Some issues driving politics

Loss of privacy needed to compromise.
I really think there needs to be some level of privacy in DC in order to allow for compromises that might be popular, but progress the agenda in a more rational manner.

Loss of local politics.
The saying all politcas are local is no lo longer true. Increasingly in the local school boards are becoming national elections.

We are using the wrong paradigm.
There is no longer left/right in this country. The issues now are more about how to adapt the changes brought forth from the left/right pardigm that existed in the 20th century.

Balanced economy

The idea is that what is important is a balanced economy, not a balanced budget.

A balanced economy is one where the different strata in the economy are made secured from critical failure and are managed in the most economical way possible.

The ebb and flow in politics

Watching events in the middle east and mid-west this week I'm really getting a sense of the ebb and flow in politics. The technique by which it progresses.

There will not be democracy in Egypt, Libya or Wisconisin in the coming weeks but the protests are a push back that will have an impact in the long run.

Only in hindsight does politics happen all at once. In realtime it feels like continual skirmishes between the haves and have-nots. Where the haves are continually winning.

Yet it is these confrontations in the streets and in the media that re-define the future political landscape. It is the new force (young, poor, oppressed) butting heads with the established regime (old, rich, priviledged) - as in the middle east; or it is two divergent views of the same establishment trying to re-vitalize a stagnant politic - as in Wisconsin.

In this way politics is a macro-cosm on how methodological ambles it's way through adaptation. Two or more opposing forces that cause an ebb and flow until and eventual compromise is reached. A compromise that is not necessarily agreed to by anyone but that happens in order to keep a equilibrium.

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I currently reading the Best Technology Writing 2010 and ran across a blog posting from Clay Shirky that does a good job at describing the methodology amble currently in the newspaper industry:

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases...  No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

Regressive politics

The 60's were a time of great expansion on all fronts.  Socially there was the summer of  love, the civil rights movement, and woman's lib; and economically there was globilization, a media boom, and computers.

This level of expansion has to be followed by a period of integration. This integration touches on all parts of our culture. In politics it has led to a politcs of regression.

Note: regression usually has a negative conotation, but here I'm using it strictly as the concept that after a growth period there follows a regressive period of integration.
The politic regression is a coming to terms to the social changes that occured in the 60's. A mistake currently being made in politics is that we are no longer dealng with the changes that occured in the 60's. The reality, as I see it is, that the changes made in the 60's were generational changes, meaning that the scope of these changes were so profound it'll take atleast a generation before they become  integrated into society.
An example of this is civil rights. From what I can conclude from both researching media and personal observation is that institutional racism is no longer an issue for people under 30. Most of the social tension in that age group is based more along economic issues than race. But for the baby boomers and some that came of age in the 70's racism is still a part of the worldview. We still, on some level, segregate along racial preferences.

Barack Obama was elected because, in part, race is no longer an issue to his core younger constiuents. Since his elelction there has been a reactionary movement built around a segment of older people for whom race is still an issue. They will diguise it in economic and liberty rhetoric, but at the core it's just a racist reaction towards a black president. It goes unsaid but I believe that part of the resason the Repulican party will not bargain with Obama on anything is that they simply won't abide by a black president.

So how does politics deal with this divide? This is a the core question of modern politics.

Capitalism and immigration

I was reading about Germany's Angela Merkel rant on how the Turkish immigrant workers had become a failed policy. This similar to what other European nations and the United States are beginning to drag into the mainstream.

Which on an ideological front is valid. If you value cultural purity over multi-cultural dynamism - so be it.

But from a systems point of view if it wasn't for cheap immigrant labor Germany would, most likely, not be economically healthy enough to demand such purity from it's culture. And the future doesn't look any better with the median age getting older and the native birth rate getting smaller.

It is the same dilemma for all established democracies across the globe.

In the U.S. the middle class would not exist if it wasn't for cheap labor coming north from Mexico.

Some of the fundamentals of what it is to be middle class in the U.S.:

- The ability to renovate your house
- Cheap food, and affordable restaurants
- Affordable entertainment (cheaper hotels, cleaner public bathrooms)

just would not be available if it wasn't for immigrant labor.

And if you don't think the ability to add a room  to your house isn't what it means to be middle class in the U.S., then you don't get the concept.

The point being is that there is a paradox to the speeches of a Angela Merkel or a Glenn Beck. Capitalist societies can not function without a constant influx of cheap labor. The only point of discussion is whether we build a viable immigration policy or turn a blind eye to it.

