Conclusion: Grand Challenges Purchased

The National Academy of Public Administration is an American non-profit organization that was established with a charter from the U.S. Congress in 1967. Its purpose is to help government leaders solve critical management problems.¹Close In November 2018, the academy announced a new project. It made a public call for comments about the “grand challenges of public administration.” Specifically, it sought advice on two questions, capitalizing for emphasis: “WHAT government must do over the next decade and HOW it should do it.”²Close

This was an unusual venture for the academy, which typically gives advice to executives within federal departments and agencies, examining administrative practices and making recommendations for improvement. With this project, the academy pitched its concerns more broadly. It asked about national priorities, the main lines of government policy, and implications for the organization of government. In other words, the academy wondered what the strategy for governing the United States should be in the coming decade.

The academy posed these questions in 2018 because there was confusion about what the strategy ought to be. There had been a rough consensus on strategy in the decade or so before the financial crisis of 2007–2008. America’s governing class, and most of its citizens, were generally skeptical about “big government” and supportive of free trade and internationalism. As I observed in chapter 5, this governance strategy had been launched by Republican President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and then refined and ratified by Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.³Close In the United Kingdom, a comparable strategy was introduced by Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and ratified by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s.

The Reagan-Clinton strategy began to wobble in the early 2000s and was seriously destabilized by the financial crisis and its aftermath. The world changed, and, as a result, the strategy no longer seemed as effective in achieving the fundamentals: security, internal order and comity, prosperity and justice. A surge in terrorism made people uneasy about open borders and briefly more tolerant of military adventurism. Growing inequality and insecurity caused second thoughts about economic laissez-fairism. The rise of China, and its failure to pursue economic and political liberalization, led to doubts about free trade and accommodative diplomacy. Technological innovations disturbed the economy, society, and politics.

Eventually the gap between strategy and reality became too wide, and agreement about its virtues broke down entirely. Between 1996 and 2003, the heyday of the Reagan-Clinton strategy, a solid majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going for the country, according to the Gallup Poll. By contrast, only a quarter expressed satisfaction in the decade after 2007.⁴Close The 2016 presidential election exposed the frailty of the Reagan-Clinton formula and deep divisions about what ought to replace it. Fifty-eight million people voted in the Democratic and Republican primaries in 2016. Only twenty-seven percent voted for Hillary Clinton, who was closely tied to the old formula. Twenty-two percent voted for Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist. Twenty-four percent voted for Donald Trump, an ethno-nationalist who favored less government intervention in some aspects of social and economic policy and more intervention in other aspects. Confusion and polarization over strategy persisted after the 2016 election.

This was not the first time that the United States found itself in such a muddle.⁵Close The country went through a comparable process of strategic collapse and reinvention in 1930s and 1940s. This led to a post-war order that put more emphasis on economic planning and activist social policy, among other things. There was another readjustment in the 1970s, as the post-war formula broke down: this eventually led to the Reagan-Clinton strategy. There were earlier readjustments as well. In general, these shifts in strategy do not happen quickly. Two decades passed between the crash of 1929 and the emergence of a new consensus about governance strategy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.⁶Close Similarly, two decades passed between the confusion of the early 1970s and Clinton’s affirmation of the new strategy in the mid-1990s. If history is a guide, therefore, we should not be surprised by the persistence of political confusion only a decade after the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

This history also suggests that the timeframe proposed by NAPA in its call for comments was too short. NAPA asked what problems would face American government over the next decade—but it might take another decade just to define and consolidate a new strategy for governing. As I argued in chapter 12, we ought to look further into the future, thinking about challenges that will confront American government over the next thirty to fifty years. In fact, several government agencies use longer timeframes in their long-term planning.⁷Close

However, the main difficulty with NAPA’s project was not the timeframe. NAPA specifically invited academics, students, and practitioners in the field of public administration to address its two broad questions. And it was certainly possible for people in the field to compose an answer. However, these questions were not routinely addressed within the field of public administration in 2018. It was not as though people could reprise arguments already at hand about the WHAT and HOW of government. Leading journals in public administration did not publish many articles on these broad questions. Conferences were not regularly organized around them, and graduate programs generally did not teach students how to think systematically about them. In short, addressing grand challenges was not one of the field’s distinctive competencies.

