223. "You get the government you deserve."

There's one thing wrong with that wonderful reminder to voters in a democratic country, "you get the government you deserve": it can't be said to those who voted against the majority that produced the government.  Like now, to a Massachusetts liberal suffering under the fiscal thumbs of House Tea Partiers.  "You think I deserve this?"

Tough enough under ordinary circumstances but here the dessert-serving group weren't even a majority, and what they did is not even democratic.  Their majority in the House is a result of Republican gerrymandering (the popular vote in the 2012 election of House members went to the Democrats by 1.2%) and their typical action, stopping funding by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, is a result of a procedural quirk, a leftover from a pro forma budget gesture of 1917.

The polls show that as a nation we're very unhappy with them, with approval of Congress down to 12%, disapproval up to 85%, and more than 70% of those strongly opposed to the job congressional lawmakers are doing (Washington Post/ABC).  So they're rascals, right?  From what you hear in street interviews they're that and more:  "religious nuts," "one-issue extremists," and the old one, "dirty politicians."

Depressing, isn't it, to have such people gaming the system, playing the quirks.  Differences in a democracy are supposed to be worked out, fought out, fair and square on the floor of the legislature.  Lose there and a representative is supposed to go along gracefully until his next chance to fight.  In the designated arena.  That's democracy.  Not slinking around with a wrench looking for a place to jam the machinery — machinery you have yourself already set, or allowed to be set, in motion, for God's sake.  

I can't stand it.  I'm a democrat (and Democrat) about to die of depression.

No, I won't die, nor will the masses of depressed people all around me.  We know that we, unlike the Egyptians, have a fixed, absolutely irremovable, election coming up.  And we have, in our aural memory, another good old American expression to cheer ourselves up with: "Throw the rascals out!"  Straight from the citizens who threw out Boss Tweed and the Teapot Dome gang and the Whisky Ring.  The majority the polls tell us of will assert itself.

How comforting, the thought of those rascals being thrown out, head over heels behind Boss Tweed.  The majority triumphant. 

How comforting, and now, apparently, how vain.  The majority has already shown how it's going to act, and that, in 2014, will be to keep the rascals in.  Ninety percent of them.  That's the percentage of incumbents they returned to office in 2012, when the laments over the terrible 112th Congress were as loud as the laments over ours, the 113th.

"Yes, but voters then didn't know what we know about these machinery-jammers, these district-slicers."

Ah, my friend, you have forgotten.  The jamming and slicing, and making a party of it, were already on display.  John Boehner had his (or the Tea Party's) thumb on the fiscal artery as surely, with his intentions as surely known, in April 2011, as he has now.  There was a partial shutdown of the government, remember?  With a bigger one narrowly averted in August.  What more was there to learn about these rascals?

The general electorate certainly appeared to have learned what it needed.  Hell, going into the 2012 elections you'd have thought that to be an incumbent legislator was to be one step from the tar pot and the feather pile.  Congress's favorable rating was only a little higher (15%) in the Gallup poll than it is now.  Teapot Domers, here they come.  And how many Congressmen got thrown out?  One in ten.  A rapscallion here, a scallywag there.

So, comfort-seekers, get used to it.  Americans, no matter what they tell the nice polling lady, no longer throw rascals out.

220. Congress: Debt Ceilings and Term Limits

What does the debt ceiling, due to screw up national decision-making again on October 17, have in common with the two-term limit on the service of our presidents?  Both are cases of the ignorant tying the hands of the knowing.

People living in the past are always going to know less about the needs of the nation in the future than the people living in that future.  The men of 1789 knew very little about what the U. S. would need in the way of a President in 1940.  The people of 1917 didn't know a damn thing about the expenditures needed in 2013.  Hell, nobody in the world could, even a year ahead of time, tell what the nation was going to need in 2013.

Yes, there is a difference between those people.  The men of 1789, however willing they were to bind men of the future in other ways, refused to bind them in this way.  They left it to the choice of the men on the spot at the time.  Washington declined a third term, and established a custom; Roosevelt went for a third term, and broke the custom.  Then the people of the time could make their choice.  Binding by law didn't come until 1951.

