“Change maker,” the term Bill Clinton used repeatedly to characterize his wife and nominee was probably an unfamiliar term to most in the convention hall and television audience, and not one familiar probably to most political journalists. But to those of us who spent time in the Yale Law School library, as I did (I graduated in 1969, before the Clintons arrived), it strikes a chord. It’s the term used by Bill Drayton, Yale Law 1970, who founded and still heads Ashoka, a non-profit which encourages and supports “social entrepreneurs” and “change makers” in countries around the world.
Drayton is one of the most thoughtful and intellectually and morally serious people I have ever encountered. Ashoka does not accept any form of government support and the change makers it supports span a wide ideological range. It seeks to encourage individual initiative and the formation of voluntary associations, to sustain and strengthen civil society, and has had remarkable successes. Disclosure: it’s one of the organizations to which I contribute money every year.
Bill Drayton overlapped with and knew the Clintons in law school, and I am sure Bill Clinton’s use of the words “change maker” was inspired by his example. But there’s a difference: most of the examples the former president cited were of his wife working to change government policies. Some of those changes (encouraging adoption of children in foster care) are things conservatives strongly support, and of course there is a role for government in many aspects of life.
Drayton himself worked in the Carter administration EPA, where he developed the policy of emissions trading, using markets to reduce air pollution, which proved to be much more effective than government micromanagement of emissions at particular sites. But government, as Peter Thiel argued persuasively at the Republican National Convention, has become an increasingly clunky and incompetent instrumentality. And unlike Ashoka’s change makers, government is slow to innovate and persists in funding programs that simply don’t work.
So despite Bill Clinton’s description, it’s not clear that a Hillary Clinton administration would encourage effective change making.