As I said earlier in the introduction, this deficiency did not come about by accident. It was the result of decisions taken deliberately by leaders within the field over the last forty years. The scholars and practitioners who invented the field a century ago certainly talked and wrote about grand challenges, with a determination to think systematically about questions of WHAT and HOW. Then the field changed direction. After the 1970s, we prized scholarship on meso-level rather than macro-level questions. Attention shifted because the legitimacy problems of Western governments appeared to be rooted in failures at the meso-level, and because it seemed easier to conduct rigorous research at that level.

Still, it was shortsighted to run down our skills in addressing macro-level questions, because it was inevitable that we would find ourselves in a moment like this. History shows us that governance strategies are fragile and bound to break down eventually (see chapter 9). In moments of strategic collapse, the question of whether Agency X is operating with optimal efficiency is not of foremost importance. Rather, we are concerned with the architecture of government as a whole and whether it is designed to achieve national priorities, given the prevailing conditions. As Walter Lippmann said a century ago, the aim is to adjust government to the facts of the modern world.⁸Close

The field of public administration has been caught out at a critical moment. The problems that will confront the American state in the mid-twenty-first century are no less substantial than those of Lippman’s time. Climatic disruption, shifts in the global power balance, demographic changes, technological revolutions, fiscal pressures, infrastructural shortfalls—all of these trends could jeopardize security, order, and citizens’ well-being if government does not anticipate the dangers and organize itself properly in response. And we know from experience that it takes years to build agreement on strategy and reconstruct institutions so that they give expression to it. Choices made in the next few years will shape the contours of American public administration for decades to come.

The pioneers of American public administration were aware that there was a third big question, in addition to the Academy’s WHAT and HOW: whether states that adhered to liberal democratic principles were capable of rising to new challenges at all. There was considerable doubt about the resilience of liberal democracies in the early decades of the twentieth century. Many people thought that authoritarian systems—fascism in Germany and Italy, communism in the Soviet Union—had the edge in dealing with problems of the modern age. The assignment for American specialists in public administration was to prove the skeptics wrong: that states could achieve security, order, and prosperity while also preserving democracy and fundamental rights.

We face the same assignment today. The reputation of liberal democracy has been battered over the past decade. As a result, some countries have turned toward populist authoritarianism. In 2014, for example, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán renounced “liberal methods and principles of organizing a society,” declaring that liberal systems could not survive in the “great world-race” among nations.⁹Close Other leaders have also embraced Orbán’s model of “illiberal democracy.”¹⁰Close And there are states that reject both liberalism and democracy. China—which is likely to have the world’s largest economy within the next two decades—is consolidating a system of one-party authoritarianism. Defenders of the Chinese system argue that it avoids the “deep-seated problems of the political model developed in the West.”¹¹Close Western scholars, like their predecessors in the 1930s, must show that these problems are transient, and not intrinsic to liberal democracy; that current discontent is just a side effect of strategic exhaustion; and that liberal democracies can adapt to new conditions. Of course, this requires that scholars put their ideological cards on the table. We must be clear that our aim is not just “good governance,” but good liberal-democratic governance.

More candor about first principles is not the only adjustment necessary within public administration. The field must rebuild the capacity to address grand challenges. We can begin by acknowledging the importance of macro-level questions and rewarding young scholars who choose to explore them. Conference organizers, journal editors, and teachers should create space for conversation about these questions. We will need patience as we develop the conceptual toolkit and the shared vocabulary that is essential to constructive conversation. We must explore history and the experience of other states to understand the diverse ways in which macro-level questions have been answered. And we must accept the need for informed speculation as well as well-grounded empirical research. There is no statistical analysis that will resolve the question of how leaders should anticipate climatic disruption, workplace automation, or the emergence of new superpowers. In the end, we must use our imagination as we craft strategies for governing that are effective, durable, and true to our ideals.