Category: POLITICS

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Exit the Strong Man, Enter the Bearded Lady…

Behind Scenes Circus Oz H4eWPyvufXEl

The dog days of July are upon us, and the traveling circus that is American politics are trolling the summer circuit.  The tent has been packed up in Cleveland, and the carnies and animal acts are on their way to Philadelphia.  The nation, as much as it has pressing worries, cannot take its eyes off the fantastical world of the circus and its farcical, somewhat foreboding characters.  After several decades of lousy and boring acts representing America, the citizens have turned toward a much more entertaining spectacle.  Unlike the fortnight of most circuses, this one, come November 8th, 2016, is scheduled like it or not for an extended, painful run.

In the past when the Republican circus has come to town, the more spectacular venues have typically been outside the tent.  The staid Republicans have attracted. like flies to a picnic, the more exotic carnival acts.  A motley crew of communists, race baiters, environmental globalists, and animal rights activists have typically coalesced into a street production designed to feed off the national audience tuned into the acts of the main tent. Violence, miserable hygiene,  police taunts, and the throwing of bodily fluids and worse have been part of the demanding side show..  For some reason, however,  this time the sideshow was intimidated by the main tent presence  in Cleveland of a larger than life circus act, and did little to disturb the event.  When in the presence of the real deal, I guess side shows lose their clout.

In the main tent in Cleveland, the strong man Trump ruled supreme.  His major feat of strength was the near miraculous taking over center stage of a party that in its heyday would have swept him aside like a 40 pound weakling.  This strong man, wearing the costume of a man of real heft to hide an oversold muscular persona and paunchy intellect, managed to steal the show.  The audience got a series of introductory acts that included a soap opera star, an extreme fighter and pretty much every family relation that could read a script.  But every strong man needs a foil,  and our strong man has found his in the Dastardly Ted Cruz character that exists, like the old Washington Generals, for a scheduled butt kicking.  Dastardly Ted tried to play it too cute by half, securing the role of defender of the ramparts while not endorsing the identified man of strength at his own circus.  Lifting a few weights of past shows like freedom, conscience, and respect for the Constitution, Cruz hoped to impress the audience.  But this audience got free tickets to enter from the reigning strong man,  and trump made sure their would be no alternative spotlight.  The red meat audience descended with boos and catcalls on schedule, thus saving all the oohs and aahs for Trump himself.

The strong man Trump then trained all spotlights upon himself on the final night.  Having already used cloud machines and strobe lights with a previous entrance, Trump was determined to show the audience that he could be a closing act as well.  Trump stood serenely before the audience both in the tent and watching from home, and, in the voice  of a carny barker,  described the feats of strength reserved for only the truly strong.  Terrorism would be defeated, and fast.  Law and Order would be restored, and fast.  Trade agreements that had been agreed to by weaker men would be thrown aside, and competitors would quiver and yield better deals once in the presence of a real strong man.  Fellow allies would pay their fair share to defend the world, or somebody was going to be sorry.   Immigrants, the right ones, would be welcomed in, but the wrong ones, oh, would they be sorry they were the wrong ones.  Elites would learn about the new power in town, and stop in their tracks their life of being the bully to the little guy – the bully in chief guaranteed it.  Jobs would rise. Debts would fall.  Enemies would surrender.  The crooks would face justice.  The ultimate feat of strength, achieving  agreement on who was the strongest of the strong in the first one hundred days.

One couldn’t tell if the audience, bludgeoned over 76 minutes, was entertained or bewildered.  No matter, they had gotten a free ticket, and that was entertainment enough.

Philadelphia now presents as the traveling show, and the bearded lady is the act to see.  The audience will stare, somewhat embarrassed that they are drawn to look and can not avert their eyes at such unpleasant exotica.  The bearded lady Clinton is a real carny act, living a life of victim status, while in real life being on the lam from the law for four decades.  Each time the law closes in, she changes her appearance and talks about events in the past as if they happened to someone else.  The democrat party activists, so used to carnival acts,  may be able to muster an audience, but applause is likely to be wanting.  When Clinton presents upon the final day of her convention expecting her due, it will not surprise in the least if the real show will be on the streets of Philadelphia, and the a half baked audience somnolently stares and wonders, how such an act managed to get into the center ring.

Nobody in the world wants to participate in a circus run by a has-been bearded lady, but is anybody ready to have the strong man take over, when it’s relatively clear, the one muscle he has never exercised is his intellectual muscle.  When the carnival closes and the show moves out of town, we will be left with having to decide between the two as to who will become leader of the most powerful country on earth.  It’s not a show certainly I would have hoped for, and one wonders if the rest of the world, dying on the vine, can survive either.  The greatest show on earth, it will definitely not be.

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The Rule of Law on the Endangered List

ScalesofJustice

When the Constitutional Convention met between May and September 1787, the delegates hoped to codify substantial improvements in the previously governing Articles of Confederation that would create a national consensus of governance.  The weaker Articles had led to poor decision making and conflict resolution structure, and lack of vision and resources to face the future.   A carefully debated and perfected set of checks and balances were devised to provide limitations to the power of centralized government, so recently faced at great peril and barely overcome with so much blood and treasure. The delegates wanted to make sure the aristocratic impulses that are promulgated in the coalescence of power were blocked by a division of capabilities.  The Legislature elected by the People would propose laws of the land and secure their passage, and provide the means for their investment.  The Executive would use his office to faithfully execute those laws.  The Judiciary would adjudicate and secure that both the intent of the laws and their execution would be consistent with delineated and limited capabilities of government specified in the Constitution.  Balanced between democracy and forbearance, the document known as the Constitution of the United States was a miracle of its time, and of all time.

The classical liberals of the time of the revolution were, however, not satisfied with the extent of the document to protect  the hard won liberties for individuals that had been the causal impulse of the revolution itself.  In order to secure the passage of the Constitution by the states required for its entry as the new government of the land, amendments codifying the Unalienable Rights of individual citizens were insisted upon as a price for constitutional support.  The passage of ten amendments to the Constitution ratified by the states in 1791, collectively known as the Bill of Rights when passed through the newly formed House of Representatives, secured the rights of the people to liberty,freedom of expression, assembly and worship, self defense, due process and equal protection under the law, and to the states any rights and duties  not reserved specifically for the national government.

And there the two pillars of the concept of law have stood since the beginning of the nation, buffeted and strained by events, the bizarre duality of the existence of slavery in a land where all men were created equal and the expunging of that stain by the calamity of civil war, the dangers of unfettered capitalism creating oligarchies, the risk to republican concepts in the dark days of depression, and the existential risks created by world war.  Through all, the incredible strength provided by such documents prevented the dissolution of the country, and the unrivaled opportunity for all who came to her shores.  Here was a land where the entitled and the indigent, the strong and the weak, the native and the immigrant, the old and the newly born all could assure themselves of their codified protection and rights secured in a rule of law and equal justice that resisted the emotions of the time.

Now we are at a time of similar danger to the concept of the rule of law, but unlike other times, the number of people who understand what is at stake appear to be a rapidly diminishing herd.  The nation that used to see as its cornerstone,  the education of its youth and newly arrived immigrants in the study of civics, setting this country uniquely among others, now faces an utter ignorance from its own citizens and an arrogant disdain from its  governing officials that puts rule of law on the endangered list.

The past weeks, with overt abominations, equivalences, and violent, deadly altercations suggest potentially fatal wounds to the country’s psyche and institutional confidence.

