When Government Was Almost Always the Answer to Big Problems…
Few of us still believe that assertion since many of the elected will stand by, or lie, as Americans die.
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I am not saying what was accomplished 50 years ago was better in every instance; it was only more likely Republicans would work with Democrats, and vice versa. My position is that the political situation was not a whole hell of a lot better when reaching across the aisle was supposedly more common, since mostly White men were making all the decisions anyway. Today, state legislatures and Congress just do things in a different bad way. Maybe half of it is not even their fault, the remainder a structural one.
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Unfortunately, both the slow climb and the quicker slide pose major problems, which has caught us in a catch-22. Our government can solve, and has solved, some big problems, but effective problem solving often requires a strong upfront, and a consistent long term, commitment. Such commitment will not occur in the political environment currently in place. While something big may pass in Congress today, there is little to guarantee that anything will be put on a long term, successful glide path.
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It has been over a decade since the A.C.A. passed into law, which required a 60 senator majority. There were also multiple attempts to cripple, or kill, the law. These attempts were likely unsuccessful because very few laws have such large-scale personalized, and sympathetic bipartisan, stories attached to them, as health insurance does. Therefore every law or program, developed without such a wide-ranging, multi-constituent, emotional, narrative buffer, is threatened by many fault lines, before it can be signed into law, and other disruptive fault lines afterwards, if it does become law.
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The Slow Climb or Quicker Slide?
The slow climb is hampered by the reality noted above. Even if political changes are successful in the near term, the needs of the nation and the world are still at major risk from climate change, and the changes facilitated by a modern society of eight billion people, and growing. Four centuries ago it took years for lifestyle-changing news to travel from the Old World to the New World, and filter down to just a majority of literate residents, in the best of circumstances. The acceleration of such information travel is now at light speed. That said, our ability to respond to lifestyle-changing news is not anywhere near as up-to-date.
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Just consider we knew about COVID almost two years ago, and that our overall supply chain still has not caught up. This widening gap, between how quickly we learn about problems, and a much slower ability to deliver lifestyle-changing solutions, will keep growing, no matter the political environment because of large population complexities. Additionally, our current spate of disjointed governmental responses, to anything of any consequence, are greatly inhibiting our solution making responses. That equates to shooting ourselves in both feet constantly, at higher and higher rates.
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I see the quicker slide into devolution and dissolution as the more probable, accurate prognosis, because we are not really developing anything to vaccinate ourselves, beyond political fixes, i.e. oversold partial fixes. These political prescriptions only regurgitate what we have lost, barely gaining anything that will thrust us effectively into the future. The math is lacking in every prescription. For example, what it will take to build our general immunity from climate change is growing exponentially while the delivery of a comprehensive, zero-emissions’ inoculation is being extended further and further into the future with yearly dosages always getting deeply cut by political machinations.
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Mostly avoiding the impact of a deteriorating climate is now wholly unlikely. Carbon sequestration of CO2 that has already been emitted, may help us in the future, but that technology is not yet scalable, and waiting for it to save us is ridiculous when we have had, for at least a decade, the technology to stop emitting 90+% of CO2. Playing chicken with our planet’s climate has only increased our exposure to a massive CO2 (salmonella) outbreak, and radiative fallout.
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We have this idea that technology can solve every problem we have in plenty of time, or at worst, in the nick of time. Yet we expect the worst problem to hit our planet, since the dinosaur debacle, to be saved by a frontal assault via one technological invention? More fundamentally, why do we get into situations like this in the first place? Why did we get stuck in Afghanistan so long when we were told initially it would not become another Vietnam? Why did we invade Iraq for WMDs when many officials knew none were there? Why have so many Americans died from COVID when South Koreans, who are much closer geographically to China, have had 42 times fewer deaths per capita?
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Whether you are a Trump or Biden supporter, or neither, it is obvious from the last question, and accompanying statistics that specific technology was not the problem with our pitiful response to the COVID crisis. Our lack of commitment to developing effective emergency distribution facilities, via a modern supply chain, as well as the politicized government response, whether local, state, or federal, failed us.
