LIFE, LIBERTY & HAPPINESS

In the Declaration of Independence a nascent nation asserted as unalienable, universal, rights the rights to life (safety and security), liberty (the absence of arbitrary, unwarranted public intervention in private life) and the pursuit of happiness. These rights were not verbatim repeated in the Constitution, but the Constitution and, particularly, the first ten amendments to the Constitution containing the so called ‘Bill of Rights’, made an attempt to codify these unalienable rights.

Among the most coveted rights bestowed by the Constitution of the United States are the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. It is no coincidence that these two rights are articulated in the first and the second amendment to the Constitution.

As much as the Declaration of Independence declared the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ‘unalienable’ the question needs to be asked to what extent they would also be ‘unbridled’. Our Founding Fathers and most of the philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Thomas Payne who inspired them, had a healthy fear for the ‘rule of the mob’, which is why in the early stages of our Republic only a small percentage of the population was conferred with voting rights. The Constitution left the voting rights issue to be determined by the States, but in practice suffrage was initially limited only to white male property owners. The establishment at the time wanted to avoid by all means a ‘free for all’, which meant that they reserved for themselves the right to govern and set the rules. This meant that there were no unbridled freedoms except maybe for the happy few who were in charge. As suffrage slowly expanded, limitations on the freedoms of the ruling class increased apace.

In our modern society we are constantly confronted with the incompatibility of our individual freedoms (liberty) with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of our fellow citizens. The Constitution has left the resolution of this inherent conflict in the hands of the legislatures of the States and the Union under supervision by the Supreme Court.

The rights to free speech and the right to bear arms are poster children for this dilemma. Where does the right of the individual trespass on the right of one or more other individuals, groups or society at large to the point that it has to be bridled in by the law? This debate rages right now in Europe in the context of the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders. Does the right to free speech protect the freedom to disrespect the religious sensibilities of others? The difficulty, as usual is, where to draw the line. It is one thing to attack by free speech the perversion of a religion like we see happening in the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and a whole other thing to ridicule the deity of the Muslim (or any other) religion. The civilized, sophisticated, interpretation of the right to free speech in a case like this should take into account the purpose of the expression of free speech. If it is meant to insult or incite it is not a legitimate use of free speech. It should not be sanctioned just like we do not sanction shouting ‘fire’ in a packed theater. That is not to say that shooting (at) the perpetrators is then justified. No self-respecting nation can allow its citizens to take the law into their own hands. If, on the other hand the expression of free speech is to expose criminality disguised as a denatured, perverse, claim of faith it should not only be condoned but protected by the law.

Similarly with respect to the right to bear arms. The second amendment to the Constitution protects against infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. According to the second amendment, this right is asserted as “a well regulated militia is considered necessary to the security of a free State”. Former Supreme Court Judge John Paul Stevens, in his important book ‘Six Amendments, How and Why we should change the Constitution’ argues that the intent of the draftsmen of the second amendment was to safeguard the people’s right to bear arms when serving in the militia. If that is correct, how far have we strayed from the original intent!

If I have, indeed, an unalienable right to keep an assortment of guns at my house, including an AK 47, isn’t that at the same time an infringement on my wife’s, my children’s, my guests’ and my neighbors’ right to life, liberty and happiness? Are my rights weightier than the rights of others living in my surroundings? The courts have been very reluctant to allow reasonable limitations on the second amendment right. This reality, combined with a fiercely combative attitude from a large part of the U.S. population organized in the National Rifle Association, frustrates just about any attempt to keep guns out of the hands of those who cannot be trusted with them and keep military or gangster type weapons out of the hands of everyone, except trained professionals who are sworn to protect us.

Has the right to liberty for a vocal and well organized minority trumped the right to life and happiness for everyone else? There is no doubt that the Constitution allows for reasonable constraints to be placed on individual freedoms for the purpose of the safety, security and well-being of the nation and the population at large, but a Congress that is incapable of taking on the big challenges the nation is facing is even less equipped to doing the delicate work of weighing the value of individual freedoms against the value of the common good.

