American Leadership
Over a Orcinus, Sara has a great series on leadership that has gotten me thinking about America’s history of leadership. Read it here, here, here and here.
Sara makes an important point. Political systems have a life cycle - they begin as a solution to a set of problems. They function well for a while, addresing problems effectively, solving problems and maintaining a broad consensus. At a certain point, however, they begin losing effectiveness. Solutions that once worked quickly and efficiently become problematic - unexpected outcomes begin. The last time this happened was the Great Depression. FDR and the New Dealers provided a solution - one that held sway for 50 years.
The fact that George W. Bush is the first President since Herbert Hoover to preside over a great many things - for instance the first president since Hoover to preside over a net job loss, over a net loss of value in housing market, over a continual decline in real income for Americans - is not accidental. The consensus and processes by which it was maintained, the way in which solutions to problems were created, has undergone two things - first the natural end of the life cycle and second it has been under active attack by the conservative movement.
Consservative politics - look no further than the Bush administration - are about creating a sort of free floating chaos, deliberately undermining the mechanisms of society, deliberately attacking not only the actual consensus but the mechanisms by which consensus can be reached. Rush Limbaugh and his legion of imitators from Bill O’Reilly on down the food chain to the lowest of local columnists, trade in anger - and endless free flowing sludge of resentment, anger and divisiveness. David Brock calls it the plen-t-plaint - there’s always something to complain about, some new misdeed to upset the masses. These complaints serve to keep the masses angry, stirred up, on the look out for traitors in their midst, to divide them from their neighbors. While that is happening in one area of conservative politics, conservative politicians are actively working to undermine the political processes by which consensus is reached. Consider that the current crop Republican Senators has more filibusters going right now than any other group of senators in history by an order of magnitude - on issues that have popular support. George W. Bush and his unitary executive theory is all about undermining historical checks and balances in power. The net effect of all these activities is an undermining of the processes of governing. Solutions become almost impossible to reach since a portion of the population is foaming at the mouth angry. (The controversy in Delaware over the adoption of a sex education curriculum is a perfect example - based on community surveys and so forth, the school board adopted a program. Conservative activisists objected to the content of several of the lessons and have sunk the entire community into a multi-year battle. No matter what changes have been made, these activists have refused to be placated, have refused to compromise. Encouraged by national conservative organizations, they have kept up a steady drumbeat of sludgy free flowing anger over any number of issues; they will never be happy. And so what could have been a productive community dialog has simply collapsed into bitterness and division.)
they almost certainly did it on purpose. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein lays out the events through which conservatives learned how to deliberately undermine other countries’ ability to fall back on their common cultural resources to regroup and recover. “Shock and awe” techniques are intentionally designed to cut people loose from these solid moorings. Since no one can articulate shared values, set community priorities, or identify the common good amid all the free-floating chaos that these techniques foment, well-prepared corporate opportunists are able to rush into the void and fill it with a new order of their own design. They destroy cultures on purpose, in order to steal people’s futures right out from under them. “After that, nothing happened” — unless the new overlords wanted it to.
It turns out that the same people who’ve been bringing corporate-engineered chaos to the Middle East have been busy in the homeland, too. They’ve spent 30 years quite deliberately undermining all the best, most noble stories Americans have always told themselves about why our nation exists, what its highest ideals are, and what we owe each other as citizens. They’ve purposefully taught us to mistrust each other and our leaders, making democratic government dysfunctional and often impossible. They’ve rewritten history so that we can’t even agree on its lessons or rely on its judgments any more. They’ve driven wedges between races, genders, classes, religions, and political parties that have left most of us not speaking to most of the rest of us.
It’s not the total-war blitz of “shock and awe;” but over time, the corrosive effects are the same: the right wing has intentionally weakened the bonds of shared vision and mutual trust that have held Americans together for 220 years, and that were meant to hold us together through future eras of transformative change. And they did it on purpose, so they could conquer America, subdue her people, steal our futures, and divide the spoils for themselves.