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From An Imaginative Perspective.
Let us take problem solving out of the bounds of reality so we can focus on it without involving our politically biased perspectives. If the worst un-human affliction started tomorrow in a country overseas, and we had six weeks to prepare for it hitting our shores, how would we react to that zombie apocalypse as a nation? Yes, individually we could load up on shotguns, shells, and other defensive and protective paraphernalia. But to discourage involvement by those employing only an everyone-is-on-their-own shotgun response, realize that going in that lone-wolf direction, instead of acting collectively, will lead to a 99% reduction of non-zombie Americans. And not more than one American per immediate family, and no close friends, would remain, so only the few true loners who lived through it would be fine with such an eradication. An effective coordinated response, on the other hand, would limit zombification to under 1%. If close-to half did not believe it was going to happen, so that group refused to work with the remaining group, the apocalypse would do us in.
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Once zombie terror became real to more of us, then the incriminations and backbiting begins, and still nothing would get done in time. Due to our current dysfunctional political situation there are many ways things could, and likely would, devolve into irreversibility. So how do the great majority of us make a determination fast enough to move ahead with a plan to fix things before problems get out of hand, without dissolving our union (or humanity) in the interim? Does every decision need to be filtered through a partisan lens? Is current consensus science liberal, and last year’s consensus science always conservative? Does “winning” the COVID crisis, or any other crisis, by Democrats always mean a “loss” for Republicans, or vice versa?
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My answer is twofold. 1) We must remove such time-sensitive problem solving from the politicized arena. 2) Our society is extremely complicated, and with a third of a billion Americans, and nearly 8 billion other humans on this planet, we cannot rely on the same civic processes to thrive in this century, or any future one.
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“Big” Government “Could” Solve Big Problems.
The size of government is irrelevant except for its obligations to the people, and its ability in meeting those obligations. Yet, government for the people, and by the people was essentially absent from our Constitution’s original design, because the people meant only White males including slave-holders.
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The critical gist of our constitutional design was to hold the union together by giving slave states enough power to override the basic representative element of the electoral process. While the Senate gave every state the same number of votes, a House of Representatives without its original and despicable apportionment structure, would have put most of the slave states in a much weaker position because their White populations were smaller, except for Virginia. Though in a short period of time after our Constitution’s ratification, Virginia’s population shrank compared to non-slave states. This additional layer of Machiavelli machinations called the three-fifths clause is what put slavery into our Constitution, and ultimately that flaw made Southern secession, and our Civil War, inevitable.
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Southern Whites considered Blacks non-citizens, and worst of all, property. Most northern Whites did as well, at least by default of doing almost nothing to end slavery. When you have a government structured in such a way, where human life is devalued, and you are making gobs of money off these devalued humans, it is very unlikely you will make it possible to change your government so it functions in an efficient, effective, and egalitarian manner. That is another reason why slavery is our original sin. Structuring a government to accommodate slavery made sure it would, to the extreme, value the status quo, and incrementalism. Even though a bulky, gangly, and gaseous government is problematic, this type of outcome is only inevitable when the underlying design pushes you in that direction. Big government is only synonymous with bad government because the-powers-that-be made it so.
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Bad government must be synonymous with big government so big government is never big enough to overpower the-powers-that-be. However, big government is usually a strong government, more likely working for the people than for the wealthy. Again, big government can be bad for the people in general, but this is hardly ever the reason why the wealthy complain about its size. That is obvious because we know the wealthy choose to make money off all kinds of governments. In few instances do the wealthy avoid collecting cash, from capitalist dictatorships (Chile until 1990) and communist capitalists (China now), to democratic-socialists, demagogic socialists (Venezuelan oil), communists (grain sold to the former USSR), and dictatorships (Saudi Arabia now), even from outright racist nations (former apartheid South Africa).
