Taking the Practical Steps Necessary to Resolve America’s Critical Problems and Save Our Democracy
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The two political parties have become so polarized that, whomever we elect, there is no scenario in which the president, the House, and 60 senators could agree on practical solutions for:
- Declining social and economic mobility
- Schools that leave students without the skills to thrive in our high-tech economy
- The most costly and inefficient health care system in the developed world
- Increasingly destructive climate change
- Unsustainably rising debt
- A 75,000-page tax code filled with perverse incentives
What’s more, the 60 percent of voters outside the extremes, the “exhausted majority,” have views all over the spectrum, motivating most politicians to ignore them and, instead, cater to their own party’s largely united “base.” The two parties’ bases thereby wield power far out of proportion to their numbers.
To overcome these obstacles to resolving our gravest problems — and prevent our republic from breaking down — the Center for Collaborative Democracy has launched the Grand Bargain Project. It draws on our experience with hundreds of people who resolved political controversies after elected officials had repeatedly failed. For example, when Congress deadlocked over environmental policy several years ago, 25 advocates for the various sides met to break the stalemate. They included top executives from General Motors, Dow Chemical, and Chevron Oil; leaders of the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the World Resources Institute; the chair of the African American Leadership Summit; the director of the EPA; and the president of the AFL-CIO.
In six meetings, these long-time adversaries hashed out a detailed plan for advancing each side’s top priorities: significantly “reducing pollution, waste, and poverty,” while increasing “jobs, productivity, wages, capital, savings, profits, and education.” Each CEO then won support from his/her industry association; the labor leader enlisted the major unions; the head of the EPA got buy-in from other regulatory agencies; and the environmentalists won over other organizations in their community. As one advocate put it, “Each of us had earned the trust and respect of our own community, which is how we won each community’s full support.”
By contrast, congressional leaders from both parties admitted that lawmakers could not sell such a complex agreement, despite all its benefits, to their diverse voters.
This is just one of 200+ cases in which trusted spokespeople resolved conflicts politicians could not.
Our conclusion: If voters in each sector of our society had an opportunity to identify the people outside government whom they trust to speak for them, those trusted individuals would be far better equipped than politicians to resolve our country’s major conflicts.
CCD has therefore identified the 100 influencers and leaders whom voters in each sector would most trust to be their advocates on the six issues listed at the top of the previous page. We plan to convene the 100 online in late April. To show them that a grand bargain resolving all six issues is within their grasp, we commissioned a team of 13 former policymakers and think tank leaders from left to right (listed in Appendix I) to work out practical ways of resolving all six issues so that virtually every American would benefit.
To reach that outcome, the expert team accepted our premise that none of the issues can be resolved on its own — because any practical solution will face fierce opposition from various interest groups and blocs of voters that prefer the status quo.
Yet current policies are so flawed that, by combining common sense reforms for each issue, the team devised an overall plan for significantly increasing the total benefits while reducing the total costs, so that every sector of society would fare far better than now. The team’s plan includes pragmatic ways to:
- Increase economic mobility, productivity, and growth
- Foster an educational system that enables students to reach their potential
- Make healthcare more efficient and less costly
- Stabilize the global climate
- Shrink the national debt as a percentage of GDP
- Simplify the tax code and make it fairer
When the 100 trusted leaders and influencers convene this spring, we will ask them to use the experts’ report as a starting point for negotiating a more detailed agreement. Experienced facilitators will then help them work out a pact that each sees as far better for their constituents than America’s current course. We will widely publicize that convening, especially to the 60+ percent of voters outside the extremes — the exhausted majority who deplore today’s politics — making the case that whatever emerges will be far better for every family than what our broken, hyperpolarized political system can possibly produce.
We expect that message to motivate the exhausted majority to vote in record numbers in 2024 — seeking out candidates who support the grand bargain process and the agreement emerging from it. Politicians, even the most self-serving, would then have incentives to publicly vow to use that agreement as the roadmap for navigating our country’s greatest challenges.
To make major progress on those ills in the next two years, the Grand Bargain Project will unfold in four phases described here.