Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America

by Lou Zickar

“Is this America’s 1917 moment?"

That is the opening question posed by author and attorney Philip Howard in his latest book on bureaucratic dysfunction and the need for a new governing vision in the United States.

Called Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America, the book postulates that the U.S. is in the midst of a “major shift in the social order” – a shift spurred on, much like the Russian Revolution 108 years ago, by the failure of the ruling elite to govern the country effectively, and the populist revolt that has transpired as a result.

Of course, the leader of the current revolt is President Donald Trump, and in swinging “a wrecking ball at the status quo,” as Howard describes it, the President is giving the people who voted for him what they want. Nowhere is this more evident than in the effort by the Department of Government Efficiency to remake government that has so dominated the conversation in our nation’s capital since the beginning of the year.

As Howard rightly notes, a clear majority of Americans believe Washington needs “very major reform.”  Howard is a member of that majority.  He is also one of its leading voices, having testified, lectured, and written seven books on the need for government reform over the past three decades. His concern these days – and the focus for much of his latest book — has less to do with the wrecking ball that has been tearing through Washington than the question of what comes next.

Howard’s concern these days – and the focus for much of his latest book – has less to do with the DOGE wrecking ball that has been tearing through Washington than the question of what comes next.

“Where’s Trump’s vision of how government will work better the day after DOGE?,” Howard writes in the book’s introduction. “Toppling the old order leaves a vacuum that, without a new vision, can be filled by unpredictable new ideas for governing, sometimes catastrophically, as with the Committee of Public Safety after the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks in Russia.  Letting nature take its course after Trump’s wrecking ball is unlikely to end well, leaving a wreckage of public agencies, perhaps replaced by an AI-driven autocracy that would exacerbate populist alienation. 

“Democrats are strangely quiet, apparently content to wait until Trump fails. This works fine for Democrats as a business model: Opposing Trump is all they need to raise buckets of money. Interest groups will pay a lot to defend the status quo, and Democrats have no agenda to cut red tape or public pork. But standing for the status quo against the tides of change is not likely to be a winning strategy, however much money is funneled into party coffers.

“So here we are: Neither party has a vision for better government.  Democrats are in denial, waiting their turn to run a bloated government that Americans loathe. Trump and friends can sack Washington, but, as Rome learned long ago, the destruction of what’s weak and corrupt can leave people worse off if there’s no new plan. Retribution is a recipe for civil strife, not a governing strategy.”

Howard devotes the remainder of the book to outlining what he believes that strategy should look like.  The key tenets of the strategy will be familiar to anyone who has followed Howard’s work over the years, and are presented in three essays laying out a “new governing vision” for the United States.  In the first essay, Howard focuses on what he considers the secret sauce of American success — namely, that since our founding, we have been a nation of strivers.

“America’s culture of striving was born of exiles and explorers confronting the challenges of the wilderness,” he writes.  “Americans were not locked in to predetermined paths of the old world. We formed our own communities, with our own values. Unlocking human potential proved powerful not only for the colonists but also for later arrivals. Immigrants two centuries after the Puritans not only worked their way to a better life, but sometimes achieved greatness and riches, where their ancestors had been peasant farmers for a thousand years.”

“Toppling the old order leaves a vacuum that, without a new vision, can be filled by unpredictable new ideas for governing.”

Howard’s previous book, called Everyday Freedom and reviewed in our pages, focused on this flawed philosophy and how it has crippled American culture over the past five decades. In Saving Can-Do, he picks up where that book left off by offering up a series of ideas and proposals that will move our country away from the legal framework that is suffocating everyday freedom and toward a culture that puts a premium, and not a penalty, on striving. 

“Red tape is strangling the goose of American striving,” Howard writes. “The new governing framework must be an open framework, activated by human judgment on the spot. Law should set goals and principles, and provide a structure of authority and accountability.  Actual decisions within this framework are made by Americans taking responsibility. The aspiration is not mainly to deregulate — although American regulation is long overdue for a spring cleaning. The critical change is to put in place a governing system that empowers officials and citizens alike to use their judgement.”

In the second essay, Howard focuses on another kind of culture — one, he argues, that is not only critical to creating a culture of striving, but is essential to reviving the spirit of America and saving can-do in the United States.  It is the culture that can be found in classrooms and, more specifically, in healthy schools. “An effective school,”  Howard writes, “will generally have a culture where students feel cared for and inspired to do their best, where teachers feel a sense of ownership for their classrooms, and where principals have fostered a common feeling of aspiration and mutual trust.”

