For what it’s worth, I support Obamacare as a health reform strategy. To the best of my limited understanding, it makes sense as an approach to broadening insurance coverage and controlling costs. Whether or not I am right, the law will have a long-term impact on public views of government and politics. For instance, as I recently told NPR’s Tamara Keith and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, young people will draw powerful and lasting lessons from their perception of this initiative. In turn, that may affect their political orientation for the next 50 years.

I can see public opinion of Obamacare crystallizing in three different ways:

1. It is a fiasco that proves the government can’t be trusted. Just when we were learning that the feds can collect private information from anyone in the world (even the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, our ally), we watched the Obamacare website fail to capture data that people wanted to give it. That crisis has passed, but the whole reform could be seen–rightly or wrongly–as an emblematic failure of government.

People would ask whether more government is better, and their answer would be: No.

2. It is a demonstration of Clinton/Obama-era technocratic liberalism. The government pulls together some experts, mostly employed in universities and industries, and develops a clever set of tweaks to the existing insurance market. By offering individuals new choices in carefully designed market exchanges (while sparingly employing money and regulations), the government nudges employees and employers to act better. The key relationships are all private and transactional: I go onto a website, make choices for myself and my family, and get economic benefits for us. If that approach is seen to work, it strengthens the case for a certain kind of technocracy in which behavioral economics is the reigning discipline.

People would ask whether smarter government is better, and their answer would be: Yes.

3. It is an illustration that we the people can address problems together, using a combination of laws and the state, business and markets, and voluntary collective action. To be sure, that is not the way that Obamacare is being presented, either by its supporters or by its detractors. To its enemies, it is state-centered socialism. To its most prominent friends, it is the government helping individuals. And indeed, it was designed in a basically individualistic way. But the act has provisions that strengthen community health clinics that are governed by public boards. Lawrence Jacobs argues that the $11 billion in new funds for them is a huge investment. This investment could boost civil society and develop new leaders. Meanwhile, Health Access California has been outstandingly successful at signing people up for Obamacare by combining community organizing, education, research, and advocacy. A significant reason for the success of Obamacare, if it succeeds at all, will be this huge collaborative effort in California’s nonprofit sector.

If these aspects of the law were (a) publicized and (b) strengthened in the years to come, people might ask a different question: Can we address social problems together? And the answer would be: Yes.

The post the big lessons of Obamacare appeared first on Peter Levine.

Detroit, March 21: lunchtime plenary at the Center for the Study of Citizenship’s 2014 Conference, Wayne State University

Florida, March 28, lunchtime plenary at the “Democracy in America: Participation and Social Justice” conference at Stetson University, 

Chicago, April 5th 2014, panel on “best practices in civic engagement across two- and four- year colleges,” Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting

Charlottesville, VA, April 9: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America, the Rotunda, University of Virginia.

Champaign, IL, April 17: keynote speech at the city’s STAR (Service Together Achieves results) Expo/Awards Program.

Nashville, May 3: the Southeastern Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA)

Mexico City, May 28-30 (private seminar for professors)

Dallas, June 9, League of Women Voters National Conference

The post my upcoming talks appeared first on Peter Levine.

Someone should fictionalize this:

As Warden, and afterwards Master, of the Royal Mint, [Sir Isaac] Newton estimated that 20 percent of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon’s being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult. However, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. … Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties—there is a draft of a letter regarding this matter stuck into Newton’s personal first edition of his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. Newton successfully prosecuted 28 coiners..

One of Newton’s cases as the King’s attorney was against William Chaloner.  Chaloner’s schemes included setting up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turning in the hapless conspirators whom he had entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman. Petitioning Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters (a charge also made by others). He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint’s processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins. Newton put Chaloner on trial for counterfeiting and had him sent to Newgate Prison in September 1697. But Chaloner had friends in high places, who helped him secure an acquittal and his release. Newton put him on trial a second time with conclusive evidence. Chaloner was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered on 23 March 1699 at Tyburn gallows.

The post a free idea for a novel appeared first on Peter Levine.

The recent Pew survey of Millennials is aptly entitled, “Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends.” One form of detachment involves religion. Pew says, “This generation’s religious views and behaviors are quite different from [those of] older age groups. Not only are they less likely than older generations to be affiliated with any religion, they are also less likely to say they believe in God.”

That is a clearly Bad Thing if God exists; many Millennials have drifted away from their Maker. But from a secular (or religiously neutral) perspective, the trend is more ambiguous and debatable.

W. Bradford Wilcox argues that religious adherence and congregational membership are linked to various good outcomes, including personal happiness and trust. In that case, detaching from religious institutions could be harmful.