Libertarian dictatorship

I ran across an odd graph:

http://hubpages.com/hub/A-Libertarian-Dictatorship

I'm not sure of the logic behind the graph, but it did get me thinking about the connection between libertarianism and dictatorships.

Methodologically it does make sense. Weak central governments do make for a power void. This type of power void is usually filled in by a dominant group fronted by a charismatic leader -- the classic dictatorship model.

It reminds me of South American dictatorships, where it was everybody for himself. The only rule to survival being to stay on the right side of the dictatorship. Other than that the rules we're minimal.

The myth of one

I was listening to a Robert Reich interview last night. He was talking about his new book, and aside from the economic issue I think it dealt with another interesting issue: that tension between the myth of American individuality and the practicality of group dynamics.

Reich's premise is that the current recession can be linked directly to disparity between the have and have nots. And it makes sense in a structural way. The more parity in income the more participate in the economy. If the wealth is concentrated in the hands a few then the economy stagnates because money does not circulate.
There are more layers to what Reich was saying, but it's interesting to me when something so common-sensical is so media hidden. I'm not claiming a conspiracy, so although there is some high level manipulation going on in the end I think what's at play is a distrust of the common good.

I think this it has to do with our current sense of the individual being more important than the whole - the rugged American individuality. Yet this is a myth of one because most of our achievements have been communal. We work best as a whole.

I don't think any amount of government or business can fix the issue until our media starts to promote the structural superiority of working as a whole for a common good.

Fables of the de-construction

Ex-Cons Help To Rehab Baltimore Blight (NPR news story)


Premise :

The United States is going through a time of de-construction - not so much a tearing down of things as a re-assessment. That is why this NPR story caught my attention. It's an example of proper deconstruction, in that it makes the most of available options.

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One of the biggest deconstruction issues, at the moment, in this country is the inability to face up to the fact that we have "white men in suits" failure. This is not meant as a racist jab, but rather simply to say that this generation's established class has made some serious mistakes in judgement.

In order to aid this delusion of infallibility we keep re-enforcing, through mass media, popular fables about methodology that are no longer viable:

- Militarized foreign policy makes the U.S. safer
In the long run influencing a foreign nation's political decisions by use of military force has never worked. it always just opens a can of political worms.

- Prohibition is necessary
We can't eliminate vices from our society through the use of zero tolerance policies.

- Corporations are individuals
It no longer makes economic sense to treat corporations as individuals.

- Oil is the only viable energy source
Oil is currently viable only due to the vast subsidies given, directly or indirectly to oil companies.

- Markets are self-correcting
Non-producing markets just die, and those who thrive are the ones to take advantage of this fact.

Only when we can agree to stop these fables can the U.S. will begin to deconstruct failed policies to adapt them into the 21st century.


Major editing: 30DEC11

Adapting instead of augmenting

I was just hearing a story on NPR about the new Office of Social Innovation . This is the type of stuff that our government needs. It needs a way to review and consolidate, in order to solve problems, instead of looking for something new to augment on to existing processes. The only issue I have is that I doubt this new office will be able to do this. Issues like prohibition, the media, and the gun control -- which are social issues worthy of study -- don't stand chance of review.

Thereby making this office another example of what it is trying to eliminate - useless fluff.

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Prohibition: There is more that sufficient evidence proving that prohibition does not work on any level. This goes for drugs and anything else one can derive profit from.

Media: Media has changed drastically since the 1950's, but outside of copyright and delivery issues, there isn't much different in the way we talk about media. What's needed is a discussion on how to handle the level of information we have access to.

Gun Lobby: At some point the U.S. will need to face the fact that, as pliable the constitution is, our nation has reach a point where certain issues are beyond the scope of the constitution, e.g. privacy, abortions and gun control. I mention gun control, because despite the success of the gun lobby, it is obvious that the second amendment was never meant to deal individual ownership of hand guns and rifles. I'm not saying that the signers of the constitutions were pro or anti gun control, simply that the concept of gun (musket) ownership was so different from what we are now experiencing that there is no way the second amendment could have been written with our current dilemma in mind.

Political change (in the real world)

I was watching a talking head this weekend who said historians will look back on the Obama administration and point out how similar the current administrations Middle East policies are to the Bush administration.

The implication being that historians will view Obama either as a political opportunist who never intended on keeping his political promises or a failure who was not able to accomplish his middle east agenda.

I disagree. I think historians will chuckle at the idea that we expected Obama to change our current middle east policy in 365 days.