Though the examples are diverse, the threat to the rule of law as the honest arbiter of conflicts and eliminator of corruption is the underlying meme.   Exhibit number one is the email security scandal of the former Secretary of State of the United States.  The Congress, in order to protect the people of the United States against enemies of the country gaining access to information that put the nation or individuals at risk, passed laws to guard against such damage being done, either willfully or through deceit or negligence.  The rule of law secures both the protections of the people and uniform compliance of the law for all that would come under it:

Title 18 Section 793 (F) of the US Code of Law  :Chapter 37 Espionage and  Censorship            (f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

The clarity of the language is not oblique as to the responsibilities of any individual entrusted with such information, from the lowliest clerk at the Pentagon to the President of the United States.  Equality under the law secures both the rights and responsibilities that guarantee both the freedoms and potential penalties prescribed by law are independent of a person’s station in life.  Without such guarantees, the nation is helpless against the corrupting influence of the powerful to set one standard for themselves, and one for all others.  President Nixon was not impeached for ordering a break in or even creating the incitement for it.  He was positioned for impeachment for using the tools of government to obstruct the achievement of equal justice under the law, and the Constitutional principles he had sworn to protect.  Secretary of State Clinton took a similar oath of office to faithfully execute the laws of the land and the duties of her office.  She had reached the cabinet position after a lifetime of interactions with the concept of law and its role in society.  She was a lawyer who had in fact participated on the house Judiciary Committee Congressional Council staff that was charged with investigating President Nixon’s possible crimes, was the lawyerly wife of a President Clinton who was himself impeached for perjuring himself under oath, and had been a Senator involved in committees that vetted sensitive information.  Such intimate association with ethics stained events and forty years of law had certainly prepared her for the importance of understanding the rule of law and the role it plays in securing the rights for all in society.

Positioned at one of the most powerful and most sensitive positions in government, and having lived a lifetime of intimate interactions with those who had run afoul of their sworn responsibilities, there was probably no one individual in the entire government who should have been more aware of the importance of fealty to the law.  It is therefore a travesty of justice, when the implication was made this week that although her actions regarding maintaining a private unsecured server for all her governmental communications outside of accepted security was clearly from her specific direction, the exposure of multiple secrets and sensitive information represented only “careless” activity, not the gross negligence specified in the law as felonious.

The FBI investigation into Clinton’s server insanity identified lies and actions that would have prevented any other individual from receiving any job in the federal government, most companies, and given the realities of the damage done, an indictment and likely trial for crimes against the United States.

She lied when she said she did not send or receive any classified emails.  She lied when she said she turned over all pertinent work related emails. She knowingly routed sensitive and secret government information through a private server she knowingly set up against all policy, servers that did not have, as expressed by the director of the FBI, even the simplest level of  security to hackers offered by G-Mail.  She lied when she stated her E-mails were reviewed by her team of personal lawyers to assure all pertinent information be turned over to the investigating authorities and brazenly ordered the scrubbing of any potential evidence of her servers to guarantee no one could ever gain access to the actual undoctored information.

When the extent of the negligence is so appalling, and the evidence of willful intent to manipulate both evidence and the appropriate investigation of her actions so clear, how is it possible that the Director of the FBI could make the ludicrous statement that no “reasonable” prosecutor would find reason for indictment?   It is because we are becoming comfortable with the idea that people who represent our views are to be forgiven  their infidelities, regardless of the damage it does to objective justice and the protection of rights through the rule of law. The FBI Director was more concerned that the determination of guilt be adjudicated by an election, not a court of law.  Doing so, he flouted the role that the legislature plays in determining our laws, the executive plays in faithfully  executing those laws, and the judiciary’s role in securing justice for all, regardless of position of influence.  This careful system of checks and balances assures the objective removal of corrupt processes, before they can do damage to the principles that secure the country as a functioning republic.  He brought to risk all individuals responsibility for being faithful to, and respecting law.  He provided precedence that laws are contextual only, and that our highest officials may provide their own interpretations, different from those the commoner must face.

It was such context and arrogance toward law that led the nobles of England to secure from King John the delineated principles of the Magna Carta in 1215, assuring that the rule of law be common to the rulers and their subjects.  Hillary Clinton has led a life that at almost every turn suggested the rules of society are for the little people, and our establishment has grown impotent to do anything about the single minded destruction she brings to our most basic principles.  From flaunting the privacy considerations of the Watergate committee in order to insert her political views into the investigation, colluding to hide documents from investigators from her revealing her billing actions with the Rose Law Firm,  assuring the destruction of Whitewater fellow investors in order to protect her involvement with savings and loan shenanigans, and devastating attacks upon the character of women who were harmed by her husband, Clinton has used her position of power to protect and enrich herself at the expense of any who unfortunately touched upon her sordid moral compass. It has been  a lifetime built on the altar of lies, amorality, and personal gain.  Now the FBI Director, to avoid being accused of denying her what unfettered democracy may yet provide her, ultimate power, has stained himself and a lifetime of work serving justice, joining the many others who have been thrown under the Clinton bus.

A society that would put her in such an ultimate position of power has a dead soul, and the hard won miracle of a classless society based on equality under the law, collaterally damaged perhaps beyond recognition.  Our choice this fall is the fool’s bargain.

 

 

 

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Sunrise After Brexit

 

Sunrise attrib Wikipedia Commons
Sunrise
attrib Wikipedia Commons

The morning after the Brexit vote, one imagines Britons awakening with a similar sense of bewilderment, and a diametrically opposed sense of outcome.  Those who voted Leave, woke up with a tentative sense of blissful relief, as if a migrainous pressure behind their eyes had been lifted with the rising sun, and they could safely view the rays for the first time in a long time without averting their sight.  The Remainers awoke also bewildered, but adjusting to a massive hangover painfully focusing the reality of a resultant wakeup from a decades long bender.  Both likely thought, “What just happened?”.  What just happened will take some time to sort out, but the makings of something very significant for people in Britain, and beyond, has clearly and irreversibly occurred.

The outcome of the momentous vote in Great Britain on June 23rd to leave formal membership in the European Union spared no one’s worldview.  In the stunning bullseye of the outcome stood the Prime Minister of Great Britain himself, David Cameron.  Completely misinterpreting his constituents fundamental concerns with an ever more encompassing elitist need to control their lives, Cameron felt he could use fear tactics regarding a world after Leave without elitists’ guarantees of stability for all would be enough to impel the great undereducated to support an establishment who would look after them. He was so wrong, that it appears his political mandate so recently secured in the parliamentary elections of 2015,  has been scuttled.  He has announced his intent to resign. The British people spoke in 2015, and thus they spoke again.  Like most leaders who, upon retaining power, assume it is all about them, Cameron found out that both his comprehensive victory in 2015 and his crashing defeat in 2016, were decidedly not about him.  Likewise, the American President Obama, who likes to declare in profound elitist egocentrism  every time an opposing opinion to his worldview gains traction, “This is not the America we want,”  discovered that the people of Great Britain didn’t find his preening intervention in the issue helpful in the least.   It turns out British citizens wanted to let Obama know, “This is not the Britain we want.”

What has transpired I suspect, is a very natural human reaction to excess.  When the Industrial Revolution brought for the first time a means by which individuals could achieve the position of kings without a hereditary portfolio and in the interval of a single lifetime, the benefits were profound, but so were the excesses.  As wealth spilled out from the exclusive domain of royalty and clergy,  millions of people attained the benefits of a meaningful life filled with both security and bounty.  Lives progressively became less the fight for survival then the search for personal worth and meaning.  The elites were progressively shunted aside to directional forces determined by the proletariat and burgeoning middle class.  Transportation became universal. Food became plentiful. A life now stable became increasingly worthwhile to maintain one’s health.  All good things. However, the darker impulses were also apparent.  The individualism left other important communal outcomes wanting.  The environment sustained critical damage. Morality became a relic, with diminished roles for family, increasing pleasure absorption, and an increasingly bitter sense of being left out, once the reality of opportunities for success was progressively available to all.  The most aggressively destructive forces in the twentieth century were not led by the elites, but rather the out of control proletariat that coopted nations into tools of domination.  Common men led the most egregious – the journalist Mussolini Fascist Italy, the failed painter Hitler Germany, the would be priest Stalin, the pseudo intellectual Mao.  Worse than their own perverted sense of progress was their willingness and ability to draw millions like them into armies of mass destruction.

