An Analysis of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: On a Party's Self-Serving Elite

The 2024 U.S. Presidential election warrants a post-partem analysis, not so much to affix blame, but primarily so the electorate might grasp the perils when the elite of a political party refuses to apply self-restraint in order to keep the party-wide platform and campaign speeches from reducing to the elite’s own favorite ideology even though it is not held by a significant number of the “rank and file” members (i.e., voters), not to mention independents. In other words, running a massive political party to serve the ideological agenda of what Bertrand Russell calls “the inner ring” can cost a party dearly on election day. I contend that this applied to the Democratic Party, which had become a center-left party still dependent on its non-college, working-class, members, whose cultural values were not necessarily progressive. To be sure, substituting managerially-oriented political calculation for visionary leadership and broad policy proposals that are based on principles rather than particular political interests can easily be perceived generally as small, especially in the context of the horrific military attacks against civilians in Ukraine and Gaza. It is paradoxical that Harris lost working-class voters who were socially conservative, and thus “anti-woke” (e.g., against men in women’s bathrooms and playing in women’s sports) even as she lost some liberals who believed that Harris, in explicitly stating on The View that she would not deviate from Biden, was too timid in standing up to Russia’s Putin (e.g., by withholding long-range missiles) and Israel’s Netanyahu rather than enabling the horrific military crimes against humanity with continued shipments of weapons as if the UN’s court were irrelevant to international law.

I begin with the immediate historical context of center-left parties. The parties on the left in the U.S. and E.U. shifted to the center in the 1990s and 2000s. The parties were able to pick up moderate voters, but at the risk of losing ideological distinctiveness (from the center-right parties), and thus their raison d’etre in terms of broad principles and policies.  The 2024 U.S. Presidential election can be fit within the broader shifts since the 2000s that have rendered center-left (rather than far-left, or even socialist) parties less successful in elections. Bill Clinton brought the Democratic Party closer to the center in part due to the losses of Edward Kennedy in challenging the center-left Jimmy Carter in 1980 and of Walter Mondale in challenging Ronald Reagan in 1984. The party’s political elite paid attention to these losses, which went down like lead balloons, and Bill Clinton was a result of the ensuing effort to move the party closer to the political center. Crucially, both he and Barak Obama were able to win with support from the middle class (i.e., labor), which was still primarily voting on the basis of economic interest, including redistribution.

Then, two shifts began that caused the Democratic Party’s working-class, relatively conservative, faction to gradually peel off. The first shift can be described as a negative reaction to the increasingly business-friendly aspect of the party moving to the center. Historically, center-left parties in North America and Europe were critical of capitalism and wanted to constrain it. In reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, however, center-left parties let go of the even more important role of constraining capitalism that had frozen up from within due to uncorrected increased market volatility.

In the E.U. state of Greece, for example, the Syriza Party campaigned against austerity measures during the state’s legislative election in 2015 by promising to renegotiate the state’s bailout agreements. However, just after winning the election, the party’s head, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, accepted the existing austerity conditions in spite of there having recently been a referendum in which the Greek citizens overwhelmingly rejected those very conditions. Considering that the austerity resulting from the government’s required budget-cuts was especially harsh on the working class, Tsipras’ betrayal in going along with the creditor-beholden E.U. state of Germany doubtlessly cost the center-left party votes and Tsipras was ultimately defeated (though strangely, after being reelected again).  

In the U.S., Barak Obama entered the office of federal president in 2008 at the worst of the financial crisis, and he stocked his administration with plenty of folks from Wall Street. It is no coincidence that Obama went along with financial bailouts for the banks without conditions, even in terms of putting ceilings on the bonuses of the banks’ executives. Considering that they had displayed incredibly bad judgment in over-leveraging their respective banks by packaging and even buying bonds based on risky sub-prime residential mortgages, the bankers not only did not deserve bonuses, but arguably should have been fired as a condition of getting the funds appropriated by Congress and those created by the Federal Reserve Bank. Instead, the culpable bankers received hefty bonuses out of the TARP money provided by the U.S. Treasury—money that was supposed to be lent out to stimulate the economy so the working class would not suffer from traumatic unemployment. It was not lost on the Democratic Party’s non-college working-class segment that the incompetent but wealthy bank executives got bonuses in the political elite and the financial elite being cozy. Ironically, it was not until the first Trump administration that Treasury issued checks to every American.

Unfortunately, the trajectory of the partial unraveling of the Democratic Party is not so simple, for it was not only the growing perception that the party had joined de facto with the Republican Party in siding with corporate America at the expense of workers that caused the latter to gradually but steadily peel off from the center-left party—after having asked, perhaps, what was still left about the Democratic Party.

Firstly, structural changes in the economy also had an impact. Economic inequality was increasing, and workers could see that the Democratic Party had done nothing substantial to stop even the increase. That the party had missed an opportunity to come up with its own, alternative economic policies with which to differentiate itself from the Republican Party was especially important because the Democratic Party had moved closer to the center, and away from the wing associated with U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  

Secondly, another structural change, not economic in nature, also had an impact. Since 2000, a shift towards identity/cultural grievances had been occurring in the middle class wherein a gradually increasing number of voters have been less interested in economic redistribution than in opposing the “woke” ideology, which is centered on legalizing rights of certain groups of Americans based on group-identity. Historically, religious wars in Europe had been based on the premise that group-identity is primary in human consciousness; race riots share that assumption. The failure of the Democratic Party to constrain the excesses of capitalism during the financial crisis may be a factor in this shift away from economic distribution, as increasing numbers of working-classed voters came to realize that both major parties had become bought and paid for by the business sector through its political campaign contributions and promises of executive jobs. Regulatory capture of the regulator agencies by the regulated companies is but one result of the inordinate influence of business in government.

