I f your opportunity for a good job with rising pay is less than it would have been in 1990, and Washington is busy playing politics, does it make a sound? With Capitol Hill absorbed in more symbolic Obamacare repeals — Congrats on your 50th, Congress! — while a very real middle class declines, there’s a sense our federal government is trapped in a universe of its own. But we are the ones truly trapped, and the absence of the representative democracy our Founding Fathers envisioned should compel our generation to seek new roads going forward.
A Princeton study released this year examined almost 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, finding economic elites have substantial impacts on policy, while average citizens have little independent influence. Reasons for this situation are occasionally heard in the media: corporate money in elections, partisan redistricting, special interests, etc. But a common issue underlies all of them.
While Americans disagree on where the country’s problems originate, there is a common sense of how : institutions that grow too large. Whether it’s Wall Street firms or Capitol Hill, organizations that grow to such massive scales also grow farther away from the control of ordinary Americans. Our age is realizing the limits of endless growth, and if our democratic legacy is to continue, government and business must become more localized.
However ambitious this sounds, an opportunity is already emerging: we millennials stand at the fore of a historic urban reordering in America that is shifting priorities. After over a half-century of depopulation, cities are filling up as millennials seek out economic opportunity, cultural diversity and denser living. With the influx of their voices demanding a more inclusive society, their vision has a chance to move closer to reality. Closer to the needs and voices of those they serve and empowered by a more unified electorate, city governments can do what Washington can’t for the foreseeable future: govern.
Already, urban America is witnessing an agenda focused more on communities and less on politicians striving to be booked on this Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” A wave of new mayors, from New York City’s Bill de Blasio to Seattle’s Ed Murray, are proving cities to be laboratories for innovation. It is too early to see the results, but there is reason to hope the benefits of these community-centered agendas will become too obvious to ignore.
As radical as a shift to local empowerment may sound, its roots lie in our very nation’s founding. The hope for a nation ruled by the plain folk, as Thomas Jefferson articulated, was as present in the 18th century as it is in the 21st. But such a revolutionary idea takes some revolutionary willpower. And that is where you and I come in.