Let me be blunt here: we’re not going to make it through the vast changes looming ahead of us unless and until we can undo the damage done on this one essential front. Our only hope of surviving and thriving through what lies ahead is to create, promote, and unite behind one vivid, detailed, inspiring vision of the America we want to become, and the new society we want to create — and then find enough common ground to stand on so we can pull together and lay the foundations for the new center, the core of a new era.
The root of such actions, are denial - denial of the seriousness of the problem, denial of the problem itself, refusal to see the changes that have taken place. Sara wrote:
However, it’s obvious now that denial itself compounds the problem by several orders of magnitude. Companies, communities, and countries that make the effort to spot trouble while it’s still on the far horizon usually find they have time to think through their options, and make well-reasoned preparations for the transition. (Most of what we’re facing now isn’t news; almost all of it was well understood the day Clinton took office 15 years ago.) Those whose leaders choose to hunker down in denial, using distraction and distortion and scapegoating and whatever else they can think of on the fly, are doomed to face the full fury of the storm without plans or preparations of any kind. The longer they live in denial, the more catastrophic the actual change process will be when it does come. When Bush stole the election, he also stole from us eight critical years of prep time. The price we will almost surely pay for that loss may ultimately be beyond reckoning.
Sara’s series provides insight into the failure of the Democratic congress to effectively stand up to George W. Bush:
When things begin to seriously break down, the managers, in over their heads at last, typically go into hard denial. People are holding them responsible for everything that’s going wrong, even though the problems are due to large-scale (often externally-imposed) issues that are outside their line of authority and well beyond their control. Since they can’t fix it, their only defense is to deny flat out that it’s broken at all — a farce they’ll keep up long past the point where they become completely ridiculous, and lose all credibility with reasonable people. The phrase “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” was coined for this exact moment.
The problem we’ve had with our politicians in the past few years — both Republican and Democrat — is that they’re managers in denial about the fact that the system they’re ruling over is in total breakdown, and hurtling toward a fundamental reorganization. Take Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, both of whom are running as seasoned, experienced corporate candidates who are savvy managers of the status quo. The fact that they’re offering their management skills as a selling point tells you everything you need to know about just how out of touch they are with this particular historical moment. They haven’t even admitted to themselves, let alone us, that the American life we’ve known for the past 60 years is collapsing underneath our feet: instead, they’re still blithely making happy promises to take us back to the glory days of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, respectively.
As a I read this passage, it occurred to me that Congress - even the so hopefully elected Democratic Congress - are in deep denial about the failure of the mechanisms of Congress. The policies embraced by the Republican Majority starting in 1993 have had the result of shutting the minority party out of decision making. Throughout the long era of the New Deal coalition, the official and unofficial stance of Congress was built around achieving consensus, of integrating the views of the minority into decision making. As Paul Krugman observes in
Conscience of a Liberal the long era of consensus was marked by a national consensus around most issues (Civil Rights being the one large exception). Under Santorum and Hastert (though Delay was the real power in the House), Democratic congress members were effectively locked out of decsion making.
The national consensus began breaking down with the rise of the Conservative Movement - a breakdown conservatives both benefited from and aided and abetted whenever possible. Utah’s own Congressman Matheson is the exemplar of an effective manager rendered utterly useless in the new reality - his own Blue Dog democrats, with the endless positive and imaginary bipartisanship, their ongoing and continual enabling of the Bushista’s and their crimes is an example of the system in breakdown.
Decades of conservative contempt for shared American values, strong communities, and the common good has left our sense of collective destiny and common purpose in tatters — just at the moment when we’re about to rely on it most. They’ve rewritten our history, muted our media, squandered our dominance in technology and science, replaced the rule of law with the rule of men, and co-opted government to the point where it can no longer effectively address our future. All these assets were a sort of national trust fund that generations of Americans paid into, specifically so we’d have resources to fall back during times of challenge and change. Like every other American legacy left to us, the modern Republicans have spent it, quite literally, as if there was no tomorrow.