The shift in the American working-class voting increasingly on social issues affected the Democratic as a wedge. The “woke” ideology in favor of defunding the police, transsexual rights (i.e., men in women’s bathrooms and sports), reparations for Black Americans, sanctuary cities wherein illegal immigrants are legally protected, university “cancel culture,” such as in mislabeling pro-human-rights protests as antisemitic, and diversity programs gripped the political elite of the party and its left-wing more generally even though Kamala Harris did not emphasize “woke” planks in her speeches. Meanwhile, the “anti-work” political reaction had been gaining speed since at least 2015 among the non-college-educated working folks. This reaction viewed the gay “rainbow” flag as a cult symbol that was being imposed seemingly everywhere, and was viscerally opposed to transsexual men being able to play in women’s sports and use women’s locker rooms, the notion that illegal immigrants somehow had a right to be in the U.S. even though they had committed a crime in entering the country illegally, the proposal that even people living paycheck to paycheck should be taxed more to pay for reparations to Black people, and that certain words could no longer be spoken or written in college courses and even in political protests. Indeed, protests against Israel had practically been banned at many universities, including Yale, where 47 pro-human-rights students were arrested by private university police employees, and Harvard, which had turned Harvard Yard into a preemptive police presence by September, 2024. So much for academic atmosphere and academic freedom; non-academic employees with guns were in charge as scared academic administrators looked on as if proud mice.  My point is that Harris didn’t have to say anything “woke” on the campaign trail; non-college educated workers in the Democratic Party had by then viewed their party’s elite as very “woke” indeed. 

It can be argued that in having no internal check or self-restraint, the party's political elite had pushed the “woke” ideology too hard and too far (and perhaps, most importantly, too fast), and thus naturally had prompted a political reaction against both the elite itself and its favored ideology. That is, the political elite of the Democratic Party refused to constrain itself from pushing its mandatory ideology even though it was clear, or should have been clear without the blocking self-centeredness, that non-college-educated workers, especially in small towns, would bolt. Even with the mistaken assumption that the working class would still vote on an economic basis, the fact that the anti-woke movement was gaining steam should not have been missed or so easily dismissed for being illegitimate. Presumptuousness can indeed be blinding or distortive, as can the underlying self-centeredness and primitive desire to use power to enact one’s own ideology. This is ultimately why Donald Trump was able to win in spite of his own voters acknowledging that he was admittedly a flawed man.

The elite of a political party does its party a disservice by stubbornly pushing whatever ideology that elite loves, as if it were a fact of reason and thus should be imposed on detractors whether they like it or not, rather than applying self-discipline and a little humility to back off the ideology so as to retain the socially-conservative workers for the sake of governing to constrain capitalism. The ancient Confucian scholar, Xunzi, points to “a degree of self-restraint and even virtue, namely trustworthiness ,” as one reason why a hegemon, a ruler who is not as virtuous as is a sage (i.e., a wise and virtuous person) but is more virtuous than is a vicious tyrant, can be “a strong and successful ruler.”[1] Even though a hegemon “is not committed to moral cultivation of himself or those he rules,” applying the virtue of self-restraint, such as channeling away one’s instinctual urge to promote one’s own preferred ideology over others in a political party, can make a ruler successful (and not tyrannical) anyway.[2] The political elite of the Democratic Party could have benefited from this ancient lesson. That an increasing number of voters in the working class were more interested in voting against the societally interlarding “woke” ideology and especially its demands than in voting for economic redistribution means that the self-centered and haughty ideological stubbornness of the Democratic political elite really costed Harris votes.

Thirdly, even given the ongoing shift among working-class Democrats toward voting on the basis of cultural issues, economic pressure from the price increases, especially in gas and groceries, even after the temporary bump from supply shocks and higher transportation costs during the pandemic, prompted a significant number of voters in the middle class (and poor), which is especially vulnerable to price increases on necessities such as food and transportation, to vote on the basic of their bank accounts.

Harris’s promise to reduce grocery-store prices rung hollow because Biden had failed to do it and she said she would not differ from Biden on policies. Even given the trend in the working class to vote on the basis of social over economic issues, the center-left party erred in failing to recharge its historic mission to constrain the excesses of capitalism. Pledges to use federal anti-trust law to break up the meat-producer and grocery-chain concentrated rather than competitive industries would have differentiated the party from Trump’s rightward shift of the Republican Party. Even the Democratic Party, in accepting so much corporate money from lobbyists, was susceptible to enabling rather than lessening the tendency of markets to consolidate—to go from competition, by which food prices would have gone down after the supply shocks during the pandemic, to just a few giant companies with enough market-power to hold prices high and even convince consumers to expect even higher prices in the expectation of inflation as inevitable. As my academic advisor at Yale, who was an Episcopalian priest, once said, “If you must sin, then sin boldly!” Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt would not have lost much time translating that advice into political terms in terms of bold policy in place of political calculation and capitulation to even the private powers behind the proverbial throne. Unfortunately, neither Biden nor Harris was a Jackson or Roosevelt.

Fourthly, as for the shock that many “far-left” Democrats and even some independents had after the election that a convicted felon and narcissist had just won the popular vote (as well as the Electoral College), the explanation for Trump’s success with labor is not only due to the reasons I have just discussed, but also because Trump was very wealthy and bold in a way that vote-maximizer politicians usually are not. That these personal attributes could possibly “trump” the man’s flaws, such as admitting that he could get away with touching women sexually without their consent, allegedly pressuring Georgia to come up with more votes for him, and allegedly prompting a mob to riot through Capitol Hill as electoral votes were being counted by Congress on January 6, 2021, would shatter the ideological view held by the Democratic Party’s elite on what matters in a presidential character. Indeed, the nature of the alleged crimes may actually have augmented or strengthened Trump’s stature to working-class voters, given that their paradigmatic criteria for leadership differed so from those of the political elite (of both parties!).

Whereas America’s political elite and the left-wing of the Democratic party believed that voters should vote at least in part based on whichever candidate is most wise and virtuous, Trump himself might counter that the masses vote instead on the basis of wealth and being bold even in speech as well as action, rather unlike the typical people-pleasing politician, such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Taking into consideration the fact that the level of education (college versus no-college) had been the single best indicator during the arduously long campaign “season” of which candidate a voter favored, it is likely that the criteria valued by the working class differed paradigmatically from the criteria valued by college-educated voters, including the political elite. Unconsciously, the elite of the Democratic Party projected its own paradigm of character-leadership onto how the non-college-educated laborers of the party’s “rank and file” see things. This can explain why even the criminal charges against Trump did not dint his base.

