Let’s Have a Year-Long Moratorium on Politics--to Rediscover and Plan for California

Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature are to be commended for putting together a budget that more fairly meets the needs of Californians. And it is especially commendable that they successfully negotiated a financial scheme for education and transportation in the process.

The pathetic reality, however, is that this took a miracle, or what Speaker Willie Brown called “an awesome legislative achievement.” California is a magnificent ship adrift. What our elected leadership lacks is vision, the ability to see what things will be like 10 years from now and plan, as historian James MacGregor Burns puts it, beyond one’s own ambition.

A way to generate such vision would be for the people of California to call for a moratorium on politics over the next year. Like the Year of Jubilee proclaimed in the 25th chapter of the Book of Leviticus, no bills would be introduced or passed during the next legislative session, except for those that formulate the budget. And the budget would be developed and adopted only after eight months of study, debate and planning.

That long-range planning process would commence on September 16 when the current legislative session ends and extend until June 30, 1990. Campaigns for state political offices would not be allowed to begin until July 1, 1990.

All Californians would be invited to participate in the debate about the shaping of our future. Legislators and the governor would go out into the local communities and listen to the people.

With all due respect to the many conscientious legislators of both parties and in both houses, what goes on in Sacramento year after year is absolutely insane. Since January, 4,599 pieces of legislation have been introduced, hundreds of them restructured with countless amendments. That’s ridiculous! No legislator can keep track of the bills, let alone understand them and how they all fit together. This is essential for the responsible development of public policy.

What is worse is that their overriding concern and preoccupation is not principled law-making, but getting elected the next time around. This is commercialized politics marketed for an increasingly disconnected electorate of consumers.

The newly framed abortion question could provide a marvelous opportunity to reconnect the electorate and involve them in the vigorous public debate that is the stuff of democracy. But, because of the commercialization of politics and the lack of vision, what the campaigns of 1990 promise is a thoughtless and fruitless exchange of loud and angry slogans, playing for the polarized crowds.

That’s the way things will go, unless and until we the people start taking responsibility for our future and stop leaving politics to the politicians. We must re-enfranchise ourselves in the knowledge and skills necessary for effective citizenship.

And we can change. It’s already happening in a number of communities throughout the state. In 1988, for example, it was not the politicians but people organized at the grass-roots in the inner city of Los Angeles who brought about an increase in the minimum wage for California workers. Similar church-based community organizations are working from a shared vision of what they want their cities to be like to solve the drug problem as it menaces their neighborhoods in Oakland, San Jose, Anaheim, Santa Ana and San Diego.

We need to revitalize the traditional seedbeds of civic virtue: families, churches, neighborhoods and local communities. There we need to talk to one another about what is important to us and how we want to live together as communities of mutual support. What are the truths we hold to be self-evident? How do we realize them and live by them in our public life?

With this as a start, we can begin to come to grips with the issues that remain unaddressed in most political campaigns, from environmental degradation and urban decay to the feminization of poverty.

Hunger, homelessness and the lack of access to basic health care are the most blatant symptoms of a system that is not working. There is no reason that the system cannot be made to work. But that will never happen unless we reject the short-term, piecemeal, quick fix finagling and manipulation of a fragmented system that has masqueraded for enlightened government for too many years.

Perhaps the most important thing to be hoped for from a moratorium on politics as usual is that during that time someone will come up with an idea for how we can do away with the commercialized politics in which wealth and technical expertise determine public policy.

A global consensus is emerging that, as we stand on the brink of the 21st Century, we face an unprecedented time of reckoning, a singular moment of opportunity. But without radical change and recovery of civic virtue, we will stagnate in the vicious circle of visionless, self-serving and ultimately self-destructive commercialized politics.