The world that barely survived this excess turned to elitists to save them.  Post war communal arrangements were designed to soften the worst traits of nearly destroyed world of the out of control individualism and national primitivism.  The new meme of the elites was “globalism”. Individuals, and the nations they personified would subvert their baser tendencies to a global sharing through the guidance of elites.  Companies in competition would consolidate into global corporations in sync with shared values. Nations in competition would align with others to redistribute resources, regulate excesses, and degenerate their uniqueness.  Shared money, shared language shared aspirations, shared outcomes would remove the calamitous instincts of individuals to ‘get ahead’, and the world would forever grow beyond the need for violence, greed, and flag waving that got us into all this trouble in the first place.  The new wars would be against other – climate, division, asymmetry, and sexuality.  Sure there would be some unbalanced aspects.  Elites would preserve their world and flourish.  The rest would see the benefits of the elites beneficence – just like  in the olden times.

The Elites – the Harvard trained Obama and the Eton and Oxford prepared Cameron – could not comprehend that the average individual might want to bring some meaning to their lives by living their lives differently.  The Elites had extended their altruism to the point where they demanded to provide solutions for aspects of life where there were no identified problems to solve. Brexit was not so much a negation of all that came before but a democratic break to the undemocratic impulses of those who would determine that the future is a settled science of vast bureacracies, infinite regulations, removal of moral constraints, and destruction of free will and individual opportunity.

The morning sunrise after Brexit brings the faintly uncomfortable sense of a world less predictable.  As Groucho Marx cogently once said, he would be uncomfortable belonging to any club that would have him as a member. As a result of Brexit, older forces may have to be monitored for and deftly dealt with.  Germany’s natural inclination to dominate the continent and to gaze toward the East. Great Britain’s tenuous hold on its own unified sovereignity with such a close but divergent opinion as to the best course for its future. America’s isolationist tendencies and longing for a simplier world when it could self gaze safely behind a moat of surrounding oceans.

The better option is likely a form of compromise that preserves the best of what both elites and proliterians have to offer, without allowing the worst characteristics of each to see a world better off without each doing its part.   Thanks to a bunch of conflicted but resolute Britons who trusted themselves, the world has a chance again to take a breath, and breathe the beautiful air of freedom.  This particular sunrise, for those of us who still man the Ramparts of Civilization,  is one moment worthy of the sentiments of Rule Britainnia :

The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.
“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
“Britons never will be slaves.”

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Donald Trump – Novice Maximus

Donald Trump salon.com
Donald Trump                             salon.com

You have to give the man his due.  Donald Trump entered the nomination process last June as a rejiggered Democrat non-politician running in the Republican Party nomination process alongside 16 other experienced, motivated, better funded and better prepared candidates – and with last Tuesday’s crushing of the final two pretenders in the Indiana primary – left all 16 in a pile of rubble the Trump bulldozer had cleared off the road. But not only the 16.  He additionally has created a meme where the power structures forming the fifty year edifice of a conservative movement that had at the beginning of the primary season demanded that Trump declare loyalty to the party and not go off the rails with a third party run, were now fumbling to say if they would declare loyalty to him.  The former Speaker of the House, who led the first  congressionally directed conservative takeover of American political philosophy in 1994, Newt Gingrich, enthusiastically supports Trump.  The current Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who was hostilely drafted to resurrect the conservative will of a corrupted leadership in 2015 and is the chairman of the party’s nominated convention, cannot bring himself to declare the undisciplined, unideological Trump as his movement’s standard bearer.  The brother of the President of the United States who Trump declared lied to the American people regarding Iraq vows Never Trump.  The former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, who championed the very Iraq policy that Trump says was a perpetrated lie upon the American people has come forward to support Trump.  It has resulted in the 1996 loser of the presidential election Robert Dole to vociferously endorse Trump, and the most recent loser of 2012, Milt Romney to scheme to get rid of Trump.  Down the line, governors and senators, congressmen and assemblymen, conservative think tanks and journalists, industry chiefs and regular tool box guys, wise thought leaders and talk show blatherers alike, are finding themselves aghast at the prospect of having to choose who they are, when they thought they already knew.  The meme is a question – If you are for Trump or you are against Trump, what does it say about you?

The American style electoral process to this point has been based on a party structure that looked for candidates who would represent the party members values, and attempt to convince the rest of America, on the values fitting the currents times and events.  It has been said and believed, all politics are local.  The party’s strengths are formulated through retail politics of local leaders meeting the constituents, kissing the babies, and fixing the potholes. Successful local leaders then take their local resumes to achieve state offices and learn the art of compromise and debate, interest groups and budgets that prepare them for the national stage.  At the national stage the lessons learned from a career of relationships with like minded people forms the party structure of a national vision that a fully vetted standard bearer must earn the right to represent, perhaps earning after having fallen short a time or two, and refining his or her understanding of the vision process to eventually be selected and succeed.   This was the structure that was built to prevent the hijacking of the party vision by an extreme version or transiently enthusiastic impulse.  The Pat Buchanons, Ron Pauls, George Wallaces, and Pete McCloskeys could not get through the obstacle course and subvert the party to their extremism. It was a protection against demagogues such as Huey Long or Douglas MacArthur democratically overwhelming the mechanisms of restraint.

However perfect the restraints, the parties would occasionally struggle to avoid falling in love with a relative novice, like Wendell Wilkie, Dwight Eisenhower, or Barrack Obama, on the basis of a single gift. Even then there was some logic.  The Republican candidate of 1940, businessman Wilkie was a sacrificial lamb against the massive Democratic machine that controlled all facets national politics led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  The party had nothing to lose in trying a non-politician against the ultimate politician.  In 1952, Eisenhower’s singular gift was that he had adroitly managed the most massive military machine ever assembled and had helped save the entire world.  That certainly made him hard to turn down.  In 2008, the Democrat Party turned to a  state senator who became a one term US Senator only so he could become President.  As to his party’s nefarious recognition of his supposed singular gift, his eventual running mate and gaffemeister Joseph Biden  crudely framed it, saying  “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Donald Trump has exploded all the constraints by being Novice Maximus.  He is not an industrial leader like Wilkie, he is a wheeler dealer business speculator.  He is not a leader of men and women like Eisenhower forged in battle, he is leader dealer  who sells to others his version of dealing, defining success and failure by how closely they adhere to the Trump model, firing non-acolytes in the Apprentice, or failing non-converts in a fraudulent “Trump University”.  He has not captured the media by superficially looking and sounding nonthreatening to them like Obama, but rather overwhelming them and enslaving the media through ratings success their previous biases had prevented them from ever achieving. Trump, the Novice Maximus, towers over all previous models, converting individuals who would not remotely respect his bizarre politics into ‘Trumpeters’ for the cause.

And thus, the dilemma for anyone who has an inkling as to the principles that make this modern republic great.  The Republican Party has positioned themselves to endorse a candidate who shows no identifiable message discipline or understanding, and is proud of it.  This party of limited government influence on people’s lives is about to underwrite an individual that declares he alone will adjudicate whether a company moves their business, a person of muslim faith can gain entrance, another sovereign country will be forced to pay fealty, or that the country he represents will resolve to default on its debt.  The Republican Party, wholly unable to control Novice Maximus in his inevitable drive to the party nomination, now asks its constituents who did not buy into Trump to ‘trust’ the party to be able to ‘control’ Novice Maximus once he has obtained the reins of power through ‘wise council’ and ‘checks and balances’.  This type of logic has been ludicrously promoted before against of demagogic figures, the most disturbing historical example being  the decision of the German right to believe it could ‘control’ Hitler by bringing him into government as Chancellor and having him mentored by Hindenburg.  Obviously, Trump is no Hitler, but the Republican Party is not even remotely Hindenburg.  Donald Trump refined modern social media control with the best propagandists of the 1930’s, and once in place of the ultimate bully pulpit, would be out of the reach of any stabilizers.