According to Adam Smith in his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and the worshipers . . . of wealth and greatness.”[3] These two things are contrast to wisdom and virtue, which the masses “are perhaps incapable of even discerning.”[4] I don’t think Smith is being fair to the “masses” here, but his main point concerning the different criteria is important for college-educated Americans to grasp. Like people outside of a political (and economic) elite, Smith eschews “the proposition that people of superior wisdom and virtue possess a title to rule.”[5] He maintains that birth (family) and wealth are more visible and certain to the masses than are virtue and wisdom.[6] Wealth and greatness, Trump doubtlessly could have said during his 2024 campaign, “are my two middle names.” By “greatness,” even as he applied the adjective to the country itself in terms of its potential, consists not only of wealth, but also the kind of strength that is bold rather than timid, or limited to political calculation at home and abroad. Thinking that they too could someday be rich and admiring bold people, working-class voters could very well have loved him for being both. Again, the shift away from being concerned with redistribution to wanting to push back against the presumptuously encroaching, passive aggressive antagonistic “woke” advocates means that Trump’s “offensive” statements were viewed by the working-class as a plus rather than a minus in terms of character. In other words, few labor-union members would be likely to quote from Aristotle’s Ethics to insist that a virtuous person is necessary to put into effect Trump’s policies.

As for Trump’s pathological lying, the heads of the Democratic Party were hardly blameless in falsely claiming that Harris had been selected as the nominee in an “open, bottom-up” process. With a hundred days to go before election day, the party had time for a primary, which could have been set to take place forty days out, with the general election following after sixty more days. In the same year, the E.U. state of Germany set an election just sixty days after a scheduled no-confidence vote at a time in which that vote was just a month away. To claim that Harris’ chances were diminished by having only a hundred days fails to recognize that the year-plus long campaign season for U.S. president was excessively long. Lacking in boldness in terms of proposed policies was more of a hindrance than just having a hundred days. In other words, she had more than enough time to distinguish herself by departing from Biden’s policies, especially given his unpopularity for not going far enough in terms of a variety of areas. In fact, Harris’ lack of boldness took votes away even from the left-wing of the Democratic Party!

Going on the basis of political calculation, or “the political reality,” based on the presumed power of AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) in U.S. politics, produced political timidity just as cowering to corporate interests, even of the oil and food industries, presented Harris as a politician rather than as a leader. Leadership does not operate by calculation, but by broad principles. Whether those principles are standing up to an aggressor ravaging through Gaza rather than enabling him by being in favor of continuing to supply weapons to his military, or enforcing market competition (and a windfall-profits tax) rather than suggesting that the government give Americans money to spend in the oligarchic grocery chains that would feel free to raise prices even more rather than cut prices to compete for buyers, boldness of policy can be appreciated even more when it involves standing up to entrenched political and economic interests that have turned squalid in part because of the U.S. Government.

Management differs from leadership in part because management is narrowly focused and incremental rather than being oriented to formulating and promoting a vision of society in ideal, paradigmatic terms. I submit that both Biden and Harris were managerial in nature, whereas Ronald Reagan can be studied in terms of providing a vision (e.g., “Government is the problem.”). To be sure, not every vision that a political leader espouses is ethical. Hitler, for example, provided a vision of a strong Germany without weakness enervating the country from within. That vision can be challenged ethically both in regard to how Hitler conceptualized strength and weakness, and his government officials could be challenged for how they implemented Hitler’s vision by literally exterminating what they saw as weakness from the country and even in trying to free up living space for Germans from the U.S.S.R.—Hitler having promised Hindenburg that Communists would be eliminated within Germany, which in turn could mean going after the source further east.

What to a working-class Trump voter was boldness was viewed by some Harris voters and the Democracy Party’s elite as fascist. The claims that democracy was in the balance may have been fueled in part by the fact that Trump working-class voters tended to value wealth and political boldness over wisdom and virtue. To people who value or follow political calculation to minimize political risk, a candidate not speaking as a politician and advocating bold policies would of course be viewed with fear.

It is possible, even ironic in this case, that representative democracy can be put at risk by a cleft or division existing between a party’s elite and a significant part of its “rank-and-file” base. To be effective electorally and in sync with democracy itself, the elite of a party needs to remember that its perspective is not necessarily that of the whole of the party, and if the respective perspectives do indeed differ, the elite needs to exercise some self-constraint in place of self-centeredness and a self-assumed mandate to impose, ideologically, even on the party’s membership. In short, a party’s elite needs to put that membership first if electoral success is desired as a means to being in power.  The refusal to exercise self-restraint deserves to be voted against. Trump’s lack of self-restraint in his use of vitriol against his “enemies,” which included anyone who criticized him publicly, and even in his use of lying habitually to get out of trouble was in line with the boldness atypical of politicians that the working-class valued in a leader, whereas Harris’ lack of self-restraint regarding highlighting aspects of “wokeness” and in not standing up to big business and Israel worked against her. Not that Trump would stand up to big business, for he himself was a part of it, and not that he would stand up to Netanyahu (or Putin), but all that Trump too may have appealed to greatness-as-strength as construed and valued by enough of the the non-college-educated working-class voters.

1. Eric L. Hutton, “Introduction,” in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. xxviii.
2. Ibid.
3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I. iii.3.2.
4. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), VI.ii.I.20, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 42.
5. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
6. Ibid., p. 45.

On the Reputational Capital of a Business Leader on a Societal Stage

Is it better that companies be publicly or privately held? Such a question is of such magnitude that glossy, simplistic answers should be eschewed. This is not to say that the answer is situational in nature. Rather, it is more likely that each comes with pluses and minuses from the perspective of an economic system as a whole. As business “leaders” give their advice, it is important to keep in mind whether any personal or institutional conflicts of interest exist and thus could warp the space itself of the advice. Yes, I am intimating Einstein’s theory of general relativity here. Rather than provide an answer without having studied the matter sufficiently, I will provide a way to look at the advice given by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

The full essay is at "Reputational Capital of a Business Leader."

Exfoliating a Hero: On Lincoln's Unconstitutional Overreaching

Lest we get carried away and inadvertantly enshrine our leaders with mythic laurals, it is worthwhile to peel back our societal "remembering" of past figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, who have become larger than life.

Lincoln was a moderate, promising merely not to spread slavery. In his address after being sworn in, he promised not to go after slavery where it existed. Accordingly, radical abolitionists complained. Even so, the 1860 campaign had been viewed, at least in the south, as a referendum on the southern way of life. Lincoln received only 40% of the vote; he was not even on the ballot in ten states.  There were just 33 states in the union at the time. Lincoln's victory suffered from a deficit of legitimacy in some quarters. In fact,he was burned in effigy at a state capitol in the south. With free Kansas becoming a state, the slave states felt that their respective abilities to defend their way of life in the general councils of the union would become even more truncated or dilute. Berift of a sense of influence on general matters that concerned themselves, the confederating republics felt they had no alternative other than secession.

