It's interesting to see the New Deal brought back to the forefront of public debate lately. The almost certainly dead attempt to destroy Social Security by the Bush Republicans has had the inadvertent effect of resurrecting FDR's ghost. And as Democrats struggle, once again, to find their identity after another failed election, the timing could not be better.
This is because the New Deal represents the first tier in the split between the traditional Democrats and the so called New Democrats. In fact, the DLC and their champion Bill Clinton did more to disassemble the New Deal and its underlying philosophy than the Republicans ever could. And what we have now is just a continuation of the internal conflict between those who believe in market based growth and those who still believe in redistribution and social safety nets.
What's especially encouraging is that the ideologues of social progress through free market forces are running head on into a brick wall of the reality that these ideas haven't worked as planned.
The recent defection of Nobel Prize-winning economist and free trade guru Paul Samuelson from the free-markets-can-do-no-wrong camp is testimony to the fact that economic theory and economic reality are not as cozy as once thought.
The fact is, the brick wall has been there for many years. Unfortunately, just not in the US. To those who wish to see just how neo-liberal theories have fared in the real world, they need look no further than Argentina: where the privatization of their national services like water and electricity, and the selling of their banks left their economy in ruin. But here in the states, we are only now getting a glimpse of the "benefits" of deregulation, privatization, and the misguided belief that capitalism without strong democratic restraint is not self destructing.
The brick wall here in the states has taken the form of massive energy blackouts, Wall street corruption, the decline of our above-living-wage job sectors, and the consequent rapid erosion of our middle class. It is this brick wall of hard, cold reality that prompted Samuelson to publish a paper calling for the rethinking of free trade.
The bottom line is that the only ones who have benefited from neo-liberalism are George Bush's ownership society. And since this excludes the overwhelming majority of Americans, and indeed citizens of the world, it is only natural that backlash would ensue.
So this leads to the other half of the equation: what should we offer in its stead? The conflict between the left and right, whether in the form of conservatism vs. liberalism, or neo-liberalism vs. socialism, or any of the other dualist manifestations that have emerged in the struggle between the left and the right, has been going on for over a century.
Is it possible this can ever be resolved? Or are the warring factions condemned to irreconcilable positions?
I believe there is a solution. A third way if you will.
First of all, this is long term stuff. While the new internet revolution holds the promise of vastly accelerating changes in thought, it will still not happen soon. But remember, the neo-conservative movement has been in the works for decades. Starting as a discussion, and then, through persistence, emerging as a movement.
We too should not be afraid to think long term, and to think big. The new power of internet communication has created opportunities for political change that were previously unavailable under the tight control of mainstream media. And since all political revolutions begin with thought, we should use this new medium to challenge the constraints of what has been, against the possibilities of what can be.
The Conflict
I believe the first step to understanding the historical conflict between the left and the right is to reduce it to its most basic elements. Its essence. What are we really fighting about? A close examination will reveal that, on its most fundamental level, this conflict is simply between two basic principles: competition and cooperation.
The competition camp believes that man achieves his greatest proficiency through the motivating forces of competition. This is, in part, the underlying theme of free markets, privatization and a general loathing of "socialistic" government programs and regulatory control.
The cooperation camp believes in the power of government to solve social problems, advance the interests of the commonwealth, and to restrain the snowball effect of those with wealth accumulating exponentially more wealth. This latter phenomenon, the snowball effect, can be illustrated through analogy with baseball. Imagine if the Yankees, the most profitable baseball team, were left to their own devices, and using their vast fortune were able to buy up all the best players. How long would you bother to watch the Yankees win over and over again?
If this seems all too simple, it is. Complexities arise from the interactions of these two forces in their many manifestations. From a small business to the halls of congress, you will rarely see these raw elements in their pure form. To this day I have yet to hear anyone define the left-right struggle in terms of cooperation vs. competition. Nor do I find anyone who is 100% on one side or the other.
But it is essential to define this struggle not just for the sake of understanding it, but for selling the solution.
The most common weapon used by the right against cooperation is the inefficiency of government. They rail against the bureaucracy, waste, and intrusiveness. They claim the government cannot be trusted with the taxpayer's money. They claim the government is a threat to liberty and if left to its own devices, we will all end up as servants of the state.
Now, we've all heard this rhetoric before. And we all know that there are ulterior motives for such comments. Getting the "oppressive" government off your back can sometimes mean billions. And we will all recognize the blatant hypocrisy behind some of these allegations as well. But in spite of such motives and the inflammatory rhetoric that often accompanies them, we must also ask the hard question of why such rhetoric resonates so well with so many.
