of consent, justice, liberty, equity, rule of law, respect for individuals, respect for communities apply to another hot-button issue that had divided the nation, healthcare.
This is another area where the U.S. is clearly failing to live up to its own ideals. American health care violates consent in complicated ways, with patients finding it difficult to choose their own providers or even reject certain interventions. Americans are separated from their healthcare decisions by third party payers who determine what kind of care they get and how much it costs.
Also obviously, the health care system violates our commitments to justice and equity because the people who can least afford it are those who pay the most - whether economically or physically - for the system many of us benefit from. People with disabilities, pre-existing conditions, low-income people, and the uninsured all struggle to access high-quality care.
U.S. healthcare also violates liberty because people are not free to choose their physicians, their insurers, or even where their health care dollars go. Patients are limited to specific in-network providers or are limited geographically by regulations they may be unaware of. Patients who may want access to non-medical providers like hospice or midwives or home health aides may find that the only place they can use their healthcare dollars is in a hospital with traditional medical care. These kinds of limitations undermine informed consent too, which we'll discuss at length in another post.
Finally, American healthcare represents a clear violation of rule of law because the system is so complicated that most Americans can't understand why it is the way it is or how to operate in a system that makes it impossible to do simple things like change jobs or plan for the future. Most Americans have no idea what special interests have built the healthcare system we have today and have no idea why their options are so limited and why the rules are constructed the way they are.
Finally and most obviously, the American healthcare system fails to respect individuals and the communities they're part of. From lack of individual options to lack of community-based clinics to a lack of culturally competent care the U.S. healthcare system is peculiarly poorly set up to personalize or individualize care or to care for the most marginalized communities who have the most complex health needs and who face a dearth of qualified providers.
Radically Moderate Immigration Reform
Those same principles of consent, justice, liberty, equity, rule of law, respect for individuals, respect for communities apply to yet another polarizing issue, that of immigration reform.
Immigration policies in the United States violate requirements of consent in the basic sense that people who live here, contribute to their communities, and have built their lives in our nation have a tortuous path to citizenship, if they have any path at all. We have millions of people living among us who cannot vote, cannot share in the wealth they help create, and who are cut off from resources needed to make their lives better.
Our immigration policies also challenge justice and equity for the basic reason that our rules are arbitrary, privilege the well-off at the expense of the most needy, and cut undocumented immigrants off from access to public goods, even when they are in the country through no fault of their own. It's even more a violation of justice because huge swaths of the American economy rely on immigrant labor for their very existence. Whether we like it or not, the average American is living off the back-breaking labor of people who their system does not recognize as existing and who are granted no part of the political decision-making process that determines their fate.
Immigration policy also violates freedom for the obvious reason that our decision to slam our doors shut prevents people the world over from fleeing abusive and destructive regimes when they need to most. Freedom of movement is one of the foundational requirements of human liberty, but the country the most devoted to human freedom has one of the most restrictive immigration policies in the world.
Our immigration policy is also a violation of rule of law because our leaders have completely abdicated their responsibility to regularize the status of undocumented people living in the United States, creating an entire generation of people who live in a kind of legal limbo, unprotected by the laws the rest of us rely on and living in constant fear of the random and often arbitrary enforcement of immigration police. We've created a system where millions of our fellow community members cannot plan for the future and cannot predict when, if at all, the law will work for them or against them.
Finally and most obviously, U.S. immigration policy destroys the lives of individuals and communities as people live in fear of immigration enforcement. Not only the desperate people outside our borders who are forced to live in fear with no place to go, but those in our own communities whose families and communities are torn apart by increasingly abusive immigration enforcement.
Moreover, when we say immigration policy is arbitrary, we mean it. U.S. immigration policy has been cobbled together over the past century and a half largely as a result of xenophobic reactions to whatever wave of immigration currently threatens the status quo. Immigration policy has ranged from explicitly racist to simply discriminatory to actually cruel, but what it does not reflect is a thoughtful balancing of the needs of our national community alongside the needs of people seeking a better life. It's time for that to change, and hopefully we can provide some options for moving forward.