Change takes time. Our current conflict in Afghanastan is just the tip of 40 years worth of failed policy in the middle east. Actual change in the middle east requires a much deeper level of examination and discussion, followed by comminent to long term policies on disengagement.

It's incredible that the current media is dissapointed with the Obama administrations inability to create change in its' first year. Now I know there's a degree of hype to the media's reaction; but there also seems to be a current cultural disconnect with just how long change takes.

Whether it's global warming, or affirmative action, there is a general consesus that these issues which took hundreds of year to manifest should be fixable within a generation or two. To disagree is to be obstructionist or opportunist.

I think this is one of the real issues plaguing Washington. The lack of political will to explain the reality of change to the general public. I'm sure inside the beltway no one believes immediate policy change is possible in the middle east.

Yet our current political zeitgeist is built on this assumption. The result is an endless series of course corrections that are costly and useless.

Living in a state of spectacle

I was watching football the other day when it occurred to me that we are in an age of spectacle. We are at that point in an empire before it slips into decadence and falls apart.

And how did we get here? I've been looking around and I think empires like the United States aren't brought down by avarice, greed, or malice - rather by an oddly aggressive complacency.

We want things to remain just as they are.

This is odd on 2 counts.

The first being that I've always assumed the U.S. as a place of re-invention, constantly churning out the new.

Now as I take a look at our current state and compare it to the 20th Century there does seem to be a sense that we have run out of answers and frontiers. Everything is a remake now-a-days. And not just at the movies.

The other is that this spectacle isn't Orwellian. It does not feel like Brazil; we are not losing our humanity among the ducts. It feels more like a huge boring party were no one wants to admit it's boring because of all the time and effort put into making it happen.

Global warming and Empire change

The irony in the global warming debate is that historically the massive loss of natural resources has been a major cause in the demise of empires. So the question not currently being asked is whether or not any current government can survive global warming.

If I had to choose who has a better chance of surviving global warming, the polar bear or the United States, I'd say it's the bear.

reference: A Short History of Progress

Innovative Government

Politics is innovation. By this I mean what we call politics (capitalism, democracy, regulations) is actually a series of methodologies that have been adapted by a country for the greater good, with the greater good being up to interpretation.

I bring this up because we tend to treat politics the exact opposite. We treat politics as accepted dogma not to be altered: capitalism has always been our economic model; democracy is how we maintain our government body - these are the two stalwarts of the 'American way'.

So what's wrong with this? What's wrong is that innovation needs to adapt with the changing times.

One of the major agenda items of the Obama administration centers around the buzzword innovation. Every week there seems to be a new initiative to promote innovation. This got me to thinking that politics itself is innovation. Yet government is treated as something outside the normal rules of innovation, more akin to gospel.

That is to say is if politics could be treated as social innovations instead of gospel then we could further the dialog of some of the more intractable current issues.

An example of this is the duality of Capitalism and Socialism. Both came into being as economic theories and wound up becoming political dogma. But the reality is that all developed countries are a hybrid of these two economic theories. The what degree a country is capitalist or socialist is what should be at play and not whether one economic theory will eliminate the other.

edit: 07NOV10

Closed democracy

Our biggest political challenge, post-60's, is the shift from a closed democracy to a more open democracy. This makes consensus more difficult to reach.

By this I mean that prior to the 60's most elections were more closed due to factors like limited media coverage and local prejudicism. Elections were not as influenced by outside forces as they are niow.

This nationalization of the local is a huge re-mapping of  political discourse.

Post America

Fareed Zakaria seems to be one of the few voices to talk about the U.S. in adaptive terms. Specifically, on the need to re-seed our political landscape to reflect the current political climate instead of maintaining the status quo regardless how ineffectual it becomes.

NPR Interview

Newsweek column- The Fearful Superpower

Politics as Innovation

Going through the books at the public library I ran across the origins to what had only been an unfamiliar catch phrase - " The End of History " It refers to an philosophical treatise written in the late 90's that promotes the idea of Democracy being inherently superior. You can read it's Wiki page for a further info. As political diatribes go I find it thin, but that's not what I'm writing about.

What interests me is that it treats politik as an act solely of will; bypassing the notion that political theory is at its core a cultural innovation that evolves through adaptation. The essay states that democracy flourished in the 20th Century because it is culturally and morally superior to communism; without giving any thought to the notion that democracy flourished because it is the more practical and stable of the two. Two systems, the one that survives is the one that is able to adapt better.

But the only way to survive is to keep adapting. By arguing that liberal democracy is the end point of our social evolution only shows a lack of understanding of the term evolution.