What to do?  Vote your principles, and your desire for forward looking, rational answers to our many problems goes down to defeat.  Jump on the Trump Train, and assure the complete destruction of ideological clarity to problem solving, while still going down to defeat, win or lose.  For me, principles trump Trump.  Losing one’s soul is not a reasonable price for defeating the less defined of two evils.  The 1932 german patriot who held on to his humanity and civility and didn’t join the lemmings, at least didn’t have to live the evolving calamity soulless.

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Checking The Box

The Ballot Awaits - What will you do?
The Ballot Awaits – What will you do?

Voting is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.  The vote represents the compact a country’s people hold with its government to follow the agreed upon constitutionally ordained mandates, laws, security, and strategic investments.  It is the pat on the back for positive performance, the weedwacker for removing governmental congestion,troubled concepts and inadequate or corrupted leaders. The great arsenal of democracy is the ballot box, converting the performance chart into measurable, digestible time frames that allow an engaged citizenry to control their future.

The zenith of the American voting process is the vote for the Presidency.  Every four years, the country puts its prospective leaders through an onerous process that vets each prospect’s  capacity to articulate a vision, respond and modify to others’ criticisms, and engage and hold the attention of a majority of Americans who see the future as they do.  Its an intense process, and it should work at a level of outcome worthy of the great democracy it serves.

Yet, for years, the process has appeared significantly out of sync with the voter, and has time and time again positioned candidates that seem incomplete or unworthy, and that leave the voter with a choice of selecting the lesser of two evils.  Progressively, the Presidential vote has come to voting against someone we feel will be damaging to our future, rather for someone who positively represents our views and our vision. For the past thirty years, this has been particularly an unsavory process for the conservative or libertarian voter.  The Republican Party, positioned to represent the world of the individual initiative and limited government, has put forth candidates who are further and further removed from this philosophical pact.  It has demanded the conservative go into the booth, hold his or her nose, and vote against the other party rather than for the republican candidate, to protect a rapidly diminishing societal compact with those two pillars the party claims to be fundamental.

This year, the wheels have completely come off the wagon.  Short of a radical change in events, the two party nominees will be Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the Clown against the Criminal, and a huge segment of the Republican Party’s base are left with the impossible choice of voting for intolerable options, or abdicating their responsibility as the ground troops of democracy and staying out of the Presidential vote all together.

The Republican Party is wholly responsible for this approaching debacle.  Every four years, the process of selecting candidates has leached out the more principled conservative candidates on the premise that a principled conservative could not possibly appeal to the greater population.  The Voter got Bush instead of Kemp, Dole instead of Graham, Bush instead of Forbes, McCain instead of Romney, and Romney instead of Perry.  Each time, the consensus candidate either significantly let down their conservative base of support once elected (in case of the Bushes), or got clobbered by the ideologically purer democratic alternative in the general election.  On multiple occasions, the base got back of the floor and organized off year election victories and with the exception of 1994, had their elected legislators turn their back on the ideological struggle and give in to the statist Borg.

2016 was going to be different. This was to be the year in which the executive election ideology would match the legislative thrust, and the conservative voter could go into the booth and positively pull the lever for our version of an ideologically pure candidate. Perry, Jindal, Walker, Rubio, Cruz, Fiorina.  All are gone or nearly so, and the man left standing is Donald Trump, the anti-ideologue whose base instincts would fit securely into the Democrat Party’s vision of leading society through correct beliefs rather than correct facts if he had determined to run under his life long party, rather than his recent epiphany that he must be a Republican. Certainly a surprise to his children, who didn’t even have time to change their party allegiance in order to vote in the “other” party’s primary in New York for their father.

Instead the party of individual initiative and limited government will be represented by the             very candidate who has publicly declared these concepts an anathema to him.  The result has been a sense of doom and withdrawal that are normally foreign to the conservative voter, usually the most committed and engaged supporter of the constitutional process.  One can vote for Trump and pretend that what one believes doesn’t matter in governance, or stay out of the election and allow Clinton to be rewarded for a life of insolent behavior, statist, collective ideology, and lousy performance.  Peggy Noonan in her Wall Street Journal editorial of April 28, 2016, refers to this sullen recognition of  what she calls the Moment, when the lack of an out is expressed as a psychological wounding.  The Republican Party,clumsily looking to expand its appeal rather than firm up its convictions, set up the primary process so that an outside demagogue could parley minority anger into a majority delegate position. The Party is now desperately attempting to imply the conservative voter must once again “hold their nose” and vote to prevent a supposed worse outcome, or risk the shuttering of the party.

The final defenders of the Ramparts are being labeled the NeverTrump clique and are being set up to either be a hypocrite to their principles, or permit a final closing of the door  of a vision of a country once uniformly seen as a place of opportunity, self responsibility, and societally moral relations.  Well, a stark future awaits, and unless something unexpected happens, it is not clear  a way out of Peggy Noonan’s Moment can be formed out of the madness.

A difficult, tumultuous summer and fall looms.

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Ssshhh! …Still Some Clear Thinking Going On…

 

General Petraeus in Field - Roberto Schmidt getty images/cnn.com
General Petraeus in Iraq           photo Roberto Schmidt getty images/cnn.com

The political discourse these days is so trivial, hyperbolic, and lacking in thought that we might wonder if we are undergoing staging for a reality show rather than vetting potential Presidents of the United States.  The idea that there might be a philosophy of engagement for the most powerful nation on earth or an identified self interest is anathema to the candied brains of the current front runners.  The Democrat front runner sees the Libyan fiasco as a great accomplishment.  The Republican front runner wants to get rid of NATO and demands fools gold from other allies to maintain positions in the world that long have been critical to the nation’s self interest.  The current President uses political calculus rather than in-depth analysis to attempt a policy of retrenchment.  As a result, his concept of retrenchment waffles between red lines and withdrawals, disdain for his enemies capabilities and inept, pinprick reactionary responses to threats.  Is there anybody left who has thought this through?

Well, there is someone.  Someone who could have been President, but ruptured his bond with integrity and took himself out.  General David Petraeus, who served both Republican and Democrat Administrations and was the strategic genius behind the Iraq surge that finally won the Iraqi conflict, only to have it dissolve with the forced withdrawal of his carefully and painfully won stabilizing force.  The general committed political hari-kari when he exposed three classified documents to his biographer mistress, who as an intelligence officer additionally had classified document clearance.  It resulted in a very public humiliation by the Obama  Administration by Petraeus, who was forced to resign as CIA Director, and a Justice Department prosecution that led in 2015 to 2 years probation and a 100 thousand dollar fine.  The four star general’s career was over, and the unique means of his political demise takes on special focus when weighed against the massively larger security breach that was brazenly propagated by Secretary of State Clinton. Ms. Clinton, who could very well be our next President.

It is David Petraeus, not Hillary Clinton, who is banished to the wilderness.  We should remind ourselves however who General Petraeus is, because the old war horse has a soaring intellect and much yet to teach, if we are willing to listen.  David Petraeus was in the top 5% of his 1974 graduating class at West Point, the top graduate of his 1983 class at the 1983 US Army Command General Staff College, and subsequently earned a MPA and PhD in International Relations from Princeton University.  As a commanding intellectual, Petraeus proved equally adept at the real testing ground of soldiering, becoming a commissioned Army Ranger, promoted to commanding a battalion of the famed 101st Airborne Division, a brigade with the 82nd Airborne Division and eventually the commanding major general of the 101st in the second Gulf War combat assault on Baghdad, Karbala and Mosul.