THE INEQUALITY CONUNDRUM

In my book, ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’, I make the case that the inequality problem that has surfaced in the twenty-first century in America is the direct result of the flaws in the American political system and the resulting dysfunction in Washington D.C.

That position calls for some elaboration.

There is nothing more un-American than to see a good segment of the American populus excluded from the rising welfare and prosperity that this nation is still producing. Charles Murray, in his seminal 2012 book ‘Coming Apart’, was one of the first political scientists to vividly illustrate that America is coming apart along the lines of birthright. He writes that the fortunate have created their enclaves where they cluster together in high priced real estate, out of reach for the general population (Murray calls it,“Belmont”), and that the unfortunate get similarly bunched up in dilapidated, drug infested, and crime ridden neighborhoods (Murray calls it,“Fishtown”).

Only the children of the fortunate can afford to go to the top prep schools, colleges, and universities. They get the better education, get to mingle with the right crowd, and end up getting the better jobs. Their parents themselves are educated at the nation’s top schools and thus have an elaborate network and the connections needed to climb the ladder. For them money is never an object. Because of the environment in which they live in Belmont, they get exposed to cultural influences that are out of reach for the inhabitants of Fishtown. They get to travel abroad and widen their horizons in a way that children from Fishtown can only imagine. If children from Belmont get in any kind of trouble, drugs, sex, or crime, there are abundant, but expensive, remedies available that can nip the problem in the bud before it gets out of hand. Social pressure and vigilance will further help staving off potential misdirection. Not so much for children growing up in Fishtown. They have a better chance of ending up in jail.

The authoritative weekly magazine The Economist writes in its January 24^th, 2015 edition a cover article titled ‘America’s new aristocracy, Education and the inheritance of privilege’. In it the editors point to a remarkable consensus between politicians like Paul Ryan, Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton, who agree about little else, that the chances of ordinary Americans rising to the top are not what they once were.

Under ideal conditions, social mobility is a two way divided highway: There is a lane open for people to move up the social ladder based on talent, hard work, and perseverance; and then, there is a lane for people to move down the social ladder based on the lack of these same attributes. Social mobility serves a nation optimally when it shows vibrant movement both up and down. Only then does it create a true meritocracy, where the most deserving (not the most privileged) reach the top and the least deserving (not the most under-privileged) hit bottom. But that appears to be missing in America today.

If America has indeed developed an inequality conundrum, the question should be asked: ‘Who is going to address it and how’. Reversing the trend of rising inequality will require a societal recognition that the acceptance of the separation between Belmont and Fishtown – and never the twain shall meet – is counterproductive to America’s chances to continue to lead the world in economic and social development. And it will be the task of the federal government to set the conditions for that societal recognition to take a hold. That should not be too hard, considering the political consensus that apparently already exists (according to The Economist).

The problems get more intransigent when it comes to figuring out how to reverse the trend and restore a functional level of social mobility. The first order of business is to accept that there is no single silver bullet solution to the problems. That the solution will have to come from dealing, systematically, with the shortcomings in some of the major building blocks of national strength like: education, immigration, healthcare, welfare, social justice, infrastructure, public finance and civic engagement.Unfortunately, the American political system as it operates today is utterly incapable of dealing with these big ticket items.        I contend that it is this very inability of Washington D.C. to address and effectively deal with the big challenges of our time that stands in the way of restoring the quintessential American notion that with hard work, frugal and clean living, a good education and perseverance anybody can rise to the top. It is the ineffectiveness of the federal government that has, if not created the current level of inequality, certainly contributed to it and it is that same ineffectiveness that stands in the way of addressing and solving the issue of inequality.

That brings the inequality conundrum in clear focus: The deficiencies in the major building blocks of national strength will not be addressed and removed unless our system of governance is restored to functionality and inequality will not be brought back to acceptable proportions unless these deficiencies are addressed and removed. It all hangs together and America’s destiny hinges on the linchpin of a functional system of governance.