On Feb 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederate States of America. At his swearing in, Dixie, which had been composed by a northerner, was played. The two sides in the continental dispute were closer than they perhaps realized. Both Lincoln and Davis, for example, were from Kentucky originally.  According to the Confederate constitution, Davis had a line item veto and would have had a six year term had the confederacy lasted that long. Astonishingly, international slave trading was outlawed. Even so, there were fundamental differences involved in the dispute. Ironically, had the southern states freed the slaves before firing on Fort Sumpter--depriving Lincoln of his motivational tactic midway through the way--perhaps something resembling the southern way of life in a loose confederacy would have prevailed. The United States would have been left to consolidate to its heart's content.

On the way to his inauguration, Lincoln declared that he would rather be assassinated than to see even one star removed from the flag. Such a stance reflects the "all or none" mentality that accompanies political consolidation. In spite of Lincoln's line in the sand, the War between the Confederated States and the United States began at 4:30am on April 12, 1861.  Technically, it was a war between a federated alliance and a federal government. The opening act was bloodless, even as the war to come was the bloodiest in American history. Siloh alone matched the casualties at Waterloo, and there would be 27 more to come. 51,000 men lost their lives in the three days at Gettysburg alone. The contest between the old and new federal forms exacted a heavy toll in human loss and suffering. Who would have thought that contending distinctions in political theory could be so bloody. Of course, might does not in itself make right, although the passion of the unjustly oppressed can bring about victories disproportionate to the relative lack in number. Furthermore, in this particular case, the respective populations in the federations and the industrialization of several of the union's states gave the forces of modern federalism an advantage not necessarily sourced in the nature of the type.

At the time, the union states had a combined population of 21 million while the confederacy had only 9 million, 4 million of which were slaves and thus not in the fight. In spite of the fact that so many southerners volunteered to enlist that a third of them had to be sent back home, the confederacy was perhaps destined to lose the bellum given the tremendous disadvantage in terms of population. That the conflict lasted until 1865 may point to the extent of resentment that had been allowed to build up throughout the slave states against what was viewed there as an “intrusive” federal government. For example, the devisive tarriff that had nearly caused South Carolina to secede in 1832 was reimposed by the U.S. Government in 1858. As in 1832, the tax was to finance northern industrialization. The states producing cotton and/or rice were left not being able to defend their interests in Washington. Accordingly, that distant government was viewed as encroaching and increasingly foreign. The root of the festering dispute went far beyond the issue of slavery.

To the confederate citizens, the cause involved the rights of their republics as well as their property rights. Slaves, being viewed as property by their "masters"--a decadent conception of slavery unknown to ancient understandings--were thus in play as part of the wider and deeper southern concern with self-determination, which the southerners identified with their respective countries and associated ways of life. Even Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863 (almost two years into the war), applied only to slaves in the states that had already left the union (rather than to the five slave states that had remained).

The confederate states were not subject to U.S. law as long as they were part of the confederacy rather than the union. Lincoln's proclamation was thus extra-constitutional, and thus without immediate effect other than to motivate an increasingly weary northern citizenry and armed forces. To be sure, Sherman freed slaves as he blazed a trail to the sea. However, even without the proclamation, he would have deprived the confederates of their "property" along with their other means until they surrendered. Slavery was not outlawed in the United States until 1865, when the thirteenth amendment was ratified by the states (the former confederate states excluded even though they had been re-afixed to the union).  There was some duplicity involved in, "Welcome back to the union! But unfortunately your vote doesn't count yet because you don't agree."

Fundamentally, the "north" and "south" interpreted the United States differently. This is what the war was really about, and the issue went all the way back to the contentious debates in the constitutional convention in 1787. The delegates had hotly debated whether the proposed General Government would consolidate power via "general welfare" spending and the potentially unlimited taxation, irrespective of the question of slavery. The people who wanted to secede viewed the U.S. as more like a confederation than a modern federal government. That is, confederates viewed their states as countries and the U.S. more as an alliance having only strictly defined enumerated powers that a national government. Robert E. Lee, for example, was offered command of the union army. He refused and went with Virginia. He could not draw his sword, he said, against his native country. Virginia had to come first; there was never any question about that. Such a view of Virginia and the other republics was to fade even as they still retained residual sovereignty at least into the twenty-first century.

In general, the southerners feared that the federal government would usurp more and more power from their countries; as things turned out, the fear was not without foundation. Even then, Lincoln declared war against the confederated states even though the U.S. constitution clearly stipulates that Congress is the governmental body in the U.S. Government that declares war.  As the president is the commander in chief, there is a conflict of interest in that office also declaring war. So technically speaking, the war was not constitutional, and thus legal.  Lincoln also suspended habeus corpus, though the constitution allows for this in time of rebellion.  To keep the Maryland from seceding, he locked up thirteen of the state's legislators without trial. 

Chief Justice Taney, who had four years earlier concurred with the Dred Scott decision, said that Lincoln had gone too far beyond the constitution in the powers he was exercising. Taney was on firm ground on the declaration of war. Even so, astonishingly, the president simply ignored the chief justice. From the standpoint of an independent judiciary with teeth, Lincoln was laying a precedent very dangerous to the republic.

Because the judiciary has no means of enforcing its decisions by force, the branch depends on the other branches, and, indeed, the people, resisting the temptation to contravene a judicial decision. The basis of the resisted temptation rests on the court's legitimacy, for the judiciary has no troops of its own. In fact, Bickel refers to the court as the “least dangerous branch” for this reason. Lincoln’s precedent in simply ignoring the court put at risk the system of checks and balances that resides in the separation of powers in the federal government. Fortunately for us, Lincoln’s treatment of the Chief Justice's effort to hold the executive branch within its proper constitutional sphere, as though Taney were a mere bystander, has largely been forgotten.  Yet the expediency of an imperial presidency has indeed been on display since Lincoln as Congress has gradually lost power to the commander in chief. The danger is real, and Lincoln's precedent could yet be used by an ambitious commander in chief who has his or her eye on another country to invade. 

Ironically, Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions at the beginning of the war ironically to save the union could be viewed as confirming the charges made by the confederates against the encroaching nature of the federal government.  Lest we miss the lesson as we remember the bloody war 150 years later in 2011-2015 from the standpoint of the victors, we might take note of the susceptibility of power itself to consolidate, ultimately in one person—indeed, even in a hero. The consolidating proclivity is as much a danger in the modern American empire today as it was in ancient Rome.  

