Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

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A Runaway Presidency

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Our present experience suggests that the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. Why were they so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy?

At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia the colonists’ representatives reveled in anti-monarchist thought. The founding fathers wanted to create a way to avoid a monarchy, beginning the work of establishing a government to be shared by three co-equal branches. They were certain there would be no equivalent to King George III in what would become the federal district established along the Potomac. John Adams was among the first to propose the three-way power sharing we are supposed to have today. So there is a dark irony in the fact that we now have—more or less–what he and his deliberators in 1776 wanted to avoid.  And though it is not fair to simply cast blame for a lack of foresight at this and the later 1787 Constitutional convention, it is clear that the founders’ vision of distributed power failed to adequately account for the possibility of a runaway presidency.

Today evidence of the near-collapse of legislative and judicial functions at the federal level is all around us. One party controls all three branches of government. Indeed, we have a single-party controlling majorities in both houses of Congress who functions more like spectators than participants in the Trump circus. One can wonder if those folks in the majority should be paying Broadway theater prices for the seats they occupy as passive observers to the dismemberment of the federal government. The courts are more active, but mostly delay but not change the Trump agenda. And both lack any constitutional teeth to punish the executive bureaucracy for overreach, leaving the Presidency with increasingly unchecked power. The rarely used “guard rooms” in the basement of the Capitol are a reminder of the limited power of Congress to enforce anything it does. As to the judiciary, “court shopping” and long appeals processes today endlessly postpone reckonings for most of the wealthy who are facing civil or criminal actions.

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In hindsight, there should be more direct constitutional checks on the abuse and compliance enforcement acts undertaken by the misnamed ‘administrative’ branch of government.

Only the Commander-in-Chief has broad authority to oversee what has evolved from administrative to policing agencies. They range from the military services to the  F.B.I., to HHS. For example, in a break with precedent Donald Trump is using the Department of Justice to pursue his own urges for punishment and retribution. Ditto for federally supported arts, education, and research units in every corner of the nation. Article II of the constitution is mostly silent on  limiting these magnifications of power.

In short, the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. We have a President who behaves like a king. Moreover, in hindsight it is obvious that founders like James Madison knew that Britain’s civil life even in the  mid-1700s did not amount to a simple monarchy. The House of Commons evolved much earlier, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Even a cursory reading of British history yields the conclusion that an active parliamentary system in Britain was established well before America declared her independence. The founders would have known about the power of Sir Robert Walpole, who dominated the political scene in London and became the first British Prime Minister. They had the example of an emerging parliamentary system of government if they wanted to consider it.

Why were the founders so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy? It turns out that scapegoating to the mentally challenged king was perhaps a bit too easy. I have new sympathies for the loyalists within the colonies who were willing to stake their futures on British rule and the advantages of a parliamentary system over a republic. Even within a titular monarchy, parliamentary governments have advantages and flexibilities that are lost in republics like ours which thwart direct elections and are slow to adapt to changing political circumstances. Our system leaves disastrous parties and our own mentally challenged Presidents in control for far too long. And so we stagnate. Constitutionally, and when a political party is complicit, we have no viable pathways to “no confidence” votes against a leader that could pull us out of our civil miseries.

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Tuning Out of Public Spaces

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Positive situational awareness means someone knows what is going on around them.

There is a walker in front of my house that I see almost  every day. He is clearly diligent in getting some exercise. But here’s the thing: he walks, head down, staring at his right hand. Though he passes others in neighboring yards and on the narrow sidewalk, he seems mesmerized by the screen he is holding. I expect that eventually he will fly off the edge of the curb one day when gravity reminds him that multitasking can be dangerous.  Walking and reading at the same time are not really companionable activities. This pattern repeated on most pedestrian routes everywhere is a reminder of a minor violation of the social contract. Simply put, we should first notice others and acknowledge them: not every time and not all the time, but sometimes. The norm might be a verbal greeting, or at least a friendly glance.

What have we lost when it is no longer routine to affirm someone in their presence?  It’s a signal of something bigger that has been building for several decades.

This awareness of people passing within our personal space ties into the useful idea of “situational awareness,” which applies to everyone from airline pilots to close encounters on a sidewalk. Positive situational awareness requires that a person notice what is going on in the real world around them: perhaps noticing a pedestrian about to step in front of an oncoming car, a baby verging near the edge of a swimming pool,  or even a large boat about to crash into a quay.

We were not made to be mentally immobilized by our portable devices. Such is our fractured attention that we miss experiences where we might engage. I’ve told this story before: a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon through brush-covered flat prairie, suddenly coming upon the breathtaking gorges extending to valley floors too deep to see. This miraculous break in the landscape of the high desert can leave one speechless. I’ve seen first-time viewers break into tears at the awesome sight. Within a few feet of the sheer rim we noticed a family pulled over in their car.  They have apparently just arrived. The parents walk to a nearby precipice to take in the wonder of it all, but their children are still in the car watching a video.

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The relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters.

There is a bigger point here. We are still in the first generations of a tectonic shift in how humans interact. Roughly speaking, for thousands of years communication with others in our species was direct and unmediated. Human groups lived together and constructed social selves from daily experience. But especially after the birth of commercial radio in 1920, our relationships with each other began to rapidly change.

I’ve probably buried the lede here. But in the history of the species, the advent of radio is a key thershold that has helped initiate us into what is now the norm of trucated communication. For better or worse, it put listeners on just the receiving end of mediated messages. No need to react, respond, or acknowledge. A mediated message is filtered through some mechanical-electrical tool and often stripped of the nuances of face-to-face communication. True, books, letters and newspapers existed decades earlier. But in the west radio was more revolutionary than evolutionary. It was  the first widespread medium where a family could be in the same room, but left to the stimuli of an external source that isolates the consciousness. This relatively new social configuration of being “alone together” is one cause of missing interactions in everyday encounters. In media analyst Sherry Turkle’s words, “we expect more from technology and less from each other.” And so we have a acquired a fairly recent incapacity. Media and even portable phones have retrained us to be more comfortable in our own heads. Like that walker I first mentioned, many of us seem to be more solitary souls, saving full and rich interaction only when it is necessary.