Unfortunately, he continues, public schools in America are providing anything but that kind of culture.  Instead, he argues: “America’s schools are treated today like other arms of government. But most governing responsibilities are regulatory or reactive to possible violations of law, and are governed by laws and regulations that are supposed to be uniform and general centralized. Schools are different from governing. There’s no reason for schools to be uniform … uniformity tends to destroy their spirit. Schools are supposed to provide the training and values for individuals to flourish, not to extrude them through a common mold. It’s hard to imagine a worse structure than one that organizes schools like a police function, handcuffing teachers and principals. Just as the country can’t flourish with decrepit infrastructure, so too it can’t flourish with schools that are organized with one-size-fits-all codebooks.”

Howard’s solution?  Reduce administrative bureaucracy and unions and give more authority to parents, teachers, and principals to “make the everyday choices needed to build and support effectives schools.”  He also argues that in some cases, public school systems are beyond reform and simply need to be rebuilt — which is exactly what happened in New Orleans following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.  “The transformation of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina,” he writes, “demonstrates what is possible when communities can start over — after the public school system was replaced by independent charter schools, high school graduation rates improved from 52 to 72 percent, and gaps between racial groups narrowed.  Not all the new schools were successful — about a quarter were shuttered for poor performance.  But the ones that survived produced materially superior results with far better school cultures.

“The aspiration is not mainly to deregulate — although American regulation is long overdue for a spring cleaning. The critical change is to put in place a governing system that empowers officials and citizens alike to use their judgement.”

“The secret to success of new schools in New Orleans was not educational genius or even better people … but simply the authority to make basic choices. New schools worked because, according to one school leader, ‘teachers and school leaders have more autonomy to be adaptive in the new system — they can improve more quickly, they can more easily make the small changes and decisions that need to be made every week and every year to better meet the needs of students and parents and teachers.”

Still, he concludes: “…no meaningful progress can occur until political and educational leaders acknowledge that the bureaucratic model of America’s public schools has failed. The control model fails because it crushes the human spirit and autonomy needed to build and sustain good school cultures. Those top-down frameworks should be abandoned, and communities empowered to rebuild America’s schools as local institutions rooted in local values and personalities.”

Howard’s final essay, “Escape from Quicksand,” focuses on the kind of framework that he believes should be put in place to meet the needs of America with regard to modernizing our infrastructure.  In trademark fashion, he studs the essay with recent examples of how the current legal and regulatory framework has let the country down.  In 2009, Congress passed a bill which allocated $5 billion to weatherproof older homes.  Under this legislation, it was estimated that 2,500 homes per month would be fixed in California alone.  Unfortunately, by the end of 2009, the number of homes that had been weather proofed in California totaled only a dozen. More recently, in 2021, Congress passed a landmark infrastructure bill which allocated $7.5 billion to construct a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. Three years later, only eleven charging stations had been built.

Howard contrasts this under-performance with the over-performance of the federal government during the New Deal.  As an example, he cites FDR’s creation of the Civil Works Administration in November 1933, which was headed by his friend Harry Hopkins and was intended to give jobs to the unemployed. Less than two months later, Hopkins and the CWA had hired over two million Americans — an achievement, Howard notes, which reflected the governing philosophy that was predominant in Washington at the time.  “The New Deal projects worked not only because officials had the legal authority to push ambitious projects forward, but also because those officials viewed their responsibility as achieving results,” he writes.  

Flash forward 90 years, Howard argues, and the governing philosophy in our nation’s capital has become just the opposite. It is a philosophy mired in bureaucratic procedures and shackled by a system that has replaced good judgement with rules and red tape.  Howard’s solution is to take a page from the past by returning to a system that empowers the individual, much in the same way that FDR empowered Harry Hopkins.  “Governing effectively is impossible until designated officials are empowered to make ultimate decisions,” he writes.  “America must return to the human responsibility operating philosophy envisioned by the Framers. The current system is built on the wrong idea of law. Law cannot make public choices. Moreover, while law can protect against arbitrary choices, it cannot validate which choice is best among a wide range of plausible options. Law instead is supposed to frame the responsibility of officials who, within legal boundaries, make choices that are politically accountable.”

Howard concludes the essay with three recommendations for a new framework to guide public decision making when it comes to modernizing infrastructure in the United States.  No spoilers here — you can read the recommendations for yourself when you read the book.  But it’s safe to say that the ultimate goal of the recommendations and the book is to outline a new framework for governance in America, one that not only promotes accountability, but produces results.

Like Howard’s more recent works, Saving Can-Do is a slim volume, coming in at just under 140 pages, including notes. But don’t let its modest size fool you.  This book packs a powerful punch, and provides a timely answer to those who support the underlying mission of DOGE, but are also concerned with what could – and should -- come next.

Lou Zickar is Editor of The Ripon Forum.

The Ripon Forum is published six times a year by The Ripon Society, a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 –Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.

SOURCE: https://riponsociety.org/article/saving-can-do-how-to-revive-the-spirit-of-america/