The British conservative trying to make American politics more human

As a close adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron during his first two years in office, Steve Hilton helped to modernize and reform the modern Conservative Party in the U.K.

Later, after following his wife to the U.S. in 2012 for her job at Google (she’s now an executive at Uber) and launching his first tech startup, the digital fundraising analysis site Crowdpac, he wrote a book drawing from his experiences in the political arena and Silicon Valley. Released in the U.K. in 2015, “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First” argues for the radical decentralization of government power and warns of the negative societal impacts that giant conglomerates have in the business, education and health care sectors.

Now Hilton has reworked the book for a U.S. audience. It was released April 26 and published by PublicAffairs.

Hilton’s argument — that political power has become far too centralized and needs to be radically diffused in order to start solving the nation’s problems — is similar to one made in a new book by conservative intellectual Yuval Levin, “The Fractured Republic,” which will be released May 24 by Basic Books. But during a conversation with Yahoo News, Hilton made it clear that he has some strong disagreements with Levin’s emphasis on local “mediating institutions,” which include “neighborhoods … religious communities, fraternal bodies, civic associations, economic enterprises, activist groups.”

I sat down with Hilton during his visit to Washington, D.C., last week and asked him what he thought were the most radical proposals in his book. He named three: banning minors from unsupervised Internet use and from owning Internet-enabled mobile devices (he has chosen not to have a smartphone himself); a universal, ongoing home-visiting service conducted by government workers to help families after the birth of a newborn; and the idea that “the default setting for local government is the neighborhood.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Yahoo News: Why did you start Crowdpac?
Steve Hilton: We want to be the world’s platform for democracy. The largest type of participation is voting. Other components are running for office … without relying on the party machine.

You’re not a fan of political parties then?
I think the rationale for them is falling away. Like everything, it’s not black and white. … It’s been helpful to mobilize and organize, giving a voice to people who were literally oppressed by the system. I think now the effects are pretty pernicious in that you have this stale, entrenched way of viewing the world that stands in the way of a more interesting way of viewing the world, where labor and capital are not the only things that define and divide people.

Don’t parties serve as a brake on radicalism?
I think it’s a brake on radicalism, [but] I think we need big changes in the way the world is organized. … I’m certain that the party system will endure, but it would be good to dilute it a little bit with a more independent candidate. … Radicalism has to be combined with decentralization, so that in that sense you’re mitigating the risk of system-wide failure and you’re able to run truly radical experiments in a more local setting. And then if things work, they can be adopted elsewhere.

Is this about reducing the size of government?
I really hate the whole conversation about the size of government. I think it’s not helpful and not interesting. The real issue is the location and the manner and style and approach of government. The idea that you just cut it back and everything will be OK is completely wrong. This is the fundamental mistake that conservatives make when they get into this argument.

I couldn’t be more of a crusader against big, bureaucratic government. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it, I completely have that impulse, but the idea that all you have to do is just cut it and everything will be OK is completely wrong. We all want to cut the supply of government because we think there’s too much of it — too much spending and too much taxes. But if you cut supply without looking at demand, you end up with a mess or, more precisely, debt. No government can ignore the social problems that increase demand for government, so unless you solve the problems that cause government to grow, you will never in the long run cut government.

What do you think of the argument that many of the challenges to social breakdown should be handled by what some call “mediating institutions”?
To me, that’s a bit lame. I’ve read a bit of [Yuval Levin’s] book. It’s a little bit like the Paul Ryan approach, which is, “Let’s transfer the responsibility in funding federal programs to local charities, and they’ll do a better job.” They might, but they might not. This is a very ideological and not human argument. It’s a lazy, superficial, simplistic approach. Sorry to put it so harshly, but I get sort of irritated by it because I think it’s the sort of thing people say when they haven’t actually done policy work. … You can’t just do that. It is not the answer. You have to have some sort of accountability, particularly when it’s public money.

What are the most radical proposals in your book?
One of them is minimum viable government. The unit I think should be the default setting for local government is the neighborhood. It’s something human that everybody can understand. We should go through every service that government provides and ask ourselves, “How can this be provided at the neighborhood level?”

How would you accomplish that?
The power of example. … State and local leaders can demonstrate it. … They do have control over a lot of resources and policy. Potentially working through this system myself to show how that can be done. Running for office myself. … That is something I definitely think could be done. … You could say, “Look what happens when you put neighborhoods in control,” to show the positive side of a more human approach.