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You call me the “Silent Killer.” True enough, I’ve done in almost 90,000 of you. Also murdered a big chunk of your GDP. But today I won’t be silent.

America, you ought to be ashamed of how you’ve been fighting me. I’m going to challenge you to do better—and now tell you how.

Why the friendly advice?

I enjoy the sport of our struggle. I thought I might now even up the match a little, for the next time around. And believe me—there will be a next time.

So where to begin?

First, forget the blame Olympics. Your people are in a raging but unproductive argument about who’s been most at fault for my destruction: Trump’s leadership, Obama’s poor preparations, Chinese malice. Forget the rear view mirror.

Think Differently

Instead, look now in your own mirror—and confront your democratic identity. You’re a big, complicated self-governing society—fundamentally vulnerable to my kind of attack. Your nation is open, diverse, and regionally differentiated. You love liberty in speech and action. You thrive on debate about what to do in a crisis. Compared to places like Germany and China, your complex and freedom-loving culture makes my job a whole lot easier.

Face your real strategic problem: you aren’t playing to your democracy’s strengths. Winners leverage what they do best, and mitigate the rest. Take a hint: up your game, by changing how you play it.

Five Tips

1.Depoliticize your processes of detection and action—but not too much.

You didn’t catch onto me at first, though experts warned you. You weren’t paying attention, you weren’t prepared: not enough science to understand me, nor testing to track my spread. And you still haven’t gotten serious about that. Fast and stealthy, I continue to do plenty of needless killing.

Meanwhile, you’ve made yourselves even more vulnerable—turning me into a political football. As the clock ticks, I continue to get thrown around by different factions, arguing how big a deal I might be, and whose fault is that.  

America: democracy means politics—but there are two kinds. Good politics is deliberating and debating a crisis, and what to do about it. People argue, but at their best, come to better answers together.Alas, bad politics is also part of democracy.  As when elected leaders drive short-term personal agendas, selfishly bypassing the common good.  They downplay risk to avoid telling citizens fearsome news, or about painful solutions a crisis requires. They kick the can down the road—to get reelected before the storm hits.

How to fix that? Because we viruses can wreak such havoc, you’ve got to re-balance how your experts and elected leaders work together, to guide your people how to defend against me.

First, shore up the independence of your experts, so they can report unbiased data, and truth-tell publicly without fear of reprisal. They must be free to recommend best science and best practice. Perhaps you should re-charter your CDC (or create a dedicated pandemic advisory board) as a standalone institution:  more like the Federal Reserve than a cabinet department.But don’t turn those experts into sacrosanct priests: sometimes they get it wrong. You must demand that they advise transparently, about levels of certainty, and the risks and rewards of potential courses of action. They don’t mandate policy, but work with elected leaders to help develop the best trade-offs for the nation. And there will always be trade-offs.

Good politics is part of the process: expert recommendations balanced by citizen voices—subject to debate and challenge, and accountable to civic judgment. Your elected leaders set final policy—but they too must be subject to debate and challenge, accountable to citizens. All parties must answer: how well do the solutions proposed support the long-term common good? What risks and sacrifices are we willing to endure together for that?

2. Worry less about your leaders, more about your citizens. In your hospital ERs and local communities, I hear longing for better leadership: “Where is our next FDR, to steer us through this crisis?”

Hope all you like: democracies always have leaders both good and bad. Ain’t gonna change.  

Shift your focus towards the real democratic power: your citizens. Invest in the people who will choose your democratic leaders, and work with them to build nationwide pandemic defense.

Start at the bottom and ensure their basic needs—food, shelter and healthcare. My destruction falls most heavily on your poor, who disproportionately work your critical front-line jobs—and are dying at higher rates. And don’t think that today’s government relief will be enough to stem the social inequality now shredding your democratic fabric. You have to fix that too.

Next, build your citizens’ pandemic awareness—engage them honestly about what must be done to halt me (I grudgingly admire Governor Cuomo’s daily briefings).

Longer term, improve your education system. Too many of your children lack the scientific proficiency to fight future pandemic wars. Too many are ignorant of your nation’s history, and its traditions of sacrifice, empathy, and volunteerism. Build these capabilities to strengthen your future citizens’ defense.

3. Develop an integrated public health system. You have world-class hospitals, medical schools, pharmaceutical companies and research institutes. Thanks to their innovation competence, you’re now accelerating development of therapies and vaccines against me.

