Impossible Choices

The trouble with understanding power is that everything you know about it you probably learned in kindergarten or before, and it’s wrong.  That playground bully (or your big brother) shoved you, and you concluded, one – that power is the ability to coerce, and two – that it is a property of the person (or later on, the organization) resulting from some intrinsic property like bigger muscles (or, again later on, from smarts or having lots of money.)  Both conclusions are wrong, or at least highly limited to playground-like situations.  Napoleon could have told you that as he complained bitterly about his inability to get his ministers or his generals to do what he ordered them to do.  But they are the basis of a lot of silly discussion going on these days on the editorial pages about “the decline of American power” in places like the Middle East.

The problem is that there are at least three different definitions of power, none covering all situations but all useful.  The first is the playground bully’s definition, the ability to coerce.  The second is the ability to get done what you want done; call it the diplomat’s definition.  I used to tell my staff that personal diplomacy is the art of letting the other person have your way.  If you’re willing to let others get credit for ideas you know you initiated, you can get a lot done that way.  Broader than the first, it presumes that skilled diplomats can get done what needs being done, and that failure to get things done is either a failure of diplomacy or a weakening of American power.  Either way, in international relations that implies the loss of some intrinsic ability, and it’s bad news for America.

Call the third the sociologist’s definition.  It describes power as a relationship between people or organizations based on dependency.  A (either person or organization) exercises power over B to the extent that B depends in some way on A.  If the dependency changes, the power changes.  Intrinsic capability does not count.  Dependency relationships change many ways.  A child needing help from daddy to climb upstairs may one day be helping daddy.  Many a person or organization suddenly set on a shelf wonders what happened, when in fact the change may have been in a relationship between third parties.  A local store where everyone bought may fold when a Wal-Mart moves in.  If that schoolyard bully grew up and went to jail (that sometimes happens to bullies) and you turned out to be his warden, the childhood power situation would be completely reversed.

The third definition is what is useful in looking at international relations.  The U.S. is powerful to the extent other nations depend on the U.S., either for money, for protection, for its buying ability, for resources or for its ability to influence.  Political and other changes around the world can change those dependencies, with nothing changing in the U.S.  The money of Saudi Arabia may eliminate Egypt’s dependency on U.S. aid; nothing has changed in the U.S., but the power relationship with Egypt has been altered.  Russia and China may oppose the RTP (Responsibility to Protect) doctrine because of their own internal problems with dissidents, and that opposition may take the form of sheltering Syria from U.N. intervention.  That shelter may embolden Assad to thumb his nose at the U.S.  Nothing here has changed.  The emergence of democracy and resource changes around the world has changed it from a bi-polar “cold war” place to a multi-polar globe – without changing American capabilities.  But America’s power relationships have changed.

We are no schoolyard bully, nor should we seek to be, yet two Yale Law professors claim today in the Washington Post that is exactly what we would be if we take military action against Syria without a U.N. mandate.  A U.N. mandate is impossible with the veto power of Russia and China in play.  So the professors’ reliance on principle leads to inaction in the face of a moral outrage. In the new multi-polar world, the best road for America is to lead in establishment of internationally accepted limits on morally abhorrent coercive behaviors.  But are we the enforcer of those limits also?  An argument can be made that the use of chemical or biological weapons anywhere is a threat everywhere. Is that justification for action when we ourselves have not been attacked?  The rules elaborated by St. Augustine for Just War are broader than the international law that has evolved from them.  Just War principles provide both justification for war in self defense, and war to prevent persecution of the helpless.  They would support our military action, but are not international law.  And the 17^th century taught us the dangers of allowing them to be.  Military action is a last resort when other choices are exhausted. There is no right choice.  It does not represent a decline of American power, but a changing world.