What tied Petraeus’s unique balance of intellectual depth and combat assertiveness into success was the depth of his own philosophical development in concepts of counter insurgency.   Petraeus saw counter insurgency as requiring creation of security and stability by the twins of tactical force and political compromise, achieving the trust and the buy in of those he was asked to defend.  Nowhere did he succeed more profoundly then when he was asked to command the surge of US forces in 2007 in the desperate attempt to salvage the floundering US effort to pacify Iraq. Recognizing the Anbar Awakening for what it was, Petraeus presciently identified the appropriate winners and losers and supported his winners until they could assert their own control.  The success of the surge was so dramatic, that the key issue of the 2008 presidential campaign was lost to then candidate Obama. By 2010, the Obama Administration, noting that Iraq was so pacified that US Army deaths due to monthly training accidents exceeded combat deaths, declared a stable Iraq as their Greatest Achievement, and promptly threw it all away by not renewing the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.  All of the hard work and sacrifices of the American effort in Iraq came to nothing as the black anarchy of death rapidly seeped into the vacuum.

Obama requested Petraeus’s help in Afghanistan and then the CIA in an effort to contain Petraeus rapidly rising political star, before Petraeus removed himself as a political foe through his own foible.  Nobody was more relieved then Obama.

Petraeus might have been the next in line of the perfect citizen soldier statesmen, such as Washington, Grant, Marshall, and Eisenhower that helped this nation out of its doldrums in the past.  Instead his personal vanity led to foolish weakness that has deprived us of this generation’s great leader.  Petraeus thankfully has not given up on helping format a way out of our current international morass.  In a Washington Post OpEd, Petraeus helps suggest the principles in countering the plague of radical Islam, that could direct future Administrations to a restoration of stability in this most unstable world.  His Five Big Ideas in the OpEd reflect Petraeus’s philosophical underpinnings he has previously described for breaking sclerotic impasses and achieving Institutional Change: First: Get the Big Ideas Right. Second: Communicate the Big Ideas Effectively. Third: Oversee Big Idea Implementation. Fourth: Capture the Lessons Learned, Refine, and Repeat the Process.  The current opinion piece mirrors the foundational Big Idea concept. Petraeus defines the Five Big Ideas as :

  1. Recognition that ungoverned spaces contribute the agar dish of chaos that draw radicals and allow them to flourish.
  2. Radical Islamists will not confine their attacks to their lairs or strongholds.
  3. The U.S. can not absolve itself of responsibility as the singular world leader capable of coordinating a counter insurgency
  4. The path to success will be comprehensive, multi-faceted, involve allies and friends,   and not just precision strikes and special operations.
  5. Victory ( and Petraeus does not see U.S. self interest in something short of victory) will require sustained U.S. effort for extended periods, defined by conditions on the ground, not enforced timetables.

What the general is describing is nothing more than the reversal of the last seven years of U.S. strategy of leaving the chaos of the world for others to solve, and retrenching to the role of leading from behind.  Such strategy has led to propagation of Syria’s catastrophic collapse, Iraq’s dissolution, ineptly permitted by  a puppet government of the Iranian mullahs that lost the Anbar to the ISIS monsters, sacrificed the Yazidis, offended the Kurds, and seek to destroy the Sunni ,  and the Libya, Mali, Somali, and Nigeria calamitous infernos of Mad Max warscapes.  I could easily see where it might be long past time to reverse such strategy.  Unfortunately, the political discourse would suggest we may  be willing to elect even more wrong way thinking approaching at its extreme, real bone headed logic.

There is real thinking out there.  If the country is willing to overlook completely profligately amoral and sustained behavior from its leading candidates, could it possibly overlook a brief lapse in a career of brilliance for our nation’s sake?

Where have you gone, General Petraeus, Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you woo,woo,woo…

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Down The Homestretch

Apr 25, 2010; Milwaukee, WI, USA; Klements Racing Sausages get ready for their race during the sixth inning of the game between the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers at Miller Park. The Cubs defeated the Brewers 12-2. Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports
Down the Homestretch with the Final Five                                                                                                      Photo : Mandatory Credit: Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports

 

The Great American Extravaganza that culminates in the election of a Chief Executive  of the United States is fully upon us.  There have been tens of scores of debates, town halls, fundraisers, greeters, and interviews.  Over half of the state party caucuses and primaries have declared their voters’ preferences.  The compression of the pack has seen the dropping out of the race of the O’Malleys, Chaffees, Walkers, Perrys, Jindhals, Rubios, Huckabees, Santorums, Patakis, Carsons, Fiorinas, Grahams, Gilmores, Pauls, Bushes, and Christies.

We are are left with the Not So Magnificent Five.

Every four years the  over-wise pundits that suggest an ideal candidate for the nomination of either party are left dumbfounded with the recurrent verdict of the electorate to select someone who is anything but ideal.  How does the vetting process designed to get us a Washington or a Lincoln, end up with Sanders, Clinton, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich?  When somebody famous was quoted as saying anyone could grow up to be President of the United States, they weren’t kidding.  The process has become a manipulable grind that removes measured considerations of a candidates bonafides in any discernible way the average voter can engage.   We are left with winners of ‘Survivor’, and the country is the loser.  Different from other years at least, some of the winners are not yet sure if they survived and some of the losers refuse to admit they are beat.  It makes for some superficially compelling drama. Let’s see how the Not So Magnificent Five are positioned as they approach the final furlong.

Hillary Clinton:  It was supposed to be a coronation.  The old war horse had the money, political machinery, and the pedigree to swat aside the ridiculously weak challengers she would face, and yet last weekend, the sure thing candidate lost to her opponent challenger Sanders in all three contested states by historically enormous margins.  Sanders won 82% of the vote in Alaska, 70% in Hawaii, and 73% in Washington.  Are you kidding me? What kind of sure thing front runner loses by margins 4 of 5 voters, and 3 of 4 voters respectively anywhere?  Where is the love?  Hillary Clinton once again has shown what a notoriously poor candidate she has always been, and the lack of connection she makes with people.  Add to her natural lack of political talent, the uncomfortable reality that in her own party, polls have shown only 36% of Democrats view her as honest or trustworthy, and you have the makings of an epic fail.   Clinton has a substantial delegate lead for her nomination becomes of the previously secured so called “super” delegates, but she leads Sanders only by 1243 to 975 in delegates selected by voters in her own party.  Facing a potential spring of squeamish and uninspired voters, and an elephant in the room investigation by the FBI of potentially both security breeches and influence peddling, the coronation may look more like a Charles I moment.

Bernie Sanders:  What do you do for an encore after a life of back bencher eccentricities and contrarian views acknowledged by no one in power? You at 75 years of age run for President, and install the Glorious Revolution on the strength of voters who weren’t yet born when you turned fifty. Pretty amazing for a self styled radical of the sixties who protested under the banner ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty‘.  Awards should be given for anyone who can stand the rigors of an extended election campaign at nearly 75 years of age, but then again, Bernie looks youthful compared to the irritable and forgetful nearly 70 year old he is running against.  The fountain of youth has struck this back bencher on a wave of unachievable dreams of tax rates of 90%, tripling the deficit and making everything free, but… at least it’s a plan for the future.  Having principles, even when they are this wayward, looks appealing to kids, who feel their only other choice is to support their mean grandma.

Donald Trump:  The whole thing was supposed to be a publicity campaign to support a flagging brand.  Spend a few months talking about how everyone else is stupid, you’re the smartest, and then get out while the going was good.  Who could have known that the cynical opinion of the average American held by the billionaire real estate pitchman from New York, was not remotely close to how cynical the voters actually were?  Now he finds himself the leading delegate getter in a party with which he has no philosophical commonality and people are starting to take notice that he actually hasn’t thought anything through.  At some point, talking about 80 foot walls, 45% tariffs, and taking countries’ oil was going to run into stiff winds when people began to realize the guy might actually win the nomination.  Well, he suffers rebukes not at all.  The race is such that even this realization may not be enough to stop a Trump nomination, but watching the whole edifice collapse in a cloud of dust and fire is going to make for real entertainment for those who thought conventions were boring, predictable exercises lost in distant yesteryears.