BOUNCERS

I think that most of us know what needs to be done to underpin the economic recovery that is apparently underway in America but has a hard time throwing off benefits to the vast majority of Americans. And there is no reason to believe that our politicians in Washington are any different. If America is lacking in anything, it is not think tanks, which we have in any flavor of political persuasion, and these think tanks produce an endless stream of policy recommendations for dealing with the major ills this country has not yet conquered. Our representatives and their staffs are well aware of these recommendations, which are written to be put on their desks and pc’s. Somewhere in there they should be able to find solutions to this over-arching problem of our time: how can we assure that more Americans benefit from the national growth and prosperity this country is capable of. If they don’t act upon any of these recommendations, we need to ask why that is the case.

Now, there is no lack of think tanks who will make the case that government has little or no role to play in this process and that the best thing it can do is stay out of the way of the private sector and do nothing, These advocates will make us believe that gridlock is good, because it keeps the government from doing more harm than good.

This approach finds no sympathy with me. In the first place, I strongly believe that there is a role for government to play in the process of national progress and the equitable distribution of the fruits thereof. This role is best described as an ‘enabler’. The task of a national government is to create the conditions, the framework, and the structure under which its population can prosper. Second, someone has to be the arbiter of how resources are to be deployed for the common good. In a democracy that arbiter has to be the duly elected government. We can have a legitimate argument about the size and the scope of the government, but not about the need for a government in general, including the need for a government in the management of the national economy. We see in places like Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen where the absence of a national government leads. We don’t want to go there.

The first order of business for our government is to make sure that America keeps generating sustainable growth in a measure that keeps it competitive in the global context and allows its population to prosper. That should be paramount.

Logically, in order to achieve that mission, our government would operate on the basis of a national strategy that would establish policy priorities and implementation plans aimed at achieving the mission. The national strategy should include a funding plan that would identify what revenues would be required and how to generate these revenues. In our world of today it does not work that way. There is no national strategic agenda and no constitutional mandate to create one. We have our funding system backwards: we guess at what our revenues will be given the existing tax and revenue laws, then we divvy them up over the functions and departments we maintain within the government and we borrow if our expenditures exceed our revenues, which is almost always the case.

If we could start from a clean slate and had complete freedom of action, we would devise a tax system that could be tweaked from year to year to give us exactly the revenues required to pursue the national strategy and execute the implementation plan. Government borrowing would then be reserved to cover emergencies, catastrophes and to make long term investments. If we could start from a clean slate and had complete freedom of action, we would carefully reconsider which sources of revenue to tap into, given the civic and moral need for fairness, efficiency and optimum return. We would not just tinker at the margin of existing tax structures and play with populist redistribution principles. We would reconsider to what degree we want to rely on personal income taxes for revenue generation as opposed to corporate income taxes, consumption tax, user fees and asset taxes like property taxes. And we would want to rid ourselves from all the accumulated tax exemptions and deductions that have crept into our revenue code over the years. Simplicity, fairness, adequacy and certainty of indiscriminate collection should be the guiding principles behind our tax collection process. A fundamental rewrite of our tax code based on these principles would be a great first step in underpinning our nascent economic recovery.

But we cannot and will not start from a clean slate. What keeps us from doing so is the mortal grip that special interests have on our political process and our elected representatives. It is unthinkable, in the current constellation, to fundamentally alter our tax code and do away with all the exemptions and deductions that these special interests have inserted in the system over time. As long as our two parties and our elected representatives depend on these special interests to finance their re-election campaigns, fundamental reform – desirable as it may be - is just not in the cards.

Special interests are like bouncers, who, in the most vulgar ways based on brute strength, decide who can go in and who stays or goes out. Special interests have become bouncers of otherwise laudable legislative initiatives by allowing them, in addition to petitioning the government (lobbying), which is a fundamental, constitutionally guaranteed right, to become the financiers of the political parties and the candidates for elective office. That is where America made a crucial mistake that is now costing it dearly in terms of lost freedom of action when it comes to proper governance of the nation’s and the people’s business.

