Political discussion today is poisonous, but some people and organizations are trying to make it more substantive and constructive.

My friend Les Francis highlights several projects. Running to Govern is a group of “young, skilled political organizers and policy wonks who will labor only for candidates–Republican or Democratic–who are pledged to work toward solutions to our nation’s most pressing problems.” Les also mentions a bipartisan group of retired Members of Congress, including John Porter (R-IL) and our former colleague David Skaggs (D-CO), who are working together on proposals regarding “budget deficits, entitlement reform, infrastructure, and national security, the threat of terrorism, global competition and education reform.”

Finally, here is a highlight tape from “AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy,” this past summer’s national citizens’ deliberation.

Senator Susan Collins writes, “in modern times, I have not seen the degree of bitter divisiveness and excessive partisanship now found in the Senate.” That is probably an accurate description of the Senate and the country as a whole. We have sorted ourselves by party and ideology and are hurling outrageous invective across lines of political division. That is bad, not because politics should be polite and warm-and-fuzzy, but because bitter rhetoric drives people out of public life, whether they are contemplating a run for office or simply trying to follow the news. The field is left to professional advocates and interest groups. Also, when we are sharply and angrily divided, we cannot understand each other or work together even when our interests and values do overlap.*

So I agree that the present state of discourse is bad, but I do not share Senator Collins’ view that ideological moderation (her own declared philosophy) is the solution. Congress is tangled in invective because Americans are angry. Americans are in an especially bad mood because the economy is terrible. When the economy is poor, trust and comity fall because people naturally develop a zero-sum, suspicious attitude toward institutions and toward one another. See Eric Uslaner, The Decline of Comity in Congress (1997) for evidence.

At least part of the solution must be to improve the economy. There are at least three leading prescriptions. The federal government could cut spending to balance the budget, cut taxes to stimulate investment, or borrow to subsidize state governments and stimulate demand. I must say that I find the third option much more plausible than the first two, but all have supporters.

What we are actually doing, instead, is the “moderate” thing. The stimulus package was an even mix of tax cuts, direct federal spending, and aid to states. The amount of the stimulus was capped at about 2 percent of annual GDP. Meanwhile, states are cutting their spending by comparable amounts. The net effect is very close to a wash. That doesn’t fit any coherent theory of macroeconomics, but it represents a compromise that Susan Collins and a few other Senate “moderates” voted for. If it was poor economics, then moderation contributed to the economic crisis and prolonged an important cause of incivility.

What’s more, because the bill was such a compromise, no one can see clearly what theory was tested. Many Americans believe that the administration just tried a radical, leftist strategy, which is certainly not true, but we didn’t try supply-side tax cutting either. We muddled through the middle, and the results speak for themselves.

*Compare Federalist 60, in which James Madison criticizes Pennsylvania’s “Council of Censors” (which had met in 1783 and 1784) as overly partisan. He wrote: “Throughout the continuance of the council, it was split into two fixed and violent parties. … In all questions, however unimportant in themselves, or unconnected with each other, the same names stand invariably contrasted on their opposite columns. Every unbiased observer may infer … that, unfortunately, passion, not reason, must have presided over their decisions. When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.”

Cathy Cohen, a distinguished political scientist at University of Chicago and the PI of the Black Youth Project, writes:

When record numbers of young African Americans turned out to vote for Barack Obama nearly two years ago, political pundits predicted the start of an important and positive trend. Socially marginalized young blacks buoyed by the election of the nation’s first black president would supposedly begin to see themselves as newly politically empowered and engaged. …

So how is it that heading toward midterm elections in November, large percentages of black people ages 16 to 25 continue to feel alienated from mainstream American society and contemplating not who to vote for but whether to bother voting at all? … The bottom line is that we’re going to see lower turnout among young people next month, and we’ll see even substantially lower turnout among young black people.

She concludes: “If these young people don’t come out to vote, the Democratic Party will have only itself to blame. Instead of harnessing the energy of young voters across the board, particularly black ones, and nurturing their political momentum, President Obama and his party ignored them once the election was over.”

As we approach the 2010 election, one way to think about youth participation is by looking at the trend in previous midterm elections.

The last midterm vote was in 2006. That year, youth turnout reached 25.5%, up for the second cycle in a row. (Young African Americans, by the way, slightly beat young whites and all other ethnic groups in turnout that year.) So we could set 25% as the baseline for youth turnout and declare success if 2010 sets a higher mark, which remains possible. If we keep seeing upward progress of, say, two points every four years, then we could reach 50% turnout by the year 2060. (Although I will be 93 then if I’m lucky enough to live so long.)

