Summary: The key to forecasting the future lies in seeing the trends that produced the present. For example, Americans have lost trust in almost all of our institutions, both public and private. During the coming time of troubles, we probably will turn to the two remaining institutions that we trust. We can only guess what will follow; probably large mistakes with long-term horrific consequences. Tomorrow is part two.
“Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”
— The Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key (1814)
A reader asks “How does America’s glorification of the military affect our future.”
That might be one of the key questions of our time. Look at the graphic from “In Nothing We Trust“, National Journal, 19 April 2012 — “Americans are losing faith in the institutions that made this country great.” Who we trust might determine the fate of the Republic.
This graphic shows the change from 2002 to 2011 in Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions survey. The results are more striking from the their first survey in 1999 to the 2011 survey. Confidence in almost every institution has declined. Especially note the loss of confidence in the 3 branches of government.
- the medical system: -1%
- public schools: -2%
- newspapers: -5%
- organized labor: -7%
- TV news: -7%
- church: -10%
- big business: -11%
- the presidency: -12%
- Congress: -14%
- the supreme court: -14%
- banks: -20%
Our confidence has increased in a few institutions.
- the police: +2%
- the criminal justice system: +5%
- the military: +10%
These results should not surprise us.
.
These are fitting results for the nation ranked #1 in per cent of its population in prison, fifth in the number of executions, and spending more than the rest of the world combined on foreign intelligence and the military. For a frightened people (as our reaction to 9-11 proved). A people with low confidence in their political institutions. A people with low confidence in each other, and low confidence in ourselves and our ability to work together.
Who would you expect such people to turn to in troubled times? To simple people wielding force.
How will this work? We can ask our neighbors to the south. How well have military and police-dominated governments worked for them? Worked for Africa? Europe?
We can already see the effects of this shift in our patterns of this. Tomorrow’s part two gives some valuable if disturbing evidence.
I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
— Revelations 19:11-16
Other Chapters in this series
- A look at the future of the Republic: we will choose leaders that we trust, 14 May 2012
- A look at the future of the Republic: we will choose leaders that we trust, not the ones we need (part 2), 15 May 2012
- More evidence that the military is slowly cutting itself off from civilian control, 15 July 2012
For more information
See the FM Reference Page America’s military, and our national defense strategy.
For more information about our future:
- A Washington Insider looks at America, but does not understand what he sees, 7 September 2011
- America is the new Rome. Late Republican Rome (not the best of times), 13 October 2011
- What will replace the Constitution in Americans’ hearts? Let’s check for Fascism., 29 March 2012
Choose leaders whom we trust? Isn’t that exactly how we got to this point? What we need to work on is the methods our kids learn to use when selecting whom to trust.
Roger Erickson is missing the point, I think. Misplaced trust has indeed gotten us to this point. If you look at most of the American institutions in which trust has increased, they’re badly broken and not worthy of trust.
“The church and religion” have been revealed as a group of pedophiles systematically covering up child molestation — probably not the best folks in which to put your trust.
Our medical system is so badly broken that doctors as a group now believe and continue to prescribe treatments which don’t work. See the New York Times article “Believing in treatments that don’t work,” 2 April 2009. We don’t even need to get into the Journal of the American Medical Association’s editorial urging doctors to stop accepting bribes from big pharmaceutical companies. These are clearly not people you should put your trust in.
As for the U.S. military, let’s see how trustworthy they are… “One third of women in U.S. military raped” (by our own soldiers).
“U.S. is recruiting misfits for army: felons, racists, gang members fill in the ranks,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 2006.
“GAO blasts weapons budget,” Washington Post, 1 April 2008. “Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon’s biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.”
Are these the kind of people in whom Americans should put their trust?
I think that’s FM’s point, if you re-read his post.
Not at all. I was merely pointing out that the outcome – misplaced trust – is not the point. The strategy by which we lead ourselves to that outcome IS the point.