When there is no course but error, wisdom teaches to err on the side of justice and compassion.  That means some kind of action to prevent further harm.  Some “surgical” minimum intervention is called for, and that is what our strategists are seeking.  A warrant from the International Criminal Court indicting Assad for War Crimes might help, but is probably not possible.  Action must be taken within the present boundaries of the situation.  If that action can only be military, then military it must be.  Let us hope our strategists can find a way.

Voices from the Future

I walk down the street this morning on a lovely day.  The sun is warm on my cheek, but there’s just a hint of coolness in the air to make its warmness really pleasant.  The grass is green from all the recent rains, flowers are prolific all around, and the first dry leaves of autumn are cluttering a neighbor’s driveway.  Wait a second! It’s August, not October.  What are this weather and those dry leaves doing here? That’s the problem with climate change – for all the super-storms and record high temperatures, there’s just enough pleasant interludes to keep the nay-sayers happily convinced that they can talk climate change out of existence.  Of course they can’t.  The weather I'm enjoying is part of the rapid changes in the timing of seasons that's part of climate change.  This is the fluctuation of the thermostat as it seeks a new equilibrium.  But it’s nice to enjoy pleasant days like this; we may not get too many more of them for the next several hundred years.

We’ll adjust somehow to the changes eventually.  The coldest I ever felt psychologically was reading Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, when Ivan casually comments that it would be a good day because the temperature was only -17 degrees. A brother-in-law of mine who worked in the Antarctic describes many occasions of having fun outdoors in weather like that. And like horned toads, we’ll find ways to thrive in the blistering heat.  Now we can add surviving super-storms and drowning coastal cities to our repertoire.  But the world will be a crueler place, and survival will be challenging.  Evolutionary biologists tell us we as a species have evolved to manage climate change, so we'll find ways.  But we shouldn’t be forcing those tests on ourselves. 

The problem of course is that nay-sayers are really concerned with present costs, and the problems of weather 60 years from now are, well, sixty years from now.  Nay-sayers can talk them out of existence for at least that long.  They are like the statistician who stood with one foot in a bucket of ice and one foot in a pot of boiling water, and insisted that on the average he felt comfortable.  And I, and others of my generation, will not be here to worry about them.  But I have 4 grandchildren 6 years old or younger, and they will be here to face the problems in 60 years, when it’s much too late to have solved or ameliorated them.  The voices of the future are all around us, but they are too young for us to pay much attention.  We need Pharaohs willing to set aside part of the profits of seven fat years to fund the needs of seven lean years, and our legislators are no pharaohs.

One of the problems of the climate-change debate is that scientists are talking abstract things while nay-sayers are talking hard money.  We need ways to take the abstractness of climate models and make them real.  We need to give voices to our children, for it is their lives we are talking about.  We need to organize and fund a children’s’ crusade against climate change.  Ads featuring children on TV and the internet, awareness campaigns in the schools, all the tools of modern media need to be focused on how to present a gut-level message that will change hearts.  And children with placards at the polls ought to be part of it.  It’s their climate, and their world, we are changing.  We shouldn’t be allowed to forget that.  They will remember if we do.

Breaking the Bubble

There’s a trend going on these days in retail marketing that has interesting, and possibly gloomy, ramifications internationally.  Harold Meyerson reports in the Washington Post that the attempts of Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, and other low market retailers to enable cheap prices by squeezing employee wages are backfiring on them.  Their same-store sales are declining and earnings-per-share are falling also.  Meanwhile upscale retailers paying higher wages continue to show increasing profits.  Wal-Mart and Kohl’s are discovering what Henry Ford knew from the beginning, that your employees are your best customers, and when they lack buying power, you will lack sales.  Meyerson reports that retail trade is fragmenting into a prosperous upscale sector and a stumbling mass market sector.  Non-union workers are restlessly seeking increases in the minimum wage and threatening walk-outs.  Things are beginning to resemble pre-depression days of the 1920’s.  Back then, Filene, a leader in retail reform wrote that, “if workers cannot settle their issues inside industry by industrial methods, they will go outside industry and settle them by political methods.”