The men of 1917, on the other hand, were not only willing to bind men of the future to what they thought best for them, they were willing to give men of any party the ability to bind all the men who came after them, at any distance — decades, years, months — to what they thought best for them.  I know, the men of 1917 did this by accident, and it took the men and women of 1995 (the new Republican Congress), to do it by intent, but still it was done.  Both oppose the democratic notion that people, by majority vote, should be free to determine what's best for them.

Where do knowledge and ignorance come in?  In the claim that justifies such apparently undemocratic action: we're smarter people.  There's nothing new there.  All people in parties think they're smarter than people in other parties.  But these people, or whoever put the binding into law, were saying that they were smarter than everybody, including those who might come along later.  "We know the nation's needs at that time better than they will know them."  No, it's worse than that.  It's the howler, "We know the nation's needs better than we ourselves will know them."  In the case of the debt ceiling they will be referring to the on-the-spot measures they will have knowledgably passed, or let pass, but which still, maybe a week later, have to be funded.  They assert, practically simultaneously, A and not-A.

I think we can bear the arrogance here — "Since we are smarter than all the dumb bunnies who follow us, we'll fix it so that they'll have to recognize our wisdom" — but I'm not sure we can bear the stupidity.  How smart do you have to be to recognize that people facing a problem are going to know more about it than people guessing at it from the past? 

No, you can't argue that that's what our Founding Fathers believed.  "Didn't those fathers see the need to protect dumb bunnies from themselves?  And aren't we all dumb bunnies?" Of course we are, and they devised a Constitution to protect us from ourselves, binding us.  But none of those bindings, like the one to keep us from uniting church and state, are like these, binding one set of Congressmen (or voters) to another, earlier set, on the grounds that the later set will be less wise in the choice of a candidate or budget.  And you can't argue that the Athenians, our models, did that, by setting limits.  They did, but only for offices chosen by lot.  For the rest they trusted elections.

"Yes, but there's nothing in our Constitution to protect dumb-bunny voters from the demagogue who learns how to make his position permanent, or from spendthrift Congressmen who break the bank." 

That's just wrong.  Elections are specified in the Constitution and they protect us.  But that appeal to the Constitution, like so many others, is beside the point.  It's not that debt- and term-limit setters are saying that voters are dumb bunnies; it's that they're saying that some bunnies are less dumb than others, and that's them.  With no basis whatsoever.

Where did they get the idea that future voters could not identify a three-term-hungry demagogue (or a bank-breaking Congressman) but that they could?  The idea that future voters couldn't throw him out with an election but that he had to be thrown out by a law?  If they were so smart why didn't they see that along with the bad demagogue they were going to throw out all the bright, good, non-demagogic nation-savers that might be there in the same bathwater.   I think they got their idea of future incompetence from the conviction that they themselves were the nation-savers.  They couldn't wait for history to bestow that title.

Oh how a democracy needs that, ability to wait.  Leaders who wait for history, citizens who wait for an election.  It's the ability Egyptians so needed if they were to have a democracy, ability to bear the Muslims in power long enough to meet the requirement that they throw them out in an election.  No, they saw nation-destroyers, and needed nation-savers.  And got what Thomas Jefferson could have predicted, a tyrant, one who, like all tyrants and demagogues, sells himself as a nation-saver.

Well, nation-saving is as nation-saving does, and maybe Egypt needed such saving.  Maybe we can come up with a justification of General el-Sisi, and maybe we can justify our democracy in supporting him.  It's hard but it probably can be done.  Worse things can happen to a country than loss of democracy, I suppose.  But of all the kinds of saving we try to justify I think the saving of our nation from its dumb bunnies by another set of dumb bunnies must surely be the hardest.

178. Absolutism in Congress

 

It isn't often that we get to see three cases of thought-stopping absolutism play out at the same time but that is now our privilege.  The Norquist pledge, the Second Liberty Bond Act (debt ceiling), and the Budget Control Act (fiscal cliff) are all about to do just what our Philosophy 101 instructors were trying so hard to do: teach us to bear the pain of critical thinking.

Carefully assessing the present situation, making your best projection about the future, weighing all the options, and finally striking a workable balance — that was mentally painful.  But, if you wanted to find the best solution to a problem and a good grade in the course, there was no way to avoid it.

