Get it America

A healthy society transcends two-sector politics to sustain three-sector balance. Instead of swinging fruitlessly between left and right, while paralyzing the center, it balances the influence of government, business, and community, in sectors that we call public and private and another we should call plural. These collaborate while holding the excesses of each other in check.

For two centuries, American society sustained such balance, more or less, to become the model of democracy. No longer. Over the past half century, private sector capitalism has come to dominate America, much as public sector communism dominated the Soviet Union, just on the other side of the political spectrum. There, government subjugated business and marginalized community; here, business overwhelms government and likewise marginalizes community.

In my book Rebalancing Society, I proposed the label plural sector so that it can be seen to take its place alongside those called public and private, also because of the wide variety of its associations—co-operatives owned by members and trusts owned by no one, including congregations, foundations, and NGOs, as well as informal social campaigns. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s about Democracy in America: "…civilization itself would be endangered” if people “never acquired the habit of forming associations…” The people of America certainly acquired that habit.

The remarkable success of America may be associated with the vigor of its private enterprises, but no less significant has been the role of its community associations, some of which have served to counter the assertiveness of business while pressing government to maintain balance. When asked by a black activist to support his cause, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly replied: "I agree with you; I want to do it; now go out and make me do it." Plural sector activism has made American governments do it.

Post World War Two, American society was arguably in better balance than ever before. Substantial taxes on the wealthy supported significant welfare programs for the disadvantaged, while the country experienced remarkable development—social and political as well as economic. Then, a half century ago, technology and Ronald Reagan took over.

New technologies that arose during the 20th Century had been taking a toll on community, a phenomenon political scientist Robert Putnam characterized as “bowling alone.” Automobiles took people off the sidewalks, and television took them out of the bowling alleys, to be entertained at home. Later came the new social media, to focus most everyone’s attention on a little screen, distant from whoever happened to be pictured on that screen. As a consequence, individualism, always a predisposition in American society, has been running rampant of late—at least, in the sense of acting for oneself, if not thinking for oneself. The number of community associations remains large in the country, but not their influence.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan set out to fix an America that wasn’t broken, at least compared with what followed. Union busting and the like removed basic protections for workers while drastic tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations set the stage for the coming class divide. Starved for funding, governments at various levels increased their reliance on regressive forms of taxation, including on sales and residential properties, while forgoing many of the post-war protections for the disadvantaged.

As Reagan left office in 1989—exactly two centuries after the founding of the Republic—the Berlin Wall came down, taking with it, not only communism in Eastern Europe, but also balance in America, thanks to a misunderstanding of what brought that wall down. Pundits in America had a ready explanation: capitalism had triumphed. They were dead wrong. Balance triumphed in 1989. While post-war America had been rather well-balanced across the three sectors, the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were utterly out of balance, in favor of public sector government. People there, fed up with the consequential greed and corruption, brought that wall down.

Empowered by this misunderstanding, capitalism has been triumphing in America ever since. The tipping point came in 2010 when the Supreme Court legalized bribery, by opening the floodgates of public elections to private donations. Lobbying took off as never before, and the country's renowned democracy has been in free-fall ever since.

Today, America builds the walls, political and economic as well as physical, rendering the society increasingly divided. At one extreme are what might be called the filthy rich, at the other, the dirt poor. In between, tending toward the wealthy, are the comfortable, many of whom live off that wealth—as lawyers, accountants, consultants and executives, as well as no few academics. And next to them, tending toward the poor, are the beleaguered, who struggle to meet inflating expenses with lagging incomes. Can they be blamed for asking why, as the country of their dreams gets richer, they get poorer? Many support a form of populism that promises deliverance while delivering deceit.

Donald Trump is not the cause of the current imbalance in America, just a striking manifestation of the imbalance that has been festering in the country since the 1980s. Elected as a populist to help the beleaguered, he leads a frontal attack on government programs that were enacted to protect these very people, while widening the class divide with ever more tax cuts for the wealthy. So much angst in the country for the insatiable greed of so few.

In discussing this three-sector balance with moderate Americans, conservative and liberal alike, I have found general agreement. After all, they share a common concern for stable progress, to preserve what is best for the country while changing what is not. Calling for balance across government, business, and community is hardly left-wing, or right, nor is it some sort of compromise between the two. It just reframes the political discourse.

How, then, to fix a broken America? Socialism will not do it, even if some Democrats could carry this tired idea into power. The country hardly needs another form of imbalance. Nor will fixing capitalism, the popular solution of the corporate right. (I have found eighteen different proposals for what can be called "adjective capitalism," from Accountable Capitalism to Sustainable Capitalism, with Democratic Capitalism—notice what's the noun—in between.) Capitalism certainly needs fixing, but that would no more fix a broken America than would fixing communism have fixed a broken Soviet Union. Enough of the lopsided "isms"—communism, socialism, capitalism, populism.

It is American society that needs fixing, and that will require people to get their collective head around balanced three-sector society beyond contorted two-sector politics. Business needs to be put back in its place, namely the marketplace, away from the public place, just as government needs to return to its proper place, namely protecting citizens with regulations and welfare alongside policing and defense. For this to happen, communities of the plural sector will have to recover their place, namely to restore and sustain balance in society.

Imagine a declaration of interdependence, to hold another truth as self-evident in America: that all people are created dependent, on each other, this earth, and its climate. What the country needs today is reformation, from the ground up, with communityship ahead of leadership. The "human resources" of America will have to reassert their resourcefulness as human beings, with a groundswell of campaigns that reverse what is wrong and renew what can be made right.

I do not use the word reformation casually. The Reformation of 16th-century Europe arose when people, outraged by the greed and corruption of their leadership, acted collectively. An obscure monk named Martin Luther posted a sheet of "theses" on the door of an obscure church, which his students took viral with the new social medium of the time, the printing press. The time has come for another reformation.

America today suffers, not from too much government, but from a misunderstanding of the role of government in a balanced society, also from a failure to understand the role of community in maintaining that balance. Winston Churchill reportedly claimed that the Americans always get it right, after they have exhausted all the alternatives. To get this right, there is one alternative that the people of America cannot afford to exhaust, namely balance, across government, business, and community.

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© Henry Mintzberg, 2026, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
These ideas are being brought together in a pamphlet entitled For the Sake Of Survival.