Meanwhile Fareed Zakaria reports, in an article he titles “The fading American dream,” that social mobility in the U.S. is rapidly falling, both absolutely and in international rankings.  We are losing our middle class and becoming the rich and the poor.  Nowadays Canada and Australia, both similar in many ways to America, have twice the economic mobility of America.  One of the standard excuses for declining mobility has been American heterogeneity and immigration, but Canada actually has more foreign-born people than America.  A recent Harvard-Berkeley study points toward two major facts in the decline.  First is the increasing economic segregation of American cities, which in turn leads to low expenditures on public goods, their “social capital.”  Zoning separates the rich from the poor, and poor neighborhoods suffer from under-funded schools, high crime rates, family breakdown, lack of civic support, and low community-service orientation.  Meanwhile rich neighborhoods prosper, their residents oblivious to the surrounding poverty.  The separate-world “bubbles” grow before our eyes and, like Disraeli’s 19^th century England, we become “the rich and the poor – two nations that do not know each other’s lives and do not understand each other.”  We still remain far from a third-world country, but that is the direction toward which we are heading.  For a nation that has only rich and poor cannot compete in an increasingly high-tech global economy where already China is producing many science and engineering experts for each one we produce and the ability to understand and adapt to constant rapid change is a key to success.

Zakaria notes that a recent OECD report reveals that America is one of only three rich countries that spend less on disadvantaged students than on other students.  That is because, he notes, our nation-wide school funding structure is based on the property tax.  School districts with many poor have low property values, leading to low school revenues and inadequate schools, while wealthy districts have more than enough.  The “big bucks” we spend on education are mostly at the college level, where they benefit students already advantaged.  Americans remain mostly oblivious to major needed educational needs, and consequently are unwilling to fund or support them.  A Washington Post article today reported that two-thirds of Americans do not know about or understand the “common-core” educational reforms already being implemented in 45 states.  55 percent say they oppose providing free public education for the children of “illegal” immigrants.  Both of these measures are aimed at and would strongly enhance our social and economic mobility.

I started out by mentioning Wal-Mart and Kohl’s.  Both are examples, writ small, of what happens when you try to build a prosperous economy while ignoring the poor.  The poor are your neighbors, your customers, your workers, and their children are your fellow citizens of the future.  As they prosper, you prosper.  And as they struggle, you will also.  I mentioned some of the obvious policy areas where reforms would help – increasing the minimum wage, worker re-unionization, residential zoning reform, property tax reform, funding education for the disadvantaged, building the “social capital” of cities.  Other ways exist – re-enacting Glass-Stegall, for example, to make investment for the future by the middle class less a game of Russian Roulette – but it begins with breaking the bubble and becoming aware of the lives around us.  For then we become aware that they and we prosper or fall together, and their future is ours also.

Witnessing Reformation

Amid the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin’s preaching in Geneva was a shining light throughout Europe. One of his antagonists/admirers was fellow protestant Michael Servetus.  In 1553, Servetus, while escaping from Catholic imprisonment sneaked into Geneva and sat in the rear of Calvin’s church to hear him preach.  He was spotted by Calvin, who regarded him as a heretic and had him arrested and burned at the stake.  The year before, Catholic Venice had expelled the Jesuits in a dispute with the Pope, and previously Venice had drowned heretics in the lagoon with a stone around their neck (a scriptural punishment.)  Less than 20 years before, Thomas More had been beheaded in England for refusing to recognize the king’s divorce on religious grounds.  The Inquisition was under way in Spain and Italy.  And 50 years later, all Europe was aflame with the 30 Years War, which drew in countries from Spain to Scandinavia and caused the death of one-third of the population of Germany.  Atrocities were so common that people stayed home, and the modern hymnal was born as a substitute for group worship.  It would only end with the Peace of Westphalia, dubbed “the peace of exhaustion” at the time, which gave us church-state separation and the birth of the modern nation state.  Even then, Westphalia required three simultaneous conferences of negotiators, each first negotiating among themselves then negotiating their results with the other two conferences.

