(CNN) -- One hundred and sixty-five years ago, in
Coloma, California, a carpenter named James W. Marshall built a sawmill
to harness the power of the American River. Below the waterwheel, he saw flakes of metal
where the spent water flowed. Marshall marked the moment saying, "I
have found it." He had discovered gold in California and more: For the
next century, our nation would mine its future in the Golden State.
By the 1950s, California
had manufactured an optimistic nation's dreams, brought them to life in
the steel and smoke of industry and then captured them on celluloid.
Business bloomed in deserts, nourishing one of the world's great economies. A green Eden of farmland, the Central Valley where the sun shone 300 days a year, grew one third of America's produce. Innovation followed discovery: Silicon, it turned out, was even more valuable than gold.
California's public
sector also boomed. The state built a web of roads, bridges and
aqueducts that shamed their Roman inventors. It funded world-class
universities to prepare beach boys and California girls for lives of
endless promise.
Alex Castellanos
To see where the rest of
the country would be in 20 years, we could look at California. But the
roads to success and failure are often almost the same.
As the state gorged on
its success, California's transportation arteries grew clogged. The
public sector's blood began to thicken.
Californians moved
faster, their problems grew more complex and their demands on government
accelerated. The state's aging public sector could not respond with
matching dynamism and flexibility.
Newsom: What to look for in Prop 8 case
Even as the state poured
more money into education, transportation and public safety, it
delivered less value in them. Government grew larger and more expensive,
with less and less to show for it. Finally, when the housing bubble
collapsed, state revenue did too. California's river of gold dried up.
The waterwheel would not turn.
Today, California owes hundreds of billions: $300 billion alone in pension obligations. Even after Gov. Jerry Brown's effort to pay down $28 billion of immediate debt, California's liabilities for retiree pensions and health care exceed what it spends for all state programs combined.
California's future looks
anything but golden. Taxpayers who don't want to be left footing the
bills are in exodus. The state's politics is as paralyzing as
Washington's. To see our nation's bright future in 20 years, can we
still look at California?
Maybe so. Sometimes, the first green shoots emerge in the forest where everything burned.
---
Gavin Newsom is
difficult to classify. Tall, slim and rakishly elegant, he could be the
American reincarnation of British actor David Niven. A contradictory
combination of left and right, he is a liberal hero for legalizing gay marriage in his city and a liberal villain for reforming its overly generous welfare cash payment program.
The 45-year-old Newsom, a
Democrat who is now California's lieutenant governor, is more than a
government theorist, however. He owns 17 small businesses
with about 1,000 employees. His confederation includes three wineries
that make luscious, fruit-forward elixirs. In business, he is a
swashbuckling entrepreneur whose motto is "anyone who is not failing
isn't trying hard enough." What is most revolutionary about Newsom is
that in government, he's an entrepreneur as well.
When Newsom became mayor
of San Francisco, he found a city with little money to meet social
needs and behind Estonia and South Korea in digital governance. His push
to modernize San Francisco without expanding its dysfunctional public
sector is the launching point of his new book, "Citizenville." It is a fertile garden of original thinking.
The lieutenant governor
argues that government's biggest problem is not that it is misguided but
that it is archaic. Newsom cites open-source software pioneer Tim
O'Reilly's analogy for government. "We think of government as a vending
machine: You put money in, services come out." When something goes
wrong, Newsom points out, we shake the vending machine out of
frustration. If we feed it more money, it is to little effect: Vending
machines are not particularly innovative or adaptive.
Our government is still
built on that model, Newsom reports, the outdated, industrial-age
paradigm of the factory, though everything else in our personal lives
and our private sector has moved past it. Simultaneously, an explosion
of technology, social media and e-commerce has created a more informed
and empowered citizenry.
A "citizenville," Newsom
writes, now has the power and connectivity to solve problems in new
ways, e.g., determining where tax dollars are spent, how crime is fought
and where garbage trucks go. Speaking through their laptops and
iPhones, people are increasingly able to organize themselves and solve
social problems, independent of the old, creaky, public-sector
industrial plant.
"Technology changes the
very nature of government -- from a top-down entity to a bottom-up one.
From one-way hierarchy to two-way democracy. From vending machine to the
cloud," he explains.
If we open the doors of
government to the private sector and make data accessible, we can
jump-start a new era of social innovation. Open up the doors of
government satellite data and you get Google Earth. Give Web designers
in Chicago and Oakland access to public police data, and they create
innovative crime-mapping tools that prevent muggings. Invent a digital
"currency" to reward citizens for participating in their own governance,
and small town decision-making becomes as interesting and involving as
Farmville. "The future is sharing -- open data, open participation, open
source, open everything," Newsom writes. "And it must happen at every
level."
Our old, marbled shrines
to bureaucracy have grown unserviceable and unaffordable. Can we
continue to justify them when mayors are using Twitter to address
constituent needs instead?
The lesson: The public
sector no longer has a monopoly on government. We are in a new world of
revolutionary and empowering technologies. Americans aren't waiting for
Washington or Sacramento to reinvent government for the next century;
they are creating an app for that. With it, they are creating a new path
for democratic vitality. Now, people-to-people government is an
alternative to one that flowed only to people from the state.
With new tools and
technologies, Newsom contends, it is time to redefine "government" to
seize the opportunities of a new day. Would we still rather be governed
the old way, top down, politically and artificially by plant managers?
Or bottom-up, authentically, naturally and organically, through our own
decision making and handiwork?
Perhaps this has been
the promise of the American experiment in self-government all along, and
we have only been waiting for the powerful and democratizing technology
of the communications age to seize it.
Once more, when we need it most, maybe California has discovered gold again.
