Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

Policies and Politics

Talking Versus Doing Barack Obama’s vote for a recent farm bill may help him win Iowa, but it will lead to higher global food prices and more hunger in Africa. In 1965, Mancur Olson wrote a classic book called “The Logic of Collective Action,” which pointed out that large, amorphous groups are often less powerful politically than small, organized ones. He followed it up with “The Rise and Decline of Nations.” In that book, Olson observed that as the number of small, organized factions in a society grows, the political culture becomes more divisive, the economy becomes more rigid and the nation loses vitality. If you look around America today, you see the Olson logic playing out. Interest groups turn every judicial fight into an ideological war. They lobby for more spending on the elderly, even though the country is trillions of dollars short of being able to live up to its promises. They’ve turned environmental concern into subsidies for corn growers and energy concerns into subsidies for oil companies. If elected, Obama’s main opposition will not come from Republicans. It will come from Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. Already, the Democratic machine is reborn. Lobbyists are now giving 60 percent of their dollars to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The pharmaceutical industry, the defense industry and the financial sector all give more money to Democrats than Republicans. If Obama is actually going to bring about change, he’s going to have to ruffle these sorts of alliances. If he can’t do it in an easy case like the farm bill, will he ever? Levin points out that the health care system, the immigration system, the regulatory system and the entitlement system all need reforms. Instead of talking about personal honor or perpetual tax cuts, McCain should focus relentlessly on modernization. In fact, Monday in Detroit, McCain declared: “In all my reforms, the goal is not to denigrate government but to make it better, not to deride government but to restore its good name.” Obama, sad to say, failed the farm bill test. McCain may have found a theme for a nation that has lost faith in its own institutions.

• Perspectives on the economy, with Pete Peterson, The Blackstone Group chairman/co-founder and David Walker former U.S. Comptroller

•  Blocking a Balloon Budget The Senate democratic budget decision might get pushed back, says Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH

A Theme for McCain's Pudding Here's how to tie together the campaign's assortment of ideas: a reform agenda for the 21st century. What has not emerged is a coherent campaign narrative: a theme that unites McCain's proposals, his persona, his assessment of the state of the nation today, and the essence of what he plans to offer the voter in November. Indeed, this absence of an organizing principle was painfully evident in his "America in 2013" speech, which was the very model of a themeless pudding. It is of course fairly late in the game to be engaged in basic message development, but McCain's peculiar path to victory in the primaries did not force him to do so earlier. McCain himself long ago offered the core of the answer. In announcing his first run for the presidency, in September 1999, McCain declared that if elected he would work to "reform our public institutions to meet the demands of a new day." So far he has not made the vocabulary of reform a key to his second run for the White House. But a comprehensive reform agenda, which framed America's challenge in terms of revitalizing and reimagining its core public institutions, would be a natural fit for McCain, and for the challenges of the day. It would provide him with the overarching theme for the assorted elements of his approach to public policy. A successful McCain campaign would begin with noting what is wrong with the Democrats' main theme: change. In an election year marked by a vague but pervasive sense of anxiety among voters, there is something ironic about the Democratic mantra. Change, after all, is exactly what Americans have been experiencing over the last several decades: Many of our public institutions arose to meet the demands of the 20th century. These institutions have always had critics, but in recent years the old debates have begun to seem outdated as the circumstances from which they emerged have changed dramatically and the institutions begun to show signs of serious decay. Grave institutional failures have been behind some of the prominent problems of the Bush years. The right is well suited to the task of such reform. The overarching lesson of our failing institutions is not that government has failed to reach far enough into American society, but that life in the 21st century is more complex and less predictable than our 20th-century institutions can readily fathom. The answer is not to expand government so it can rescue people from themselves--which is the underlying premise behind just about every plank of Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's platforms--but to make the institutions dynamic and flexible enough to advance the causes of economic growth, cultural vitality, and national security.

Let’s Be Serious There is growing evidence that the election may yet be undermined by the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex. The general election is about to unfold and we’ll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers. Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II. And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex. In his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?,” Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.

The End of Entitlement We middle-class Americans are in a funk. "The overarching economic narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle class has grown more difficult," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, which recently published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind (31 percent). Pew pronounces this "the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century." Part of the deceptive sense of falling behind reflects the elastic nature of being middle class. "Progress" keeps draining our pocketbooks. Pew finds that four-fifths of Americans find it hard to maintain middle-class lifestyles; in 1986, two-thirds did. But today's middle-class anxieties transcend the well-advertised "squeeze" on incomes. The deeper source of disquiet, I think, lies elsewhere. Middle-class families value predictability, order and security, and these reassuring qualities have eroded. People worry about rising living expenses; but what really upsets them is the possibility that their incomes or fringe benefits -- pensions, health and disability insurance -- might vanish. We are losing our sense of entitlement. Under the implied social contract, people who "played by the rules" (to use a phrase popularized by Bill Clinton) deserved modest middle-class guarantees: a steady job, rising income and protection against random misfortune (sickness, disability, job loss, accidents). There was a belief that diligence and responsibility were their own rewards.

The Economy: Back to 1979? Still, as the old saying goes, history may not repeat itself but it frequently rhymes. For instance, it was during this speech that Carter announced the creation of the Energy Dept., which quickly evolved into a massive, hidebound bureaucracy. That said, the most intriguing aspect of Carter's 1979 chat may be that it was a transitional speech marking an ideological shift in how to run an economy. With the benefit of hindsight, it appeared to be the last gasp of government-centered domestic economic policy. Aspects of his talk contain hints of the ideology that replaced managed capitalism: A strong belief in free markets and deregulation. Think Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the economics department at the University of Chicago. According to the free-marketeers, economic problems would disappear if government backed off and let the magic of markets work. And indeed, the unleashing of free-market capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s nurtured entrepreneurial innovation and business productivity. But the wheel of history has a habit of turning whether we like it or not. Now, like Keynesian liberalism before it, the credit crunch has exposed the ideas that have held sway in Washington as also bankrupt. "The current conservative, free-market cycle that commenced with the Reagan presidency, with all its achievements, seems to have long since foundered in the oil seas of gross excess," writes Charles Morris, author of The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash.

George Packer: Is the Republican era over? Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal”—seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead. Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people. In the past two months, Democratic targets of polarization attacks have won three special congressional elections, in solidly Republican districts in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era. Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich’s diagnosis. “There’s an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn’t yet been made clear by defeat at the polls,” he said. “The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it.” Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Only a few years ago, on the night of Bush’s victory in 2004, the conservative movement seemed indomitable. In fact, it was rapidly falling apart. Conservatives knew how to win elections; however, they turned out not to be very interested in governing. Throughout the decades since Nixon, conservatism has retained the essentially negative character of an insurgent movement.

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