Initiating insight matters not unless one pursues the causality chain back to it’s origin, or at least to an optimal place from which to divert it.
I’m not sure if it is necessarily accurate to look around at third-world countries that have had a bad time with military involvement in politics and conclude that these bad endings were caused primarily by and must always result from this kind of involvement. There are many reasons why the military might get involved in politics in a third-world, i.e., weak, country. They might be placed there as an instrument of suppression and control by a dominant outside power, in which case of course things aren’t going to go well for the people– but the primary causal factor is outside interference, not a politicized military per se. Or the military regime might be a last-ditch nationalist uprising against overwhelming outside pressure– in which case the regime most often gets besieged and desposed, which brings countless hardships on the people, but again this is mostly driven by the larger geopolitical context rather than some inherent dysfunction in the regime itself.
One can look around the world and see some examples of military political influence that has had positive results, at least least in the eyes of the majority of the citizens of those countries. While they are often harshly criticized by Western political scientists who are primarily interested in finding ways to impose firm, universal Western hegemony, military coups in Turkey, Thailand, and other places have been popular and widely viewed as legitimate.
I think it is accurate to say that this kind of political arrangement is associated with social and political stress. It just doesn’t seem clear that the effect is always negative. Personally not looking forward to it in America, though.
The obvious answer is that people should not – ever – trust government. Not even “trust, but verify”; it should be “disempower by default, grant authority on a case-by-case basis” The notion of the social contract, in which the governed grant broad powers to government is an idea that was promulgated by political philosophers who favored dictatorship (e.g.: Hobbes’ Leviathan) Plato correctly identified that the problem with power is it is self-serving, because those attracted to power are those that we least want to vest with it.
The US government was constructed by plutocrats who ensured that they were in power (while retaining the overall structure of a slave-state, and a disempowered populace) so that they could run things while avoiding the usual reactionary dictatorship trap that popular revolutions fall into. We have been indoctrinated into respecting those men as great political thinkers and leaders when, in fact, the republic they built was so shaky it lasted hardly more than a century before collapsing in a horrible civil war. There are some ideas in the constitution that are brilliant, such as the notion that “all powers not explicitly granted to the government are kept by the people” – one of the first points of attack as the government quickly figured out how to grant itself more powers.
With the telecommunications infrastructure that we have, it would be plausible to construct a political system that was actually a direct democracy, without even an executive branch (substitute for the executive branch a debating house and separate organizations responsible for execution on specified projects ratified by the people) Indeed we could construct a model democracy in which it was no longer necessary to vest power in a president, because one is not needed. There would be consequences, of course, for such a political system – namely, it would be virtually impossible to effectively prosecute wars of aggression. I don’t see that as a bad thing, personally, now that we have a nuclear deterrent that renders us dangerous to our entire species. Another issue we could address is the notion of government secrecy. A democratic government, simply put, should not be able to keep secrets from its citizens. Voltaire correctly identified “secret diplomacy” as one of the greatest weaknesses of republics and democracies (and, in a way, predicted the web of interlocking secret treaties that lit the fuse for WWI) The reason we are seeing citizens’ trust in branches of the government is because we are discovering, over and over and over again that every branch of the government that isn’t lying outright to us, is incompetent.
I argue that the structure of the US was never good enough to save, and is not worth saving. The question is how to claw back from the near-dictatorship of corporate interests, military/industrial complex, and plutocrats towards an open society, without an implosion. As we’re seeing with mr facebook billionaire, who just gave up his US citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on the gigantic amount of money he expects to get, the wealthy will flee like rats the moment it looks like their happy hunting ground here is going away. There are so many parasites latched onto the body politic, now, that we’re headed for a “3rd world country with nukes” future if we don’t do anything, and a “3rd world country with nukes” future if we do.
Exactly! Both Darwin & the USMC came this conclusion independently.
“Success tracks quality [& tempo] of distributed decision-making.”
“We generate tempo by distributing decision-making.”
