Philip K. Howard, David Brooks, and a Call to Personal and Positional Responsibility ─ Transitioning from a Currently Failing Culture into a Successful One

© 2010 Peter Free

 

24 September 2010

 

Personal and role responsibility, where did they go?

 

Columnist David Brooks has a gift for putting cultural problems into perspective.  Yesterday he wrote about the frustration ordinary Americans are feeling as their country seemingly disintegrates around them:

 

The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another.

Financiers send the world into recession and don’t seem to suffer. Neighbors take on huge mortgages and then just walk away when they go underwater. Washington politicians avoid living within their means. Federal agencies fail and get rewarded with more responsibilities.

What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility.

 

 

© 2010 David Brooks, The Responsibility Deficit, New York Times (23 September 2010)

 

Philip K. Howard’s ideas about a flawed American legal and political system

 

Brooks credits Philip K. Howard (whom I also recommend reading) with sound thinking about our culture’s decaying ability and willingness to attribute responsibility and accountability.

 

Howard believes that the interwoven thicket of American legal and political systems actually get in the way of accomplishing both.  His solution is to give individual people the responsibility to act and then hold them accountable for results.

 

This is a simple, conservative idea.  It should appeal to core America.

 

Changing systems that get in the way of attributing responsibility and accountability may be difficult to do ─ but that goal is worth aiming for

 

Changing the prevailing legal and political systems may be difficult to do.  But that’s the point.

 

Increasing personal/positional responsibility and accountability is a conservative goal that sound American leaders should aim for.