Sequence is Everything

Imagine this.  Imagine that after the American Revolution, the colonies had immediately had a democratic election, postponing the decisions about a constitution until after the election.  The only candidates allowed in the election were those who had demonstrated experience as royal governors. And any criticism of them for prior actions was deemed contrary to the public interest and treasonous.   The result was a direct democracy with monarchists in charge (remember that there were sizable numbers of Tory sympathizers during and after the revolution), and public unrest was rampant.  The army remained strong to hold down the unhappy.  The result would of course have been either a series of short republics, a la France, possibly another monarchy, or most probably chaos followed quickly by re-absorption of the colonies by the European powers.  This, in essence, is the picture painted of current-day Iraq and Egypt by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post.  Those countries, following an elect first, then think about it, scenario are rapidly falling into a predictable chaos.  As Zakaria puts it, they put democratization before liberalization. That included domination by the majority Muslim Brotherhood of a quick, ramshackle constitutional assembly that enacted an at best partisan document for the new  Egyptian constitution.

For Zakaria, the good guys in the Middle East these days are the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco.  In Jordan, the king established a constitutional council to draw up a constitution, transferring some of the king’s power to a parliament and setting up an independent commission to administer elections and a court to oversee constitutionality.  It was approved and elections were held with a good mix of candidates elected.  Although the Muslim Brotherhood tried to boycott the elections, their effort failed, and the country comfortably accepted the results.  Morocco is following a similar path.

When I was learning to play a little (not much) chess from a friend who was an expert player, the mantra he constantly drilled into me was, “sequence is everything.”  The good player knows that just a small change in the sequence of moves in a complex situation can produce remarkable results.  Nowhere is that more evident than in the Middle East.  The Islamic Spring is being followed by hurricanes without structures having been built to shelter from them.  Part of the problem is cultural; civility is enforced by strength.  Maintaining dignity during passionate argument is so essential that insulting an official is made illegal in a useless attempt to control violence. In the west, insulting officials is so routine that no one notices.   But that is strong evidence that constitutions and laws should come before elections, not after.  The shelters are needed.

And, as Governor Christie mutters, candidates matter.  The American colonies were successful in their revolution in part because, instead of electing the most liberal of the monarchists, they elected the most conservative of the revolutionaries.   Patrick Henry was banished from their councils while the Constitution was constructed, and Jefferson was sent away to France.  Washington was a revolutionary leader, but not a revolutionary thinker.  Franklin, Hamilton and Madison were true moderates.  Electing before the constitutional framework is established to create a balanced political system ensures that either the strongest conservatives or the most passionate revolutionaries will be in charge, to the detriment of all.

The result of these sequence issues in the Middle East has been the emergence of what Zakaria terms “illiberal democracies.”  But such governments are naturally short-lived; they cannot cope with the stresses of constant societal change without the moderating structures to contain them.  Things will fall apart.  They will be torn between the needs of their people for orderly government and the anarchic ideals of the revolutionaries.  Egypt and Iraq, like many countries before them, will need a fresh constitution, balanced between all their interests, and moderate leaders to design it and to execute it.  They have some good role models, from the neighboring Middle East to Turkey to Indonesia to the western democracies to guide them.  It is important for the health of their nations and of the world that they study and learn from them.

The EU and General Electric

The Preamble is undoubtedly the finest writing in the U.S. Constitution, but it is also the most necessary.  Only constitutional lawyers can quote easily from Section I or 2, but just about all Americans can quote large portions of the Preamble, beginning of course with “We, the People…”, for that states the goals and purposes we all share. Political arguments in the U.S. are really about the priorities and nuances of those purposes, and never about their validity, for the first of them, “to form a more perfect union”, i.e., a political union of the separate states, has long since been achieved.

That’s quite different from another admirable kind of document – a good business plan.  I used really to admire the strategic planning operation at General Electric, for the way they started from scratch with their planning by first determining that GE’s fundamental business revolved around the exploitation of carbon-related technologies.  They knew that understanding purposes from the beginning was vital to a good enterprise in keeping it from going astray.

A solid understanding and statement of purposes is the common thread between the two kinds of documents.  Among other things, it helps to distinguish between them.  A political union and an economic joint venture are just not the same thing, and failure to realize that can cause the downfall of either.  The founding fathers had failed miserably at trying to operate the united colonies as an essentially economic venture, and not a very good one  – no foreign policy, a miserable domestic policy, a failed currency, famine everywhere and the Great Powers of Europe waiting hungrily in the wings to pick up the pieces of the surely doomed confederation.  It was their genius and their desperation that drove them to the Constitution, and they started it right.