And we must also be prepared for the answer: because there's truth to it.
The cold, hard truth is, government has failed at many of the task for which it was assigned. And even many of its so-called successes have been marked by only marginal performance. From the noted incompetence of such government agencies as the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Energy to the failure of such well intentioned programs as welfare, farm management, or the "war" on poverty, the history of government action is a history of only occasional success. Even our most cherished government action, education, is a borderline disaster.
Now I don't want to undermine the times when government actions do work. But we are never going to grow and evolve by defending the indefensible for the sake of political ideology. We must be willing to try new things and rethink old concepts.
I also want to point out the fundamental flaw in the right's "government is the problem" campaign: government, in a democracy, is the way we make collective decisions and solve collective problems. To say you are anti-government, in a democracy, is to say you are anti-democracy. In a government of, by and for the people, what exactly are they attacking? They are attacking us. And themselves.
So this leads to hard realization number two: the degree with which they can get away with that argument, is the degree with which the government is either no longer of, by and for the people, or the degree to which it is perceived as such. Of course the ultimate irony is that the right, far more than the left, has been instrumental in making this so. Power to the people has never been a crying charge of the right. But regardless, as long as people are aware that they have a diminished role or power in their government, it becomes easier to demonize it.
So the left has two primary challenges: making government work, and doing so in a way that restores the participation and power of the citizenry to the process - making government of the people again. This is fortunate because the latter, as I hope to demonstrate, is the essential ingredient to the first.
It all comes down to accountability
If you could identify one single thing that is wrong with America, our government or our society as a whole, what would it be? Corruption? The electoral process? Incompetent politicians? An incompetent press corps?
I tell you it is all of these things and they are all manifestations of one thing: the absence of accountability.
If you could identify one thing that our founding fathers were revolting against, it was an absence of accountability on the part of the monarchy. This is why they chose democracy. What is democracy but accountability. You do well, or you get replaced. In all aspects of our lives, from personal relationships to business transactions, accountability is the real motivator. It is what makes us strive to achieve and it is what keeps us honest.
Recently, my wife got in the habit of turning off the water but not turning off the shower nozzle. A week passed of me getting rained on with ice cold droplets before I had had one drop of coffee. I thought about the conversation I would have and how that would play out. It was not appealing. Then I remembered the old accountability principle. I left the shower nozzle just the way she had left it for me and by the very next day, no droplets. We've never discussed it once.
By recognizing accountability as the fundamental motivator of achievement, performance and integrity, we can eliminate the archaic concept of competition. Competition is merely another form of accountability. Go to a business that does not need your business and you will see the need for competition. Why, because competition is accountability.
So if competition is just another form of accountability, what is cooperation? Cooperation requires accountability too. But it is a higher order. Which is why I'm a Democrat. Using competition only as the great motivator is to believe Adam Smith's thesis that man achieves his greatest proficiency when working in his own interest.
Cooperation recognizes the truth that we must indeed work for our own interest, but we excel the most, and prosper the most when we work in our own interest and in the interest of society. Believe it or not, this was proven mathematically by John Nash and he received a Nobel for it. So whenever you see the bumbleheads spouting Adam Smith, tell `em you've seen Beautiful Minds and you know they're full of shit.
If you've been wondering, the Democratic philosophy of cooperation is now used every day by economists and stock brokers. You can take it to the bank. Go rent Beautiful Minds again. It is nothing less than the story of a math geek proving us right. Anyway...
After spending a decade in LA I decided to rent a farm in a small town to write and relax. It was quite pleasant. I had deer grazing in my yard. But a fringe benefit I didn't expect was I found a guy to work on my car who I could actually trust. I gave this a lot of thought and realized that, possibly he was just a really nice guy, I have no doubt, but also that he had to be trustworthy. Everyone in town knew who he was. There was simply no way to sustain a business in that small town and be a crook. You can do it for a while if you're clever. But eventually people will be on to you and essentially run you out of town. That is accountability.
And this leads me to the problem of government. It does take a village. But the federal government is not a village.
I want to introduce a new word: non-locality. I stole this from the physics world and there it sort of means action at a distance. In this context, that's exactly what it means.