Source: Ken Burns’ The Civil War (PBS)

Congress: Hitched to the Status Quo

To lead is to be out in front, pointing the jet’s nose one way rather than another. Leadership is not that which causes drag at the back of the plane. Leadership is not that which holds a society in place or protects the vested interests. Whether envisioning something new or a return to a better time, a leader is not oriented to the status quo. It is significant, therefore, that the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, one of the two chambers in the American Congress, has stated publicly that the Congress is rigged to advantage the status quo. The stunning implication is that members of Congress are actually anti-leaders.

In an interview in 2013, Nancy Pelosi admitted, “This is an environment that is almost rigged, intentionally or not, wittingly or not, rigged so that the status quo just goes on.”[1] This amazing line can be read as confirmation that the fears of some of the American Founders has come true—namely, that the U.S. House would itself become an aristocratic body rivaling the U.S. Senate. With just 435 representatives for over 310 million people, George Washington’s plea on the last day of the Constitutional Convention that a minimum of 30,000 rather than 20,000 in a district would not be sufficiently democratic sounds trite, even antiquarian. With so few representatives relative to the total population, the U.S. House could not help but be aristocratic, each member being like a magnet to huge “gifts” from vested interests. “We have to kick open the door and make our own environment” in the Congress, Pelosi urged, “reduce the role of money [in campaigns], insist on the civility of debates, and bring more women here, and that’s a better reflection of our country.” In painting this picture for us, the Minority Leader was indeed leading, for she was intrepidly venturing out beyond the status quo. Nevertheless, the thrust of leadership is not always enough to counter the gravity of the vested interests grounded in the status quo.

For example, as long as so few representatives hold such power, the money of the vested interests will inevitably find its way to the campaigns and the Congressional bills will continue to be written by the vested interests themselves. In approaching this problem systemically, more is needed. One possibility is to sift the E.U.’s lower legislative chamber for possible solutions. 

The U.S. House of Representatives (top) and the European Parliament (bottom). 

At the beginning of 2012, European Parliament had a maximum of 751 representatives to cover a population of about 504 million, which works out to an average of 671,105 people in a district. Meanwhile, the U.S. House had 435 representatives to cover a population of about 313 million, which corresponds to an average of 719,540 people in a district. The difference is 48,435 people per district. To get down to 671,105 people per district, the U.S. House would need to add 31 seats. Were the House to have 751 representatives, the average number of people in a district would be 416,777. While more democratic than districts with an average population of 719,540, neither figure comes close to satisfying George Washington’s objection that 30,000 people in a given district is not sufficiently democratic (i.e., too many constituents for a given representative).

Therefore, in addition to increasing the number of seats—with the knowledge that 751 in a chamber can work—further reduction in the centralized power would be needed to reduce the money magnet’s power. One option would be returning more domestic policy areas to the state legislatures. At the time of Pelosi’s statement, the U.S. states had 7,382 state legislators altogether. [2] Spreading around additional powers, taken from the Congress, to so many more representatives would not only make American federalism more democratic, but also open up possibilities for real change beyond the grasp of the status quo. As a few examples even without the additional power, some states had legalized gay marriage, two had legalized pot, and one had achieved universal health-insurance. Admittedly, the status quo has a greater grip in some states (e.g., Kansas) than others (e.g., California). However, spreading out governmental power could perhaps be sufficient to give leadership a chance to outpace the moneyed interests in the status quo.     

1. Laura Bassett, “Nancy Pelosi: Congress Is ‘Rigged’ to Maintain the Status Quo,” The Huffington Post, June 5, 2013.

2. National Conference of State Legislatures, “Sizes of Legislatures,” 2013.

When Platitudes Undermine Real Change: US President Obama at the U.N.

U.S. President Obama’s 2010 speech at the UN’s annual opening lacked tangible proposals.  For example, he urged progress on the Middle East peace talks, but proffered no proposal.  He said Africa could be prosperous agriculturally, but gave no proposal for how.  He claimed that corruption in governments of developing countries is a problem, but offered no solution.  Pointing to corruption in general diffuses responsibility so talking about it does not shame anyone into making hard choices. Such platitudes belied the president's claim to being an advocate of real change. 
The substance of the platitudes rested on the then-current paradigm of international political economy rather than moved over onto an alternative. For example, he could have proposed a Middle East Federation or trading agreement. He could also have announced that the U.S. would no longer give any foreign aid to A.U. states that are riveted with corruption. He could have urged African leaders to cede more governmental sovereignty to the African Union, which in turn could have been given the power to act as a check on government corruption at the state level.
Additionally, Obama could have gone beyond citing his efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation to announce that the U.S. would join the ten countries that have created a movement with the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons completely. Meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, the ten countries launched the new initiative to work towards a world without nuclear weapons. Foreign ministers, led by Japan and Australia, hoped to bring new life to efforts for nonproliferation and disarmament. Their mission statement said: “The only guarantee against the use and threat of nuclear weapons is their total elimination.”[1] This would indeed be real change.  In contrast, Obama said only that his goal was securing loose nuclear material around the world in four years. 

In short, real change goes beyond politics as usual and platitudes. It goes beyond incrementalism to proffer systemic change. Refusing to challenge the status quo intellectually or take on its power not only restricts a leader's ability to lead, but also eliminates real change as even an option. 

See: The Essence of Leadership: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, by Skip Worden, Ph.D. Available at Amazon.

1. Catherine Bolsover, “Germany Joins New International Initiative for Nuclear Disarmament,” Deutsche Welle, September 23, 2010.

Putin Likened Protesters to "Weak Birds"

At the conclusion of the 2012 Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Russia, the host president, Vladimir Putin, likened the birds that had been following his motorized glider south one day to the Russians who did not follow him--in other words, the protesters. “Only the weak ones,” he quipped, "didn’t follow me.” Elaborating, he added of the birds, “not all of the cranes flew, and the leader, the pilot, has to be blamed because he was too fast in gaining speed and altitude and they were just lagging behind; they couldn’t catch up.” It is interesting that he was blaming himself as well as referring to the lagging birds, and thus protesters, as weak. Was Putin really blaming himself though? Furthermore, doesn't blaming the protesters contradict the notion in the transformational-leadership literature that such leaders build up rather than push down their followers?

Putin could not have been entirely objective on the protests against him.      

Source: Democracy Chronicles

Putin stated that “during certain circumstances, when there is strong wind and bad weather, the pilot has to lift very speedily—otherwise the vehicle, the flying machine, could overturn and capsize.” In other words, Russia would collapse were he to have relaxed or compromised on his agenda for change. 

