The Mitchell Report

Infallibility: Papal and Otherwise

 

  

Q: What’s the difference between God and Bono?

A: God doesn’t walk around thinking He’s Bono

The Snark Handbook: Insult Edition

Lawrence Dorfman

 

Dear Friends,

Curiously enough, ‘papal infallibility’ has been on my mind of late, on two accounts.

As you may know, the doctrine was originally defined at the First Vatican Council of 1869–70, during the pontificate of Pope Pius IX, and redefined at Vatican II nearly a century later during Pope John XXIII’s pontificate.

Vatican II clarified that ‘infallibility’ comes with the office and some indispensable assistance from the Holy Spirit.

“[I]t is a charism the pope ‘enjoys in virtue of his office, when, as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith, he proclaims by a definitive act some doctrine of faith or morals. Therefore his definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly held irreformable, for they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, an assistance promised to him in blessed Peter.’" (Catholic Answers)

And this brings me to two current headliner news events: the historic resignation of Benedict XVI; and the cantankerous pontifical pronouncements on sequestration-related matters by the Washington Post’s ‘untouchable,’ Bob Woodward.

While most observers and participants in this fiasco have multiple and conflicting accounts of the politics, the chronology, and the precise position of the ‘goal posts,’ there is one observer who claims an air-tight, iron-clad, and fact-certain account, a modus operandi familiar to those acquainted with Woodward’s post-Watergate identity.

It is this assertion and defense of ‘infallibility’ by Woodward that has garnered more headlines and airtime in the last couple weeks than the issue on which he stakes his claims of reportorial precision.

Woodward’s tolerance for criticism is slight, being at least as short-fused as any politician he’s written about. And like most larger-than-life characters, he’s as enamored and protective of his public persona as a high school star quarterback in a football-crazed Texas town.

That said, there’s little value in becoming a third-party (or more) to this recent round of anti-Obama fulminations that have brought him to center stage once more. We need less Woodward, not more.

And that takes us back to the papal resignation and the skepticism of various news media organizations and others about whether Benedict XVI’s departure was a matter of conscience or a conscious decision to get out while the getting was good.

I take Benedict XVI at his word, and especially because he witnessed the debilitating final years of his predecessor’s pontificate, which were burdensome ones for the church as well. Beyond that, I assume that the onus of dealing with the consequences of the heinous crimes committed by Catholic clerics around the world would wear down the strongest among us, and particularly because these were deliberations in which Cardinal Ratzinger had played a major role.

Irrespective of motive, Benedict’s decision demonstrates a maturity of judgment about ‘knowing when to go.’

And that brings us back to Woodward.

Let’s state at the outset that Bob Woodward is among the preeminent investigative journalists of his generation, perhaps primus inter pares. And were that still his ‘day job,’ there’d be little to write about.

However, Woodward is no longer simply a journalist drawing a salary from the Washington Post and occupying a position on the paper’s masthead. He’s become a two-career person where ‘conflict of interest’ has been an issue on more than one occasion (remember the Scooter Libby episode,) not least this week’s intemperate invective about the President of the United States.

Woodward’s conflict recalls a cautionary exchange between a grandmother and grandson in the 1975 film, “Hester Street:”

“You can’t have one tucchus and dance at two weddings.”

And this is the crux of what might be called the “Woodward conundrum:”

Is Bob Woodward the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post who writes an occasional book – a practice common throughout the industry?

Or is he a best-selling author who produces prodigious ‘factual accounts’ -- i. e.,  news -- of current political issues and debates, but ‘holds’ that information until his books are published and promoted during week-long, front page, above-the-fold pieces in the Post?

Is there another journalist who enjoys such an arrangement with a bona fide news media organization?  

Is there another journalist – reporter or editor – who could appear on a national television program and gratuitously refer to the “madness” of a president without being taken to the woodshed if not shown the door?

Who decides where and when Woodward’s ‘public’ responsibilities as a journalist at a major daily newspaper and his ‘private’ rights as a prolific author of books on the subjects his newspaper covers begin and end?

And does it matter that material ‘reported’ in Woodward’s books has often been reported by other journalists at other news organizations prior to the publication dates of his books? And that credit is not given to those preceding reports?

 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, has made his historic decision and begins life anew today as Pope Emeritus of the Catholic Church. Might be a good time for Robert Upshur Woodward to follow suit, and to become Assistant Managing Editor Emeritus of the Washington Post with all the rights and privileges thereto.

 

R. Garrett Mitchell

The Mitchell Report

March 1, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Fire, Ready, Aim

Dear Friends,

They’ve been stacking up this month like NASCAR racers at Talladega or bumper cars at the local amusement park. It’s not clear whether this will just be a three-car accident for the Obama administration or whether others will plow in behind. But as the saying goes, “three’s a crowd.”

And while each mishap has its own etiology and departmental locus – CIA, Justice, State, Treasury -- the favored narrative (i.e., conventional wisdom) is that they are all part of an Administration that has lost drive, energy, focus, purpose, and, perhaps, its moral compass -- demonstrating a penchant for serving political interests first and national interests second.

In particular, some of the more predictable opiners are beginning to whisper Watergate, code for any imbroglio in which an Administration willfully uses agencies for narrow political and electoral purposes.

And if you look cursorily and superficially at each of the three stories – Benghazi, IRS ‘hazing,’ or the broad sweep of the AP phone record subpoena – it doesn’t look good.

Add to that the rolling anger that lingers about the Obama presidency, and you have the makings of a new level of unpleasantness and vitriol that the country needs like the NFL needs more reports of early dementia from retired players.

It doesn’t take an army of bottom feeders and political bombasts to create a polluted political environment, but one is growing in size and influence these days. We’ll refrain from naming names, knowing that that would simply be a gratuitous swipe at the low-hanging fruit.

Suffice it to say that we are witness to a collision between some slipshod, misguided or errant acts by officials inside the Obama administration and a take-no-prisoners, draw blood first – ask questions second, facts-be-damned modus operandi by a band of freelance members of the opposition who will seize any opportunity to discredit people and destroy careers in the service of future electoral victories.

For those who were sentient and paying attention forty years ago when the Watergate dike burst, or more recently during the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra debacle, it is instructive to recall how challenging and divisive those times were – when partisanship played out daily on the front pages and the network broadcasts, and when citizens’ faith in government was beginning to erode around the edges.

But that was then.

In both eras, adults were still present in sufficient measure in the Congress, not everywhere, but in enough positions of leadership that when it came time to act on behalf of the nation, and to put party and partisanship on the shelf, it could be done.

During Watergate: Sam Irvin, Howard Baker, Daniel Inouye, and Lowell Weicker in the Senate; and Peter Rodino, Lawrence Hogan, Barbara Jordan, Hamilton Fish, Paul Sarbanes, Bill Cohen, Elizabeth Holtzman, and others on the House Judiciary Committee.

During Iran-Contra: Daniel Inouye, Warren Rudman, David Boren, Bill Cohen, Sam Nunn, Paul Sarbanes and George Mitchell in the Senate; Lee Hamilton, Henry Hyde, Tom Foley, Mike DeWine (and Dick Cheney) in the House.

This is now and adult behavior is the exception, no longer the rule. Intensely partisan polarization and the caucus-as-compass have replaced regular order and fundamental respect for the institution, thanks to a powerful, asymmetric composition of legislative Luddites who believe they were sent to Washington to destroy the machinery of democratic governance and to decapitate those who would compromise.