Ted Cruz:  Somewhere way in the past, teenage Rafael Edward Cruz decided no matter what the circumstances, if he simply hung in there with his significant intellect, unbounded ambition, and thick skin, even a person of his circumstance could become president.  Well, he is one of the few survivors of The 17, and probably the one no one would have predicted still standing, based on his narrow vision, and reputation for poor relationships with his comrades in arms.  Don’t look now, but he seems to have outsmarted and outworked all the more ‘deserving’ choices, and has secured the rail position as alternative to the Trumpzilla.  Would a one term Senator who has cut his teeth on irritating everyone he has worked with blossom into a leader who sees beyond the horizon and fashions a future for this suddenly uncertain giant of a country?  It likely comes down to Wisconsin.  A Cruz win, and it will be interesting how many hesitant travelers jump on board.  A Cruz loss, and the tenacious effort will have only delayed Cruz joining the Other 14 who have been booted off the island.

John Kasich:  I’m No.3!  hardly seems like a path to victory, but Kasich will not be denied.  A record of 1 win 24 losses does not exactly instill a veneer of inevitability but some people just can not be dissuaded.  The race for President is usually about seeing a potential path for victory, but Kasich is after something else entirely.  His idea apparently is to stand by and see if the other two candidates kill each other off, and leave the electorate yearning for the Ohio Everyman.  The problem for Kasich is, if the top two go, it is likely that everyones’ next up, will not be the current No. 3.

On April 5th Wisconsin votes, and from that point onward, the Great American sausage race will run for the tape.  Its times like this, I wish I was a vegetarian.

 

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Around The World

Lowell Thomas used to bring you the world on Movietone
Lowell Thomas used to bring you the world on Movietone

At the height of the calamities of the mid twentieth century, an assured and distinctly American voice brought focus and attention to world events in brief  movie vignettes presented at the primary American gathering place of that time, the movie house.  Thomas, a very American entrepreneurial character, was in a strange way his own news

Lowell Thomas
Lowell Thomas

service, and invented many of the concepts that currently form our visual news services today.  Thomas was the man who brought the visual media to news celebrity, finding and engaging T.E. Lawrence, helping turning him into “Lawrence of Arabia”.  He helped found nightly radio national news broadcasts, was responsible for the first television news broadcast, and anchored the first telecast of a political convention.  But Lowell Thomas is secured in history for going around the world in Movietone News, tying crisp and tight prose to sharply edited and dramatic newsreel footage to bring impact to the stories of the day, often in far off places ,to the contained world of the viewer.  You could leave the movie theater knowing what you needed to know, because Lowell had synthesized it for you.

  Well, nobody could possibly do like Lowell Thomas, but there are plenty of reminders out there of a world of ongoing events that we should keep in front of us as cascade down the year of 2016.  Ramparts therefore humbly borrows the snapshot techniques of Lowell
Thomas and Movietone and takes you Around The World with RAMPARTS-TONE NEWS.

Great Britain: On June 23rd, 2016, the voters of Great Britain will contemplate in the voting booth a referendum decision to potentially overturn the political directions of Europe cultivated over the last 70 years since the end of the Second World War.  Out of the calamity of war, the governments of Europe determined to bind themselves together ever more securely in a union that they hoped would sublimate the nationalist tendencies that bedeviled Europe’s peace for five hundred years.  BrexitWhat was at first the concept of a common market, has progressively become more of a political union in which the member states have less and less to say regarding their own economic and political decisions.  Great Britain, the fifth largest economy of the world, feels increasingly hamstrung by its place in the European Union, the rules of trade with any partners outside of the EU at the mercy of joint EU decisions, its monetary system based on the pound sterling unteathered to the Euro.  Germany and France, the joint force behind both EU and Euro policies, is not about to let Britain make independent decisions without being lashed to the Euro.  Given the economic events in Europe over the last several years, being lashed to the Euro is the last thing on Britain’s mind.  What makes up a modern nation state, how do economies work, what would happen to the United Kingdom (particularly pro EU Scotland), and what is the effect on the stability of post WWII Europe are just some of the small considerations Great Britain’s voters will need to educate themselves upon before voting on June 23rd.  Polls suggest that those who want to stay in the EU comprise 45% of the voters, those that wish to exit, the BREXIT voter are close behind at 40%.  The BREXIT referendum currently has a volatile 14% undecided, so with so much on the line, the heat will certainly turn up as one gets towards the June referendum.

South China Sea: A great economic power inevitably looks to secure its economic future and defend it with a strong military.  What is happening in the South China Sea is more complicated than China simply defending its right to commerce.  China is claiming hegemony over the South China Sea and the islands within it, and it is not asking the opinion of any of its neighbors.  The South China Sea happens to be one of the world’s busiest sea trading lanes, and many countries see it as vital to their independence and prosperity.

The South China Sea - and the competing claims of the little atolls and reefs that form the Spratly and Paracel Islands
The South China Sea – and the competing claims of the little atolls and reefs that form the Spratly and Paracel Islands

The sea lanes have been guaranteed for decades by the world’s largest military, the United States.  What happens when a country such as China sees free access to a region it feels is vital to its economic self interests is a recipe for real trouble.  The region is thought to contain huge oil and gas reserves, and the neighboring countries of Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan, do not intend to allow China to exclude their access to the riches of the sea, or the freedom to navigate.  China is forcing the issue by building up the reefs into capable islands with air and sea access for their military, and the United States, responsible for freedom of  the sea lanes is none too happy. When a country like China starts determining to secure its neighborhood, the reverberations can be very,very dangerous.  This is a building story that will go far beyond the calendar year of 2016.

Libya: Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, it doesn’t look like the calamity of Libya she fostered in her ill considered decisions as Secretary of State, is going away any time soon. The country was unravelled by France, Britain, and the United States by assisting in the overthrow of Muammar Quadaffi in 2011, then passively standing back as the wolves descended on the carcass of the country.  Clinton’s unique role in the US disaster at Benghazi is still being investigated, but the future is much scarier than the past. The country is split in half with a General Al-Sisi like strong man, General Khalifa Haftar, running the eastern half of the country and looking to extend his control over the western half which includes the capital of Tripoli, , truly a wild,wild west, run by competing Islamic extremists, including with increasing radicalism and strength, ISIS.  The formation of a caliphate with its dagger edge pointed much as in the days of Carthage

Carthage and the Punic Wars
Carthage and the Punic Wars

directly at the Italian and Iberian peninsulas is a dream come true for ISIS and a nightmare for Italy and Europe. In classic President Obama fashion, the lead from behind strategy has promulgated special levels of damage in a region where passivity is seen as true weakness, and ruthless strength is considered the calling of greatness.  Obama, and his apparent successors in Clinton or Trump, are not exactly the type of deep thinkers that understand existential risks.  It may be up to Europe, if it wants to survive, to start understanding and reacting to what is at risk from its southern exposure.

Turkey and Syria: Lawrence of Arabia, if he were to accompany Lowell Thomas today to the Middle East,  would recognize the increasing calamity that is Syria and every one of its players.  Events are happening on a daily basis that are rending the decisions of the day before rapidly past tense.  The vestiges of the Ottoman Empire continue to vibrate in every action and reaction.  Syria, converted into a horrible wasteland by marauding warriors from distant places and the corrupt and genocidal acts of its on government is at the mercy of ever larger forces.