Why Start Here?
These are obvious targets for Radical Moderation because the status quo so clearly violates the principles our country was founded on. They violate our most foundational commitments to each other and to our shared goals of governance. What all these policy areas share in common is that they:
Overwhelmingly harm the most vulnerable among us.
Overwhelmingly violate rights.
Cost enormous amounts of money and are entangled with special interests, so that they benefit the few at the expense of the many.
But there's hope! Another reason for focusing on these three areas is that they are also areas where conservatives, libertarians, and progressives agree, or at least ought to agree (and when they don't one can ask why). Most conservatives, libertarians, and progressives share in common the belief that the criminal justice should punish criminals and not poor people. They also agree that healthcare should be high quality and relatively low cost and relatively evenly distributed. And they all agree that immigration policy should come from a place of thoughtful balancing of needs and should not be completely arbitrary or gratuitously cruel.
We'll be talking more in subsequent posts about where these policies come from, whether it's kludgeocracy or crony capitalism, and what we can do about it. But in the simplest sense what all these policies share in common as origin stories are policies that grew up over time -- often directed for the benefit of a few powerful interest groups as the expense of the people as a whole -- so slowly that no one noticed quite what was happening.
Low Hanging Fruit Reforms
It's not all depressing though! The good news is that there exists some serious low-hanging policy fruit we can start tackling right away that would have a clear and definitive positive effect on people's lives.
Criminal Justice Reform: We can start by decriminalizing stupid things, which some places are already doing. Citizens voted to decriminalize marijuana in a record number of states and municipalities and Oregon moved toward decriminalization of all drugs, with an emphasis on rehabilitation (the Portugal model, more or less). But it's not just marijuana. We criminalize being poor in a variety of complicated ways. We can also improve accountability for police, prosecutors, and other public servants who violate the sacred trust they're given to protect the public and who instead shoot, lock up, and entrap innocent people. Focusing our efforts on real criminals saves money, enhances liberty, and brings about a more equitable system. Everyone wins!
Immigration: The easiest people to support are those who are either innocent and already members of our community or those who have risked their lives to help American causes. In both cases American immigration policy has failed the people who need its help the most. Right now there are by some estimates 3.6 million people who were brought to our country as children who have no clear or legal path to citizenship. Many of these folks grew up in America, they speak English, want to go to college, join the military, contribute to their country. But their country won't recognize them. This is an easy fix and Congress should get on it. The other easy fix are those interpreters, contractors, and other foreign citizens who assisted the United States overseas in the War on Terror. We have a process, the Special Immigrant Visa program, in place to help these people, but the number of visas is unconscionably small and the process so bureaucratic that many SIV applicants are murdered at the hands of our enemies while they wait for the U.S. to open its doors. Focusing just on these two groups would bring skilled and motivated citizens into the country, would underscore our commitment to justice, and would expand the blessings of liberty for millions of people trying to improve their lives in a country they love. Everyone wins!
The "easy" fixes for healthcare are harder, because the system is so complicated. The obvious ones are things like providing universal access to Health Savings Accounts, perhaps with some kind of state matching or incentives, as states do with 529s for college savings. The other obvious fix would involve loosening out-dated regulations that prevent competition from lower-cost providers to allow people to use their health care dollars more flexibly and for a greater range of providers. These two basic fixes would improve access, equity, and justice, and expand individual freedom. Everyone wins!
All this is great, but the low hanging fruit only gets us part of the way there, which is why we'll be focusing on some "reach" goals in future posts.
The good news about all of this is that despite the challenges we're facing, we have the principles available to move toward reform. One of our favorite quotes is this one, by Frederick Douglass, who had every reason in the world to criticize the cruelty, injustice, and deep inhumanity of U.S. policy on slavery (and criticize it he did), but who also emphasized the power of our principles for moving us forward.
I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
Frederick Douglass
We'll try!
As always, we'd love to hear from you! What did we miss? What would you have added? Tell us in the comments!