But I still have a big edge. Because your open, market-based society fragments the relationships among all the many players who must seamlessly work together to deliver civic health. Researchers and hospitals are under-connected with your primary care and community facilities. Add in your upside-down-incentivized insurance providers, vulnerable supply chains for equipment and medicines—so easily do I slip in and through the patchwork of it all!

For all your pathogen foes, you need a fully-integrated, more collaborative system that harnesses all assets smoothly, continuously learning and taking action to curb every new pandemic threat.

4. Renew the advantages of your federalism.

Your federalist system, a great asset of your democracy, has lost its way. Its complementary roles and responsibilities once enabled you to be both big and small: Feds handle big investment, standard-setting, specialized assistance; states, closer to communities, provide citizen-facing services, tailored implementation of standards, customized local practices.

But now, lucky me, the system is breaking down: confusion and conflict about sourcing and allocating critical supplies; turf battles about decision-making; persisting arguments about relief funding.

Some more friendly advice: first, revisit and clarify who does what for pandemics like me. Second, take better advantage of all the experiments in your “laboratory of democracy ” that the dual system provides.  If some states want to roar back to work, accepting the risks of higher death rates, stop carping and observe what really happens. Study also lessons of states who move more slowly. Dramatically expand testing, so you can honestly assess the benefits, costs, and what works and doesn’t work—and manage relaxing or tightening social distancing as data unfolds. And get yourselves on the same page about the key metrics of success—you still seem confused about all the different data being collected and evaluated about my campaign against you—especially how to measure the right balance between stopping my curse and rebuilding your livelihoods.

BTW, while you’re at it:  why not pass a law banishing from all civic discourse the phrase “I told you so?”

5. Don’t miss the opportunity of this crisis—to prepare for the next one. Anytime some national disaster hits, my human hosts vow to fix mistakes and do better in preventing and managing next time around. But inevitably, all is quickly forgotten. Will this crisis be different for you?

Well, I’m skeptical. But let me finish by spooking you to reach for a higher standard.

You may end up beating me, but other deadly pathogens will darken your future. And some will be even more lethal than Covid-19. Because, unlike me, they won’t be accidental. They will be engineered by malicious human foes.

Foreign enemies have been inspired by your clumsy struggle with me. They see that America the Great is now surprisingly vulnerable to a pandemic. They will soon enough come after you—with weaponized mutations.  Trust me, pal: build up your democratic strength now—or say goodbye to your lovely and ornery land of the free.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed as the next U.S. Supreme Court justice? Depends who you ask. Democrats (mostly “nay”) and Republicans (mostly “yay”) are assembling their polemical narratives. Whether a man of “impeccable credentials” who “interprets the law as it is written” (thus the White House) or “your worst nightmare” about gun control (Senator Richard Blumenthal), who will “forever change your life if you are a young woman” (Senator Kamala Harris), Judge Kavanaugh is now another installment in the raging debate about what our democracy is becoming–or not. The partisan fight over Donald Trump’s latest nominee will rumble along until it reaches some kind of climax in the forthcoming Senate confirmation hearings.

Predictive Hermeneutics?

As is now the norm, Kavanaugh is being vetted for his legal history. Partisan warriors are preparing arguments based on hermeneutically-extracted fragments of the candidate’s former decisions and writings. The implicit assumption is that anything Kavanaugh once ruled about contemporary wedge issues (abortion, immigration, presidential authority, etc.) will determine his future stance on the Supreme Court (either a specific decision or the “legal philosophy” he will consistently apply).

Projecting people’s actions for years that lie ahead from what they thought a decade ago has its place–but it’s hardly a fool-proof algorithm. Think about your own career: do you want your boss to predict how you’ll make a decision in a complex situation tomorrow based on something you wrote years ago in a college freshman essay? If you’re striving to be a leader, shouldn’t people expect you to learn, develop, and grow in your judgment over time?

And isn’t that fundamental to what democracy is about–for people, and especially democratic leaders, not to follow mindlessly a given ideological line, but rather to listen and learn from one another, to grow more sophisticated about making decisions, and even sometimes change their minds? Doesn’t that make for a more unbiased and thoughtful Supreme Court? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to have?

A Thinking Leader Or A Partisan Robot?