Not that freshmen didn't have a way.  My instructor called it "the absolutist escape."  Any time you declared that there was one value, one course of action, one thing that you would never do or always do, you were taking it.  And yes, you'd get a period of ease.  No more thinking, no more pain.  "That's settled.  Whew!"  But, sure enough, there would be the instructor (or the textbook) with a case that unsettled you.  "Non-violence, you say?  Well, here's this monster whose greater violence your violence can prevent."  There went your declaration.

Absolutists were, in the card-playing analogy my instructor liked to use, one-card-trumps-all people.  They were a drag in any complicated game, like morality, or politics, or life.  Among other people they contributed little.  Among themselves they wound up with solutions that seldom fit the problem.  It could hardly be otherwise.  As soon as they said, "X, whatever the situation," they doomed themselves to a misfit for every situation that wasn't exactly like the situation in which they said X.

Grover Norquist, who has been to college (Harvard BA, MBA), must have known this.  Yet with his offered pledge he was willing at the start of the 112th Congress, to turn 238 members of the House and 41 members of the Senate into absolutists.  "I will not raise taxes, whatever the situation."  We college teachers have to wonder.

The debt ceiling operates a lot like Norquist's pledge.  It says, "You will not budget more than X whatever the situation."  Only in this case X is an exact number, declared first in 1917.  That has been a misfit so many times that by now you'd think the absolutism would be clear, but apparently not so.

Who can miss the absolutism in the Budget Control Act?  "Budget cuts will be made on this date whatever the situation."

See who the absolute authority is in both of those last two?  Members of Congress.  Only at an earlier date.  Both are acts saying, "Congressmen in a different situation are wiser than Congressmen in the middle of the situation that has to be dealt with.  Accept their authority."

The debt ceiling will, according to Timothy Geithner, kick in sometime in February or March.  The Budget Control Act takes effect on January 1.  The Norquist Pledge hangs over the whole period — about the length of a college quarter.  Plenty of time to measure the pain of absolutist playout against the pain of critical thinking.

50. "Credibility." The United States.

  

"A government's credibility is founded on its commitment to pay its debts," says The Economist in a leader.  The credibility of the United States government is now being lost.  Where? Not, certainly, in its commitment to pay its debts. That's as firm as ever. It's being lost in our inability to follow through on that commitment. It's being lost because we're letting a group of quirky politicians take advantage of a quirk in the laws to interrupt the payment of a debt already recognized and for which payment has already been budgeted. Who would have believed that the credibility of the United States would be lost on a quirk?

 You think our debt ceiling is not a quirk? We're the only country to have one. (You can't count Denmark because its ceiling, three times the country's present debt, is meaningless. Ours could be a once-in-a millennium accident.)

How to deal with the people taking advantage of this quirk?  Make the issue our standing in the world, rather than our fiscal responsibility. Make it a belief in the United States of America, her power and her word.  "Haven't you, Republicans, always painted the loss of that as a disaster?" That should put the pressure on them. They can see blame coming, and they certainly don't want it here.

Nor do they want their leaders to lose out in competition with the "world leaders" quoted in yesterday's lNYT ("In World’s Eyes, Much Damage Is Already Done"), whose countries stand to gain in stature if that of the United States is lowered. It's a zero-sum world feast, this "quality or power of inspiring belief." Somebody's always ready to jump on a spill, or see one. How often did De Gaulle tell Europe that this incident or that "cast doubt on America's leadership"?

But we ought to be used to loss of credibility. Think back 75 years. In that span America has probably lost its credibility more times than it's lost its innocence.

49. Democracy. Debt Ceiling.

Democracy. You have to have the machinery — the laws, the facilities, the parliamentary rules, the system — and you have to have a certain kind of people using the machinery. The collapse of so many democracies after they got started shows how necessary both are and how difficult long-term success is. Democracy, we know, is a fragile thing.

One thing about surviving democracies is that they're full of old machinery, some of it still working well, some kept working by clever adaptation, and some of it — like our Electoral College — just sitting there. It's like junk DNA.

Interesting but harmless, right? Wrong. As long as it's sitting there old machinery can be used, and in ways dangerous to democracy. Somebody can come along and say, "Hey, here's something that will help me get my way." That's the way it was with the rule that senators had to be allowed their full say on the Senate floor. "Hey, I can keep talking and get my way with this legislation." That's the way it is now with the debt ceiling, that junk from World War I.