We hear so often, when people are fed up with the bickering in the Beltway: ”Let’s throw all the bums out.”  That would not do it. The next class of Congressmen would be as beholden to the special interests as the one we got rid of. The solution is in getting rid of the bouncers by transitioning to a system of public financing of election campaigns and taking the money influences out of our governance system.

SMALLER IS BETTER

Humanity has lived for aeons in a male dominated society (even when women were doing most of the work) in which the prevailing rule seemed to be: the bigger the better. We are obsessed with the urge to grow, first as a child that can’t wait to grow up. Then as an adult seeking to grow our income, our business, our family. We seem conditioned to be striving for big, a big job, a big house, a big car, a big future.

But just like male dominance begins to wane – and, where it does not wane it is associated with backwardness – the notion that bigger is necessarily better begins to lose much of the traction it once had.

In the animal world, including the human species, the male is typically larger than the female, often translating into superior strength, power and dominance. In a world where most results were achieved by muscle strength – which by and large was the rule before the industrial revolution – size mattered and gave men a natural advantage over women and larger, stronger men and advantage over smaller specimens. But that is no longer the world we live in. Results are now mostly achieved by applying brain power and technology. Size does not matter that much anymore.

There is change in the wind. We are beginning to wake up to the notion that, maybe, smaller is better. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that scaling things down may be the key to a better way of doing things and a better future for mankind. How so?

First there is the whole matter of nano-technology and micro-technology. It is counter-intuitive, but we find that we can make many compounds and instruments work more effectively if we can bring them down in size. Particle size reduction of compounds to nano-levels allows for more precise dosage, absorption and integration. And instrument or part size reduction improves application and penetration which lead to greater effectiveness and reduced logistical cost. This field is still in its infancy and it is not hard to believe that a great deal of innovation in the twenty-first century will come from this source.

Then there is the concept of micro-finance. If we can unleash the productive capacity of entrepreneurial people all over the world by providing them with access to enough working capital to get started, there is no telling where economic growth, employment opportunity and prosperity could go, first and foremost in developing countries but also in the developed world where access to capital holds back many good people and ideas. Our public and private financing system is too focused on the big bang and the silver bullet, on getting in early on the next Apple or Google rather than the many small seeds laying in the furrows, waiting for the capital drench to come in order to facilitate germination.

In business we have found out that effective management is much better applied in small units than in large organizations. The units may be bundled in one large corporation, linked together by common culture, strategy and policy, but the company has a much better chance of sustainable success when managed at the unit level rather than from the top of the organization down. Smaller business units are much more nimble, responsive to customer needs and agile than the organization at large.

We also begin to turn away from big government. While it is unrealistic to expect that people will want to give up on the entitlements and the safeguards provided by the welfare state, there is a strong aversion of the growing size of government and the grip that government has on our daily lives. A lazy, bloated bureaucracy spitting out endless regulation is not what the American people are looking for. Nor can they afford it, with fewer and fewer people of working age paying the bills. What the American public wants (and deserves) is a small but effective government. Just like computers have been reduced in size, weight and cost while becoming infinitesimally more powerful, our government needs to find a way to focus on the few things that really matter, with fewer but better qualified personnel and deal with these matters in an efficient and effective way. That is only possible if America unites behind a national strategy and pursues its goals by applying talent and technology.

A great future for our grandchildren requires a contrarian mindset to begin to prevail. It will be predicated upon America’s capacity to wean itself from the Texan premise that bigger is better and systematically ask the question: how can we do more with less? The Dutch have an expression for this approach: “Klein maar fijn”, which means “Small but Great”. That’s what we should be looking for.

MONEY SPEAKS

If you ever believed that throwing billions of dollars of private money at the national election campaigns is just the way things get done in America – evidence that we are a truly capitalistic country – and has no effect on the outcome of the legislative process, I recommend that you read two books, Act of Congress by Robert G. Kaiser and America’s Bitter Pill by Steven Brill. These authors argue persuasively that both the Dodd-Frank legislation and the Affordable Care Act left so many vital issues unattended, because special interest groups had made it clear what they would and would not accept.