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The wealthy powers-that-be want it both ways; us weak, as well as able to take from countries, or buy from them, as much booty as possible, and to manufacture our stuff, suffocatingly-sweatshop-labor cheap, no matter what the foreign government is doing, or not doing. It just so happens, when it is us, it is better for our government to be weak, which means smaller. You do not want a lot of regulators if that allows you to rape the environment, emit your pollutants back into it, and pay employees next to nothing because all of that repulsive behavior generates higher profits.
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Another catch-22 is that big government could solve problems, but our current structure is set up for the small government, powers-that-be’s wealthiest contingent. There was a short window when we had the possibility for greater We The People change, shortly after WWII. While I believe the potential was real, the actual likelihood was much more illusory. During the fifties and sixties government was working for the average worker in a few ways that had decent promise.
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Federal, state, and local government was still overly and overtly racist, but the average White male worker was on a higher, long-term trajectory. Then as the 1970s approached the-powers-that-be started making their move to regain strength, and superiority, over our government. Our wealth must be pauper-austerity limited, because theirs is grossly insatiable.
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Sadly, we respond as we usually do, blaming our losses on those below us, as the wealthy take many gluttonous gulps from the trough in between our other response. That is bashing our poorer neighbors for their asks and aspirations including reparations for bootstrap theft, freedom from discrimination, and equally true opportunities for the pursuit of happinesses.
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The Turnaround via a “We The People” Workaround.
Turning things around, or flipping things better side up, can happen. Luckily, there is a high likelihood we can make many needed changes without initially altering the current structure. Before I explain how it is possible, we must consider why it has not happened in our current structure.
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In most cases, presidential administrations can turn one major thing on a dime each term, or in two terms. Obama made many promises that he did not keep, or could not keep. His administration, with congressional support, did push through the A.C.A. legislation. This one-off problem solving pattern has beset our nation except in a few instances almost always after much acrimony, neighborly aggression, and many deaths. Any more than one big change is seen as our system being a failure by the status quo, i.e. everyone to the right of moderate conservatives. At that point, the pro-status quo forces get enough support to halt further change.
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This inability to properly, and fully, change-pattern has been our near undoing many times since. The same back and forth, and halt, move forward, retreat, pattern was explicitly showcased in the decades before our Civil War. Therefore, our current system can do little else but build up, ever-increasing pressure, being trapped in a one-off crisis pattern with a problem-solving doom loop. Solve one major problem (usually partially), but only after passing-go through a doom scenario.
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Presidential candidates must make big promises, otherwise their campaigns run flat, and are uninspiring. Did some presidents actually have the potential to secure more promises while in office? Possibly. That is contingent on many factors, which looks to be a doom-filled precursor. Few presidents had the sympathetic audience, national rage, and fear of not making changes than did L.B.J. in the 1960s for the Voting Rights, Civil Rights, and Fair Housing Acts. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments had our Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination as their impetus.
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Looping from doom to doom to gain incremental rights, and better conditions, for another subset of Americans has an obvious historic foundation. Even gaining the right to vote for (White) women meant arrests, prison time, being force fed, and other violence against them, as well as the general imposition and the doom of prohibition.
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Double Time Losses in the Political Process.
We have an inability to fully break from our past negatives, or unresponsive-to-change structures. These structures weight down our progress, pull needed changes off the shelf to be put away in a forgotten storage closet, locked up from further discussion, denied votes to move out of committee, and of course, never actual or complete implementation. Politicians will be forever restricted by time, and time. The time it takes to advance a needed change before it becomes irretrievably politicized into hyperbolic hot air, and the time in between our two-year election cycles.
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No politician worth their weight is going to take on a subject that reduces their chances in any way to win on the issue highest on their current slate, or would harm them in the upcoming mid term, or presidential, election. Therefore, we must workaround these structures at a higher, and much more expansive, and sustained level, by developing and employing a new We The People structure.