Meanwhile, sitting at the edge of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, predecessor of modern Turkey and the superpower of the time, debated whether to take advantage of the European strife and invade.  Other than a brief, bloody war with the Hapsburgs in Hungary, they did not.  They had their own internal political conflicts at the time, and for us that was lucky.  For had they intervened, the fighting Europeans would have undoubtedly coalesced to resist; the emergence of church-state separation at the Peace of Westphalia would have been aborted or indefinitely delayed; the legitimacy of absolute monarchy and of religious intolerance would have been reaffirmed.  In short, all the necessary steps, including the exhaustion and loss of legitimacy of religious intolerance, that led to the Enlightenment and to the American and French Revolutions might have been indefinitely delayed or might never have occurred.  I say we were lucky; the Germans of the time would have felt far differently.

That is the kind of debate we in Europe and America are having with ourselves about the goings on in Egypt, the Middle East and Afghanistan.  Atrocities are occurring, religious intolerance and strife are everywhere, absolutist regimes are struggling viciously for their existence.  We are justifiably horrified by each occurrence and wish we could do something, anything, to end the violence.  What we don’t “get” is that we are witnessing the bloody birth of a modern Middle East.  Islamist traditionalists and absolute monarchies everywhere are feeling the pressures of modernity and are fighting fiercely for their existence against equally violent reformers.  Many Middle East scholars have dubbed this the Arab Civil War, an aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but that does not go far enough.  It is far closer to an Islamic Protestant Reformation.  And like the European Protestant Reformation, if left alone, it too may require 100 years of bloody conflict ending in exhaustion for its resolution.

It is highly tempting to treat the whole process as a necessary evil, required for the traditional Middle East to catch up with the rest of the world.  But we live in an interconnected, global world where what happens in Egypt or Syria or Iran has world-wide repercussions.  Extremists on each side in each country struggle through lobbying or through terrorist acts to capture our attention and gain our support.  If we could build a wall around the Middle East, we might.  But we can’t.

The wisest course seems the approach we are pursuing now, though it is morally painful and criticized by many good hearted people.  Intervene only when we absolutely must, and then, only reluctantly and cautiously.  We are observers of a process we cannot fully understand, and too much intervention is possibly harmful to us, to the participants, and to their descendants.  The difficulty, as always, is to settle the meaning of “must.”  Are excessive atrocities by themselves sufficient for justification, or are national security interests required?   After all, atrocities to the point of exhaustion and revulsion are what led to our modern world.  A constant pressure to minimize them without ourselves becoming just another participant seems called for.  We cannot become either just another warring faction or the aborter of necessary resolution.  We are, and must continue to be, only witnesses to the birth of another modern world.

Daneel Olivaw and a Robust Economy

When I was just age 13, Isaac Asimov began his epic career as a novelist (he had others) with the publication of I, Robot, precursor of a sweeping saga of the “future history of mankind”.  It would go on to include by some estimates over 500 books that would contain major science fiction works like the Foundation series as mere subsets.  Threading his way through it all is the semi-immortal humanoid robot R. Daneel Olivaw, often invisible but always active in his watchful guardianship over the emergence of a galaxy-wide human civilization into full maturity. So invisible in fact that a whole series can go by without any reference to him, only to have his key role in it revealed much later in other series.  He easily captured the imagination of a 13 year old boy.  And he fundamentally shaped all our views of robotics, both for the better and the worse, long before the actual birth of the field.