What we’re seeing as the Bush era at long last draws to its disastrous conclusion is the price of having manager’s in charge for far too long. Even LBJ’s Great Society was little more than an expansion on established New Deal policies and principles. It was easy to assume that once things were restored to their “natural order” - that is, a Democratic majority in Congress - things would return to their normal state. Things would be simply fine. Of course those outcomes didn’t happen. The underlying realities have changed. Dubya’s active contempt for the balance of powers to the strange inability of Democratic leader to realize the Bush and the Republicans are actively hostile to the idea of compromise are all part and parcel of the failure of America’s politics to catch up to the new realities.
Those realities, ironically, are nothing as trivial as Middle Eastern terrorists. Murderous lunatics are nothing new and are while they are a problem, they are a tiny part of the overall change. Massive changes in the way the world eocnomy works and is tied together, global warming, foreign policy, working conditions, health care, and growing economic equality in the US are all concerns of every day Americans, ignored by our political elites in their deep and seemingly unending denail abou the extent of the changes in the world.
There is an American myth that somehow great leaders - people like Lincoln and FDR - magically emerge when we need them. I’m not so opitimistic. When Southern slaveholders decided their right to keep other human beings as chattel were more important than national unity, we got the Civil War. When corporate interests in their desire to live free of government regulation than the right of the people to have things life sure knowledge of financial products, we got the Great Depression. Lincoln and FDR were the natural leaders because there had been effective, progressive movements for decades before their national moments arrived. The progressive movement of our era has instead been divided, distracted by endless internecine fighting, and failure to articulate a real, progressive vision. We’re in a fairly advanced state of break down, but the progressive movement that could respond to it is in its infancy.
We progressives - as called for in Crashing the Gate - have a lot of institutiional and organizational growing up to do and very little time in which to do it.
January 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
It’s not just Naomi Klein. Josh Marshall had the GOP strategy figured out almost four years ago. Here’s how he explained it (emphasis added):
Of course, Josh’s prediction didn’t come true. Their chunk was bigger (maybe with a little Diebold help) in 2004. I don’t think it is now. Maybe this will be the year the Republicans go down. Some are saying it will be Obama versus McCain– that might be a good test of whether people are truly tired of partisanship, or just tell pollsters that they are.
I’d rather have Edwards representing the Democrats. When the other side declares a “cataclysmic fight to the death” it’s not what I call an invitation to sit around the campfire, Obama style.
January 6th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I’ll show you a ‘Cataclysmic Fight to the Death’. Fetch me my bipartisan carafe of submission. They won’t have a chance!
January 6th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Like the dems don’t plan to divide and conquer. They would if they could.
Glendon now that you and Naomi have focused on this truth like a laser beam, it should be a simple matter to defeat these people. The reason that you cannot is that the divisiveness is bi-partisan,even at the subconscious level, the fight empowers the enemy. Issues that should be private are brought into the public forum…game on. The issues brought to the fore often completely out of the scope of Constitutional government, with business and social policy being discussed as they are, vehemently, and instituted as State or National policies. They exceed what government should do. At a very high level this is purposeful. What seems obvious to you as good social policy, is anathema to a true believer. You are both being manipulated to create the very friction which allows the chaos to reign, and the crocs to feed. Sorry Glendon, progressives are just a different herd of wildebeest crossing the river to the elites that rule us. When we can see that, we will quietly make our own ways and means, and separate from the others. It is the way of independence, and history offers many examples.
Problem the dems have, is they have no real constituency that will knee jerk vote for them time after time, no matter what the comedy of errors or willful malice and deception.