Another way to look at this issue is the way Cathy does. We should have much better turnout. In the 1800s, more than 90% of eligible voters outside the South voted in some years, a rate that remains common in many other democracies. What would it take to move us from our current rate to an acceptable one? I’d advocate for political reform, but some kind of transformational event could also help.

Now imagine that a presidential candidate recognizes the potential of a diverse and energized young population to exercise political power. He develops a powerful bond with them and offers them exciting ways to engage with his campaign. More than half of eligible young voters turn out, and two thirds of those vote for him. He wins, thanks, in significant measure, to their support.

This sounds like the basis of a generational transformation. And yet two years later, we are asking whether youth turnout will rise to 27% or fall to 22% or 23%. It is not too soon to ask Cathy Cohen’s critical questions about the responsibility of our political leaders for missing a remarkable opportunity.

We are morally obliged to treat our fellow human beings and their communities as subjects in development. In this post, I take a stab at defining “development” and a developmental ethic.

Any theory of development expects constant change, as opposed to a theory that assumes stability, ignores the dimension of time, or overlooks the potential for bad things to improve. Development is not random change, but it also is not fully pre-determined and predictable. When something develops, we can say that changes occur because the object is moving toward some kind of objective or end, whereas ordinary physical objects change only as a consequence of what is done to them.

In the case of a biological organism, we are able to talk about “development” and change toward objectives or ends because the physical structure of the object includes guidelines for its own growth and transformation (mostly encoded in its genome). In contrast, we would not say that a mountain “develops,” even though it changes, because there is no design encoded in it that makes it change in a particular direction.

Human beings’ development is more complex, because we are able to reflect on our own trajectories and strive to change them. Not every influence is random or encoded in our genes. On the other hand, we are never fully free, because our developmental course up until the present influences our efforts to change. Thus development can involve intentions and self-consciousness, but it is not simply a matter of choice.

Nor do human beings pass through automatic “stages.”* Personal decisions and external events and opportunities disrupt the standard progression and can produce wide variation. Nevertheless, some phases or periods of development are encoded genetically, or are deeply embedded in our cultural traditions, or come logically before or after other phases. For example, there are important reasons that individuals typically babble before they talk, learn to read before they become sexually active, attend school before they vote, fill the roles of children before they are parents, and hold jobs before they retire. Some of these sequences are biologically necessary; others are wise conventions; and some might be mistakes. To think developmentally is to pay attention to the typical (and atypical) sequences and the timing of opportunities and experiences. The usual course of human development is open to critique but it cannot simply be ignored.

The same is true for communities, institutions, and other groups of human beings. Like individuals, they have developmental trajectories that are shaped by their initial designs, constrained by logic, affected by random events, and yet susceptible to deliberate alteration by the group itself. Sun Belt boom towns are at a different stage of development from Rust Belt inner cities. The government of the United States has developed rapidly since the ratification of the Constitution and cannot now reverse course. To think developmentally about a community is to take its past seriously and not to imagine that it can simply start over from scratch, but also to recognize the potential for deliberate change.

An ethic of development, then, is a particular way of making judgments and intervening in the world. It does not presume that every person, community, or institution has equal merit and virtue: some are better than others. But if we think developmentally, we are alert to the ways that the past has shaped each one’s present, the limits of choice, and the potential for any person or community to change for better or worse.

For example, I know college professors who are offended that their students are relatively superficial and undisciplined thinkers. That perspective fails to view students as individuals in development; their thinking will change rapidly. On the other hand, if you are a college teacher who simply tolerates and expects your students to think immaturely, you are not contributing to their development. If you try to make them think better, you ignore the inevitable responsibility of human beings for their own development. But if you leave them to do and think whatever they want, you forget that healthy development requires guidance and support. If you treat a 12-year-old just like your college students, you are unreasonable. But if you try to shepherd a fellow adult intellectually, as you would your own students, you misunderstand your limited rights and responsibilities for other people’s development. In short, thinking developmentally is not easy—it raises a host of empirical, strategic, and ethical questions—but it is indispensable.

*Important stage theories have been presented by Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others. These theories offer important insights, but I am persuaded by a general critique. The idea of stages makes the developmental process seem internally regulated and automatic except under exceptional circumstances. That is plausible for language-acquisition but not for civic or moral identity after early childhood. Development is a complex and variable interaction between the organism, its own norms, prevailing external norms, and other aspects of the environment.