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Obama gave in on Guantanamo, upped his focus on immigrants and their deportation, and allowed Big Health to engorge itself, all three done in large part, to help him get the A.C.A. win. Whether his actions were worth it overall, or not, is very hard to say for sure, but it was definitely not worth it if we could have avoided losing on the other three issues, and gotten an even better A.C.A. health care bill. Another example, this time from the Bush administration, that allowed the Immigration Reform Act of 2007, which Bush supported, to die, mostly to keep his wars funded, and get additional tax cuts. Almost every president gets caught in this legislative maw.
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While both presidents may have been less interested in making the improvements excluded from their top goals than I am surmising, getting wins in the other areas would likely have been preferable to them. When many major changes are required simultaneously, but only one issue, or at best two, get addressed, and usually incompletely, is the crux of our political process problem, and why a We The People system is necessary. No other politicized path provides such a way forward.
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Political Capital v. “We The People” Commons.
How much political capital a politician, or a political party has, can determine what and how much they can do, often in a specific amount of time, e.g. the first 100 days, and usually before the next controversy, or election season. Nixon had more political capital after his 2nd term win, but less after the Watergate scandal was exposed in noticeable detail by the media. Bill Clinton had less capital after his affairs with Monica Lewinsky hit the fan. Bush had less capital due to his wars lasting beyond 2005. The Obama administration just got underway before his political capital was gone; a 60 Democrat leaning Senate was barely enough to win him the Affordable Care Act. Each of these presidents could have fought harder and done things differently, but still none of them got around their political capital losses, however the losses occurred.
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The hardest thing to do is admit defeat. But our system is defeated by such politcal truths. We have created a political system that will never overcome its own limitations. We elect a world-record holding, one-hundred meter sprinter, and ask them to run a marathon, a sprint, and all other track events in world-record form, or vice versa, merely because they are in perfect shape, and are world-class athletes. Plus we, they, and-or happenstance puts hurdles in front of them, many without warning. The perfect politician cannot outperform the crappy and dispiriting laws of political capital, no matter how you want to define what that capital is.
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Imagine if our legislative needs increased by one percent a year. There is no reason why political capital would increase in the same way. Better yet, imagine if every third president had two additional major problems dropped in their laps, and the others only had one major problem. Note: all these problems would have substantial partisan pushback. Those third presidents cannot, or do not, triple their capital just because.
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The third presidents have so much of their political capital bled out of them, each of the solutions to the three problems will be drained of their long term value. This bleeding out of solution value is the biggest contributor to the defeat of our political system, whether it is one solution like the A.C.A., or three big problem solutions. Bipartisan, across the aisle, compromises are laudable with the very thinnest veneer when it comes to major, or very contested, legislation. Yes, there are some benefits, but such major issue compromises are similar to a car without wheels that still provides heat, and air conditioning. Some of the oppressed feel better initially, yet too many get nowhere in the long term.
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Incompleteness is More Corrosive Than We Realize.
A half assed, half baked, or half crap solution hurts us in two basic ways. 1) it is not a real solution, just a short-term feel good exercise. 2) {White male} society as a whole thinks it is solved, so we move on. This means forever fake solutions, and since it was solved, no need to upgrade, refine, etc.
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Why do we get inspired about incomplete legislation that we then cannot (disloyaly) criticize for its ineffectiveness in practice? Compromises that achieve incompleteness are too often another way of saying, we have done our best, now time to move on. Of course, then we are trapped in a something or nothing, chicken or egg battle. Completeness instead gets us nothing, and compromise gets us something that becomes nothing, and continues as forever contentious. So we are left with pulling out our hair, or grabbing at theirs, for generations.
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One reason we have a big problem achieving complete solutions, while I will be somewhat simplistic about it here, has to do with conservatives not wanting change, except going back to a certain time in the past, and liberals wanting to make major progressive changes in most every area. This unequal and opposite action means few changes are likely because stalling and blocking is easier than building new social structures, and expanding minds from a pluralistic standpoint. Remember that if major social and economic changes are required, what conservatives have built their religious faith, and secular beliefs on — our Constitution and form of government — are and have always been, ugly, wrong, bad, worthless, and a failure.
