Policy, Politics, and Civic Voice

As their fellowship comes to an end, the Millennial Public Policy Fellows are using their final DM posts to reflect on their 11-month journey through D.C.’s think tank and public policy landscape. 

Political Reform Senior Fellow Lee Drutman once told me about a lunch he had with policymakers from both the United States and Europe. The lawmakers from across the pond remarked that, knowing that they will never constitute a clear majority makes them know that they will only get anything done if they work together, bringing down the kind of heated rhetoric and performance that makes politics a bloodsport here.  This highlights what will likely linger on my mind as I prepare to end my time here at New America: the relationship between public policy and politics.

Lee’s work on proportional representation indicates the very structure that determines how we send elected officials to Congress (a first-past-the-post system) structures the polarized, darkly competitive nature of our politics. This is not a new or innovative discovery that I’ve made and yet, during my time at New America, understanding the relationship between public policy and the political context in which it resides has taken on a new and fierce urgency.

What I learned here, or at least what will linger on my mind most of all as I make the leap to go full time into my next step as a graduate student is that there is no one-way street between public policy and the political machinations that help develop and construct it. More specifically, every battle over policy is also a battle over civic voice, developing with and against with one another.

At the beginning of my time at New America, I wrote about the unique forms of precarity that mattered to the Millennial generation with respect to unprecedented levels of student debt, cost burdens of finding housing, and an increasingly volatile jobs outlook. While I talked about this in my first blog post, I now have a much deeper sense of how these increasing levels of risk have dramatic and complex impacts on the civic engagement and political participation of young people as well.

Even more so, the work of people in has helped me think about this relationship between different spheres within the public policy space and how that shapes who feels empowered to participate in the political process. New America National Fellow Marcia Chatelain’s new work on the intersection of fast food and racial capitalism is a story of constrained choices in communities of color in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. It is also a story, however, about the ways that these deeply material constraints about the types of food we consume and the kinds of jobs that we have access to create unexpected political realities that matter in terms of the kinds of policies that we support and the representatives we vote for to enact them.

Another Millennial Fellow, Spandi Singh, has written extensively on the ways that finding policy solutions for content moderation on social media platforms, a still nascent and growing policy problem, can create more consequences than remedies while simultaneously subverting free speech for the most marginalized communities around the world. Reconciling the need to combat hate speech with the impulse to curtail civil liberties is a core question for governance in the 21st century going forward and yet, as Spandi has talked about here and here, this doesn’t mean that governments around the world would have uniform (or even positive) ideas for how to address it. These kinds of thorny, multi-layered problems don’t lend themselves to easy answers. What is clear is that who we ask to solve them have to attend to the policy space of finding innovative ways to protect users safety and freedom and the political context of who currently even has access to either of those things globally.

My own work on voting rights reform was in direct response to this relationship between public policy and political engagement. Originally, I started thinking about voting rights as a response to some work I was doing on minority representation. But as I dug deeper, I realized that existing law, which varies dramatically from state to state, was almost always passed as a result of state legislatures trying to shrink or expand the right to vote for communities of color. The government is never a passive actor when it comes to supporting the representation of its citizens.

Even as the Supreme Court lurches even further rightward and it seems like polarization gets worse by the day, public policy has more roles to play than we might think at first glance. Understanding what these counterintuitive roles are, like empowering communities and decreasing polarization is critical because with as the battles to control our statehouses and courtrooms continue to intensify, we still have to find new and more imaginative ways to combat the forces that separate us into increasingly calcified camps.

I’ve been lucky to be here at this time both in my life and also in the life of American democracy. It’s not an easy time to live in DC. It sometimes feels like you can’t even talk to people for fear of having to deal with a viewpoint that is antithetical to your humanity. While understanding public policy as an outgrowth of these times is bracing, it can also be comforting because the fight is never over.