I was reminded of this while rummaging through some old papers and discovering a graduate school policy analysis I had written back in 1983, on “Managing the Impacts of Robotics”.  It contained some of the usual blather of grad school papers, but also some insights and recommendations I still find useful 30 years later.  It starts off by pointing out that “robotics” is a loose concept that can combine many different technologies. A firm definition is uncertain, and that definition can make a huge difference.  One of the reasons Japan’s use of robotics has advanced much more quickly than that of the U.S. is that Japan’s definition of Robot is much broader than that of the U.S.  That is the negative side of R. Daneel Olivaw.  We tend to think of robots “only” as walking, perhaps talking, possibly humanoid, intelligent machines capable of performing work and making decisions on their own.  That leads to the view of robots as a product to be built, used and sold, rather than a process for doing work.  We are gradually learning better now, partly by emulating the Japanese, but in the meantime it has prevented our recognizing that productive use of robotics will require fundamental reshaping of factories, work flows, and ways of relating to work itself, and it has slowed both our use of robotics in the U.S. and our entrance into the global robotics markets.  For example, we have trade restrictions against sale abroad of sophisticated electronic components capable of being redirected to use in weaponry, and that practically is our definition of a robot.  And it has left us unfocused on necessary alterations in the relations between the work process and our labor supply, i.e., us.  Again for example, a work process consisting of worker + simple task requires much less training for the worker than a process consisting of worker + robot + complex task.  An educated work force becomes a necessity.  And of course, how to deal with worker displacement is already a well known major issue.

 One of the things that made introduction of robotics fairly easy for the Japanese is that they faced a growing labor shortage as their population began to shrink.  An article in the Washington Post today reported that the U.S. worker population is now growing much more slowly than it has in the past. The Post sees it as a possible harbinger of a permanently stagnant economy, but of course it could count as a kind of grim blessing as a backdrop for a vigorous transition into a robotics driven economy.  That economy could include all sorts of robotic tasks we haven’t even thought of yet.  The rest of the world is already getting out ahead of us, and we have a lot of catching up to do.  In Japan, they’re developing robots for child care.  The BBC reports that in Scotland, they’ve developed a robot named “Giraff” for care and companionship of persons with dementia living alone.    It’s a humanoid robot with a TV screen for a face.  Steered by a caregiver located elsewhere, it can go around cleaning up, checking for use of medications, etc., then allows the caregiver, shown on the TV screen, to hold companionable conversations with the dementia patient.  The possibilities for improving the quality of our lives as well as the productivity of our workplaces are enormous.  Daneel would be proud.

The Japanese found that one of the quickest ways to spread robotics is a system where robots are developed by R&D in large organizations for use in small businesses.  We tend to think in terms of robots clanging their way around the floor of large factories, but that could be only the smaller part of the picture.   To achieve that robotics diffusion process in an American setting will involve reshaping our thinking about business-labor relations. Here, I found two of my recommendations back in 1983 to be still of possible interest.  First, it could involve setting up a system of guaranteed lifetime part-time employment in exchange for a payroll tax based system of “training accounts” that provide for the lifelong retraining that will be part of a robotics driven economy.  Second, and a necessary adjunct to the first, is the creation of “robot leasing corporations” in which workers could buy shares and derive income as robots are leased by small businesses.  In other countries, such corporations might be a government-business joint venture, but in America large pension funds might work better as a funding medium.

Whatever the particular ways of managing the diffusion of robots, it is too important an issue to be left to “nature taking its course.”  Failure to resolve the issue in equitable ways will result in long-term social conflict and the gradual falling behind of America in the global economy.  The Post article noted that the difference over 25 years between a projected stagnant annual growth of 1.75 percent and a robust growth of 3 percent is 36 percent of the size of the resulting economy.  One of the primary dangers in introducing new technology is premature entrenchment of a haphazard way of using it which forecloses better long-term opportunities for its management.  We have already lost too much time on robotics, and the door of opportunity is closing quickly.  We need ways to work together.