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From the conservative perspective, admitting there are major problems to fix is also saying the negative critiques above represent their beliefs, and resemble their viewpoint. This is likely why conservatives reacted so aggressively and angrily to the murder of George Floyd by attacking C.R.T., identity politics, and Black Lives Matter. Unless they react as such, the liberals will corner them with real truths they denied, and make them admit to failures. Again, these are conservative perceived (or promoted) fears. Whether, or when it is a tactic, or a reality, or both, it is hard to say. But we know fear mongering has an effect on some portion of the population, and enough voters to delay, mutilate, or destroy needed change.
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A Word On Collective Action, and Individualism.
America has come near a total whittling away of our collective responsibility, as if merely mentioning the phrase, will turn the word collective into oppressive, communist collectivism. Yet I think only a small percentage of Americans want to be forced to pitchfork hay, and finger snap beans on a communal farm their entire lives, any more than everyone wants to be forced to type on a computer keyboard six to eight hours a day, nearly every day, like I do. Individualists must work cohesively, and in a coordinating fashion, to make society successful.
Those few on the farthest right will be almost completely individualistic growing their own canned food, making their own guns using iron they mined, living in an Etsy redecorated cave, and watching basic cable. Those few others on the farthest left will want to self-flagellate themselves with Fanatic Kumbaya Verses as they work on a communal farm all year with a bunch of weirdo hippie types. Fine and fine.
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That said, the remainder of us should have as much freedom as possible to create, and live, our futures somewhere in between the farthest left, and right, extremes as long as everyone else is not unconstitutionally harmed by their, and anyone else’s, anger or actions. We do not need to chuck collective actions, and responsibilities to have individual freedom. The framers of our Constitution were a collective before they were able to guarantee individualism for anyone without the immediate resources to buy it, as could a wealthy overlord in their own fiefdom. Collective actions are constantly required to uphold and enhance our future. Therefore we must always be vigilant about our collective responsibilities, and regularly reinvigorate each, and rethink, and reinvent, them when the time arises. Otherwise, our individualism will always be in jeopardy.
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Conclusion.
First, let us review the findings above:
- Individualism and collectivism require each other, so they are perpetually intertwined.
- Political capital is finite; We The People strength and value is infinite.
- Time is always on our side if we work together.
- Conservatives associate societal change with failure, and accepting any changes would make conservatism a failure, so they see societal change as almost never necessary. Suggesting change often elicits a strident reaction.
- Big and small are not good or bad, only bad is bad, and good is good.
- Complexity must be understood, internalized, and managed in a modern society populated by billions of people.
- While greed may be the root of all evil, our collective knowledge can overcome such evil, and wrest control from its power purveyors.
- Incomplete solutions that still negatively affect millions of people in America will continue to churn up unhealthy behaviors that will plague future generations, harming our union.
To navigate all of the concepts above, and many others, and overcome or acclimate to them, then implement a solution effectively with each one in mind, requires a comprehensively expansive, flexible, and scalable system that meets all the challenges of a complex society.
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The complete solution strategy does not guarantee complete success. Getting to success requires a deep and wide understanding of the issues’ complete structure. Digging up the ancient elements that produced it, and ripping out the ancient structures that still protect it, and impede movement in a better direction is vital. Discovering completeness is hard work, the-powers-that-be tend to shirk societal hard work. One M.O., oft utilized by the-powers-that-be, is the perfunctory version treating only a symptom or two. This is after dismissing the people affected by the social constructs and physical barriers, and making few lives actually better. Their worst M.O. is victim blaming, as in focusing on unwed mothers as the problem rather than education, poverty, housing, jobs, health, pollution, crime, policing, redlining, and racism. We can no longer follow this classist and racist mantra: If it is the victim’s problem, it is not a societal problem.