Wilcox is a conservative writer, but some on the left would offer a complementary argument. They might emphasize power more than happiness. For example, in Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, Mark R. Warren argues that the “rich and vibrant” networks of churches, along with small businesses and community organizations, “served as the basis for the social and political gains African Americans made in the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties.” The Black Church provided the recruitment, leadership, budgets, moral underpinning, and prophetic voice of the Freedom Movement. And that is not a unique example: Warren’s own book is about Latino Catholics in San Antonio from 1970-1990.

We could develop functional equivalents or replacements for churches. After all, religious denominations have done harm as well as good in the world, and there might be other paths to worldly justice and happiness. But any functional equivalent would have to meet the following criteria, I think:

1. Depth. Warren begins his book with a vignette of Father Al Jost reading from Ezekiel: “Them bones, them bones …” This is a biblical verse, written more than 20 centuries ago in Hebrew. It is fantastic poetry: a spooky story about bones reforming into living people and a fascinating dialog between the prophet and his God. It has had a long and complex history. Via Jerome, it entered Latin, the language that evolved into Spanish and colonized the New World. Via the King James Version, it entered Renaissance English. In that form, it was quoted from all kinds of pulpits, but most notably in the Black Church, where the idea of the bones reforming as a result of prophesy became a metaphor for the oppressed people’s rebirth in freedom. When a White Catholic liberal priest quotes Ezekiel to a group of predominantly Latina parishioners, they may hear a wide range of associations, but the effect is palpable. They are nervous before Father Jost speaks, but they respond “with a resounding ‘Amen’ and [stride] onto the stage to the sounds of a mariachi band … exuding confidence and collective determination.” I propose that the original quality and the subsequent reuses of Ezekiel’s poetry partly explain their power. A secular equivalent would have to match that depth.
2. Mechanisms for recruitment. The old civil society of churches, unions, parties, and newspapers recruited people for very persuasive reasons (getting to heaven, getting a job, getting patronage, and reading the classifieds and comics) but then helped at least some of their members become politically and civically engaged. The new civil society of nonprofit groups and loose social networks asks people to join because they have political and civic motivations. Many do not. Therefore, the new civil society is badly biased in favor of the already-active. A functional equivalent of churches must solve that recruitment problem.
3. Mechanisms for overcoming collective action problems. As Gerald Gamm shows, when Catholics were tempted to leave Boston (unfortunately, because of racial prejudice and tension), the Catholic Church was able to stem the tide by committing to fund and retain the parish churches and parochial schools. Individual choices would have produced mass flight. Coordinated action preserved the institutions and let them evolve so that some of the old Irish Catholic churches are now predominantly Latino or Haitian. That is in some ways an ugly example, but it is also a clear case of how institutional structures help people achieve shared ends. Institutions need not be churches, but they must work as well.
4. Plurality and freedom of choice: America offers many religious faiths, denominations, congregations within each denomination, and small groups within each congregation. Also, every religious tradition is a rich and ancient array of ideas, many in tension or even conflict with each other. So a religious believer can (unless overly pressured by other people in her life) make her own path. If we had one religion and it was a fully ordered system of rules and principles, then religious adherence would conflict with freedom. But in a massively diverse and competitive arena, religion is compatible with freedom.
5. Bridges as well as walls. It is true that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week; and religion reflects the ideological, cultural, linguistic, and class segregation of the US as a whole. On the other hand, religious adherents see that problem and build structures to connect congregations: interfaith dialogues and broad-based religious organizing efforts that are now impressive at the level of whole metropolitan areas. These connections also keep individual congregations from becoming too morally disconnected and intolerant. Does it work perfectly?–absolutely not. But when other efforts to bring diverse people together are so weak, the potential of interfaith organizing is relatively impressive.
6. A long historic arc. It is hard to keep going with civic and political work. Failure and defeat are inescapable. Persistence is a lot easier if you see yourself connected to a permanent community with a prophetic vision of the future–if, for example, you believe that your people were sold into bondage but are walking slowly toward the Promised Land.
7. Moral obligation. You do not have to be religious to be moral. I hope not, because I am not religious. Further, you can be religious and evil: that is common enough. But being good does require commitments to other people (and perhaps to nature) as intrinsically valuable. Those commitments do not come from science or reason. In fact, science would suggest that people are dramatically unequal and that nature is fully exploitable. So I think moral people have “faith-based” commitments even if those have nothing to do with the divine. And one source of challenging moral thought and language is religion. Functional equivalents must be at least as good.

Finally, a sociological point. Today’s young people are less religious (in terms of both belief and practice) than today’s older people. One reason is generational change, and that suggests that they will remain less involved for the rest of their lives. But another reason is the life cycle. According to a Pew study from 2010, Millennials are just three points less likely to attend religious services than Xers were at the same age. But we Xers have grown substantially more observant as we have moved into middle age, and we now resemble Baby Boomers. I would tentatively predict a similar pattern for the Millennials.

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