So, it’s up to the President to take action, to move swiftly, to demonstrate a capacity to ‘fire, ready, aim’ on behalf of the country, even if it means removing good people who are tainted by association or who lack the requisite gravitas and have become ‘surplus assets,’ ‘damaged goods,’ or both.

And here’s where the naming of names serves a public purpose.

The President has started smartly by forcing IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller out the door. Next should come division director, Lois Lerner, and presumably others who were part of this scheme. Whether and to what extent Miller and Lerner are responsible for the charges that have been alleged is no longer the issue. They are in the spotlight in one of the most citizen-sensitive bureaucracies in government, and to preserve the integrity of an otherwise honorable agency, and to assure the citizenry that there is zero tolerance for questionable activities, doing this with dispatch is the only option.

Next, the President should encourage his very capable Attorney General, Eric Holder, to seize the moment to return to the private sector. Not because Holder is a ‘wrong-doer’ or incompetent, but because the Justice Department has meted out a punishment to the Associated Press that neither fits the crime nor honors the process by which previous administrations and news organizations have negotiated differences of this sort. The fact that Holder had recused himself from this action is both irrelevant and vexing at the same time, and particularly because the department has been unable to find the supporting document that records his recusal.

In addition, for reasons that do not point directly at Holder himself, he’s a growing liability for the administration – a contempt of Congress citation for the “Fast and Furious” debacle; and the considerable political fallout from his recommendation to hold a criminal trial in the civilian system in New York City for Khalid Sheik Mohammed rather than a military tribunal in Guantanamo (his boss blinked on this one.)

Though his ill-tempered response to Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) at yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing is easily understood, if not wholly appropriate given the setting, the Attorney General looked low on fuel and short on resilience – not like someone who was relishing the prospect of another four years as punching bag.

In the White House, three additional steps would send signals to important constituencies (while riling others): replace his Congressional Liaison, Miguel Rodriguez; remove Valerie Jarrett from her substantive and policy roles in the White House; and replace his Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough.

Even before this trifecta of troubles took center stage, the Obama presidency was off to a tepid start on the second term. Whether accurate or not, there was a perception that the president was floundering – tired from a grueling campaign, facing four more years of a Tea Party-infused political environment, unable to make headway on the sequester, gun control initiatives, tax reform, incoherent on Syria, inert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, issuing one too many ‘red lines,’ and more.

It does not help that President Obama finds himself dealing with a restive press corps resentful from four years of a back-of-the-hand, dismissive treatment that has become the administration’s communications policy trademark.

Taken together, and knowing how quickly laissez les bontemps roulez can become laissez les mauvais moments roulent in a town where schadenfreude is the default emotion, the President is well advised to overreact.

Nixon didn’t; Reagan did – thanks to the unlikely partnership of Nancy Reagan and the Democrat’s Bob Strauss.

For Reagan, it began with firing Don Regan and recruiting Howard Baker. And for Obama, nothing less will suffice. He needs horsepower and deep experience in his Chief of Staff – a John Podesta, Donna Shalala, Bruce Babbitt, or even Vernon Jordan.

He needs to separate friends from governance, moving Valerie Jarrett from Counselor to the President to Friend of the First Family.

And while it’s not clear whether any mortal could be a successful Congressional liaison for this President with this Congress – not even a Bryce Harlow, Max Friedersdorf, or Larry O’Brien – he can do better and he must. Strength, agility, and chutzpah are essential, as is the ability to eat crow and chew gum at the same time.

There’s more, but there’s not much time in which to act. Everything about this moment will be counterintuitive for the community organizer and constitutional law professor in Barack Obama. He’ll need some help from strong friends, eminence grises (if they exist) and not from those inside the White House who, we are told, see the fifth face on Mt. Rushmore when they look inside the Oval Office.

America needs a successful presidency and the only person who can deliver it is the President himself.

Please Do Not Pester During Sequester

23 February 2013

 

Dear Friends, 

If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.

First, there was the ‘fiscal cliff,’ over which the republic would tumble on its way to another financial disaster.

This was quickly and tragically followed by the ‘slippery slope,’ on which the rights of gun owners would be taken away in treacherous acts of legislative legerdemain by the heirs to the anti-war movement, and the kinds of deadbeats who were once dragooned into appearances before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

Now, of course, we are approaching ‘sequestration,’ a euphemism for castration in the fiscal arena, and about which Bob Woodward will soon set us all straight. It’s the thing we most prize about Woodward -- i.e., ‘being set straight.’

And if you fear that TMR is about to leap into that fray, relax. It’s at moments like this where we most need diversions from the solemnity and humorlessness of public policy, and that explains this week’s offering.

When you’re able to set aside seven uninterrupted minutes, and are ready for an exercise in erudition, here’s a graphic and musical journey through the history of music.

But don’t sequester yourself; share it with family and friends in acts of random bipartisanship and generosity of spirit.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/the_history_of_music_told_in_seven_rapidly_illustrated_minutes.html

 

 

A Valiant Flop

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/jan/22/richard-blanco-inaugural-poem-obama-flop 

22 January 2013

Dear Friends,

Apparently Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem -- "One Today" -- was too much for the British poet, Carol Rumens, FRSL, to simply let stand without comment. In today's edition of The Guardian, she was moved to offer up an acidulous analysis -- "A valiant flop" -- employing the full panoply of pedantic tools, to explain why "One Today" wasn't up to the standards of the academy, or at least the post-modernist wing thereof, and certainly not to the Royal Society of Literature, where she is a Fellow. 

For example, it wasn't until reading her offering that we were instructed in proper poetic construction:

"Parallelism is a useful device for creating an incantatory lift and narrative logic to a poem in danger of becoming a sprawl of lists, but what if the motif itself isn't strong enough to bear so much repetition?" 

Now that we've been warned, let us have another look and listen -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkSRy8SGTEE -- to what some philistines among us might have otherwise thought to be an elegant, even sublime, expression of the occasion -- the quadrennial ritual of this democracy -- and even of the spirit of the Inaugural Address itself. But as we do, bear in mind the critic Rumens final observation:

"It might seem that the biggest problem with writing a public poem is that crude simplifications are forced on a reluctant poet. Blanco, it seems, is able to write in this "genre" with more natural conviction than most. A shorter poem, and above all one with a tighter form, might have helped maintain a consistently high verbal pressure, with no sacrifice of accessibility."

Indeed, as we go forward, let us always eschew the 'sacrifice of accessibility."

12 For '12

January 8, 2013

 

Dear Friends,

The first principle in the presentation business, written or oral, is simple: Never begin with an apology.

So we won’t. 

However, be forewarned: this will not be quick. You see, when you set out to review multiple books in one ‘sitting,’ length -- and reader fatigue – is inescapable.

But because outstanding artists and scholars have treated us to some marvelous thinking and writing during 2012, we wanted TMR readers to share the wealth.

Blockbusters

Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson

Okay, we’re taking chronological license here. Isaacson’s remarkable biography of Jobs was published in late 2011, but continues to be on best-seller lists, and may just be among the dozen finest biographies of the last century, along with Isaacson’s accounts of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

Isaacson is Jobs’ Boswell, and has given us Exhibit A for what a ‘no holds barred’ biography can be: the author held back nothing, and the subject asked for no control over what was written. The result is an encyclopedic, unvarnished, and astonishing account. If you’re interested in probing the mind and character of a man who revolutionized six different businesses – personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, digital publishing (and retail stores, some would suggest) – and who was neither trained in or for any of these, Isaacson has given readers the record.

“Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.”

