In the 96 years since Brookings was founded, rarely has change been as unpredictable, multifaceted, and consequential. Rarely have there been such acute and widespread doubts about the efficacy of democratic institutions. And never, in the Institution’s history, has Brookings had more capacity to play a leading role in meeting these challenges.
National morale is in the doldrums. Partisanship and polarization are more extreme and toxic than at any time since the late 19th century. Public optimism and trust in government are at an all-time low.
While our scholars deal with many issues, they are all, in diverse ways, addressing the question of how to make our political system more effective. They ask how to restore a sense of common national purpose across party lines and between the public and private sectors; how better to organize, protect and empower our citizenry—in short, how better to govern ourselves in an increasingly interdependent world that is suffering from a contagion of economic woes and political discontent.
Our scholars’ ability to generate fresh, bold, pragmatic ideas flows naturally from the Institution’s evolution over the decades. For much of our history, Brookings has been the premier Washington think tank, though always with an eye on the larger world. Toward the end of the 20th century, we moved aggressively outside the Beltway. We formed networks with metropolitan areas that were emerging as the drivers of the U.S. economy. At the beginning of the 21st century, we went global.
All this outreach—into the American heartland and across borders and oceans—enables us, as we like to say, to move from the local to the national to the global and back again. We can do that because of our distinctive advantage, which is the combined breadth and depth of our scholars’ knowledge and experience.
In order to foster collaboration and coordination among scholars in different fields, we have identified
four “All-Brookings” priorities: opportunity and well-being; growth through innovation; global change; and energy and climate change. Each of our scholars is working under one or more of these rubrics, and many are doing so together on an interdisciplinary basis.
This past year, even while many of our scholars were circling the globe, our single biggest preoccupation has been the converging consequences of the weak American economy, the bitter polarization of American politics and the growing concern, at home and abroad, about the capacity of the United States to maintain its leadership in the world.
In addressing these and other major problems of our time, we are determined that Brookings will be, as it has been in its long history, a trustworthy source of workable solutions. It is in that spirit that we will, in the years ahead, do our part to help end the jobs crisis; restore fiscal sanity to the nation’s accounts; build a consensus on the size, scope and mission of the federal government; define “smart growth” and how to achieve it; bolster the integrity of our electoral system; and adapt the conduct of foreign policy to the realities and opportunities of a changing world.
Moreover, we will do our job not only in the substance of our work but in the way our scholars advocate for their analysis and their policy prescriptions. As we see it, setting—and meeting—the highest standard of nonpartisanship, independent thinking and civil public discourse is the overarching All-Brookings priority.
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Strobe Talbott,
President
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