Is it really the case that a political leader’s transformational paradigm must be implemented quickly or the government, economy or society will collapse? Is a glider stalling and falling really comparable to a government slowing down on reform? I contend that the latter is oriented to graduations, whereas a stall in the air happens all at once (i.e., a qualitative change). 
Was there really the political, economic or social equivalent of “strong wind and bad weather” facing Russia at the time? In the 1990's in the wake of a collapsed Soviet Union, governmental and economic transformation was clearly needed as soon as possible. In fact the rise of the suddenly rich Russian oligarchs can be taken as an indication that the government did not produce adequate economic laws soon enough. In 2012, it could be argued that Putin was applying “leadership in a crisis” to “leadership in the status quo” in his own time. In the midst of a tsunami, for example, there is not time to question or debate the directions from a leader; people must get to higher ground as soon as possible. Russia was not facing such a massive wave in 2012. Therefore, Putin's argument that he had not been at fault because he was avoiding stalling so the economy and/or government would not collapse is valid. 
Had Putin been willing to take some responsibility for the protests, he may not have characterized the protesters as weak. According to the transformational leadership literature, doing so undercuts a leader's ability to transform an economy, government, and society. In Transformational Leadership, James Burns defines transformational leadership in terms of developing the capacities of followers, which presumably includes the followers being able to become leaders themselves. Nietzsche would beg to differ, claiming that the weak cannot be weak; they are simply not constituted to be strong. The strong too, cannot be but strong. I suspect that Putin would agree with the nineteenth-century European philosopher. In the transformational leadership literature, leadership is portrayed as stronger than followership because a leader can encourage followers to develop their own inner authority, which in turn can be used in becoming a leader. Plato's notion of justice, wherein reason is in control of the passions, is consistent with the notion that inner authority (i.e. self-discipline) can enable a person to be a leader. A just polis, Plato claims in The Republic, is one in which a government uses reason to control the passions in society. 

It is possible that Putin's comment regarding the protesters actually reveals Putin as weaker. According to Nietzsche, the truly strong feel no need to dominate as they have a surplus of self-confidence and pleasure from exercising power to go after protesters. "What are these parasites to me really?" such a political leader would say. "Let them have their protests; my sights are on turning my transformational paradigm into reality."  In fact, the strong are not stingy in giving away the surplus; they have more than enough. The best source of such power, according to Nietzsche, is from the inner strength to master an internal intractable instinctual urge. Doing so gives the strong such pleasure from power that they are not motivated to be cruel to an opposition even as it protests. Put another way, in trying to snuff out threats to his power, Putin demonstrated a lack of self-confidence and strength.

Source:

David Herszenhorn and Steven Lee Myers, “For Putin, a Flight of Fancy at a Summit Meeting’s Close,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012.

On Nietzsche applied to power in business, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management (available at Amazon)

Leading at the Top beyond Appearances: The case of John Boehner, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

In the wake of President Obama's mission to execute Osama bin Laden, Speaker Boehner issued a statement complimenting his rival in the White House. In contrast, Sarah Palin gave George W. Bush all the credit. The Speaker, too, could have gone with political expediency. Therefore, for the Speaker to have publicly acknowledged Obama's victory as America's more generally involved political self-discipline. Speaker Boehner had sought to apply self-discipline, moreover, to his decentralized leadership style from the moment of his swearing in. Given the consolidating nature of power, such a leadership style in the U.S. House of Representatives faced considerable head winds.

On January 5, 2011, John Boehner was sworn in as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He had promised to decentralize the power that had been so tightly held by the previous Speaker and others further back.  Indeed, it had been Gingrich's micromanaging of Boehner in 1995 that may well have prompted Boehner to want to give more power to lower-level party leaders and committee chairs. Boehner even promised to better provide for the minority party in that proceedings would be more open and fair.  Of course, obstructionism, favoritism, and in general the realities of governing all can be used to consolidate power. The exigencies of Boehner's position could have trumped any bad memories of having been one of the low men on the totem pole.  It is only human nature, after all, to identify with and prefer the present at the expense of the past. Hence, the concept of the net present value of money. Additionally, consolidating power into a few select hands may seem necessary to getting the trains to run on time.

Indeed, Boehner might have been tempted to add trains. Noting the inherent difficulty in having one legislature (albeit consisting of two separate chambers) governing an empire-scale union, the anti-federalist (and pro-commerce) Agrippa of Massachusetts wrote in 1787, "A diversity of produce, wants and interests, produces commerce, and commerce, where there is a common, equal and moderate authority to preside, produces friendship." (Agrippa, Letter 8, 4.6.30). Agrippa was bemoaning the consolidation that he feared would ensue from the powers granted by the U.S. Constitution to Congress (at the expense of the state governments). Agrippa was by in large right. The dual-sovereignty in American federalism has largely been eclipsed by decades of encroachments by the general government. It would have taken self-discipline for Congress not to have encroached when it could. Similarly, self-discipline is required for a Speaker of the House, which is a constitutional office, to preside, which is to say, to look to the overall interest of the whole rather than to engage in partisanship.    In spite of Boehner's intentions to return some power to the states and to decentralize his power in the House, he was from the start already likely to reverse himself in practice. The nature of power may well be paradoxical: those who love it most tend to find it most offensive to give even some of it up to others. It takes maturity for a leader who does not crave power to trust others in decentralizing it; I can scarcely imagine a person who climbs the difficult mountain to the head of a governmental body (or business corporation) to suddenly work on the newly won power. So I am led to wonder, what exactly was Boehner's motivation in publicly stating his vision of a more decentralized power structure in the U.S. House of Representatives? Perhaps he knew that people out across the lands would approve of him as a result. There is the appearance of power and there is real power. I'm not convinced that the citizens who vote in a republic are able to get behind the appearance, if efforts behind the scenes are intensely invested in keeping the public awash in appearances. 

Sources:

Naftali Bendavid and Patrick O'Conner, "New Speaker Vows to Share Power--a Tricky Proposition," The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2011, pp. A1, A6.

Agrippa, in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Anti-Federalist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 243

See Skip Worden, Ethical Leadership, a booklet available at Amazon. See more generally, Essence of Leadership, a book available at Amazon.

Occupying Wall Street: A Self-Regulated Protest?