Thanks to Isaacson, this isn’t simply a biography about a man; it’s a study in innovation, leadership, risk-taking, strategic focus, and a touch of madness and magic just for good measure.

The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt

Reader Beware: this is not a ‘beach book.’ Nor is it a book for every one. Though Haidt might question this thought, I’d recommend listening to an illuminating conversation he had early last year with Bill Moyers -- http://billmoyers.com/segment/jonathan-haidt-explains-our-contentious-culture/ -- or to a 2008 TED Talk that deals with much of the same subject matter -- http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html --  that fills the pages of his path finding work.

In each of the three major sections of The Righteous Mind, Haidt offers an intellectual anchor:

• Part I: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second (didn't we just read that?)

• Part II: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness

• Part III: Morality binds and blinds.

In his conclusion, Haidt offers counsel to us all, and particularly to those who govern and legislate:

“This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult . . . to connect with those who live in other matrices which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations.

“So the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality or in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest.

“We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.”

If you happen to have a connection to Messrs. Obama, McConnell, Reid, Boehner, Cantor and Madame Pelosi, you might want to share this with them.

America in the World

The World America Made, Robert Kagan

Few scholars can think their way through complexity with the agility and clarity of Bob Kagan, and even fewer do it with his welcome capacity for brevity and his wit.

As his friend David Brooks reminds us, Bob Kagan writes two kinds of books – very large ones (A Dangerous Nation) and very small ones (Of Paradise and Power, The Return of History and the End of Dreams) and now this one.

It begins with an apt metaphor:

“In the Frank Capra classic 'It’s a Wonderful Life,' George Bailey gets a chance to see what his world would have looked like had he never been born. It would be nice if we could do the same for the United States, to see what the world would have looked like had the United States not been the preeminent power shaping it for the past six decades, and to imagine what the world might look like if America were to decline, as so many nowadays predict.”

And concludes with a stark observation:

“The lesson of the twentieth century, perhaps forgotten in the twenty-first, is that if one wants a more liberal order, there may be no substitute for powerful liberal nations to build and defend it. International order is not an evolution, it is an imposition. It is the domination of one vision over others – in this case, the domination of liberal principles of economics, domestic politics, and international relations over other, nonliberal principles. It will last only as long as those who imposed it retain the capacity to defend it.”

Kagan comes to this thesis neither as an apologist for American power, nor an advocate for expeditionary campaigns in foreign lands. He is neither John Quincy Adams redux – “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy” nor a neo-Wilsonian bent on a new “Fourteen Points” agenda. He’s an historian reporting the facts -- a kind of Sgt. Joe Friday look at ‘America in the World’ --  “Just the facts, Ma’am.”

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power, Zbigniew Brzezinski

And now comes the advocate and the architect for an America that sustains its commitments to global leadership, all in the context of a world where the center of gravity is seen shifting from west to east, and from Atlantic to Pacific.

“The world needs an America that is economically vital, socially appealing, responsibly powerful, strategically deliberate, internationally respected, and historically enlightened in its global engagement with the new East.”

In less than 200 pages, Brzezinski covers the globe, leaving no region unexamined, while outlining America’s primary objectives in each part of the global order. ‘Zbig,’ as he is known to friends, is an inveterate list-maker: six critical U.S. liabilities, six assets; eight geopolitically endangered states; seven possible threats of rising Asian nationalism(s); five major threats to Chinese social stability; and six major U. S. objectives in its relationship with China. And that’s not all.

But few scholars have Brzezinski’s comprehensive grasp of world history, his hands-on political experience (as Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser,) and his incisive strategic insights that quickly lead to specific policy recommendations.

His concluding observations:

“Thus, America’s central challenge and its geopolitically imperative mission over the next several decades is to revitalize itself and to promote a larger and more vital West while simultaneously buttressing a complex balance in the East, so as to accommodate constructively China’s rising global status and avert global chaos.

“America must adopt a dual role. It must be the promoter and guarantor of greater and broader unity in the West, and it must be the balancer and conciliator between the major powers in the East.”

It recalls Woody Allen’s observation of some years ago:

“It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.”

No One’s World: The West, The Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn, Charles Kupchan

In a town where marquee players like Brzezinski and Kagan get lots of ink and airtime, there are a handful less well known to the outside world who are equally valued for their policy contributions on foreign policy and national security issues -- and Charlie Kupchan is one of the very best.

Where many prognosticators see the world tilting toward Asia, away from Europe and the United States, Kupchan sees it in less certain and more nuanced terms:

“The emerging landscape is one in which power is diffusing and politics diversifying, not one in which all countries are converging toward the Western way. Indeed, the world is on the cusp of a global turn.

“The twenty-first century will not be America’s, China’s, Asia’s, or anyone else’s; it will belong to no one. The emergent international system will be populated by numerous power centers as well as multiple versions of modernity. For the first time in history, an interdependent world will be without a center of gravity or global guardian. A global order, if it emerges, will be an amalgam of diverse political cultures and competing conceptions of domestic and international order.”

Kupchan also ventures some observations that depart from what might be called a ‘consensus-of-sorts’ among the global order experts, and which with the passage of time since finishing his book, seem particularly insightful:

“As the middle class expands in the Muslim world, religion may well strengthen, not lose, its influence over political life.

“What likely lies ahead is an Islamic brand of modernity, not the secularization of Islam.”

And finally:

“The bottom line is that states around the world are on very different political trajectories. The divergence is a function of profound variation on many dimensions, including political culture, path of socioeconomic development, and religion . . . The next world will not march to the Washington Consensus, the Beijing Consensus, or the Brasilia Consensus. It will march to no consensus. Rather, the world is headed toward a global dissensus.”

Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, National Intelligence Council

A slight departure from the norm – not a book, per se, but a report from “The NIC,” their fifth and, arguably, most comprehensive.  The list of scholars, practitioners, universities, think tanks, science labs, and other civil society organizations around the world who contributed to this work takes up three pages, and ‘first among equals’ is the Atlantic Council of the United States, which organized a series of workshops on key issues around the globe, and whose leadership – Fred Kempe, CEO, Barry Pavel, director of their Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security, and their ACUS colleagues – merits special mention.

If you’re not inclined to a rich fare of global governance, move on to the next section. But if a thoughtful and analytical consideration of global megatrends, game-changers, and potential world scenarios is of interest, the NIC report is ‘must reading.’

http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-trends

Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, Rajiv Chandrasekeran

Remember Afghanistan? If you’ve managed to put it on the back burner, the Washington Post’s senior correspondent and associate editor, and author of the highly-acclaimed Iraq account, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” puts it back on the front with the heat on high and laser beam focus on what’s in the pot.

Chandresekran combines uncommon literary skills with prodigious reporting habits, and the result is an eminently readable and enormously depressing tale of mismanagement, or worse.

“What happens, I asked the general, if we win Helmand but lose Afghanistan” ‘That would be just fine for the Corps,’ he said.

“As I walked down the dirt road in Lakari, I contemplated how it was that more than two hundred Americans had found themselves in this strategically questionable patch of Afghanistan. Why weren’t they in the districts abutting Kandahar or in parts of the east besieged by the Haqqani network? This wasn’t an issue of grand strategy. Even if Karzai hadn’t been a loose cannon and Pakistan hadn’t provided sanctuary to Taliban commanders and the White House hadn’t blanched at the hundred-billion dollar annual tab, Obama’s vast increase in American troops and reconstruction dollars would still have amounted to a missed opportunity in Afghanistan. The reason wasn’t to be found in Kabul or Islamabad. It was in Washington: The American bureaucracy had become America’s worst enemy.