Measurement Bias

One of the sillier correlations in statistics is that a strong relation exists between broken bones and consumption of ice cream.  It turns out that’s because both broken bones from sports accidents and eating ice cream peak in the summertime.  That’s taught to statistics students to sensitize them to hidden intervening variables (summer versus winter weather) that cloud relationships.  We assume so many things when we’re looking at numbers, and many of our assumptions are hidden even from us.  In science, for example, scientific method requires verification of results by reproducibility, and that creates an inherent reductionist view that rejects uniqueness for measurability and prefers calculable formulas’; i.e., it forms a measurement bias.  It’s impossible to verify things you can’t independently measure and calculate. Yet we proudly proclaim our individual and species uniqueness as a primary feature of our humanity, recognize the incalculable value of love and friendship and commonly accept the immeasurability of a sunrise.  So it’s interesting when an occasional slight lift of the curtain over our assumptions reveals what’s really going on in a scientific discipline.

The slight curtain lift over economics came last week amidst the rowdy debate over who should replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve.  A passing reference in an article supporting Larry Summers was made to “libertarian and economist Milt Friedman.” Aha!  We rarely think of the world view buried in the masses of economic data we face each day, but that remark encapsulates it.  A libertarian view in economics, like a reductionist view in physics or biology, so simplifies things.  The equations of economics are messy as they are, even though limited to market interactions between individual parties seeking to maximize only profit measured in dollars.  Excluding multiple motives like affection or altruism or even opting to reduce current profit in favor of a future generation enables a “rational man ” hypothesis, aka a man greedy and not concerned about the good of others. That makes equations workable.  In fact, it reduces economics simply to a set of equations expressing libertarian principles.  Milt Friedman can indeed feel right at home.  Unfortunately, it also leads inevitably to dominance of our thinking by short-term calculations of purely monetary profit for individuals.  And that is the bias from which our economy currently suffers.  We value short-term individual prosperity over long-term community prosperity.

In recent columns both Harold Meyerson and George Will are trapped by that economic bias into more or less blaming economic problems on democracy.  Meyerson recognizes the bias, while Will just blindly accepts it.  Will blames the bankruptcy of Detroit on the inordinate control of unions and public interest groups seeking resources for community interests.  It never strikes him that he is attacking the very liberty and democracy he is supposed so fervently to favor.  I suspect at the time of the Revolution he would have been a Tory and supporter of Lord North.  Lord North knew the colonists were just a bunch of crazy protesters working against their own economic interest.

Meyerson’s article, much the more interesting one, uses a recently published study to reveal a “structural bias against investment” in our current economy.  The study, by a joint effort from NYU, Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research, demonstrates that privately owned firms invest on average 6.8 percent of their assets, while publicly held firms invest only 3.7 percent.  As a result, while in the 1980’s profits and investments were each about 9 percent of GDP, today profits amount to 12 percent while investment has shrunk to 4 percent.  Meyerson attributes this to CEO concerns about stock prices in publicly held firms creating a bias toward showing immediate profit over investment, i.e., the CEO’s are responding to democratic pressures.  But in fact, both CEOs and share holders are succumbing to there being only one measuring rod for company value, and that rod is skewed against long-term investment.  Meyerson recognizes this, and points out how that has worked against the interests of workers and consumers.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that the saving grace of physics is that physicists and engineers do not accept the inexorable pull of gravity, but instead figure out how to build skyscrapers and rockets to the moon.  Meyerson points some of the ways we can also overcome our economic measurement bias, our “gravity”, to create once again a working economy.  He advocates the short term sheer necessity of having major investments in things like infrastructure and green technologies, like the program being pushed for by Obama, despite its effect on short-term share prices.  I note in passing that a few years ago, the National Institutes of Technology reported that there was so much availability of new materials and so much need for building renovation that with proper investments, materials engineering could be the fastest growing occupation over the next generation in this nation.  And businesses, workers and communities would prosper.  Longer term, Meyerson advocates unlinking CEO pay and bonuses from share value and inclusion of employee and community representatives on corporate boards. That would indeed bring the values of democracy, and not just Wall Street, to bear on determining what to do.  America was indeed built by crazy people determined to do good things despite their cost.  They pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to do so.  It’s time we also readjusted our measuring rods to enable better things.