The right to protest as a manifestation of freedom of speech is held societally as sacred the United States, but the question of how far protest goes before it becomes simply living in a park is one of those gray areas that tend to be decided by the judiciary far from the tarps and sleeping bags. The protesters’ premise that living in a public space eventuates in the achievement of their goals is tenuous where the goals are broad. Undergoing a hunger strike to get a certain anti-corruption bill voted on by India’s parliament is far different than camping out in Zuccotti Park in New York City until corporate capitalism is ended in the U.S. In short, the tactics used should be oriented to the sort of objective being sought. Moreover, the tactics and indeed the objectives themselves require a protest group to self-police such that it does not wander too far off course or spread itself too thin. Protest movements may be too prone to die a slow death from self-inflicted wounds without even the slightest recognition of the cause of death. The Occupy Wall Street protest movement had the capacity to self-regulate, but fell well short of that which was necessary for the group to achieve its anti-corporate goals.

To be sure, the movement evinced some capacity to regulate itself. Faced with the prospect of an imminent clean-up of Zuccotti Park—perhaps a salubrious subterfuge actually geared to permanently dislodging the park’s new residents—some of the protesters scurried around “with brooms and trash bags, moving mountains of sleeping bags, backpacks and jackets out of the way,” according to The New York Times. Meanwhile, others gardened. These tasks doubtlessly tapped into the young protesters’ ideal of working toward something larger than themselves, which they tend to label as “community.”  The impetus on the upkeep was geared to forestalling the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, from clearing the park a third at a time for a “once-over” by a clean-up crew, after which new rules proscribing camping, tents, tarps and sleeping bags would be enforced. But was it even in the group’s interest to allow camping to become a major issue? Secondly, could the energy of self-regulation have been put to better uses than clean up, given the group’s anti-corporate goals?

Taking the first question first, it should be obvious that occupying a park is not occupying Wall Street. If the protesters were serious on their occupation, they would have sat own in streets in New York’s financial district and blockaded the bank entrances with sit-downs—perhaps even occupying bank lobbies akin to the anti-war protest at Columbia University in 1968. This “actual occupation” strategy would have been more likely to involve the police, but the occupation would have been real—at least for a time. This strategy is distinct from protest marches, which as a strategy could have been an alternative or addition to that of actual occupation of the streets and banks. Allowing the issue to be whether camping takes place in a park can thus be seen as a diversion that is not in the protester’s own interest. Indeed, getting sick by living in a crowded park night after night would also enervate the protest (besides justify the public authorities in clearing the park for public health reasons).

Regarding the second question, the self-regulation evinced by the protesters cleaning up on their own volition can be read as supporting the argument that the protest movement could have policed itself regarding delimiting its topic and presenting a positive image for public relations purposes. Protesters could have volunteered, for example, to make the rounds to eliminate any off-topic signs, such as those for the environment and against the war in Afghanistan. Allowing the protest to be a virtual grab-bag of leftist causes deprived the movement of broader support and gave the opposition ammunition with which to relegate the movement. Even in shifting from an anti-big-corporation message to redistribution undercuts the group’s original anti-corporate (but not necessarily redistributive) goals.

Butting up against the movement’s own efforts to regulate itself was the ideology or illusion that the movement had no leaders. “Every action you see here is autonomous,” one protester said as he was filling plastic bags with trash. “Autonomous enough for people not to be doing it,” another protester added, as reported by The New York Times. That protester went on to describe his “autonomous plan” as if that label itself, and his belief in it, rather than a single-minded aim of ridding American society of large corporations were the main point of him being there.

In other words, the protesters themselves suffered from a lack of priorities and this hurt the attainment of their original anti-corporate goals. Even though the voluntary clean-up effort demonstrates that the movement was capable of self-regulation to delimit and protect the priority of its original, anti-corporate goals, the refusal to delimit the topics (based on the illusion that there were no leaders) and keep the distracting ideologies at bay undercut the group’s self-regulatory potential and ultimately the group’s realization of its anti-corporate goals. Indeed, their lip-service to the contrary, many of the protesters may not have been sufficiently interested in those goals in the first place.

In a letter to the local police commissioner, the chief executive of the property company that owns Zuccotti Park reported that there had been neighborhood complaints of “lewdness, groping, drinking and drug use.” Without self-policing such behavior, the movement risked undercutting its own legitimacy in the eyes of the wider public. Without legitimacy, the movement would face an uphill battle even to be heard. Furthermore, the behavior could be viewed as having an opportunity cost—that of the foregone focus on how to achieve the anti-corporate aims of the movement. Actions speak louder than words; from my vantage-point, it seems that the protesters could have been more devoted to the cause that presumably brought them to Zuccotti Park.

So while it might be fun for young people to relish their “autonomous plans,” get high and camp out with other like-minded people in the zest of life, the refusal of the group to self-regulate itself may have been the seed of the group’s eventual dissolution without the movement having attained its goals—whatever those happened to be. It is an interesting question whether an aggregate of "autonomous plans" can regulate a movement without even a leader as a spokesperson. But why risk "the cause" to find out?

Every group must necessarily have leaders. Whether centralized or decentralized, leadership is part of any organization. Whether accountable or stealth, leadership is there, and whether as spokespersons or committees, leadership is also there. To eschew mechanisms like majority rule and group decision-making so that every person can feel fully autonomous is not only antithetical to there even being a group, it is also at odds with the realization of the movement’s goals, which presumably are necessary means to the greater autonomy being sought outside of a city park.

In short, the protesters undercut themselves from the get-go by wanting too much both ways. They refused to self-regulate their ideology. They would hate reading this, but I suspect that a crucial error of the movement early-on was to give young people too great a role in, yes, running it. Even forestalling necessary decision-making at the group level constitutes a default-decision. In a way, to eschew any leadership at all evinces a puerile or jejune mentality of stubbornness at the expense of one's goal of reducing the impediments to greater economic liberty. This mentality may also have manifested in the failure of the young in the movement to defer to more seasoned leaders. We can do it better ourselves this time and we want it both ways. We don't want ANY limitations. To this mentality, I echo Burl Ives as the snowman narrator of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, where he shakes his white head of snow, smiles, and says almost fatalistically, Ah, youth.

In Homer's story of the Trojan War, Achilles' youthful exuberance defers quite uncomfortably to the experience of King Agamemnon; a war led solely by youthful passion would be a mere series of battles. In Lawrence of Arabia, Alec Guinness as King Faisal tells Peter O'Toole as Lawrence to leave the room so the British and Arab leaders can negotiate on Damascus. Some things must be left to old men, the king teaches the youthful warrior with a credible tone of fatalism at the expense of volition. Successful youth are mature and humble enough to know they can't do it all themselves. Successful leaders can then tap into youthful passion and direct it strategically.