That’s a wonderfully concise summary of both thermodynamics & adaptive evolution – at least for the specific context of human policy.
Unfortunately it’s not even remotely that simple. Centralization also has advantages: of planning, training, communication, logistics, etc. Successful organizations balance both centralization and de-centralization, finding some harmony that works for their specific circumstances. Neither is, as you imply, magic.
Matt D’s faith in the mirror-sunglassed colonels as political leaders seems touching, but he may want to review the history of the Franco government in Spain or the Pincohet government in Chile or the junta in El Salvador to see the results. For bonus points, google “dirty war Argentina.”
Marcus Ranum speaks with the wisdom of the founders of this country. We should change “government” to “large bureaucracies,” including business and corporate institutions, but with that caveat, everything he says is accurate & insightful.
Direct democracy was notorious in the ancient world as an unstable system of government, however. We can see its ill effects in California’s initiative system, which is too easily manipulated by demagogues and moneyed interests. Computer-mediated direct democracy could well make baseless American wars of aggression more common because of the ease with which public passions can be inflamed by rich elites. As William Randolph Hearst was reputed to have boasted in 1898, “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war.”
I agree; direct democracy is more effectively refuted by P.T. Barnum than by Plato – though Plato also demolished it by pointing out that democracy almost always will be taken over by demagogues. De Tocqueville was also right that democracy will never survive the people realizing they can vote themselves a handout.
A decade ago a friend of mine challenged me regarding how I’d structure a government, if I were trying to propose a constitution. I’ve been working on it ever since. :/ I believe that one of the biggest problems with direct democracy is that the sheeple can be easily stampeded so one of the big challenges would be to ensure that people were educated regarding an issue before they were able to vote on it. One possibility (which I do not like) would be to require a citizen to answer a randomly chosen set of questions regarding the issue they propose to vote on, before their vote was counted – to verify that they, in fact, were qualified to vote on that issue.
The approach I prefer would be to have pieces of legislation debated in a debating body, prior to their being offered to the public for votes. The entire legislative process of the US is completely corrupted by the influence of money; the only way to solve that is to divide the production of legislation up in such a manner that those proposing an action, and those advocating for it, are different.
In Marcusiana, there would be tricameral government with no executive branch at all. The first body would identify issues that required government attention. That first body would be an accepted target of both public and corporate lobbying. They would propose issues to be taken up by the second body, which would propose legislation. The proposed legislation would then be taken up by the third body which would debate it, by choosing spokespeople for both sides of a proposal (or multiple spokespeople were there several options proposed) The debating house would publicly air the issues, at which point the ultimate decision would be rendered by a pure popular vote. Certain topics, such as the decision to go to war, or to approve budget items over a certain amount, would require more than a simple majority.
In the case of budgetary items, there would be a provision for voting for a continual resolution for that item, and, if there was no decisive vote from the people, the old budget would automatically kick in again. There would be an emergency committee that would replace the current executive branch + NSC which would propose and debate emergency issues. All of these legislative positions would be highly-paid jobs similar to being members of a board of directors; they would not be allowed to accept bribes, excuse me, “gifts” but would apply for the job through a public forum in which they provided a brief statement about their beliefs, their qualifications, the issues they were particularly expert on, and why, and the citizens would cast votes on individuals, with the top-scoring slate of individuals being empaneled in whichever house they were applying for. All legislation proposing to take any kind of action would have to include the budget/appropriation for the proposal, as well as identifying the agency of the government responsible for undertaking it.
Agencies budgets would thus be tied to their ability to execute the tasks that they were assigned, and if the people began to conclude that a particular agency wasn’t getting things done, they’d stop voting proposals/appropriations to that agency until it withered on the vine. One of the fun side-effects of this system would be watching the military have to actually justify their budgets and explain to the people what they were going to get with their money. I expect the people would come to realize that roads and schools actually are more socially beneficial than generals and the trappings of empire.