“The Pentagon was too tribal . . . The generals were too rigid . . .Top commanders refused to break apart enough infantry units to create teams of mentors . . . The grunts committed too many unforced errors . . . murdering civilians, disrespecting the Koran, mistreating Taliban corpses . . . The war cabinet was too often at war with itself . . . Those rivalries were compounded by stubbornness and incompetence at the State Department and USAID.

“All told, I spent three years observing Americans attempting to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan . . .

“I kept hearing promises of how it all would be fixed. New strategies. New teams of officers and diplomats. New requests for money. A new man in the White House. But none of it remedied the core problem: Our government was incapable of meeting the challenge. Our generals and diplomats were too ambitious and arrogant. Our uniformed and civilian bureaucracies were rife with internal rivalries and go-it-alone agendas. Our development experts were inept. Our leaders were distracted.

“For years, we dwelled on the limitations of the Afghans. We should have focused on ours.”

In fairness, I’ve been assured by one of the country’s most respected military scholars that Chandrasekeran has it wrong, particularly in his searing criticism of the Marine Corps’ ‘our-way-or-the-highway’ demeanor. Perhaps so, but I fear that history is on Chandrasekaran’s side.

Inside America's Political Cauldron

Three books, among several other excellent selections, seemed to us to best capture the nature of the country’s profound political funk, and to provide both supporting evidence and substantive insight into the trap created by our seemingly intractable political polarization. Each was reviewed in spring and summer of 2012, and can be found at The Mitchell Report’s site: themitchellreport.typepad.com

Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent, E. J. Dionne, Jr.

Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, Edward Luce

It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

Taken together, the questions raised by these scholars and journalists continue to be the most salient among a long list of concerns by a growing number of people around the globe, some who simply wonder, others who wonder out loud: “Is the glass that holds America’s ‘governance juice’ half-full or half-empty?”

Fiction Anyone?

Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd

Boyd is a master storyteller, one of England’s best – A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham awards; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and several others.

In this sophisticated espionage novel that moves about from Vienna to London to the World War I battlefields of France, to Switzerland, and back, readers are treated to a brilliantly woven fabric of physical, psychological, and emotional journeys, featuring a young British actor, Lysander Rief, who goes to Vienna in 1913 to seek a psychoanalytic cure for a sexual dysfunction, and whose life takes a series of unconventional and unanticipated turns.

Add to that, prose that always beckons the reader, from beginning:

“It is a clear and dazzling summer’s day in Vienna. You are standing in a skewed pentangle of lemony sunshine at the sharp corner of Augustiner Strasse and Augustinerbastei, across from the opera house, indolently watching the world pass by you, waiting for someone or something to catch and hold your attention . . .

“And then you see – to your right – a young man striding out of the Hofgarten park. He is in his late twenties, almost handsome in a conventional way, but your eye is drawn to him because he is hatless, an anomaly in this busy crowd of Viennese folk . . .

"At the entry to Michaeler Platz he stops abruptly, pauses, stares at something stuck to a hoarding and then continues on his way, briskly, as if her's running slightly late for an appointment. You follow him around the square and into the Herrengasse -- the slanting sundays picking out the details on the grand, solid buildings, casting sharp, dark shadows on the caryatids and fries, the pediments and cornices, the balusters and the architraves . . ."

To end:

“You are standing shivering in the angle of two walls in Archer Street, peering out, trying to discern the late-night world go by, your attention half-caught by the small crowd of enthusiastic theatre-goers waiting with their programmes for an autograph as the cast of Man and Superman leaves the stage door after the show . . .

“The light is switched off but you see that the door opens one last time and a man appears with a raincoat and a hat in his hand. He looks up at the opaque night sky, checking on the dismal weather. And you will probably recognize him as Mr Lysander Rief, who is playing the part of John Tanner . . . Lysander Rief looks tired – he looks like a man who is not sleeping well. So why is he quitting the theatre so discreetly, the very last to leave?"

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes

Ah, those Brits. And their prizes – Man Booker, Somerset Maugham, Whitbread.

More than one review of Barnes’ book – about the life of Tony Webster, whom we meet as a young man and then follow into his later years -- suggests that it be read in ‘one sitting,’ given its length (160 pages, and small pages at that) and the compelling nature of its content, which Barnes’ describes in an interview as ‘an exercise in memory,’ and ‘a search for the evidence of the things that happened in your life.’

Quite early in the book, Tony Webster’s boyhood chum, Adrian Finn, makes this learned observation:

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,” and when asked his source for the quote, attributes it to “Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He’s French.”

Turns out, again from an interview with Barnes’, that there is no Lagrange (French for, ‘the barn,) but that it describes the author’s sensibilities about history and memory. And from that point on, we read:

“We were turning our past into anecdote.”

“Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions -- resentment, a sense of injustice, relief -- and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else, the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction.”

Barnes concludes with this:

“You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?

“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”

Postscript

Only a few will have made it this far, and for that we offer one of George Bernard Shaw’s finest ad libs, which you may find useful the next time someone rings your phone or doorbell on behalf of some well-meaning cause:

George Bernard Shaw answered a knock at his door one day and was greeted by a couple who announced gravely:

‘Good morning, we are Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

‘Good morning,’ said Shaw. ‘I’m Jehovah. How are we doing?’

 

 

 

 

 

Compound Fracture at the Broken Branch

 

 May 20, 2012

 

 

 

“No single vote by any single senator could possibly illustrate everything that is wrong with Washington today. No single vote could embody the full cynicism and cowardice of our political elite at its worst, or explain by itself why problems do not get solved. But here’s one that comes close.”“

McConnell’s cynical flip”, Washington Post, 2/1/10, Fred Hiatt

Dear Friends 

Despite the orthopedic and dendrological cast of this week’s TMR, we are assembled to talk about politics, and specifically about the current state of affairs in the first branch of government, aka, the Congress.

Readers who pay attention to such matters may recall, “The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track,” co-authored by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, which TMR reviewed in Summer 2006:

“These are two of America’s leading political scientists . . . widely respected for having built trusting relationships with a diverse array of members in both chambers of the branch and both political parties, and known for their willingness to speak truth to power, which they do unstintingly in this book.

“They ply their scholarship at two contrasting institutions, have substantive differences on certain political and public policy issues, and yet have formed the kind of collaborative and collegial relationship that once characterized the Congress itself.

“Ornstein and Mann are not out to ‘name names,’ or to curry favor with one side of the aisle or the other. Their task is to present the case for having found Congress in violation of its ‘contract with America,’ and in some cases, its Constitutional mandate.”

That was then, this is now.

They’re back, not to report a clean bill of health, but with an ominous evaluation in a new book -- “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” – which reveals that despite their thoughtful diagnosis and prescriptions for rehabilitation six years ago,  ‘the branch’ is dangerously damaged.

Instead of a simple, linear break, we are dealing with a fracture that is compound (skin broken,) spiral (bone twisted), and comminuted (bone broken into pieces.) 

As the radiologist would say, “Grim picture.”

Before readers leap to the conclusion that this is merely Volume II in a rant about the dysfunctionality of Congress and its impact on our political, economic, and social norms, consider the book’s subtitle -- “How The American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism” – which provides the intellectual framework for this important piece of scholarship.

The construct of the book itself promotes accessibility: Part I: The Problem; Part II: What To Do About It; seven fast-paced chapters that make the menu of component parts easily digestible; 200 pages of intelligible, clear, and absorbing prose.

