Taking Big Swings

An attitude shift

You don’t have to look far to understand that people are currently unhappy with our government.

The reasons for this are wide-ranging, but two top level themes cut across. First, there’s the general cost-of-living. American’s free-floating anxiety flows from things like prices at the pump, healthcare cuts that are driving up costs, and the ever-increasing costs of groceries and other consumer goods (rightfully attributed to government decision points like unfair and illegal tariffs).

And second, there’s the overall sense that government is corrupt. This has been driven home endlessly during this administration by stories of personal profit reaping and corporate connectivity from this President, Members of Congress, and even judges.

A new Brennan Center survey of 2000 registered voters this May finds that large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents share deep-seated concerns about government corruption, which most voters define broadly and blame for many of the country’s biggest problems going unaddressed.

And it’s not surprising that this theme is breaking through. People understand that government is prioritizing the wrong things and it impacts what they can afford. Open corruption by government officials and corporate interests that impact the working class occur regularly. This democratic backsliding and economic manipulation is a consequence of power being consolidated in the president and his allies and checks and balances failing.

So how do we effectively shift this trend? First, there is the obvious need to win an election. But that alone does not reverse the authoritarian slide. It merely gives a pro-democracy coalition the opportunity to do so. To truly shift power, political actors must embrace a bold approach to governing in a way that will quickly and tangibly improve people’s lives. And people must understand them to be doing this.

This April, Loft Beck Strategies did a survey that showed that Democratic aligned voters care far more about whether leaders will fight for them than they do about ideological alignment. By a 2-to-1 margin, those surveyed preferred someone they see as fighting to get things done over someone they agree with on the issues, or someone who seems earnest in their beliefs.

Those polled also want leaders to embrace bigger ideas over smaller ones by a 78-point margin, and want to see the next set of leaders do things differently.

Incoming leaders must shift their orientation. Wholesale. Progressive movements often win the battle of ideas but lose momentum when governing. Entrenched norms, risk aversion, and rigid processes that do not prioritize results tend to slow implementation and passage of transformative policies. Even in extremely favorable political conditions the window for bold change at the federal level closes quickly. Due to these factors, often despite good intentions, political leaders have helped maintain a political status quo that the American people have repeatedly rejected. Half-measures will not rebuild our country or restore the American people’s faith in government.

In an era of hostile courts and a dysfunctional Congress, speed and decisiveness are strategic advantages. As we saw with the COVID reaction in the opening days of the Biden White House, when leaders demand speed, (in this case for life-or-death reasons), government can deliver.

Conversely, the Biden administration waited nearly two years before advancing broad-based student debt relief, despite their ability to act under the HEROES Act and Higher Education Act. When the Supreme Court struck down student debt relief, nothing had actually happened yet. People never understood how hard so many were working to try and deliver it.

Over the past two decades, excessive caution, driven by things like litigation anxiety, has led to missed opportunities to deliver tangible results for Americans. In many cases, legally defensible actions that could meaningfully shift power were either never taken or implemented too late to create real-world impact. The absence of action, even when authority exists, feeds the perception that the government is corrupted and incapable of solving real problems.

In contrast, the second Trump administration has demonstrated that aggressive (immoral) action can reshape reality on the ground even when courts later intervene. Now this is not meant to advocate for the horrifying actions of the Trump administration, but instead to encourage learnings from their actions about risk tolerance and pace. They move fast and Americans, (in this case to their detriment), can feel the change.

Acting creatively, quickly, decisively and within defensible statutory authority is the only way to ensure real shifts in power that translate to actual lasting improvements for people’s lives. Or in other words, we need to take some big swings.

This is true for both the executive branch and the legislative. To take one example, any future administration could use existing statutory authority to promptly to deliver material gains on lowering drug prices by expanding Medicare price negotiation or using “march-in” rights to force a cost reduction for critical drugs. Congress could also act boldly, moving on key reforms to fix the Supreme Court, fight corruption, lift the minimum wage, create taxes to make the richest among us pay their fair share, and on and on.

At the end of the day, we need an attitudinal shift.

We need an approach that alters our willingness to take risk, allows for quick movement, and achieves bold reforms. This wholesale change to our approach will reap important dividends—both in actual achievement and interconnectedly, in American’s perspective on what and how government can deliver for them.

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Lisa Gilbert is the Co-President of Public Citizen