I’ll stop, now. I could go on and on and on about this. What’s frustrating is that many of us are deeply wrapped up in the question of how to fix the government, but we haven’t acknowledged that it never really worked at all, in the first place. 250-odd years is piffle. I don’t think we should be asking how to fix the government, but rather how to re-design it completely and how to survive the murderous response we’d get from the plutocracy if we tried.
“best government” ?
Easy. Just look at the evolutionary history of all known model organisms, of which human cultures & nation states are just another example.
Overwhelming answer: Distributed democracy where checks & balances scale automatically with scale of democracy. Any system that fails to self-regulate soon learns – or demonstrates – the penalty for dis-regulation. We’re either meeting the changing demands of fickle context with scalable agility, or we’re succumbing. There’s little margin in between.
Thomas: The pages of the history books are also filled with parliamentary failures. History is complicated. Again, I do not personally enjoy our creeping American police state.
Personally, I find Marcus Ranum’s suggestions fascinating and provocative. The idea of adding a third legislative body to identify problems seems ingenious! Eliminating the executive branch also sounds like a clever idea. Not sure how well that work in practice, but perhaps since bureaucrats already largely run our government, this would merely make explicit a situation already reified in practice.
Some questions: how would Marcus deal with the problem of long-term projects? It could be very hard to tell within a few years whether they were fulfilling their promise, so voters might vote to shut them down prematurely. This might stifle long-term projects like, say, the construction of Grand Coulee Dam, or the TVA, or the interstate highway system.
Also, how would Marcus deal with the problem that basic scientific research (internet, gene sequencing, etc.) in early stages can be very hard to identify a specific benefit for on an accountant’s balance sheet?
Some other wild blue-sky ideas for restructuring government:
But the wildest suggestion is based on a mathematical paper “The Peter principle revisited: A computational study” by Alessandro Pluchinoa, Andrea Rapisardaa and Cesare Garofaloc published in the journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, proving mathematically that the most efficient method of promoting people is (!) random selection. So instead of voting on Marcus’ experts, I’d propose they be selected by random lot from the general population, and periodically evaluated. Those who fail to make the grade get fired.
I would also propose that all legislators be selected by random lot, rather than by popular vote. Only policies and budgets would be subject to popular vote, but legislators would serve a fixed term and be selected at random from the general population (if we wanted to be truly adventurous, we could even drop the requirement of an age limit — why not have some of the legislators be 10 or 12 years old?).
Links to the pdfs of the scientific journal articles about the superiority of selection of officials by random lots:
Marcus’s suggestions basically resurrect representative, hands-on, tribal council systems, while inventing methods to scale those customs to new population sizes. Permanent authoritarian royalty or Administrative Offices arose from growing rates of tribal conflicts – which were a result of scaling populations. An Executive is simply someone who used to get temporary “situational command.” When situational commands are prolonged by prolonged situational characteristics, the aggregate tends to forget they once had a fluid mechanism for granting & retracting situational command. If that fluid mechanism hadn’t been scaled up for operation across a larger population, it may take a long time to reinvent a replacement process that does.
No one said evolution was easy. If it were, it wouldn’t have taken 4 billion years for life on earth to get this far. Can’t speak for the rest of the universe, but there are estimates of an age ~13Trillion years. Don’t expect that scaling up to our next level or organization will be easy.
Cheer up, it’s a exciting challenge to have. It could be worse. You could have been under the Soviet system your entire lifetime.
I hope the situation here is not so dire as to consider children(!) better legislators than even the worst politician.