The current battle for Syria - washingtonpost
The current battle for Syria – washingtonpost

Turkey, looking to insert its dominance on the region in an effort to reinstitute an Ottoman past, now finds itself under dual direct threat from a vicious ISIS terrorist cell and an increasingly aggressive Kurdish minority that sees a way to a greater Kurdistan across Iraq, Syria, Iran…and Turkey.  Russia has masterfully succeeded in entirely usurp US influence in events to become the dominant international broker, creating strange bed fellows, but now must see how to lock in its newfound position while avoiding getting sucked in to the day to day battles.  The pressure on the innocents has led to the greatest migration of people within Europe since the wars of the twentieth century, and ISIS has diabolically placed its wolves among the sheep, making for multiple threats across the continent.  Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are warily watching each other, knowing an emotional decision could create a real, first class regional war.  The Obama United States, forever inward turning, can only watch, as 70 years of being the steadying influence, is going up in smoke.

United States of America:  Can a great country overcome its desire to self destruct?  Facing a world of increasing instability and threat, internal debt, and a progressively self absorbed, uninterested population regarding the hard work of a republic, the US is looking at  a socialist, a populist, an ideologue, and crony capitalist would be felon, three of the four around 70 years of age, to lead it ShowImage.ashxthrough these many events demanding innovative and assertive leadership.  Sanders. Trump. Cruz. Clinton.   That is the roster of talent that will be asked to handle this increasingly difficult world.  Not exactly an inspiring thought.  There are terrific talents waiting in the wings, but none are positioned to help the country on November 8th, 2016.  Will the rest of the world be willing to wait for the US to get its act together?

Stay tuned.  Now it can be shown. Maybe just like the old days…

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America In Transition

 

Fully Automated Robotic Assembly Line in a Tesla Factory - smashgear.com
Fully Automated Robotic Assembly Line in a Tesla Factory       photo/smashgear.com

It’s an emotional time when one is transitioning from what was, to what will be.  America, as a result, appears to progressively be an emotional wreck.   The economy sloths along at an anemic 1-2% growth rate with job growth being led by service industries such as call centers.  The most powerful military in the world has devised rules of engagement that defy any engagement that would secure any meaningful outcomes or strategic advantage.  The political parties are in tatters, with candidates promoting populist nationalism, serving up extreme versions of the past in an attempt to preserve what is no longer viable.  The foundational principles that have adjudicated  so many other previous periods of upheaval  are helpless to buttress an increasingly ignorant population that has only the vaguest notion of what they are. What passes for public discourse is increasingly more reactionary, emotional, and agitated, defined by the slogan, What Do We Want (fill in the blank), When Do We Want It? NOW!!

Its enough to make you want to simply sign off.  That would be denying however any hope for civilization, and we of course, in our own little way, are defenders of the ramparts of that very civilization, so a little more introspection and looking for silver linings are called for.

The first thing is to recognize that we are at the end of one order of civilization, and yet to discern the elements that will begin another.  In the chaos of watching things fail that no longer work, it is easy to believe you are seeing change at work, when you are simply watching the last tired efforts of a society to desperately hold on to what it knows.  The current President thought he was bringing the Change and the Hope, but the reality was that trying to make people’s behavior bend to your will was a worn out idea that was bound to fail. Something new is indeed coming, but we need to understand what is likely gone forever and let it go, if we are going to be able to respond and potentially flourish in a new world.  The answer is leveraged in a return to, and a celebration of, critical thinking, and the challenge is to raise our consciousness to that reality.

Personal Privacy:  The concept of personhood as mysterious as an unbreakable code and  unique as a fingerprint is about to disappear.  Almost every fact and nuance about each of us is available electronically to those who would look, and is progressively given up by many freely without the least concern.  We are a data cache to large companies, governments, and social exchanges to the extent that our behaviors, thoughts and reactions are comprehensively known and open to manipulation.  Social exchanges such as Facebook have discovered people are only too willing to put the most intimate information out into the cloud to any one who wants it.  The health information of essentially every modern society is on an electronic platform, and what you eat, drink or interact with, are increasingly owned by the society rather than the individual.  Governments such as China see themselves as the ultimate owners of every citizen’s thoughts, and have become world leaders in surveillance cameras, internet monitoring, and even proactive policing (predicting and preventing the “crime” before it occurs).

There is no sense to arguing the information is yours any longer, the question is, will we be willing to protect our individuality, our personhood against unwanted invasion or manipulation.  You can’t be comfortable with the loss of some fundamental liberties, and be squeamish about losing others, without losing them all.  A higher definition of liberty and personhood is in order, and the fight for the next generation is to recognize what is at stake.

Labor as a Means of Personal Freedom:  A physical job used to link directly to personal opportunity and freedom.  It provided the stability of predictable income, health care and future pension that allowed the individual to either maintain or position oneself for advancement.  A relatively small group of people had the pride of ownership and production, and the risk/reward equation that came with ownership.  For most people, the job was simply the byproduct of a stable life and other pursuits.  Now, the very concept of “job” is disappearing.  Manual labor, the capacity to contribute to production of goods and services, that would provide the economic means to eventually secure those goods and services for oneself, is, for most of the planet, the relic of a bygone era.  Robots are substantially more productive than people in assembly work, mining, and farming.  Computers reduce the value of human data interpretation, with their ability to summon and source massive amounts of data in infinitesimal amounts of time compared to humans.  What will most people do, when there are fewer and fewer jobs for them to do?  This has been the primary impetus of our current anxieties about immigration, free trade agreements, and loss of industries to other countries.  The very number of jobs in the world are diminishing, as the ability to more productively outsource to machines increases.  No amount of tariffs or taxes as proposed by current candidates are going to protect jobs that will be increasingly performed by machines no matter how onerous we make their transition  to other countries. Governments placating people with safety nets will only delay the critical thinking required to recognize what is at stake. What will more and more people do when their productive value is progressively outsourced to machines?  Critical thinking regarding what brings value to lives, not protectionist tactics, will be necessary to imagine a way forward when industry labor is no longer the source of individual productivity.

Traditional Education Defining Advancement:  Education has become the unholy home of artificial value and pseudo – self actualization. Increasingly exploding in cost beyond anyone’s rational ability to pay, at the very time that the ‘education” offered promotes the lack of any actual skill development, traditional means of education are becoming incapable of providing us with the critical thinkers to help solve our problems.  Degrees lean more and more to dividing our knowledge base into expertise in victimhood, chaos theory, and manipulation of the masses, rather than rewarding critical thought and linking disciplines to provide creative outcomes.  Requiring massive amounts of individual investment or societal support to fund further examination of our divisions – our blackness or brownness, our sexual variance or physical differences, does nothing for recognition of our common problems or contribute to their creative solutions.  Forcing people to identify their intellectual development through a degree rather than an accomplished set of achieved insights or skill acquisitions has led to an enormous ignorance as  to what provides real personal development.  Education no longer requires rigid isolation to  campuses where thinking becomes both expensive and able to be manipulated into a politically correct ‘groupthink’.

Government as the Collective Answer:  The sense of loss of control and situational anxiety  has led to people seeking the comfort of  worn out concepts of the last century to protect them against change, particularly lashing themselves to the masts of  an ever larger  and more intrusive government. Once designed in America to support only actions that individuals could not do for themselves, government has become the dumping ground for every failure in insight.  Designed to exist for our collective defense against attack, it now seeks to protect us against unconquerable foes such as changes in climate and equality of outcome.   The result is a morbidly bloated government that promises everything and secures nothing except the pathologic maintenance of the status quo. We are now inexorably committed to securing our future health and well being through devices that were inadequate from inception, long ago  destined for failure, and financially, catastrophically unsupportable.  And yet we cling to the concepts because the alternative to government’s sclerotic approach is to require some risk of ourselves, and anxiety makes it easier to pass the responsibility onto an unborn generation.  It won’t matter because the virus effecting all world order is the reliance on historical conditions that no longer exist and insight that long since failed.  The beauty of the critical thinkers that fashioned the Constitution is that they built the perfect machinery to evolve a society, rather than codify solutions.  We need a return to critical thought processes in our governance to cleanse ourselves of the last century’s loss of focus.