A stark irony surfaces when the question gets asked: “What did all that campaign money buy us?” We all know the answer: Nothing of substance or value has been accomplished by our elected officials who have so diligently held out their hands to receive the money that has financed their election and re-election campaigns. The irony is that this is exactly what the moneymen intended. All that money (about $4 billion just for the 2014 mid-term elections) for no other result than that the Republicans strengthened their grip on Congress. We get exactly what the campaign donors were looking for when they wrote their large checks: nothing coming out of Congress: no tax reform, no tort reform, no debt reduction, no gun control, no comprehensive immigration legislation, no infrastructure investments, no climate control measures, no Arctic development and protection initiative, nothing to enhance America’s global position, NOTHING!

Nobody in America seriously believes that our elected officials are corrupt in the old-fashioned sense of the God-father (envelopes or briefcases with money under the table). If that happens at all, it is an anomaly and not at all representative of the system. But the system is corrupt in a more fundamental and damaging way. The moneymen and special interest groups have nestled themselves between the People and their elected representatives, making a mockery of our democracy as it was intended and designed by our founding fathers. 

A Congressperson, man or woman, Democrat, Republican or Independent, starts the day with a money raising breakfast, to move on to a fund raising lunch and finish the day with a fund raising dinner. The time in between is filled with meetings with lobbyists and phone calls to campaign contributors. There is no time left to do the People’s work and does anyone really believe that such agenda does not necessarily make these Congresspersons more beholden to their campaign donors than their constituents?

Former Senator Alan Simpson said it best when he testified in a campaign-finance court case: “Who, after all, can seriously contend that a $100,000 donation does not alter the way one thinks about—and quite possibly votes on—an issue?”

That is why, in my book NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism, I make the case for public financing of election campaigns, for limiting the duration of election campaigns and for reducing the frequency of elections.

How much more effective would our politicians be if they did not have to run around all the time to collect campaign contributions? Without campaign contributions from private citizens, corporations, interest groups, and Political Action Committees, how much less beholden would our representatives in public office be to anyone but their true constituency and the common public interest?

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, in his dissenting opinion in the McClutcheon case, hit the nail on the head when he wrote that, “The anticorruption interest that drives Congress to regulate campaign contributions is a far broader, more important interest than the plurality [of the Court] acknowledges. It is an interest in maintaining the integrity of our public governmental institutions.” And then he wrote: “Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard.” In his dissent he accuses the deciding majority of the Supreme Court of failing to recognize the difference between influence resting upon public opinion and influence bought by money alone.

As a public we can complain forever about how dysfunctional our political system has become, but we have to realize that one of the root causes of this breakdown in our democracy is that the moneymen have come between the citizens (voters) and their elected representatives. What counts is not what you and I think that needs to get done, what counts is what the large campaign donors want our representatives in Congress to say and do and what the influential special interest are supporting or not supporting. No-one gets elected to Congress anymore, unless the candidate is willing to cater and pander to the whims of the campaign donors and these special interest groups.

Only Congress itself can lift us out of this morass. It can do so by changing the election laws to only permit public financing of election campaigns and putting term limits in place. Not to speak of constitutional amendments changing the frequency of elections and the term of tenure for our elected officials. But that would require for the Congress to pull itself out of the morass by its own bootstraps, which—as we all know—is one of the hardest things to do. Admittedly, the hurdles for the members of Congress to effect the required change are phenomenal. First, it would have to muster the courage and moral fortitude to ignore what the moneymen and special interests want them to do. And, if they can pull that off, they would have to have the courage of conviction—in defiance of the Supreme Court— that cutting the moneymen out of the election process can be done without infringing upon citizens’ rights under the First Amendment.

UNHOLY TRINITY

If, as I argue in my book “NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism”, the public sector in America is grossly and dangerously under-performing to its capabilities, we need to look in the first place at the federal government as the culprit. The separation of powers has divided that part of our government in three branches: Legislative, Executive and Judicial.