With everyone’s indulgence (if I become too long-winded, I hope FM will drop the deletehammer on my ramblings…) I’m encouraged to comment more on the structure of democratic constitutions that I envision – what I jokingly refer to as “Marcusiana” in my own mind…
There would be two ways of instantiating long-term actions, projects, or laws. One way would be a constitutional amendment, which would require a 4/5 supermajority vote from the citizenry. Once the constitution was amended the amendment would remain in force permanently unless amended out, also by a 4/5 supermajority. The other way would be what I call a “continuing resolution.” The way that would work is that the proposing body would offer legislation flagged as a continuing resolution, which said, in effect, “this legislation is proposed to come up for renewal every N years, on the understanding that it is not changed.” When the continuing resolution is up for renewal, it would be briefly debated – as necessary – and put up for a simple majority vote. The idea behind this system is lifted from corporate governance – the board of directors is established for a period of time and is chartered to do a whole bunch of things during that time and at the end of the period there is a vote to either let them keep doing it, or – if it fails – a new board is assembled. Virtually all of the core of the government of Marcusiana would be done through the establishment of continuing resolutions. Government services would be done through continuing resolutions as would social legislation. There would be a maximum time for any continuing resolution: 11 years would be the number I pick out of a hat.
First, we consider government services: in today’s US government, agencies appear like evil fungus (case in point: TSA) and never, ever go away. In Marcusiana an agency would be, essentially, an ongoing project approved by the citizens, with a budget and charter established in the continuing resolution that brought it into being. There’s an inherent poison pill in every agency in that, if the citizens think that the agency isn’t doing a good job, they simply don’t vote the continuing resolution renewal and the agency or project is gone like a dewdrop. One side-effect of this approach is that the line between “government” and “outsourced 3rd party” would be extremely blurred – if The People choose to vote to have the airport security screening project continuing resolution create a number of jobs under its budget, fine. If The People choose to vote to have airport screening project continuing resolution assign that budget and charter to a private entity, that’s also fine. In either case, if The People are happy with the results over time, it continues and if they are not – poof.
Obviously, a project like “the airport security organization” would be huge, and would have a big sticker price that might make The People think twice about it. That’s the point. But we could imagine that the proposing house of Marcusiana might propose that there should be an overall project for a nation-wide K-12 education system which would be government funded and would provide free education to The People. The legislation drafting body might cough up 3 proposals: one for a heavily subsidized system staffed out of the project/agency’s budget with a co-pay scaled to the child and its guardians’ means, another for a free system that would be entirely staffed out of the project/agency’s budget, and a third proposing to outsource the whole thing to Halliburton. These proposals would go before the debating body which would schedule public discussion (since it’s an important topic!) and the proponents of the proposals would make the best case for them, and The People would vote. BTW, Marcusiana would use a choice voting system rather than US-style “winner take all” which encourages the formation of political parties. Once something like the educational system continuing resolution was agreed upon and in place, one would expect to see a sort of “incumbency effect” when the resolution came up for renewal. If the legislation-drafting house coughed up an alternative proposal (perhaps polls show The People are not very happy with the project) there would be a debate through the debating house, prior to a vote. Continuing resolutions that had no opposition would be voted for and would have to win a majority of votes against a simple placeholder called “NO.” So, if The People were disgusted by the airport screening project/agency and its continuing resolution came up to vote, unopposed and “NO” won – poof. The project is terminated and its budget is stopped. One can imagine the proposing house getting creative with funding – it might eventually create a tax collecting agency that collected and managed a financial pool for the government, from which further legislation could dip funds, or a piece of legislation might include its own funding source (the airport screening continuing resolution might be funded by a surcharge on airplane tickets…)
With social legislation, continuing resolutions would also be the mechanism for most laws. Just as the “NO” becomes a sort of poison pill against any unpopular/unsuccesful agency or project, “NO” might defeat a piece of social legislation that was up for re-establishment under a continuing resolution. How might this work? Imagine that the proposing house asks the drafting house to undertake to legislate a “war on drugs.” The legislating house offers up a set of competing proposals criminalizing a number of drugs, establishing budgets for enforcement programs and educational programs, etc. One of those proposals might be “hey, let’s not DO ANYTHING!” Debate ensues in the debating house and it’s put to The People. But suppose The People want to do something, and the winning proposal establishes a “drug enforcement agency” and associated infrastructure for 10 years. And at the end of 10 years The People realize that they’ve just spent a whole lot of money creating a massive program to stop themselves from doing something they can bloody well stop themselves from doing if the want to – and, when it comes up for vote, they vote “NO” – poof.