Non-locality is the consequence of centralization. When I, from my Manhattan office, decide to build and manage a waste dump down in Kentucky, this is action at a distance. And the consequences of that action are remote. In fact, from my centralized perch, I may only hear about those consequence years later in the form of a subpoena.
Now, technological advancements may enable me to get a lot closer. But I'm still in New York and my waste dump is still in Kentucky. And this is the far more important point: I don't actually live there. So if by chance, my waste dump turns out to be toxic and kills a bunch of people, it won't be me or mine. My backyard is clean.
This is non-locality. This is the absence of accountability.
Centralization is the single biggest obstacle to accountability there is and it is also the root failure of almost all government action. This is one of the most painful realizations for many liberals. For so long we've believed in a utopian vision conceived from the top and manifest down. If only given more time, or money, we can engineer a perfetc society. This, as much as anything, is why we no longer have power. Brazilia, the great brave-new-world experiment is a perfect example of the failure of centralized conception..
The history of centralization is interesting. It began with mass production and was later refined by Frederick Taylor. Taylorism, among other things, posited that a human workforce could be engineered for maximum efficiency. Through a carefully constructed set of criteria, Taylor and others (Ford) set about the process of creating the human extension of the assembly line. Unfortunately, their utterly brilliant vision only led to the formation of the labor union. People are not machines.
The failures of brilliant people attempting to manufacture complex environments from a centralized authority litter history like so many cat boxes. It just never works. Why? Lack of accountability. And of course, non-locality. Our best laid plans always meet bumps in the road of the real world that we will never conceive from afar..
Understand, by accountability I mean many things. Accountability can take many forms: from politicians losing elections, to systems failing to take necessary corrections because there is no perceived reason to do so. Any time you take an action and it has negative consequences, but you are immune from those consequences so you fail to correct your course, you will lose. It may take a while. But you will eventually be defeated by the absence of the correction.
So, I took a plunge at Hillary. Let me explain why. A village is like the small town I moved to where everyone knew each other and therefore had to be on the up and up to coexist. The federal government is a non-local entity that has so many layers of cover that any reasonable measure of accountability is all but nonexistent. From a distant office in Washington DC, you do not have to be on the up and up. This is the nature of bureaucracy. You can sit and smolder in your incompetence indefinitely.
The Holy Grail for Democrats is decentralization.
How does that play out?
Well, we're already seeing it in the new Open Source political movement here. Every thing that you need to know about what is right and what is wrong about human governance you can see right here every day. Is it perfect? Of course not. Is it better than a huddle of cloakroom lobbyists formulating strategy? You bet your ass.
When our founding fathers took the big jump to go with democracy, they took the intermediate step to full decentralization of authority. Not all of them were fully on board. Can the mob be trusted? Can the lower classes govern themselves? Considering the United States is the oldest standing government in the entire world, I think we've answered that question. Now we need to complete the task.
But, again, this will be the most difficult for liberals. We must loosen the reigns on our utopian visions. No matter how brilliant, your vision of the great new world must be relegated to localism. And with that, the possibility that it will not meet your specifications.
The perfect example is schools. As much as we all have our ideas of what education should be, the incontrovertible truth is, centralized authority of education has almost destroyed it. Our current model of education is still based on Taylorism.: manufacturing the model worker, churning out good citizens. Shipping students from all over a metropolitan area to a centralized factory of 2500 kids is nothing but grotesque.
Schools should be little oases of the community. Of their neighborhoods. In some places they are. But in far more places they are non-local, centralized factories that are far more similar to factories than to places of learning. And the results are telling: 25% of seniors graduate without basic reading skills.
It is true that by loosening the reigns on public education we will have failing schools. Somewhere down in Alabama they will get it way wrong. It will be a tragedy. But by trying to manage the whole system from a centralized point, we ensure the failure of the whole system.
Now, if anyone has been paying attention, you might suspect that I am a closet troll for vouchers and the elimination of the federal government. Rest assured I am not. I am in absolute opposition to privatization of all government services. Which is why I am trying to advocate a new way to make government work better, and most important, to make Americans rejoin the process of governing themselves.
We are the government.
But we are never going to reclaim our rightful position among the majority until we address the fundamental problems facing the country. Hollow policy proposals and empty rhetoric will accomplish exactly what we've been accomplishing for years now: the loss of power.
And to those who say that bold new visions are beyond the reach of possibility, I say, cowards. The history of American progress has always had two groups: the visionaries who fought for what could be, and the cowards who claimed that it wasn't possible.
If we had followed the cowards, we would still be British.