Mann and Ornstein cover significant political ground in these pages, but to this reader, there are three salient messages: the first, unsurprising though profoundly disheartening; the second, uncomfortable in the extreme for one political party, though undeniably factual; and the third, an unanticipated, arguably unorthodox, consideration of ‘the American constitutional system.’   

First up, the authors demonstrate that the intensity and animosity in America’s political polarization -- ‘the politics of extremism’ -- has reached heights not experienced since the Civil War.

“Watching the debt limit debacle unfold led us to our title for this book . . . As bad as the atmospherics were, the new and enhanced politics of hostage taking, of putting political expedience above the national interest and tribal hubris above cooperative problem solving, suggested something more dangerous, especially at a time of profound economic peril.”

Second, despite their years of being ‘equal opportunity offenders’ -- i.e. e., reporting on the mischief and malfeasance of both political parties in Congress – Mann and Ornstein reveal that Congressional polarization has a new, disconcerting, unipolar disorder, a little-acknowledged form, which they call “asymmetric polarization:”

“ . . . however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of the facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Mann and Ornstein provide persuasive evidence to document the asymmetrical turn of events, including lamentations from retired Congressional Republican members, including Senators Chuck Hagel, John Danforth, Alan Simpson, and others who share a disdain for the  ideological and behavioral warfare waged by far too many current Members, most of whom have committed themselves to Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Plan,” a ‘poison pill’ for a healthy republic, and arson in the democratic process.

“We believe that our case for asymmetric partisan polarization is strong and that it has enormous consequences for the country’s ability to deal with the existential challenges that confront it. Democrats are hardly blameless and have their own extreme wing and their own predilection to hardball politics. But as we have shown, those tendencies have not generally veered outside the normal boundaries of robust politics.”

Third, running throughout the book, Professors Mann and Ornstein conduct a thought-provoking tutorial about the tenets of American constitutionalism in contrast with the features and virtues of parliamentary democracies:

“The . . . serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act.”

And in the penultimate chapter, “Reforming U. S. Political Institutions,” they offer this:

“We are tempted to think big when it comes to reforming political institutions, because the problems are so large and so vexing.

“The boldest way of dealing with the mismatch between the party system and governing arrangements would be to make the governing institutions and processes fully compatible with parliamentary-style parties. The current presidential system, based on the independent election of the president and Congress, features a strong separation of powers with checks and balances. If this system were replaced with a parliamentary one in which the parliamentary majority (one party alone or in coalition with others) elects the executive, it would ensure substantial cooperation in the formulation and enactment of the government’s program. The mismatch would evaporate.”

Heterodoxy, to be sure, although the authors acknowledge that change of such magnitude isn’t impending.

Instead they delineate a series of technical and systemic recommendations to the political party system and to the political institutions to provide substantial promise for the scale of repair that must be accomplished in the near-term -- “institutional changes consistent with the current constitutional framework that would improve the fit between our current parliamentary-style parties and the policy-making process.”

Two parting thoughts.

I admit to a considerable partiality for Mann and Ornstein’s Chapter Four – “Bromides to Avoid” -- which takes on several commonly touted cures for the ills affecting the body politic, including term limits, balanced budget constitutional amendments, third parties, public financing of elections, among others. And in particular, on page 127, there’s a paragraph that will give readers a taste of what makes these two scholars such highly sought-after commentators:

“Limiting terms of public office is, in our view, utterly unresponsive to any significant dimension of dysfunctional politics. It belongs in the same trash container as a smug reverence for the status quo, independent presidential candidates, and balanced budget amendments. Thanks, but no thanks.”

And about that quote at the beginning of this report:

“No single vote by any single senator could possibly illustrate everything that is wrong with Washington today. No single vote could embody the full cynicism and cowardice of our political elite at its worst, or explain by itself why problems do not get solved. But here’s one that comes close.”

The action to which Hiatt refers was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s January 2010 vote to kill a bipartisan resolution, co-authored by Sens. Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) and Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire) that would create an eighteen-member deficit reduction task force. And here’s the back-story on the vote, per Mann and Ornstein:

“Among those who voted to sustain the filibuster and kill the resolution were Mitch McConnell and John McCain. McCain was joined in opposition by six other original cosponsors, all Republicans. Never before have cosponsors of a major bill conspired to kill their own idea, in an almost Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Why did they do so? Because President Barack Obama was for it, and its passage might gain him political credit.”

Doesn’t get much more cynical or asymmetric than that, does it?

Next question?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Divided Political Heart

 

 

 

    June 8, 2012

 

“Wherever this flag’s flown, we take care of our own.”

Bruce Springsteen

 

Dear Friends,

 

In the Mitchell Report’s Manual of Style and Usage, Rule #3 says: Never begin an essay with a caveat.

So, we won’t.

Instead, we'll commence consideration of “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in the Age of Discontent,” a brilliant new offering by E. J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University.

Okay, now that we’ve begun, here’s the caveat.

There’s an inescapable conflict of interest in reviewing an E. J. Dionne book, because to know the author is to be stripped of personal objectivity. The only hope is that this doesn't trump the capacity to be honest with readers.

Once you get beyond the intellect – summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Rhodes Scholar, D. Phil. in political sociology from Oxford University – and the professional credential (see above) you come to the person whose personal and professional virtues define the very best to which we might all aspire: devoted father and husband; generous to a fault; selfless and charitable; catholic of mind and committed Catholic in faith; gifted teacher; polymath; razor-sharp wit; and a great listener.

So what follows come from a predisposed source, a student of American history and politics who considers Dionne’s 1991 book – Why Americans Hate Politics – one of the finest on the subject to which we address ourselves today.

Some might have anticipated that he would write a sequel-of-sorts, e. g., Why America’s Politics Are So Hateful. But that is neither in the character of the author nor the mission of this thoughtful, encyclopedic engagement with the history of the republic.

Dionne begins this work with a simple, salient observation:

“Underlying our political impasse is a lost sense of national balance about who we are because we can’t agree about who we’ve been. We are at odds over the meaning of our own history, over the sources of our national strength, and over what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us ‘American.’”

Having launched, he takes readers on a 280-page voyage through ‘our own history’ that demonstrates with remarkable clarity and scholarly authority the twin pillars of the American Idea – individualism and communitarianism. To illustrate this, he borrows one of Bill Clinton’s routines:

“Take a penny from your pocket. On one side, next to Lincoln’s portrait is a single word: ‘Liberty.’ On the other side is our national motto. It says ‘E Pluribus Unum’ – ‘Out of many, one.’ It does not say ‘Every man for himself.’

“That humble penny is an explicit declaration . . . that America is about both individual liberty and community obligation. These two commitments – to protect personal freedom and to seek common ground – are the coin of our realm, the measure of our worth.”

Unlike many of his counterparts in the academy or in the opinion-giving sector, Dionne is not a polemicist arguing the case for the supremacy of one school v. the other. No ‘sides’ are taken in this remarkable historical analysis, except to reinforce that when we fail to understand the duality of our national DNA, we lose the capacity to confront the exigencies of the present and to invest intelligently for the future.

Amnesia, whether from natural causes of deliberate means, first cripples and then debilitates.

“It thus makes a mockery of the American story to deny the power of individualism in our history. But it is just as misleading to ignore our yearnings for a strong common life and our republican quest for civic virtue.”

He anchors this observation with the opening and closing words of the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

As Dionne sees it, “Individual liberty and shared sacrifice are the bookends of our Declaration of Independence.”