While the performance of the Judicial branch, culminating at the Supreme Court, is certainly worthy of a critical review, I put it aside for a separate commentary at a different time. It is not, in my opinion, where the main problem is. I bestow the title of “unholy trinity” on these three segments of the federal government: The White House, the Congress and the Bureaucracy. Each of these fail miserably in their mission and together they are responsible for the dysfunction inside the Beltway and for America’s incompetence to get its most significant problems solved.

This is not a specific indictment of the Obama White House, the 2014 Congress or the present bureaucracy (although they deserve plenty of blame) but rather an assertion that the existing system of governance is fatally flawed. Peter Drucker concluded that government “has outgrown the structure, the policies and the rules designed for it” with the result that it is “bankrupt, morally as well as financially” and I agree with him. So do some more erudite commentators on American governance, notably Philip K. Howard, Chairman of Common Good, in his recent book “The Rule of Nobody, Saving America from dead laws and broken government” and two senior editors of The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their 2014 book “The Fourth Revolution, The Global Race to Reinvent the State.”

The White House is one pillar of the unholy trinity that dooms America, because it is hopelessly politicized. The office of the President of the United States should be above the fray, the eyes set firmly on the national interest. Its job is to set the agenda and lead the nation towards completion of its goals and objectives. Instead the White House is engaged in an endless tug of war with the legislative branch about turf wars.

The Congress is the second pillar of the unholy trinity, as it is polarized by a two party system in which the more extreme wings have nearly silenced the moderate center, and because its members are beholden to their campaign contributors rather than their constituents.

The Bureaucracy is the third pillar of the unholy trinity, because it has entrenched behind and keeps adding to an accumulation of rule-making and regulation that is substituting for governance. On one hand, the rule-making continues at full speed, necessitating the addition of ever more federal employees to enforce the rules, and on the other hand the authority of public servants to act with common sense for the common good gets dwindled down to the point of disappearance. Philip Howard in his book reminds us that while the rule-making continues from administration to administration (between 1969 and 1979 the Federal Register nearly quadrupled in length) nothing ever gets rescinded, to the effect that the labyrinth of rules and regulations gets larger and denser all the time and in the end nobody knows anymore what is in there.      “The twenty-seven hundred page Affordable Care Act is now getting implemented with regulations that, so far, are 7 feet high, with more to come” writes Philip Howard in his book. And he continues: “American government is run by millions (he should have said trillions) of words of legal dictates, not by the leaders we elect or the officials who work for them.”

This picture is not very pretty. It is outright disturbing. Who is doing the People’s work? Well, I am afraid that right now the answer is “nobody”. And it shows. None of the important work gets done:

·         The national debt keeps growing without any effort to put a stop to it

·         Social Security and Medicare are largely unfunded for future generations

·         We allow our infrastructure to crumble

·         We let immigration happen rather than managing it in the best interest of the country

·         We are not winning the war on poverty

·         We are not winning the war on drugs

·         We are not winning the war on terror

·         We are powerless in the face of public waste, fraud and abuse

·         We have no national strategic agenda

·         Higher education is not uniformly affordably available

·         Healthcare is not uniformly affordably available

·         We cannot agree on a sensible gun control policy

·         We cannot agree on a sensible defense strategy against the effects of climate change

·         We cannot agree on a common sense tax simplification and reform

·         We allow our mentally ill to roam the streets, homelessly, or hide them from sight in our jails

·         We have allowed inequality to rise to levels from where social mobility has become nearly unattainable.

How does an unholy trinity get broken up? Only by a higher power and in America the only higher power resides in The People. That’s why Micklethwait & Wooldridge foresee (the need for) a Fourth Revolution without giving up on the principle of democracy. They write “The danger to democracy’s health today comes in three subtle forms. The first is that the state will keep expanding, gradually reducing liberty. The second is that the state will surrender ever more power to special interests. And the third danger is that the state will keep making promises it cannot fulfill.” 

Philip Howard advocates a thorough house cleaning and the installation of a Counsel of Citizens to oversee government. He states that “Washington is a house of cards. Any popular movement that stands up to it with an accurate indictment and a credible plan can push it over…” 

Accurate indictments come from all sides, including the books mentioned herein. Who is going to come up with the credible plan?