The Constitution of Marcusiana is fairly simple. It outlines the mechanism for moving proposals through the drafting houses, debate, and vote. The non-operational core, however, is simply the statement that the government is only allowed to do what it has been authorized to do through the legislative process. There are a few other core rules, namely that it is unconstitutional to make a law abridging freedom of speech and, that all laws apply equally and no law may distinguish based on skin color, sexual preference, gender, religion or what language you speak. Another consitutional prohibition would be against passing legislation criminalizing or penalizing a citizen without being able to show how what is being criminalized harms society or others. It would be unconstitutional in Marcusiana to criminalize a “victimless crime.”
I’ll stop here. The point really isn’t that I think we should have a constitutional convention, scrap the US Constitution (which was never worth the paper it was written on; it is an evil document that ratified a power-grab from The People by some proto-plutocrats who knew how to make democratic-sounding noises to fool the ignorant masses) and ask the people if they’d be willing to sign up for an alternative political system (observe: that’s another thing the ‘founding fathers’ forgot to do – ask The People. The asked their rich and powerful peers) The point is that it’s not hard to explore alternatives and global networks with smart-phones, combined with thousands of years of experience with political systems, ought to give us enough perspective that we can rationally design political systems with the honest purpose of preserving power and the common good, with built-in poison pills to prevent runaway lawmaker syndrome, the influence of payola, and the tyranny of the powerful and wealthy.
There is a great big gap between anarchy, which only works in the small and doesn’t allow large-scale action against global issues, and plutocracy-in-democratic-sheep’s clothing. Yes, we can ask “how do we save our republic?” but I prefer to ask “why bother, when we can do better?” I know we won’t, though, because when the unpowerful ask the powerful to reform it always means asking them to loosen their grip on the power and privilege they have arrogated – and they always respond violently. Our only hope is for enough of The People to acknowledge that the “social contract” is not worth the paper it was written on (it was handed to you at birth, already filled out!) we should not be looking back and asking how to get back the republic-turned-empire but rather looking forward and asking how to permanently keep the reins of power and the monopoly on violence out of the hands of those who consistently abuse them. Government for The People, by The People, and only with the explicit and continuing support, revocably at any time, of The People.
Fareed Zakaria just posted another small reason to freak out about the state of our current government: “Who’s the problem: People or politicians?“, Ravi Agrawal (Senior Producer), Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, 9 May 2012.
I’m not a Fareed fan, actually I’m something of the opposite. The reason why I’m concerned is that in my experience, Fareed’s defining characteristic is that he never kicks a concept (like democracy) unless he doesn’t think it can kick back. What is he hearing that makes him think that he can safely suggest on CNN that the government should revolt against the governed?
Pluto,
That is one really ugly article. Thanks for posting it. It’s always nice to see the face of our enemy.
Wow! What an inspiring and amazing bunch of ideas, you guys should develop this more!
I especially love the direct-democracy agenda setting body, and the every-fifth-year fix-broken-old-laws/agencies rule.
Throw in some instant runoff voting too. We could use it right away in the US, but if could be used in the world of direct-democracy budgeting too. And every good democracy needs a mechanism for restraint, though I don’t know how you would accomplish that without having to place a whole lot of trust in a group of people.
Shorter version of Ravi Agrawal’s article: “That girl was a slut, she deserved to be raped because of that short dress she was wearing!”
That’s a brutal summary. Accurate, too.
Fabius, it looks like the medical system went up by one, not down. Great post otherwise.
I checked my math. Looks like 40 to
3039 = -1.That’s what I get for looking at the graphic you included instead of going to the surveys, they refer to slightly different time periods.
You didn’t read the text of the post, which was quite clear about the dates:
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