Dionne shines the light of history on the flawed logic that has become so familiar to too many in this country and abroad who see American politics ravaged by a mindless adherence to a false divide between these two concepts – where it is presumed that conservatives represent, if not claim ownership of, the virtues of free enterprise, individual achievement and entrepreneurialism; while liberals ostensibly embrace the communitarian ethic with little appreciation of the essential linkage between capitalism and democracy.

“Contemporary conservatives are not wrong in seeing enterprise and individual achievement as cornerstones of the early American republic. The Jeffersonians and the Federalists, the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs celebrated both, albeit in different ways, on behalf of different constituencies, and toward different policy ends. What today’s conservatives overlook is that these were not the only values, or even the primary values, that our republic celebrated, and that government – at the federal, state, and local levels – was an active agent in promoting the national development and shared prosperity. To believe otherwise they need to wish both Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay out of existence.”

To know the history of America, and not some homespun version concocted by Philistinian pundits, is to respect the unique valence of these two atoms in the democratic-republican molecule.

Beyond Hamilton's vision of a nationally-supported focus on commerce and industry and Clay’s, ‘American System,’ Dionne enumerates the actions taken by Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, which leveraged the authority and power of the federal government to create landmark progressive programs and initiatives designed to foster both individualism and communitarianism: Homestead Act, Morrill Act, creation of the National Academy of Sciences; the transcontinental railway system; controlling monopolies and regulating trusts, creating the national forest system; creating the federal highway system, among others.

But then along came 1964 and the Republican National Convention at San Francisco’s Cow Palace where the Party nominated a candidate who proposed “to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, to make Social Security voluntary . . . to weaken labor unions . . . also called the progressive income tax into question and opposed civil rights laws.”

In his acceptance speech, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater earned his first entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations with “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Fast forward to the 2012 Indiana Republican primary contest in which the winner, Richard Mourdock, expressed less eloquently a similar approach to governing:

“I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. … If we [win the House, Senate, and White House], bipartisanship means they have to come our way, and if we’re successful in getting the numbers, we’ll work towards that.”

Reminds one of an H. L. Mencken observation about the popular support for Warren G. Harding's 1920 presidential campaign, which Dionne incorporates in one his most important chapters (IX), "The Long Consensus and It's Achievements: The Quest for Balance from the Progressive Era to the Reagan Era:" 

“After two decades of Progressivism . . . Americans were weary of ‘a steady diet of highfalutin and meaningless words,’ and sickened by ‘an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious. Tired to death of intellectual charlatanry, the electorate turns to honest imbecility.’

As good an explanation for the spectacle of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest as any.

So, does Dionne believe that “Our Divided Political Heart” is still beating?

Answer: yes, but with caveats, of course.

First, comes the requisite for the 21^st century Republican Party to reevaluate and retool its ideological and methodological profile:

“But a conservatism without a strong communal and compassionate side will be untrue to its intellectual roots, unfaithful to the Christian allegiances of so many of its supporters, and disconnected from some of the most vital streams of conservative thought and feeling in American history.

“It would be tragic if conservatives and Republicans sacrificed their great traditions on the altar of an individualism that disdains government, downplays communal obligations, and sees the economic market not simply as an efficient mechanism for the production of goods but also as the ultimate arbiter of what should be valued.”

And finally, comes Dionne’s assertion that an America worth its salt in the century ahead will be achieved only by a national recommitment to the founding ideas, and not to the fiction that has found its way into our current political lexicon:

“What I do know is that we will not restore our greatness as a nation or heal our political wounds unless we acknowledge both sides of our national character. Our history is compelling, after all, because we are neither simple nor single-minded people.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fierce Urgency of Now

 

  

“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now . . . It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.

Martin Luther King

August 28, 1963

Lincoln Memorial

 

Dear Friends,

The bell has tolled. The time is now.

Sandy Hook should not stack up behind other issues that have their noses pressed to the glass demanding action from Congress and the President. It belongs at the head of the line, and the President must take it there himself – to honor the campaign promises and the MLK writ upon which he predicated his audacious presidential candidacy in 2008.

Somewhere in the midst of our national mourning about the violent death of twenty precious children and seven caring adults who died with and for them in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, December 14^th, the country must find a way to overcome its discreditable political pusillanimity by seizing this moment to enact meaningful public policies that reflect our values and our aspirations for our children.

There is no more vital moral or political calling than to do what we must to create a country that is as safe and secure as we are capable of providing for our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren. And to say that we can do better than the present is both understatement and trivialization.

Today, we know two things for certain about the event -- a deranged human being used assault weapons to carry out the Sandy Hook School massacre. The former speaks to issues of mental health, while the latter to reasonable gun registration laws that protect the rights of unarmed citizens, children in particular, not ones that serve blind advocates of the 2^nd Amendment.

And with respect to these two elements, we must be mindful of these considerations:

Job 1 is to make things better, not ideal. Or as Voltaire prescribes: “Do not let the best be the enemy of the good.”

If we can achieve improved results in reforming gun registration laws by closing the gun show loopholes and reinstituting an assault weapons ban, for example, this will not assure that our schools, hospitals, and shopping malls will be safe places, but safer.

That legislative enactment without executive enforcement is a Potemkin exercise.

In communities, like New York City where crime rates have decreased significantly and consistently for years, strong and effective policing (not without its critics) has been the difference between tangible results and inflated rhetoric. Next door in Newark, results lag while rhetoric rules.

That we are woefully under-resourced and ill prepared to deal with the considerable mental health problems in a country of 315 million people.

So, where does this find us?

For some, the messages are familiar: that we have enough laws on the books; just need to enforce them; guns don’t kill people, people do; proof that if someone(s) at Sandy Hook Elementary had had a weapon, Lanza could have been stopped at the outset; and one former presidential candidate suggested that we shouldn’t be surprised by this because it’s what happens when we keep God out of schools.

Still others see this as the moment to act with dispatch on the enactment of new and more stringent gun laws (leaving aside the politics of passage,) and that action on mental health will have to come along later.

And, of course, for a great many observers, it’s not quite so simple.

Welcome to democracy, and to a heavily populated and diverse nation where more than 300 million people make hash out of the hope that we can weave consensus on any complex subject anytime soon.

And yet, there is a sense around the land that what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School is what historians call a ‘strategic inflection point,’ a concept described by Israel’s Shimon Peres in very different terms -- ‘a horse galloping by your window and you have to decide whether to jump or not . . .”

And that brings us to the subject of leadership, to Martin Luther King’s ‘fierce urgency of now,’ and Shimon Peres’ ‘galloping horse.’

Great leaders do not allow strategic inflection moments to pass, as millions of Americans are learning from Stephen Spielberg’s, “Lincoln,” a civics course of study where they serve popcorn.

The historian, Daniel Boorstin, described these as ‘verges’ – ‘a verge is a place of encounter between something and something else.’

Whatever one chooses to call them, they are more often recognized retrospectively, and are occasions when possibilities for accomplishment seem remote. These landscapes are always steep, vast, slippery, rugged, or a combination thereof.

Today we learned that members of Congress, led by California Senator Diane Feinstein (who knows a thing or two about gun violence and politics,) will introduce legislation designed to deal with our “Sandy Hooks” and our lax violence protection habits and laws. This legislative platform can provide a basis for the kinds of conversations we must have with each other in thousands of communities around the country and in social media, and a tangible opportunity for civic action.