Echoes

“Those who do not study History are doomed to repeat it” is an oft quoted cliché, to which an also oft quoted response is “History does not repeat herself; she speaks in rhymes.”  And what we create are her echoes.  So a fascinating echo of the Cold War is that on August 1, 2013 Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, almost exactly 50 years to the day, July 30, 1963, that the Soviet Union announced it had granted asylum to Kim Philby, the leader of the “Cambridge Five” defectors from British Intelligence.  Snowden is no Philby, truly a major defector whose impact was so great that he shook Cold War relations for years and later became the model for John le Carre’s arch mole Bill Hayden.  Putin appears to have fond memories of Philby and to be seeking a repeat of the brilliant Soviet coup of the Cold War.  Instead, he is providing more a fading echo, a weary rhyme that serves mainly to remind us that repeating the past is indeed usually doomed to failure.  He will now have to figure out how “l’affaire Snowden” will comport with the Syrian crisis and the many other hot topics that Russia and the U.S. must work together on.  Nostalgia exacts a high price.

It is also a major impediment to effective planning for the future.  De Gaulle, knowing how enormously the tank and the airplane had changed the technology of warfare, famously warned the French generals during the 1920’s not to repeat the trench mentality of WWI with the Maginot Line; they did not listen.  And an article, years ago, in the Harvard Business Review on how better to organize long range planning started out by warning that if you had previously completed a good planning effort, the leaders of that effort should be prohibited from participating in the new effort being organized.  They would be prone to repeat their successful strategies from the past, which would likely be inappropriate to the new needs.  Now technologists of the Republican party are attempting to echo Obama’s technical internet success to revive their party, not recognizing the Obama success was based as much on the content of his message as on how it was conveyed.

The newspapers are full this morning of the Republican Party’s struggles to repeat history back to the 19^th century.  The big item at the moment is Ted Cruz’s idea to shut down government in a 41^st, or is it only 40^th or perhaps 42^nd, attempt to destroy ObamaCare by defunding it as the price for letting all government continue.  He believes Gingrich’s 1993 shutdown, which everyone else including Gingrich admits to have been a disaster, was actually a repeatable success.  Beyond that Rand Paul seeks to restore the splendid, in his mind, isolationism of the 19^th century, so unfortunately destroyed by Teddy Roosevelt and his successors.  Eisenhower and Reagan are forgotten.  20^th and 21^st centuries, be gone; I’ll have none of ye.  Beyond that, though, they are skipping past Lincoln, the founder of their successes, by their efforts to curtail the Voting Rights Act, all the way to the 1840’s and the death throes of the Whig Party.   They seem determined to echo the entire 19^th century.

Part of their problem is that they do not go back far enough.  The Whigs of the early 19^th century were one of the great American success stories, and their success was founded on their championship of westward expansion and the development of a trans-American infrastructure.  Their champion, Henry Clay, had as a major life goal a continental America created with an infrastructure of roads, canals and railroads enabling its unification.  By the mid-19^th century Whigs had evolved to a coalition of northern bankers and southern planters unable to keep up with the times and Jackson Democrats.  Sound familiar?  It is interesting that after the Whigs’ demise, Abe Lincoln, leader of the new Republican Party that replaced the Whigs as the dominant force in American politics, honored and shared Clay’s vision of an American infrastructure.  Even during the Civil War, he sponsored the transcontinental railroads, explicitly to unite the continent.

Part of the difficulty of learning from the past is choosing the right echoes.  The Republicans could benefit from Clay’s championship of an American infrastructure, or Lincoln’s championship of a unifying transcontinental railroad, or Eisenhower’s sponsorship of the interstate highway system.  They could champion the new American industrial age with robotics, green technologies, job creation at home  and the like.  That is a message that might revive them.  And championing American enterprise is a subject that should come naturally to them.  Instead they present themselves as a coalition of financiers and southern conservatives interested not in American success but in their own personal advantage, and the only echo they seem to hear is a death rattle.