That’s why I appreciate David Cameron for shaking up the EU by calling for a referendum on Britain’s membership in it.  I don’t agree with his politics, and he is in large measure fighting the wave of the future, but he is right in his strong statement of the need for clarification of the EU’s purposes.  Is it essentially a joint marketing venture, out to enable easy commerce between European nations and to provide a common front for promoting trade elsewhere (Cameron seems to think so), or is it a nascent stage of political union, aimed eventually to tie together Europe into one sovereign state, with common laws, policies, currency, etc., that form a true, and singular, nation?   Being unable to distinguish between the two is the real basis for the EU debt crisis.  Members of a political union do not treat each other the way Germany and Greece have in the debt crisis, but each member of a purely economic joint venture also has far more latitude for action than EU nations have had.  The EU needs to make up its collective mind.

If the EU founding fathers do, out of desperation, decide to “form a more perfect union”, I hope they too have the genius to begin with “We, the People.”  For that is the starting point for any nation that hopes to endure, a common identification among people, not just governments, and the wisdom to recognize it.  That is their great issue.  The American colonies did not have multiple languages and cultures and histories to separate them.  Europe began as its own world; not much outside it was recognized or reachable for almost two millennia.  But it is no longer a solitary world of squabbling states; it must stand or fall united.  It may do so as a new kind of “mega-nation”, or achieve at least some success as an economic joint venture, though the experience of Greece has already shown that small, solitary nations in the 21^st century do not fare well when pitted against the new breeds of corporate giants.  Europe is now surrounded by great powers from China to the New World to the emerging nations of Africa to Goldman-Sachs, and they too are willing to pick up the pieces.

Leaving the Frontier

In a column this week in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen offers the interesting insight that the current gun control debate is not really about guns at all.  And he’s right.  According to Cohen, the debate, and those long lines at the gun dealers, are all about fear of government.  That fear actually combines two fears, a concern that the government will come and take away guns as a means of protecting individual liberty and skepticism that government can protect against guns owned by “bad guys.”  Cohen does not delve into the logical absurdity of such a compound fear – how can a government strong enough to take away all citizens’ guns be at the same time not strong enough to protect against guns? – but does thoughtfully note that the Second Amendment is more fiercely defended than the First; you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater but you can bring in a gun.  And it ignores the reality that stable democratic governments around the world, successfully and peaceably, ban the private ownership of guns.  Among the democracies in the world, violent deaths per capita in America not only top the rankings, they are three times the number in the country that’s number two.

That mix of logical absurdity and unequal concern about different forms of liberty, and of the reality found elsewhere, should have been a clue for Cohen to delve a step deeper, but he (probably wisely) chose not to.  For it signals entrance into the jungle of human emotions we call the unconscious.  Any good Jungian would immediately recognize that we are dealing here with the Other, that part of our thoughts and emotions that we find so reprehensible that we deny having them at all, projecting them onto convenient targets outside ourselves.  Even saints have violent emotions and lascivious thoughts – remember Jimmy Carter’s Statue of Liberty comments? – but if we are not reconciled with ourselves, it’s much easier to blame immigrants or Muslims or teenagers, or government. The whole of living becomes them against us.  In other words, the enemy that we fear, and call oppressive government, is really ourselves.  If we were reconciled with our own nature, it would be much easier to accept that everyone, ourselves included, would benefit from reasonable regulation of our ability to do violence.

That projection of our own worst feelings onto others serves not only to paint them with an undeservedly tarred brush – why, for example, should an immigrant wish to behave any worse toward others than we would? – it also enforces an unworkable distance between us all.  When government becomes the hated Other, capable of committing our own worst impulses against us, we become incapable of working together to solve our greatest problems.  And that feeds our fear that in case of trouble, government will not be there to help us.  We create the government we feared.