The moment calls to mind the plaintive admission of German theologian and Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemoller, following his abandonment of the Nazi conservative nationalism movement, ensuing years of imprisonment in Dachau, followed by a lifetime of devotion to pacifism and nuclear disarmament:

First they came for the communists, 
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, 
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the jews, 
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the catholics, 
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a catholic.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Time to speak for the children, and who else but us? 

 

 

The Cliff and the Chasm

 December 5, 2012

 

“America’s problem is not that it does not work like China, it is that it no longer works like America.”

Richard McGregor, Financial Times

 

 

Dear Friends,

 

There are two perilous features in the political topography of Washington DC, circa December 2012 -- a fiscal cliff, about which we’re reminded relentlessly, and a political chasm, which gets less coverage, but grows deeper and wider every day.

Going over the cliff can send the country right back into a recession, but failing to halt the erosion of the chasm can be the undoing of a republic. And the problem is that in order to avoid the steep fall from the cliff, by all rights we first need to bridge the chasm. But as they say, ‘good luck with that.’

The Cliff and the Chasm calls more for Aesop or Swift than Krugman or Krauthammer, and is an occasion that beckons for a Lincoln, FDR, LBJ, or a Reagan; and for some partners of equivalent heft in the Congress – Clay, Webster, LaFollette, Wagner, Dirksen, Rayburn, O’Neill. Instead, we find ourselves deeply exposed, running short on time, and with little basis for thinking that the country might do itself proud.

We know a good bit about the components of ‘the cliff,’ but far less about how the chasm has been carved out. The cliff is about math; the chasm is about human behavior.

It’s late in the process to ask, “How did we get here?” And yet, it’s essentially inconceivable to reverse the deterioration without understanding its etiology.

And with that in mind, there is a growing body of scholarship that can help us with that task, which we’ve selected to make six critical observations about the chasm.

• Americans are self-sorting into like-minded communities and organizations in which the societal benefits of diversity are being lost.

For this finding, we turn to “The Big Sort: Why The Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart,” a remarkable study by journalist, Bill Bishop, which describes in exacting, fact-based terms how patterns of migration in America during the past few decades have created a changed political landscape consisting of an array of ‘lifestyle enclaves:’

“When people move, they also make choices about who their neighbors will be and who will share their new lives. Those are now political decisions and they are having a profound effect on the nation’s public life . . . In 1976, less than a quarter of Americans lived in places where the presidential election was a landslide. By 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.

“Meanwhile, unnoticed, people had been reshaping the way they lived. Americans were forming tribes, not only in their neighborhood but also in churches and volunteer groups.

“What had happened over three decades wasn’t a simple increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division. The like-minded neighborhood supported the like-minded church, and both confirmed the image and beliefs of the tribe that lived and worshiped there.”

“More of us are partisan, and more of us are living in ever-smaller communities of interest, places that nurture our certainty and feed our extremism. Tolerance – and its progeny in the political world, compromise – were the victims of late-twentieth-century politics.”

Once again, on the road in search of political truths, we find that Walt Kelly’s Pogo has preceded us – “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

• When ‘birds of a feather flock together’ the aviary becomes an insular and immoderate neighborhood.

And on this point, there’s a small volume by Harvard Law School professor, Cass Sunstein, the recently-departed, controversial federal regulatory mastermind of the Obama administration -- “Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide” -- which explores the dynamics of ‘group polarization:’  

“When people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes. And when such groups include authorities who tell group members what to do, or who put them into certain social roles, very bad things can happen.

“Political extremism is often a product of group polarization, and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarization.”

Reason enough to do away with party caucuses.

• The principal dynamic in hermetically-sealed social circles is bonding, not bridging – tribalism not E Pluribus Unum

Here, we step back a decade to borrow an idea developed by Harvard University political scientist, Robert Putnam, in his masterly account, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Society,” which deals with the concepts of social capital and civic virtue:

“Of all the dimensions along which forms of social capital vary, perhaps the most important is the distinction between ‘bridging’ (or inclusive) and ‘bonding’ (or exclusive.)

“Moreover, bridging social capital can generate broader identities and reciprocity, whereas bonding social capital bolsters our narrower selves.

“Bonding social capital constitutes a kind of sociological superglue, whereas bridging social capital provides a sociological WD-40.”

Putnam references this insightful observation by a co-founder of a community lyceum in the whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1829:

“We come from all the divisions, ranks and classes of society . . . to teach and be taught in our turn. While we mingle in these pursuits, we shall learn to know each other more intimately; we shall remove many of the prejudices which ignorance or partial acquaintance with each other had fostered . . . In the parties and sects into which we are divided, we sometimes learn to love our brother at the expense of him whom we do not in so many respects regard as a brother . . . We may return to our homes and firesides . . . with kindlier feelings toward one another, because we have learned to know one another better.”

• When ‘lifestyle enclaves’ reach Congressional district proportions, members of Congress have little incentive to compromise – to do the business of governing in a democracy

Next stop is with a recently published book by the country’s leading Congressional scholars, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein -- “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How The American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism” – which TMR reviewed this summer:

Mann and Ornstein introduce readers to the concept of asymmetric partisan polarization:

“ . . . however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of the facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

“We believe that our case for asymmetric partisan polarization is strong and that it has enormous consequences for the country’s ability to deal with the existential challenges that confront it. Democrats are hardly blameless and have their own extreme wing and their own predilection to hardball politics. But as we have shown, those tendencies have not generally veered outside the normal boundaries of robust politics.”

Ornstein and Mann suggest that as partisan polarization becomes more pervasive and systemic, ironically, we are ill served by a Constitution that provides for the independent election of a President and Congress, instead of a parliamentary system where the two branches are intertwined.

“The . . . serious mismatch between the political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act.”

• Tribalism and self-righteousness are inseparable and insidious partners

Now, a brief look at some revealing research from social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt -- “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” -- which explores the realm of moral psychology and provides an analysis of how liberals and conservatives view the political landscape.

“I’ll use this perspective to explain why some people are conservative, others are liberal (or progressive) and still others become libertarians. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.”

Haidt begins with the Rodney King question, “Can we all get along?” and then spends the next 300 pages exploring the reasons why this is among our most difficult challenges.

“I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

“I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition. It is a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug or error that crept into minds that would otherwise be objective and rational."

Perhaps the most revealing exercise in the book comes when Haidt introduces readers to five moral foundations that form the basis for political behavior – care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity – and then demonstrates that while liberals cluster around the first three conservatives tend to embrace all five – “the conservative advantage,” as he calls it.

• A society that cannot deal with ‘dueling truths’ and ‘competing impulses’ is in the early stages of its demise

We close with these thoughts from one of the country’s most gifted and thoughtful political analysts, E. J. Dionne, whose authoritative and insightful book – “Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent" – was reviewed in TMR this summer.

Characteristically, Dionne has put his polymathic mind on the nature of our current dilemma:

“Underlying our political impasse is a lost sense of national balance that in turn reflects a loss of historical memory. Americans disagree about who we are because we can’t agree about who we’ve been. We are at odds over the meaning of our own history, over the sources of our national strength, and over what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us ‘Americans.’ The consensus that guided our politics through nearly all the twentieth century is broken.

“Building a new consensus will be impossible if the parties to our political struggles continue to insist that a single national trait explains our success as a nation and that a single idea drives and dominates our story. At the heart of this book is a view that American history is defined by an irrepressible an ongoing tension between two core values: our love of individualism and our reverence for community.”

If you’ve made it this far, you might either be encouraged by having some greater understanding of factors that have given us our modern-day politics, or depressed at the prospect of ‘righting the ship of state.’ Both would be appropriate reactions.