Nationhood:  The concept of what makes a nation has been traditionally tribal.  A tribe linked by language – Uzbeks forming Uzbekistan, Swedes forming Sweden, Japanese forming Japan – has conceptually been the means of nation building.  Where ignored or artificially  subverted, strife has resulted.  Kurds have seen their cultural whole divided into multiple countries within each they are a restive minority. Catalonians feel little affinity with Spaniards. Yugoslavia was ripped apart by sectarian and religious differences once the totalitarian government fell.   The United States was formed on a unique concept-a union of various peoples bound by a political philosophical culture founded on British juris prudence, British legislative governance and the British concept of freedom of assembly and speech. To best codify this political culture, the tribe became Americans and the binding language of freedom, English.  The permanent nature of this union was never in doubt when America was seen as the beacon of freedom in a world of torment, and the nation was the undoubted economic superpower of the world.  Strains are developing, however, after decades of flat economic performance, progressive assault on institutions, and a general laissez faire attitude regarding the vulnerability of hard won freedoms.  There is a growing perception that there should not be an American “tribe”, and the nation should simply be a repository for whoever sees reason to subsist there.  The critical thought that formed unique nationhood for America is no less critical today, if the idea that a nation of shared ideals rather than genetic commonality is to survive.

This year, America has determined to vote for the end of something, rather than the birth of a new beginning.  The three top candidates for President will be 70 or older, by the time they would be inaugurated, and they are selling a clinging grasp of the past with promises of illogical economics, class and racial envy, and perpetuation of the status quo.  All of which are doomed.  It is understandable that a citizenry, poorly educated about its innate strengths, looks to others to be strong for it.   It is a scary time for those who see human freedom and individual opportunity for what it is – mankind’s most successful means of maximizing our species’ capabilities and conquering our fears and darker instincts.  Inevitably, the choice is ours. And regardless of what we think, history will not wait for us.

 

 

 

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Republican Party 1854 -2016(?)

The Republican Party - Heading For The Rocks?
The Republican Party – Heading For The Rocks?

On March 24th, 1854 in an unadorned schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, a group of men came together to form a new political movement.  The impulse was provided by the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened two new territories to the possibility of slavery, allowing the settlers of both territories to determine through popular sovereignty the presence or absence of slavery in the territory.  This abrogated the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which permitted slavery in the Missouri territory to “balance” the entry of “free soil” Maine into the union, but contained any further slavery introduction below the 36th latitude. With the Kansas Nebraska Act, both Kansas and Nebraska fell above that line, and the future of slavery suddenly became a matter of who could get the greatest number of their supporters in place.  “Bleeding” Kansas resulted, with nasty violence growing rapidly into a low intensity civil war that predestined the massive carnage of the national civil war to come.  The nascent republicans in that schoolhouse recognized the country could not possibly survive the extension of a concept like slavery antithetical to the very foundational philosophy of an American union.  They determined to form a party that stood up for the concept of both personal and economic freedom, imbued in the slogan, “free labor, free land, free men.”  The party found its voice in the form of Abraham Lincoln, was forged through the ordeal of the Civil War, and became a dominant force in American politics.

The party has put forth great presidents like Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan.  It has matured into a firm conservative reflection of the American experiment, championing free enterprise, personal initiative, fiscal responsibility, muscular defense, and equal opportunity.

The current party should be at its zenith.  Having secured itself as the effective representative of the individual versus the collective state, it has achieved current electoral dominance at the state level with 3044 of 5411 state lower chamber representatives, 1,134 of 1,972 state upper chamber representatives, 31 of the 50 US governorships, 246 0f 435 US Representatives, and 54 of 100 US Senators. That last piece of political unity with the nation, the Presidency, occupied by a philosophically secure conservative, stood before the party in 2016 like never before, with a cratering government party stuck  defending its last political redoubt reliant upon an unrelatable candidate potentially fatally weakened by felonous behavior with America’s most secret information.  The Republican Party appeared  poised for an electoral renaissance that would finally implement a fundamental restoration of the principles of exceptionalism that brought America such bounty and morally secure standing in the world.

Yet..Its all about to go up in smoke.

In 2016, the national party has been infected by an insurgency that is bringing it to its knees and will fracture it forever if not eradicated. The insurgency is through the dark forces of demagoguery and nihilism in the human form of one Donald Trump.  All democracies are potentially susceptible to the charlatan who speaks to the population’s baser instincts of survival, envy, and revenge.  It is why the prescient founding fathers secured a constitution with checks and balances, separating powers to prevent such a demagogue from usurping power.  It is why they devised an electoral college to prevent the   unrestrained mob majority from securing the executive.  To many in today’s day and age, however, these olympian principles that have bound America’s diverse population into a workable whole are entirely trifling.  In a complicated world full of competing strains, many people who feel left behind  are looking to others to solve their problems, and are willing to trust them with unbounded power to do so. Trump has seen this before in the microcosm of his own life, using the concept of self importance to overwhelm any careful vetting of facts.  It has led to a veneer of uninterrupted success, when the facts suggest multiple bankruptcies, failed concepts, and at times outright fraud.  It was a sign of his shrewdness that he felt the timing was right to sell his pablum on a national stage.

One doesn’t have to travel very far back in time to see this developing trend in American political discourse,  of the so-called indispensable man.  President Barrack Obama has been a savant in this tactic, presenting himself initially as the everyman, appearing from nowhere to course serenely above the fray, seeing not a white America or a black America, only America.  Obama suggested he could achieve through his very persona a resetting of  the national attitude on race, stop the oceans from rising, heal the earth, restore America’s reputation for fairness through  constant apology and humility, and fundamentally change America from its moorings in personal risk, unfettered markets, and non-collective morality driven individuality.  He progressively overcame the restraints of compromise and coordination through a combination of bully pulpit and executive action that circumvented those constitutional restraints.  The IRS became a tool for surgical strikes against perceived enemies.  The EPA devised a regulatory vendetta against coal and oil to attempt to make the market for the products untenable.  Budgets became quaint relics of the past, so that burgeoning unvetted spending would annually move forward, with the only alternative government shutdown. On and On.

Now Donald Trump has risen from the muck and fashioned himself a better, more streamlined version of Obama. Threats to those who would oppose him are now direct and malevolent. Other countries will pay for our laxity and incoherence. Banks and insurance companies will lose decision making capacity in their businesses. No proposed solutions, just the assurance that things will be “so much better”, “waste fraud and abuse” will be eliminated, and enemies will be “destroyed”.  The executive can be trusted with the coalescence of power because he is so much smarter, more successful, and realistic than everyone else, and is the greatest deal maker that ever lived.

A tired citizenry is increasingly vulnerable to such balderdash.  Say it enough and the seepage into the national consciousness can become unavoidable.  The weak , ineffective governments of 1920 Italy and 1932 Germany were susceptible to the ubermensch argument, and the results were devastating.  It is no small coincidence that Trump quotes Mussolini:

Trump quotes Mussolini on Twitter February 28,2016
Trump quotes Mussolini on Twitter February 28,2016

Is America the sheep the Trump lion is about to devour?  Possibly not, but the Republican Party will not survive the Trumpian form of fascism.  The virus of an unprincipled demagogue is not compatible with the generation of conservatives that conceived the ideal of the modern mantle of limited government, individual rights, tax fairness, national security, and belief in the founding principles.  If Trump achieves the coup d’etat and runs the primary table, the vast segment of millions of identified republicans who wear this mantle as the definition of the patriotic American will leave the party in droves, rather than directly participate in the country’s deconstruction.  To the party establishment who have help create this unbounded frondeur, a word of warning.  This particular Pandora’s box can not be re-sealed.  The Republican Party will permanently fissure and will cease to exist as a national force.  So get a grip, America.  You still have time to come to your senses.

For millions of Americans ,there can be no ‘getting’ along with our own home grown Mussolini.

mussolini