Everyday Freedom

Fairness went too far.

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What follows was written by Mary Williams Walsh, managing editor of News Items.

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Every week the polls get more fantastic and incomprehensible. How to explain that millions of Americans think the country should be led by a sex offender and tax cheat? A purported billionaire who’s been through business bankruptcy six times? A four-times indicted defendant who won’t pay his personal attorney?

Philip K. Howard has some thoughtful answers in his forthcoming book, Everyday Freedom. The book isn’t about Trump—in fact, Howard doesn’t even mention Trump in it. It’s about the circumstances that have turned so many Americans against their democratically elected governments—city, county, state, federal—allowing the Trump “movement” to flourish.

“We have a system of government that’s designed to fail, and that’s designed to give us Donald Trump,” he said when I called him recently to ask about Everyday Freedom. “Trump is just a symptom of system failure.”

System failure is going on all around us—the 911 operator who puts you on hold; the outsourced federal “processing centers” that are months behind on essential tasks; the public-school officials who do nothing when told a six-year-old has a loaded handgun in his backpack; the mandatory D.E.I. training that says you can’t say “pregnant women” anymore—now you have to say “pregnant people.” We’ve all seen versions of it. We get steamed up about it. We go online and commiserate about it. But most of us don’t think about it in analytical terms. That’s what Howard does.

Howard has spent decades disentangling government tie-ups, especially on public-works projects. As a director, and later chairman, of the Municipal Art Society in New York City, he helped to preserve both the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal and the glitzy light shows of Times Square, both once on the endangered list. In 1990 he took on the unenviable task of organizing opposition to Trump’s grandiose plan to build “Trump City” on the Upper West Side. (The development was eventually scaled down and renamed “Riverside South.”)

As founder of Common Good, a nonprofit organization, he has advised top elected officials of both political parties (including Trump, as a member of Trump’s short-lived CEO Council).