Neither is compatible with the democratic ideal: representatives judging the will of their constituents, fighting for it in open debate, getting what they can in a compromise, giving in when they lose, and submitting to judgment on their performance in the next election. The machinery opportunist (equally likely to be a Democrat or a Republican) sweeps all that away so he can have his way. Give it to him or he'll jam the machinery.

Here's where you have to talk about the kind of people, their character. The machinery doesn't work by itself. If you trust it to you could see the system fail, the organism die — as cells die when invaders get ahold of some of the junk. You've got to have operators who, at the crucial point, put the life of the system ahead of getting their — or their party's, or their clan's, or their class's — way.

I have, in an earlier post ("Patrimoine." #42), admired the English Protestants of the 17th century as just the right kind of people to operate a democratic system. They gave us the model. In their crucial choices they put the life of the system ahead of the way of their party. I see that many of the Congressmen now making use of the debt ceiling relic are the heirs of those English Protestants. They are in the same ethnic and cultural tradition. How can there be any doubt that, when the crucial point comes, they will choose the life of the system? They can't be invaders.

Well hell, in the heat of debate we Americans are always doubting our opponents' commitment to the system. Plus, it's an effective accusation. After the fight's over we'll play golf together. Surely we'll do that again.

47. "Politicians suck."

That's what I heard Americans on the street, asked about the debt-ceiling crisis, saying all day yesterday into CNN microphones. They hadn't had a chance to read Terry Smith, the small-town newspaper sage I have quoted before. If they had they'd be saying, "There are exact causes of this crisis and we've got to distinguish those that are merely annoying from those that are imperiling the nation. I find X (a particular cause) most perilous and I blame Y (particular Republicans or Democrats) for introducing it."

If you're not talking like that you ought to get off the street. Hide when you see a CNN camera approaching. Americans can't appear before the world saying, "Everything sucks." They can't appear saying, "Politicians suck." Why? Because then they'd have to say, "Democracy sucks," and they can't say that because they'd have to keep adding "but sucks less than other forms of government" and on and on. There's no good way out of that language mess.

Smith finds the greatest peril in those pledges that 95% of Republicans in Congress have made "to never raise taxes anytime, anywhere or for any reason." This keeps them from accepting compromises that give them nearly all of the other things they want —compromises of the kind, I might add, that contending parties in other Congressional conflicts would have been glad to make, and that, in conditions so perilous to the republic, would have been embarrassed not to make.

The only people happy here might be teachers of Philosophy 101 classes. They have been given a wonderful example of "one-principle absolutism," the simplest of all solutions to problems of the good life and the just state.

It's a solution that pretty quickly fails the tests of experience. Take "thou shalt not kill" as your absolute and you fall before the Nazis. Take "no discrimination" inflexibly and your planes fall to the terrorists who get through. Take "unconditional love" unimaginatively and you're enabling the alcoholic you need to get tough with. History is full of failed absolutism.

How does flexibility and imagination do in history? How about the Swiss? There they are, a nation divided into three language groups, each in cultural sympathy with a surrounding country. By all historical experience they are a powder keg, waiting to blow up the next time their European brothers are engaged. What do they do? Suppress expressions of sympathy. Yes, abridge free speech, that most absolute of present American principles. Not that they don't like free speech; they love it. But they see that it, like every other value, has to be adjusted in the light of a greater value, like peace. It's an adjustment their history tells us to admire. How was it achieved? By constant, fatiguing attention to the compromises that had to be made.

So, might "pay attention" be the one principle we can call absolute, never needing adjustment? No, because human beings can't pay equal attention to everything. They constantly need to proportion it. There's no way to avoid adjustment.

Does this call now for a good scolding of the extreme Tea Partiers who forced the pledge? Of course, but no more a scolding of them than a scolding of the extreme ACLU members they see themselves opposing. They are actually brother absolutists. After 9-11 it was clear that the principle of individual liberty would have to be adjusted against the principle of national security. "No sir," said some members. "Not anytime, anywhere, for any reason." Refusal to adjust is not a measurable feature on the right-left scale.