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In a September 2021 article about C.R.T., Jelani Cobb wrote, “[Derrick] Bell saw in the [Bakke] decision the beginning of a new phase of challenges. Diversity is not the same as redress, he argued; it could provide the appearance of equality while leaving the underlying machinery of inequality untouched.”
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Redressing must come from a change in the underlying machinery. Removing the lying about the machinery needs to end first. Telling the truth about the origins and structures of the problem is required. Facing the reality on every side is another key element. Conservatives not attached to change as failure, or who do not see bringing up social realities like racism or sexism as blasphemy, are welcome to join in our effort. Americans who refuse to recognize the flaws in our system, or wish to ignore them, make for seriously unproductive solution collaborators.
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Whatever the details of any solution may be, I have missed some percentage of the truth and reality, and since everyone misses something, we need each other’s help to determine or discover what has been left out. Collaboration is our only salvation in a pluralistic society. Whether it is your civic influences, economic theories, scientific knowledge, or religious perspective, it all must be considered to find the complete path forward. Americans are a diverse bunch, so we must commit to a legitimate and welcoming collaboration.
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We have come to a transition point where big government is bad because two-party, polarized politics forever precludes good big government. Trying to eliminate the complexity we encounter today is impossible, and has been for many decades. The machinery cannot handle the load. Politics is no longer, and maybe never has been, a trustworthy societal problem solver. More importantly, politics cannot continue to ramp at the speed society is changing. Twice as many legislators would increase political machinations not the speed of solutions because the machinery would remain the same. It would be like doubling your telemarketing staff without purchasing additional phones. Therefore, I am proposing We The People build new machinery to handle the overload, and much quickly move into the future solving problems faster.
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That multipurpose machinery is a complete solution platform I am calling the We The People System. The system is the undergirding machinery of an amazing transition to a real 21st century society, and a transformation way beyond it. Below I note just some of the elements that explain the possibilities, advantages, and capabilities of the WTP System:
- It is for citizens and workers.
- Scalable, flexible, and completeness committed.
- Provides collective and individualist modules.
- Civic and Economic development, private, public, local, state, federal.
- A countervailing force that more than fully levels the playing field for citizens and workers, to comprehensively take on the-powers-that-be.
- Not socialism or capitalism, but democratic economics.
- A massive database that helps citizens and workers stay up-to-date, in-the-know, powerfully advocative, perennially aware of public, private (business-related), and political activity and actors, and etc.
- Extraordinary logistical coordination to manage every complexity that can implement a completely green future, and battle the next pandemic as well as ending shootings by police, and school shootings, and helping every person and community during a local disaster.
- Nearly instantaneous job acquisition, or advance training placement.
- A quick end to illegal and unethical job hiring discrimination.
- Nationwide direct democracy platform, a party politics’ gridlock workaround, eschewing politics to solve problems in realtime.
- Materially improving civic education and participation.
- Solves immigration and migrant worker issues, and can greatly reduce refugees, and asylum seekers.
- The system will help make life better, safer, and much less precarious for every person residing in America.
- A direct and powerful influence, that puts significant pressure on legislatures and Congress, to solve currently intractable issues.
- A comprehensive Watchdog Platform to monitor the goings on of government and private business to avoid catastrophic societal and environmental shocks, to stop sabotage by corporate interests, and the subversion of the workers’ future.
- Technology developed by and for We The People, never out of our management control.
- Based on a foundational ideals algorithm that millions of us will construct, and all of us will approve.
I am not suggesting we usurp the political process; instead it is a massive technological, advanced communication, and people collaborating workaround. Every American worker and citizen is automatically a member, and can work individually, or collectively, or merely utilize the other services. The goal is to develop the overall platform that completes the We The People loop, drawing together all our civic and labor power to compete eye-to-eye with the-powers-that-be machine. This system idea is not a piece of fiction, it is a reality we can achieve.
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