The obvious question of course is why America’s attitude toward gun ownership should differ so widely from that of other democracies.  It is that we have an ethos in America of rugged individualism, shaped by our early frontier history; that ethos rejected the social niceties of European civilization in favor of solitary exploration, gun in hand, of a new continent. In that ethos, any stranger is danger, the Other, and a gun must be always ready for protection.  John Wayne is almost as much a symbol of America as Uncle Sam.  But in Leviathan, written at the same time as America was first being explored, Thomas Hobbes was describing that American frontier living when he called the life of mankind outside civilization one of “continual fear and danger of violent death … solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."   As Hobbes pointed out, the purpose of civilization is to move us beyond that.  Frontier living is a pathway to something far better, not a goal in itself.  When we enter real civilization, we check our guns at the door.

It is no coincidence that America not only ranks far in front in terms of violent deaths per capita, but that the American mortality rate for those under the age of 50 is the highest among the 17 nations of Europe, Canada, Australia and Japan.  Older Americans, as Harold Myerson of the Washington Post points out, have available a Medicare system that has much in common with the universally available health systems of the other countries. Younger Americans must rely on the rugged individualism of private provision of health services.  Our education systems that we like to believe are the best in the world are currently ranked about 26^th internationally and still falling. Other measures of the quality of life show the same kind of at best mediocre American performance.  As Myerson notes, what truly sets us apart internationally is the indifference we show our fellow citizens about the quality of their lives, and our own.  Behavioral psychologists describe our American culture as having an “empathy gap.”  Our emotional ties to frontier values ensure that our lives remain, relatively speaking, “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.”  It is time we set aside the emotions and values of the frontier and claim the civilization we first came to this continent to build.

Game Changers

My teenage grandson, looking at international issues, comments, “Everywhere you look, there’s a problem.”  That’s true, and we tend to see them just that way, as a multitude of messes, too much some days to even think about.  But let’s look at them another way.  Let me posit two groups, side by side, each historically convinced it has a culture superior to its neighbor’s, one prosperous while the other struggles, the struggling one seeking, sometimes violently, to share the prosperity of the richer, the richer disdaining the other’s economic and perceived cultural failures.  That could describe the Germany/Greece, or Arab/Israeli, or Latin America/U.S., or a myriad other neighbor relations around the world, or, increasingly, a world divided between a prosperous “North” and an emerging “South”.  The trouble spots have a common thread to them that we have a hard time admitting.  What do you do about the poor who are always with you when they live next door?  Many would say that extensive aid is simply “throwing good money after bad.”  It's better to battle for territory or resouces every step of the way.  Winning is what counts.  Yet the losers, the aggrieved poor, people or nations, in our globally linked, high-tech world, replete with destructive capabilities, are more and more capable of dragging the world down with them to share their misery.

There will of course always be the poor, individuals and nations, just as there will always be the selfish, con artists and corporations and other nations, who exploit them.  The situation as presented seems to have no solution.  It constitutes what game theorists and strategic planners call a “zero sum” game.  In such games (like chess or horse racing or football) a win for one side is always balanced by a loss for the other.  Foreign policy analysts are fond of describing power relationship dynamics between nations as “a chess game.”  Such zero-sum games, chess for example, typically begin on an orderly field or playing board and proceed through slaughter until only one side, itself badly mauled, remains, and the field is a total mess.  Thus, they constitute a process of sub optimization.  Each participant winds up with less than they had or could have had at the beginning, and the consolation is that the other party is worse off than they.  That describes much of our world today.

But there are other games.  One of my favorites is a jigsaw puzzle.  There, the total mess is at the beginning, and the object is to put the pieces together in a way that produces a coherent and beautiful result.  At the beginning, unless someone has sneaked a peek at the box cover, no one knows the final result, and what the intermediate steps will require.  The more complex the puzzle, the more participants are welcome, each putting together what they can, and the result is a picture satisfying to all.  The result is optimal for all.  That is the world as it could be.

What is required is the vision to see the situation in terms of larger projects in which the parties can cooperatively work toward solution.  I love the metaphor imbedded in the beginning jigsaw puzzle American toddlers play with, where they learn geography by putting together the pieces shaped as individual states into a picture of the whole U.S.  The reason the U.S. works as well as it does is because each state recognizes that it is not complete in itself, and must rely on the cooperation of other states.  That did not come easily; a civil war took place in the middle of the process.  But the result is greater than the sum of the parts.  Germany and Greece have a start toward the solution to their issues by having the vision to recognize the need to construct jointly a more viable EU.  Other trouble spots can share their own common vision.