That is rep territory. For reps to win they need really only shed light and doubt on democrat candidates and the fence sitting dems will do the rest. Those are the ones that don’t want their taxes raised. What with home values plummeting, no savings, the price of energy, and basic living expenses exploding, selling social programs and higher taxes is suicide. All the dems can offer is to reverse what has happened, and how does that sell when they have pulled bushs’ wagon for the last 7 years?
The reagan dems are a good example of the dangers progs face. If what progressives are saying is going to raise taxes, well then, that is the kiss of death. As well as any republican they enjoy spending money printed from thin air.
Progressives must imagine the American people stupid. They may be, but they do know where taxes come from. The reps know well how to couch and hide their spending. Better come up with a winning strategy progs. Or vote for Paul.
So far the best progressive strategy has been to out freak rep senators and congressmen. That’s the game people, learn to play that way, grow some hide and teeth, and do some croc hunting.
The world has figured out that we aren’t going to pay them back, not in any coin of the realm worth anything. This slide to oblivion has been a shared bi-partisan addiction.
Vote for Paul, to muck out the stall.
January 6th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Richard - it’s not as if the strategy is new, it’s just that as the system has broken down it has become more and more effective.
January 7th, 2008 at 12:17 am
There is an actual word to describe all of this. It’s called destabilization. We used to think it was always done in other countries. Most of us didn’t know it was being done here until after Clinton left office.
This time, the cat is out of the bag. Anybody who can face the truth knows the elections have been tampered with and everybody knows that Kerry let Bush’s team do it again without the slightest whimper. He also never gave the college student who got tazered an answer to the question everybody paying attention wanted answered. “Did you WANT to lose the election?” Kerry said he wanted to reply and not a single thing prevented him from doing it.
Actually, if I were Kerry, I wouldn’t want to answer the question either. There’s not a single thing he could say that wouldn’t make things worse for him or call for additional unanswerable questions.
Are we proud, and brave Americans going to let them steal a THIRD presidential election? That is the question I’m afraid to have answered. I’m confident that we will elect better leaders then the corporations want to shove down our throats, because we did that already. They just don’t hold any offices.
January 7th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Larry, I just had a frightening thought. You know the old saw about how if a chimpanze had all the components of a typewriter in a box - he could shake it and shake it for all eternity and there’s only a very slim chance that he would ever realize a typewriter on which he could express his thoughts.
Well, suppose there was a chimp who at another time, had all the components of a functional society, who shook it and shook it till…chaos and disorder. Now why would he ever want to do that? Pathetic.
January 7th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Larry, clinton was just the flip side of bush. The elites may not have been able to get the American people to elect bush legitimately, so that is where a little rigging comes to be important. Clinton was chosen by the machine before he became popular for the very fact that he had skeletons and was essentially a weak character, easily controlled.
In the machinations of Hegel, the conflict between the groups to be controlled requires that charismatic weaklings be thrust into positions of leadership. It was, and is now, quite successful. always witrh a few competent hopefuls to round it out and make it all look good
One could not imagine a person more capable of making progressives and the NPR crowd foam at the mouth more than bush jr. Nor was anyone more willing, with his style, programs and personal life, more capable of making of making christians and conservatives lose all sensibility than the persona of clinton.
It is all very well choreographed from the top. There is no way a single man has led us to this juncture anymore than it be a single party, democrat or republican.
Imagine that every single thought that you have in your head concerning politics has been well planted for years, for the purpose of you yourselves serving as the fodder of the ongoing deconstruction of our Republic. A progressive is just the yin of the evangelical yang, in the context of Hegelian dialectic.
Ah, it is a pudding headed world we are living in.. eh?
January 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
“There is no way a single man…” Certainly true, but this admin seems particularly useless / dangerous, when capacity to discern, begin to address problems, and provide policies that would aid any other than the rich is the metric. There, they excel, and by so doing, hasten the unravelling.
Not really Anonimouse, just me, Caveat, on another ‘puter
January 7th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
It was never the intention of bush to make good and proper decisions anymore than than a lawnmower is acquired to grow grass.