A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

December 7, 2014 (73 years after the Day that will live in Infamy)

We are all incredulous spectators to the dismal theatrics playing year after year in Washington D.C. sowing more and more mistrust and disgust in the minds of the American people. But where is the backlash? The public sector of this nation has become an abject failure (in sharp contrast with the private sector, which, time and again, bails out the global economy when the rest of the world sputters or regresses). Do we need any proof?

·         The National Debt just passed the $18 Trillion threshold and is now larger than the size of our economy

·         A comprehensive immigration reform remains illusory

·         Our infrastructure is fragile and at best outdated, at worst crumbling

·         We have not won a war since World War II

o    Not in Korea

o    Not in Vietnam

o    Not in Iraq

o    Not in Afghanistan

o    Not the war on poverty

o    Not the war on drugs

o    Not the war on terror
(We should not start a war that we have no intent of winning or simply cannot win.)

·         We have not funded Social Security and Medicare for future generations

·         We have done nothing about tax reform

·         We have done nothing to turn back the increase in inequality within our society.

This failure of government is not a partisan phenomenon. Control of the White House and the Congress has not determined success or failure in governance. Failure can therefore not be laid at the doorstep of either the Democrats or the Republicans. It defies logic to assume that the failure of the federal government to address the challenges America is facing, is more than marginally the result of incompetence or malign intent of our elected officials and it makes sense, therefore, to look for the cause of the malaise in the system, i.e. the complex of rules and conditions that define American politics of today.

I evaluate the flaws in the American political system in my recently published book “NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism.” Alexis de Tocqueville coined the phrase “American Exceptionalism” because he was in awe of the capacity of the American people to govern their affairs during and following the Revolutionary War, which he termed exceptional. He would be sorely disappointed if he were around today to see how things have developed!

The systematic flaws that I see in our governance model and that I address in detail in my book fall into four categories:

1.       The money influence in politics

2.       The two party system

3.       The election system (frequency, term length and limits, financing, districting and primaries)

4.       The lack of a national strategic agenda

To effect change in any of these four areas will require a herculean effort. After all, change generally only gets embraced when the pain of living with the status quo exceeds the pain inflicted by change. This explains that, while virtually nobody is happy with the status quo, we appear paralyzed to do something about it. The pain caused by the gross under performance of our public sector simply has not crossed the threshold level, but we may be closing in on a tipping point. The 2014 mid-term elections brought about an earthquake size shift in power from the Democrats to the Republicans, but it does not appear to have triggered a Congressional resolve to start fixing problems. The people seem to have no confidence in the political system, given that only a third of eligible voters went to the polling stations.

It would be a mistake, though, to give up on hope for a turn for the better. The American people have an uncanny capacity to step back from the brink before they allow things to get out of hand. And, as Nelson Mandela said: “It always seems impossible until it is done.” We can only hope that it will not take a national disaster to galvanize our politicians into action, but the likelihood is that it will require some shock to the system to get things off dead center. The most benign, democratic and American shock to the system could come from the emergence of a centrist third party. A January 2014 Gallup poll found that 42% of the voting eligible population considers itself “Independent” versus 31% Democrat and 25% Republican. For sure these Independents represent a wide spectrum of political beliefs, some at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, and maybe only half of them would feel at home in a centrist third party, but a centrist third party could easily draw in moderate Democrats and Republicans. In fact, the surest way to establish a viable third party would be for these moderates in the existing two parties to take the initiative to abandon their ideologically entrenched parties, find each other in the middle and create a new party that is dedicated to govern from the center and on the basis of a clear national strategic agenda. Such party would then become an attractive draw for many Independents. It would probably push the Democrats more to the left (where they want to go anyway) and the Republicans more to the right (where the Tea Party is guiding them).

The jolt received from such shock to the arrogance, inertia and complacency of Democratic and Republican Parties might just be enough to break the logjam and get Washington working again for the people of America. It might just be enough to get our politicians to address the other flaws in the system as well. It might just be what the American political system needs to deliver on its promises.