The world contains many needed mega-projects these days, from climate change management, to modernization of the Middle East, to creation of a global solar power grid, to management of global food supplies, and on and on.  We need to begin organizing them in ways that invite the cooperative participation of parties currently in conflict.  Initially, they will be small, and riddled with conflict.  But the end result can become a beautiful world that fits together; the alternative is a field littered with the dead.

Reforming the Political Infrastructure

People scratch their heads over how we got into, and how we get out of, the stalemated politics that led to the “fiscal cliff” crisis these last few days; the answers go back a long way.  In a political science course I took years ago, the professor was fond of remarking on how our current American political structure is a fossil of 16^th and 17^th century Tudor and Jacobean England.  Any political structure has strong points and flaws, and our founding fathers were consumed with correcting the perceived flaws of the England they knew, from religious establishment to arbitrary monarchy to “rotten boroughs” to a “House of Lords” based on  inherited privilege.  So they created a political landscape of separation of powers, fixed terms of office, small electoral districts with residency requirements, substantial powers reserved to states, veto powers both in congress and in the presidency that require compromise, and a legal framework within which boundaries of action are determined not by a powerful president or opinionated congress, but by a court. All these served well to avoid the flaws of Tudor England; James Madison was one of the great political visionaries. But even Madison’s vision could not foresee the changes that time, demographics and technology would generate in the American body politic. For example, the America Madison saw was a young, agricultural America, replaced nowadays by an aging, urban country with vastly different needs.  What he and others created was for their time and for only the future as they could understand it.  And what they created has led inevitably 230 years later to a two party system prone to extreme factionalism that produces the kind of crisis we’ve just been through, with more promised to come.  In short, the failures of the political process these days result not so much from the failures of individual politicians as from a creaky political infrastructure built to solve the issues of 16^th century England, and will not go away until that infrastructure is fine tuned for the 21^st century.  Like our roads and bridges, politics will continue to fall apart until some major repairs are initiated.

Three major infrastructure features dominate our political problems these days.  First, the fixed terms and residence requirements for electoral districts mean that individual senators and representatives derive their power from a combination of local interests and affluent funders. They are immune from the many national party disciplines found in a parliamentary system, and as a consequence, national parties operate actually as a confederation of politicians whose real power derives more from local than from national interests. That’s why the Congress is such a mob scene these days.   This assures that only two parties will be significant at any given time – the party most likely to be elected and the party next most likely. It also assures that a coherent national strategy from each party for solving political issues during crisis situations will not exist.

Second, the residence requirement for electoral districts combined with the redistricting power of state legislatures at each census cycle has produced so many “gerrymandered” districts that congressional races are no longer determined by the general election, but by the primaries. State legislatures are generally beholding to one or another broad ideology, either red or blue, and ensure districts will elect according to that point of view.  But individual districts are often dominated by narrow views that only loosely fall within the ideas of the national party. Thus, primaries are dominated by party extremists who produce their own form of “rotten boroughs”, districts in which a splinter group of extremists can guarantee continuing election without regard to what their national party or the general electorate feels.

Third, the fixed terms two, four or six years in length for our representatives, president and senators encourage lengthy, expensive election campaigns which invite funding by special interests and consequent corruption. Third parties are forced out of the process by the residency requirement for candidates and by the sheer expense of it.  In a parliamentary system, by contrast, lack of fixed terms produces short, relatively inexpensive election campaigns.   The most expensive campaign, a separate election for the presidency, is eliminated altogether.  That, combined with national party discipline, which can involve placement of candidates in highly favorable or unfavorable districts as chosen by party leaders, means the role of special interests not interested in compromise is much more subdued, and room is created for the growth of third or fourth parties capable of forcing compromise and coalition in the national legislature.

We need, for real reform, to find changes that will encourage the growth of third parties, promote the development of unified strategies by national parties which can be voted up or down, reduce the expense of elections, and strengthen the role of national parties in planning solutions to our problems. We need not, and should not, “throw the baby out with the bath water.”   Changes might include, for example, making residence only within a state the requirement for the House of Representatives, thereby enabling placement of candidates by a state organization of each party, setting a fixed short campaign length to reduce expense, or limiting gerrymandering by establishing national standards for the creation of election districts subject to review in federal court. Whatever we do, the goal should be to strengthen the ability of the congress to reach solutions to national problems without excessive impasse.  The problems and issues of our 21^st century world move too quickly for us to continue 17^th century methods for their resolution.