None of his chaos creation is an accident, It is purposeful, and planned, the same con job, and not of his own making. We are all sadly aware of democrat complicity in facilitating the design. He is after all just a president, one man, who should have been checked by Congress or the Judiciary. Yet these weaklings at best, and accomplices at worst, are now fooling progressives into believing that if you elect them, things will all change.
And people figure bush the fool.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
All we really need is a media that keeps us well informed instead of misinformed. A reliable and transparent voting system NOT produced by and for corporate interests and republicans. Incarceration of all persons who would attempt to steal an election using ANY means to do that.
A day off for elections, (yes, even 7-11), so that the biggest, most well informed MOB could vote AND have their votes counted. That way, everybody could be blamed for any ill effects suffered by our society, and we would all have a responsibility to make sure things got corrected.
Obviously, the “experts” have failed us. We need lots more input and a lot less pundits.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
The Rooster:
If Clinton was the flip side of Bush, I’ll take that side. Anyone who could start to pay back the debt built up by Reagan and Bush Sr. is a miracle worker. Clinton wasn’t as progressive, (hell, liberal), as I would have liked, but he listened to people.
All Bush has done is to antagonize liberals as a policy because he likes to see them saddened. Clinton had us in the black. Bush has us in the red.
Those politicians are “all the same.”
caveat:
Bush would have to hire somebody to take a fully assembled typewriter out of the box and plug it in. All he would be able to do after that is stare at it.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Of course, myriad idiots like “Brandon,” who just posted the following over at ASM, certainly don’t hinder Bush’s cause:
January 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Any balanced budget in the last 30 years Larry is smoke and mirrors. clinton in no way touched our national debt or future unfunded liabilities problem. Do you ever wonder why oil is 100 bucks, 1/2 of all taxes go to debt service, and the glory of America is being composted? The money is bad, phony, printed with no backstop, a fiscal void that the rest of world is going to pave over.
I could say it started with Vietnam, a democrat exercise in stupidity, but what would that matter?, stick a fork in were done. johnsons’ “great society” not so great. It wasn’t really them anyway, anymore than bush, as glaring as he is… look a little deeper, don’t you know it somewhere in you, that the democracy is a sham? That it is the little appeaser that fills so many voids these days, and in days past?
Why are you so willing to side with ineffective, debt ridden, liberty grabbing substitutes for Freedom? How old are you now Larry? Will you truly believe, all your life?
Why are you a partisan, do you know why? Are you so willing to settle with what feels more comfortable, perhaps something to better identify with, give the cause to purpose?
We are exactly where we are for a reason, and that reason has been borne by any number of administrations, irrespective of stripe. Do you have any idea what it may be Larry? Let me know, obama can’t fix it, not sure anyone could. The gears of history are turning mightily now, the inertia truly staggering.
The problem is internal cancer, social senility, and a willingness to place faith in those that have never performed the miracles promised. At some point this Country became diseased, and our politicians are just snake oil remedies for what looks to me as terminal. ‘Lessen people wake up. obama sounds like a washed up kennedy, it is the same rehash, just for a different generation.
“Someday, a real rain will come, and wash all the trash off the sidewalk”.
January 8th, 2008 at 12:02 am
You go ahead and wait for the rain Rooster, I’m going to wait for truly free and fair elections where we-the -people can vote for people like Dean, Wellstone, Kucinich, Wexler, Kennedy, McKinney, Cleland, Gore ect…
Bush hasn’t passed ONE thing that helps America in any way. Even Johnson signed the Freedom of Infomation Act. He didn’t want to, but he did anyway. Can you imagine ANY Republican passing a bill that important. The first thing Bush Jr. did, (literally), when he got selected was to weaken that law.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m so mad at the Democrats for caving all the time and passing the stupid HAVA act that I’d like to scream, (and have), but please, don’t even compare the two parties until we have a chance to elect the Democrats we want to work with the dead wood Democrats in Washington.