But as you ponder all of this, tuck this bit of wisdom into your knapsack. It’s an observation from John W. Gardner, one of America’s most remarkable and resourceful citizens, in a monograph published in 1991, “Building Community:”

“The play of conflicting interests in a framework of shared purposes is the drama of a free society. It is a robust exercise and a noisy one, not for the faint-hearted or the tidy-minded. Diversity is not simply ‘good’ in that it implies breadth of tolerance and sympathy. A community of diverse elements has greater capacity to adapt and renew itself in a swiftly changing world.

“But to speak of community implies some degree of wholeness. What we seek – at every level – is pluralism that achieves some kind of coherence, wholeness incorporating diversity. I do not think it is venturing beyond the truth to say that wholeness incorporating diversity is the transcendent goal of our time, the task for our generation – close to home and worldwide.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

American Exceptionalism 2.0: Whither America or Wither America?

July 13, 2012

 

 

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

                   Voltaire              

 

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”   

C. J. Jung

 

Dear Friends,

 

During a colloquium hosted last month by the Carnegie Endowment on an insightful new book entitled, “The Dictator’s Learning Curve” (William Dobson, Doubleday) I began thinking about TMR’s buckling bookshelves, which are weighted down with works assessing America’s role in the changing global order of the 21^st century.

The connection was triggered by an exchange between Carnegie’s host scholar, Karim Sadjadpour (who knows a thing or two about dictators and dictatorships,) and the author, Will Dobson, in which the term “Dictatorship 2.0” emerged as a way of distinguishing between “the good old days” when the likes of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, or the Samozas of Nicaragua held sway with the usual tools of force and torture, and today’s crop that must navigate in a universe where Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and you-name-it have made the profession far more demanding.

“It’s hard to be a dictator these days,” Dobson observed, and that led to some thoughts about how difficult it is to be a democrat these days, as well.

Political leadership, whether of the Dictatorship 1.0 or Democracy 1.0 doctrine, has fallen on hard times. Strong leaders need strong followers, and both brands have lost an ‘iron grip’ on their followers, which may be the most salient political fact of these times – accounting for the sense of possibility and potential in states where dictatorships have ruled for so long, and for the sense of angst and agita in those where democracy has been in place for decades or centuries.

And while the reasons for these changing circumstances vary from country to country, it is the same array of digital communications tools, software, and apps that are fueling the transformations.

It has become difficult to hide, to keep secrets, and to keep the ‘outside world’ out – a fact that North Korea’s newest Kim may learn a thing or two about in the years ahead.

Back to that bookshelf, to questions about America’s posture in the emerging global order, and to a fresh look at American Exceptionalism.

First, an anecdotal observation.

There’s less talk these days about America being “the only global superpower,“ and even the voices trumpeting “American Exceptionalism” have been muted.

Why might that be?

Well, let’s consider some data on education, health care, and economic mobility, and some other factors, as well.

According to an OECD study, the U. S. spending per K-12 student is higher than all other countries, except Switzerland; and yet American students rank 14^th in reading literacy, 25^th in mathematics, and 17^th in science.

High school graduation rates are lower than the rates of the UK, Switzerland, Norway, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Finland and Denmark. And the number of who earn college degrees places America 16^th, while the number who earn graduate degrees puts us in 12^th place.

Add to this that while the U.S. has roughly 36% of the world's college graduates in the 55-to-64 age bracket, it has just 20% percent in the 25-to-34 age range.

Something’s going on here.

According to a World Health Organization report, the U. S. ranks 37^th in terms of “overall effectiveness” of its health care system, 38^th in life expectancy, 29^th in infant mortality, 20^th out of 92 countries in childhood obesity, and 1^st among 28 OECD countries for adult obesity.  

In a 2010 study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, America ranked last when compared to the six other nations, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand; as the report found, “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system.”

Another of the “wither factors” is the ‘hollowing out’ of America’s middle class, which the Financial Times’ Ed Luce writes about in his new book, “Time To Start Thinking:”

“For the first time in modern history the majority of American households were poorer at the end of a business cycle than at the beginning (2002 to 2007). Since then things have gotten worse.

“In the last full American business cycle, between 2002 and 2007, the top one in one hundred Americans captured almost two-thirds of the all growth while the top one in one thousand Americans (0.1 percent) captured more than a third of the economy’s growth.”

And yet in the most recent OECD study of household income, we are solidly in first place – more than $32,000, leading Canada, Switzerland, UK, Norway, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden.

So, we’re the richest,

We rank first on defense spending in real dollars ($711 billion) and as a percentage of GDP (4.3 %; only Saudi Arabia exceeds that). All told, we account for 41% of military-related spending.

We rank first in per capita incarceration rates (730 per 100,000) versus the UK (90^th), China (121^st), Canada (130^th), Germany (132^nd), and France (161^st.)

And we rank first in ‘billionaires,’ 425 out of the universe of 1200, followed by Russia (96) and China (95,) data points your grandfather would find inconceivable.

So, where does this leave us in our consideration of whether American exceptionalism is withering, treading water, or just having a “bad hair” decade or two?

As the distinguished historian Robert Kagan writes in his magisterial volume, “Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century:”

“The first American exceptionalism was really an English exceptionalism, the first American mission an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, imperial mission.”

And in what would undoubtedly shock today’s most bombastic “American exceptionalists,” Kagan offered this thought:

“What has been said of Russia, that it found its security only in the insecurity of others, could be said of the colonial Anglo-Americans, too. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they purchased their security at the price of the insecurity, and often the ruin, of Pequot, Iroquois, and Narragansett, of French and Spaniards, and by the time of the Revolution, of the British, too.”

Thus, it began with the Creator’s gift of geography, was animated by the arrival of religious utopians, followed by a generation or two of their native born sons and daughters, students of the Enlightenment, political pioneers who gave us the founding contours, principles, and even an operating system for the American republic.

Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, and back to Kagan in his newest book, “The World America Made:”

“Perhaps democracy has spread to over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy. Perhaps the stunning global economic growth of the past six decades reflects an economic order shaped by the world’s leading free-market economy. Perhaps the era of peace we have known has something to do with the enormous power wielded by one nation.”

Virtually all serious scholars who have examined the ‘whither’ or  ‘wither’ question in this century have reached two conclusions: first, that the preservation and expansion of the liberal democratic order in the post-great war period of the 20^th century owes most to American leadership; and second, that while it is unclear whether America will be primus inter pares, a “frugal superpower,” as Michael Mandelbaum has predicted, or the “largest minority shareholder in the global order LLC," as Brookings’ Bruce Jones has described, no other nation or group of nations is preparing to assume the lead position.

And thus, we are left with uncertainty, which Voltaire reminds us is vastly preferable to certitude.

Jung’s observation suggests that in order to successfully navigate the transition from Democracy 1.0 to Democracy 2.0, we must disenthrall ourselves from the dream and deal with the reality – as individual citizens, who bear much of the responsibility for the condition of the republic; and as a polity, where our political institutions must find ways of delivering results instead of dividing us further.

But how? Indeed, how?

Not easily or evenly. And probably not without a “transforming transaction,” the prospect of which seems more elusive than finding the Higgs Boson particle, aka, “The God Particle.”

And on that point, it turns out that the term “God particle,” derives not from theological inspiration, but from a 1993 book on Higgs' particle by physicist, Leon Lederman, whose title was “The Goddamn Particle,” until a politically correct publisher intervened and shortened it to a term whose meaning is lost today.

American Exceptionalism needs its ‘goddamn particle,’ and the sooner the better.