Public Life 2.0

Public Life 2.0

Public Life 2.0


At 21, Andrei Cherny was the youngest White House speechwriter in American history. He penned speeches for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and was compared to political wordsmiths like Ted Sorensen and Peggy Noonan.

Drawing on his time spent in the trenches, Cherny, now 25, has just published a manifesto for government in the 21st century, The Next Deal: The Future of Public Life in the Information Age. As Cherny sees it, if American politics is to move beyond the scandal of the day, we need a truly interactive government in which politicians and the public collaborate to serve the common good. In short, Cherny says, we need to apply new economy innovation to government.

Wired: Your book talks a lot about American history. Why dwell on the past when your vision is for the future?

Cherny: Because America's gone through this sort of change before. The last big shift was from a decentralized agrarian nation into one defined by assembly lines, bureaucracy, centralization, and hierarchy. The questions we're dealing with today are very similar to what happened in earlier times. The types of solutions that people offered up 100 years ago - expansion of government, expansion of entitlement programs - while right for that time, don't fit now.

You call for more citizen participation in government, but young people, especially, seem apathetic about the process.

People point to political apathy, but if you think about this generation's experiences, that makes sense. We have a top-down government that is basically a black hole for energy and a quicksand for idealism. A generation that gets impatient when a Web page takes more than a few seconds to appear is not going to waste its time on a government that's not able to produce real solutions to problems.

So what has to change?

The old deal was basically this: If you give allegiance to large institutions - be they government or your factory or your labor union - they'll take care of you. In today's America, we have a lot more personal decisionmaking power. But the flip side is that people have to apply that power toward a larger community goal. I think that some sort of mandatory national service would do that. If you're going to take apart the old boundaries, there has to be something that takes its place.


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