So let’s suspend partisan fervor for a moment–and look upon candidate Kavanaugh as a potential leader joining the highest court in the land. Senators, please go beyond the predictive analytics of his past policy opinions. Don’t just ask Brett Kavanaugh whether he will, robot-like, judge just as he did in this or that case in the 1990s. Or eternally affirm a paragraph he once wrote for a now dusty law journal. Why not also ask questions about his capacity to become a wiser decision-maker in coming years? About how he expects to evolve his previous views as circumstances change? About his approach to learning on the job and developing as a leader over time?

Here are five different kinds of questions for probing this nominee, not as a partisan team player or lurking enemy–but as a would-be leader in one of our foremost democratic institutions:

1. “Mr. Kavanaugh, tell us about some bad decisions you’ve made in your previous work—and what you learned from those.” Everyone makes bad decisions sometimes—but the best leaders see mistakes as opportunities to improve, and learn from those setbacks. Reflecting on their errors, they gain perspective about how things go wrong, and how misunderstandings and prejudice get in the way of success. So, let us into your head, Mr. Kavanaugh, and relive for us some of your past bad calls—and how you grew better from them. And then explain what you’ll bring to your practice of decision-making as a Supreme Court justice, and reach for even higher excellence in coming years.

2. “What are some of the most common ‘cognitive traps’ that you struggle with in your decision-making?” New behavioral and brain science now explains why people often make bad decisions: why we tend to overemphasize bad outcomes over good as we draw on experience; why we often prioritize evidence to confirm what we already think; why it’s so hard to accurately estimate risk; how we misread social cues during a negotiation.

Everyone is caught, at least occasionally, by these and hundreds of other cognitive traps–but the best leaders become aware of when and how that happens to them. They are constantly reflecting about the  biases and faulty estimations that could be affecting their own decision-making. The framers of the U.S. constitution didn’t have the advantage of this new science—so let’s update our vetting process. Why not ask, “Mr. Kavanaugh, what cognitive traps tend to bias your judgment? What do you do to compensate for those?”

3. “How well do you learn from—and shape—others in group decision-making?” On the Supreme Court you’ll be part of a collective effort to decide difficult cases—with eight other experienced judges. You’ve done group decision-making in your previous work–served on other judicial panels, worked in the Bush 43 Office of the President, and were part of  the team supporting Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.

Decision-making within a group has its own particular dynamics: every member in some way influences, and is also influenced by, other members, and helps mold the final collective decision. The best leaders know how to do that, and also appreciate the nuances of good collective decision-making—embracing diverse and inclusionary perspectives among members. They help others frame and synthesize problems to be tackled. They strive for a constructive balance between generalist pragmatism and deeper expertise of specialists.

So:  “Judge, please reflect on your abilities for decision-making within a group. And then discuss the current justices of the Supreme Court—how do you expect to relate to these individuals, what will you learn from each of them? And what skills and experiences will bring to your new colleagues, to help improve the Court’s decision-making?”

4. “What critical future issues might make you reconsider your current beliefs about the law of our land?” Decisions of the Supreme Court will continuously influence the society and economy of America–and vice versa. Though “originalists” may strive to interpret the law per the intent of the Founders, even that intent must be contextualized within a continuing stream of innovation and change within our culture, and beyond: biomedical advances improving the span and quality of life; information technologies that enhance understanding but also threaten personal privacy and the integrity of democracy; global climate and demographic shifts that are altering the meaning of natural and man-made boundaries. So: “What, Judge Kavanaugh, do you see to be the greatest forces at work that will require  new or different interpretations of our laws? How will those alter the way you make decisions as a judge in the future?”

5. “In summary, how will you grow in your job as Supreme Court Justice?” Will you get smarter, wiser and better in your decision-making over the next decade? In what particular ways? If you are confirmed, who will Justice Kavanaugh be in the year 2030? Will you be thinking or seeing the world any differently than you do today?  How specifically will your growth as a leader bring more progress to tomorrow’s American people?

Originally published on Forbes.com

Brook’s most recent book provides a powerful case for democracy and how it can survive, based on historical analysis of civilization’s best known, long-enduring democracies (ancient Athens & Rome, modern Britain & America). Democracy flourishes only if citizens are willing to adapt and keep relevant the agreement—“the civic bargain”–that they make with one another to govern themselves, free of a boss. It is a lesson modern democracies must confront to survive the continuing challenges of today’s world.