Imagine what would happen to a dithering figure like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell if he was required to show up every week to answer questions from members of the Senate.
The long shutdown of portions of the American government shares some features with the Brexit impasse that has left the U.K. in a catastrophic stalemate. As this is written, neither system seems capable of building coalitions to execute needed changes. But one system has the better odds: a better structure for moving forward.
From a political and communications perspective, the standoff in the United States is much more predictable than the impasse in the United Kingdom. Here’s why. A communications starting point typically emphasizes direct discussion and negotiation as basic tools for moving a lumbering government off dead center. A parliamentary model has the kind of deliberative infrastructure that requires direct communication. Debate in the House of Commons will not allow members to exist only in their own informational bubbles. The system requires public and frequent contact between key ministers and their shadow counterparts literally just a few feet away. Since the key business of the House is debate, members must be prepared to be effective advocates and better listeners.
British parliamentary debate is often riveting, and it is also public. Granted, positions tend to solidify when spoken in public. Any system emphasizing public discussion can turn intellectual fluidity into hardened cement. But debate in the commons is still better than our ‘no debate’ Congress, which emphasizes “statements” issued mostly for the record rather than the ears of other members.
All of this leads one to expect that Brexit would be closer to resolution than it is. Alas, the problem in London is really not structural, but one of basic leadership. The nation has weak leaders in the form of Prime Minister Theresa May and the Labor Party’s Jeremy Corbyn. May is especially risk-averse and inflexible: precisely the opposite of what seems necessary.
What a comparison of the two systems makes clear is how American divided government lacks any systemic requirement for a public airing of competing political claims.
If it’s possible, the American system right now is even more anemic, having just come off a two-year period with a mostly comatose Congress that had been thoroughly rolled by the President. As is obvious, the checks and balances that are ostensibly part of the system have been absent. Compliant Senate and House majorities have shown little interest in challenging a rogue executive.
More misery in the country was only avoided when enough Americans voted last November, resulting in split party majorities in the two houses of Congress. The House of Representatives will now fulfill the oversight function the founders envisioned. But the GOP-dominated Senate and White House are still sufficiently entrenched to make it difficult to build coalitions to solve problems.
What a comparison of the two systems makes clear is how American divided government lacks any systemic requirement for a public airing of competing political claims. Remember that C-SPAN cameras controlled by both bodies of Congress routinely conceal the truth that few are present when the House and Senate are in session. Elected deciders are usually not in the room to hear the comments of those on the other side. The cameras are never allowed to show empty seats. Instead, we depend mostly on journalists to summarize and sometimes create proxy debates on some core issues. And that’s not journalism’s job.
Journalism is not structured to foster direct one-on-one debate. It is almost never in the interests of news organizations to turn over control of a venue to opposing political figures. To be sure, we have many fine journalists working these days. But routine journalistic practices require the interruption of direct debate. Journalistic norms range from the need for heavy editing in the interests of time or space to a compulsion to introject new issues for discussion before old ones have been fleshed out. Television and ‘short-read’ articles make discursive political discussion problematic.
So it seems clear that the Parliamentary system has the edge in resolving a political impasse. If that judgment is not apparent, try to imagine what would happen to a dithering figure like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell if—as in a parliamentary system–he was required to show up every week and answer questions from Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. There’s a big difference between being a party leader in Congress and being an authentic champion of democratic discourse.
Eventually we will hear of a privately negotiated deal to end the shutdown. That’s our de-facto system, put in place not because of any constitutional requirement, but because we have mostly ignored the collective action of a body of legislators working out their differences in public debate.
The presence of a powerful organizing principle can fuel a lifetime of exploration.
These days our heads mostly in the material world. We spend a lot of time managing our things. But there are rewards for anyone willing to explore a system of ideas that can shine light on generative human impulses. Many of us can recall a transformative moment when the lights of understanding suddenly grew brighter: when so much of the strangeness of the world yielded to understandings that made sense. In most cases the trigger is usually some sort of panoramic explanation of social or physical phenomena. Anyone can cite some famous benchmarks that lead to profound insights: perhaps relativity theory, or a discovery as revolutionary as Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease, or the grounding assumption of sociology that individuals are best understood within communities.
Even so, while we still pay lip service to “the life of the mind,” it is hard to use that phrase in mixed company without producing some half-smiles hiding disbelief. “How quaint” might be the response of our friends, if they had less tact. Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc (1972) perfectly captures the common stereotype of a socially inept and forgetful academic totally absorbed in the labyrinth of his or her own theory. The academic is presented as at least a century too late for the world he inhabits. In our time large epistemic questions have been replaced even in academia with more mundane “hard skills” that suggest the more modest aspirations of a trade school: Will this skill set make me employable? How will this course look on a resume?
We usually allow religious believers their one big idea—that Jesus was the son of God, or Joseph Smith was a latter-day prophet—but academics buoyed by a single system of thought are now apt to be seen as lost in a box canyon with no exit. As an undergraduate I remember a very good professor enthused by the ideas of General Semantics, among them: that misunderstandings can be disentangled once and for all. The idea that was popular in the 60s proposed that we can actually fix the natural ambiguities of meaning: a view that no longer carries much weight with people studying natural languages. But I still think about how he lit up when he talked about this vision.
Good ideas can help us put a lot of puzzle pieces in the right places.
As a 25-year-old I was captured by the writings of sociologist Erving Goffman and the literary critic, Kenneth Burke: two men working in two very different traditions who shared the view that human action is best understood with reference to the language of the theater. We are “actors,” “playing roles,” managing performances,” “learning scripts,” and so on. There’s more to this “dramatistic” perspective, but you get the idea. For me, it put a lot of puzzle pieces in the right places, and it is a catechism of analysis I still excitedly pass on to my students. I’m probably the typical case of an academic acolyte, more animated by the possibilities of a single system than the comparatively pale subjects of everyday conversation.
I would hope every student could go through this kind of ‘secular conversion.’ It fires the passion to see beyond a limited horizon.
The idea of creating a future around a core organizing principle sprang to mind while reading Tara Westover’s best-selling memoir, Educated (2018). She describes harrowing years trying to outgrow the low horizons of her survivalist family in Idaho. Westover lived a nearly feral existence where events and ideas like the Holocaust or the civil rights movement were total unknowns. Because her father was imprisoned by a fringe interpretation of his Mormon faith, the much larger world of books, schools and civil society were kept at a distance. Survivalists tend to thrive on these self-made islands of reductionism. His only big idea was that divine guidance interpreted through him would sustain his large and unruly family.
Westover goes on to describe her unlikely journey into the life of the mind, eventually winning a graduate degree in History from the University of Cambridge. What revelations she must have discovered in that journey! Unfortunately, we never really given a sustained glimpse of what they are. Her story fades when it slights topics that fueled her ambition. It’s not the same kind of memoir of ideas given to us years ago in Robert Pirsig’s popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (1974).
By contrast, her father’s big idea remains static and sealed off from development. He begged her to quit the university even after she showed real academic promise
Faith can take take that route to a dead-end. As a form of thought it can protect its owner from new experiences and better understandings. And that’s a problem for all of us. Faiths can thrive on small ideas, dangerous ideas, false ideas and beliefs that disenfranchise. They can poison what might otherwise grow.
So there’s the rub. Ideas can justify a kind of smug stasis. But more dynamic starting points can be paths to understanding and innovation.
