Epiphany in the Oval Office-I

[This is a very short version of a chapter written in the year 2000 for a never-to-be-published book entitled Democracy for Dummies. The book was described in a blog post on may 10, 2016. This chapter provides a recreation of an  Oval Office conversation in the wee hours between a President unable to sleep, and an adviser called out of bed to serve as a sounding board.]

Mr. President, it's me Dave.

Come in Dave. Sit here by the desk.

The room is dimly lit. There is only one small lamp on the President's desk, which is bathed in an orb of soft golden light. The kind of ethereal light they use in the movies when they are trying to say something spiritual and deep. It made Dave feel both special and creepy.

Glad to be of help, sir.

I have been sitting here thinking about my talk to the UN when I looked at the world globe next to my desk. It's a great piece of work and makes you appreciate what a big place the world is. Anyway, it suddenly dawned on me how unique the U.S. is in the big scheme of things. There are almost 200 nations on that globe and the U.S. is the only one that is isolated with a body of water on the left and the right.

You're right sir, but what about England and Japan. They are even more surrounded by water and we have Canada and Mexico real close by.

Good point Dave. I hardly ever think of them as foreign countries. That's why I seek your advice; a keen mind and you don't pull punches. That's what we need in the Oval Office. Anyway, what struck me about the location of the U.S. on the globe is that our isolation by two large bodies of water is probably the reason why we are able to be so objective in our analysis of world problems. We don't see things in terms of how it might threaten us, like the English, or the Russians, or the Chinese.

Bur sir, aren't we worried about the North Korean missile threat and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Just between you and me Dave, that kind of stuff is more for public consumption. Not something for us to take too seriously. But back to our place on the globe. That can't be some kind of accident. Somebody or some great force put this country where it is because of a plan to make us responsible for the rest of the globe. Don't you see! Germany couldn't become the responsible nation because of where they are located. Who would believe them. And another thing, we probably have people from all 200 nations in the world living in our country.

You better believe it, Mr. President. They're probably all here in the District. If you took cabs as much as I do you would see all 200.

Good point Dave. A good human interest hook to work into my talk. Maybe we should get a couple of cabbies in the gallery at the U.N. and I could ask them to stand up when I make the point about the U.S. really being made up of pieces of the rest of the world. Make a note; remind me to come back to that.

Yes sir.

You can see I'm reaching for some thing big. You know, something about the special mission of the U.S. in the world. A mission that's not related to politics. It's a mission defined by nature and geography. We can't ignore it even if we wanted to. We are forced to take charge and we have no choice in the matter. The hyena doesn't choose to prey on the weakest deer and the vulture doesn't choose to feed on the carcasses of dead animals.

Yes sir, but I'm not sure that is the right image you want to use.                   (to be continued)

Is direct democracy dangerous?

As many of our readers already know, we are supporters of participatory or direct democracy. We have expressed this in our calls for term limits for members of Congress and in our calls for more referendums submitted to voters for their actions. We were therefore interested to read in the May 21 issue of The Economist an article entitled "Referendumania" in which they criticize the growing number of referendums "spreading across Europe." We were surprised by their position, as the magazine usually presents a balance of views to their international readers, and especially surprised by their concluding paragraph: "Direct democracy is fine for things that don't matter, such as the Eurovision song contest. But it is no way to run a country, let alone a continent."

Read the article and see what you think about direct democracy.

Lost in Space

An often used term to describe some of the problems experienced by people today is that they lack the ability to "defer gratification," that is, to delay the pursuit of immediate desires, which although satisfying, can be ultimately harmful. What is never mentioned is the fact that an article published in the American Sociological Review in 1953 was titled "The Deferred Gratification Pattern." The article was written by Louis Schneider and his student Sverre Lysgaard, both of Purdue University, and it anticipated much of what is being discussed today as a "modern problem." The failure of the media to acknowledge the source of many ideas, despite all the new tools provided by the Internet, suggests that we may have a New Columbus problem.   

Washington Hasn't Changed, The People Have.

The most popular theme about politics in the main stream media today is that "Washington is broken." The national television media like CBS and NBC and the national print media like the New York Times and Washington Post all trumpet the same claims made by the national candidates for President. The candidates do it because they say they will fix things when they get to Washington. The media trumpet the same theme because it gets them off the hook for not paying attention to what Washington has been doing for years.

So, let's start at the beginning: Washington is not broken. It has been doing very well at providing the tax codes, and trade policies that serve the interests of the big corporate donors. To spare you the exotic political analysis, it has always been pretty simple-- "He who pays the piper calls the tune." 
So Washington is not broken, but what has changed is that the American people have changed. Many of them are better educated and better informed, and they have learned how to organize to express their grievances. Two of the most successful efforts have been the Tea Party (in 2009) and the Occupy Movement (in 2011). The mainstream media have done their best to portray these two movements as being in opposition to each other. The Tea Party's right-wing populism has received the most media attention, while coverage of the Occupy Movement faded as soon as the movement faded. The most attention to these movements by the media was to ask the question "What do they want?" The second question was "Who are they?" Their ages? Their occupations? Their education? Were they authentic "grass roots" movements or artificial "astroturf" movements, with the latter term referring to fake movements created by wealthy elites hoping to shape their message.

What has been missing from most corporate media reports on these two movements are serious efforts to consider their similarities and the potential that exists for both groups to merge into a single unified movement for change.  While the Tea Party and Occupy Movements appear to differ in important ways, they are unified in their anger about class-based grievances about the demise of middle-class jobs, wages, benefits, and opportunities.

In some ways, the Tea Party and Occupy Movements are similar to populist movements of the past. Both then and now there has been widespread interest among Americans in changing unequal, unfair, and corrupt economic and political systems into forms more consistent with traditional American democratic ideals. However, just as past populist movements rose and then subsided, it may be that the Tea Party and Occupy Movements will shift into a dormant mode, becoming part of what some sociologists have called "abeyance structures." But sometimes new grievances arise that may stimulate new versions of these earlier movements.