Had the Occupy Wall Street movement self-regulated itself beyond cleaning up the park, the group could have enforced and sustained sufficient focus (and thus energy) on the original anti-corporation goals, wherein corporations no longer own Congress and the largest banks and corporations are broken up because of their systemic risk to the financial system, the economy, and representative democracy. The opportunity cost in broadening the movement is sad, particularly as theTea Party could have readily agreed to protest against big business and the banks. That leftist causes, even that of redistribution, were allowed to join the movement out of sheer ideological convenience and an immature refusal to admit the necessity of leadership demonstrates that the self-regulation evinced in the clean-up of the city park did not go nearly far enough for the movement's own good, and that of the republic for which we stand united for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Source:

Anemona Hartocollis, “Tidying UP, Pre-emptively, But Showdown May Loom,” The New York Times, October 14, 2011. 

See related essays: "Occupying Wall Street" and "Political Protest 101" and "Police Against Protesters: Sadism or Politics"

Leadership by Elected Representatives: Transcending the Politics of Slashing Vulnerable Federal Programs and Avoiding Tax Increases

On January 20, 2011, months before the Republicans would use leverage of a baleful debt-ceiling-default to extract additional cuts, the Republican Study Committee (RSC)—a group of fiscally conservative members of the U.S. House of Representatives—announced a plan by which $2.5 trillion could be cut from the U.S. Government's spending over ten years. According to The New York Times, the proposed cuts “would exclude the military, and would not touch the big entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security. As a result, [their] effect on the entire array of government programs, among them education, domestic security, transportation, law enforcement and medical research, would be nothing short of drastic." The leaders of the RSC claimed that the cuts were “appropriate and necessary, given the government’s $14 trillion debt and annual deficits at their highest levels since the years just after World War II." The RSC "proposed generally reducing agency budgets to their levels in 2006 — the last time Congressional Republicans controlled the budget process — and then freezing them, with no annual inflation adjustments.” The RSC also recommended “slashing the federal workforce by 15 percent and canceling pay raises for five years, for a total of $2.29 trillion in savings.” Finally, the proposal included “an additional $330 billion in cuts to specific programs, including Amtrak, foreign aid and even the Washington subway system" (Source #1).

Analysis:

Back in July 2009, The New York Times reported that most Americans continued to want "the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy" (Source #2). Nevertheless, Congress and the President went ahead in 2010 with extending the Bush tax cuts, which were expected to add an expected $850 billion to the deficits of 2011 and 2012. The President had proposed to extend the tax cuts for the lower and middle classes, which would be more apt to spend rather than save the difference and thus stimulate the economy then in a weak, jobless recovery. The congressional Republican leadership demanded that the tax cuts be continued for the wealthy as well, even though the latter could afford to pay more in tax and would be less apt to spend than save the money from the cuts. If the proposed spending cuts were “necessary” given the sizes of the deficits and debt, it would seem that the tax cuts—even those likely to be spent and thus stimulating—would have been a luxury the U.S. Government could ill-afford. That is to say, the deficits and debt could play second fiddle to stimulating the economy, only to be the reasons for “necessary and appropriate cuts.”

Besides dovetailing with the Republican goal of less government—particularly at the federal level—the combination of tax cuts and budget cuts sends mixed signals as to the importance of the U.S. Governments deficits and accumulated debt. Within the proposed spending cuts alone, cutting in some areas while leaving others—notably defense—completely untouched sends similarly schizophrenic signals regarding the seriousness of the deficits and debt. If the financial affairs are perilous, the U.S. Government could ill-afford protecting defense contractors and other sacred cows.

To be sure, Americans polled overwhelmingly said that they prefer cutting government spending to paying higher taxes, according to The New York Times (Source #3). The RSC's proposal was in line with this finding. Also, the proposal was in line with the poll's finding that nearly two-thirds of Americans do not want Medicare or Social Security benefits cut even to reduce deficits. At the same time, unlike the RSC’s proposal, the poll indicated that Americans by a wide margin preferred cutting the Pentagon's budget to cutting benefits in Medicare and Social Security; the RSC proposal treats all three areas the same (leaving them all off the chopping block).

However, those who are led by polls cannot lead, for leading involves moving the polled rather than being moved by them. Furthermore, the citizenry may not have fully aware of how serious deficits of over $1 trillion and a debt of over $14 trillion are to the viability of the United States. The seriousness of the deficits and debt require tax increases and spending cuts (including sacred cows) even if the general populous is not much bothered by the threat.

Representatives have to use judgment to know when to be agents reflecting the will of the people who sent them and when to lead constituents who sent them but would view the indebtedness as more precarious had they studied the matter more fully. In other words, elected representatives sometimes need to be critical of what their constituents think is in their true interest and that of the United States as a viable system. As faithful agents, representatives must look in such cases to the best interest of their district and to the United States as a viable concern. Going beyond polls, leaders are oriented to protecting the led even from themselves.

Sources:

1.      David M. Herszenhorn, “G.O.P. Bloc Presses Leaders to Slash Even More,” The New York Times, January 20, 2011.

2.      Dalia Sussman, “New Poll: Bring Down Debt, Don’t Spend More,” The New York Times, July 29, 2009.

3.      Jackie Calmes and Dallia Sussman, "Poll Finds a Willingness to Cut Spending, Just not Medicare or Social Security," The New York Times, January 21, 2011, p. A11.

Monti and Papadernos in the E.U.: Leadership in Technical Expertise or Democratic Deficit?

“The moment of truth has come.”[1] This was said by the head of state of the E.U.’s third largest state, Italy, in a televised address just after Berlusconi had resigned as the prime minister. Although the statement could be interpreted as referring to the need to reign in the Italian profligate system of public-sector patronage (which includes private contractors), Giorgio Napolitano could also have been referring to the credibility of his state at the E.U. level. “We need to restore confidence with investors and European institutions,” he continued before turning to the more tangible point that the state would need to refinance nearly 200 billion euros in government bonds before May, 2012.[2]

 Monti and Barroso (Thys/Agence France-Presse/Getty)

The full essay is at "Essays on the E.U. Political Economy," available at Amazon.

1. Alessandra Galloni and Christopher Emsden, “Italy’s Monti to Form New Government,” The Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2011.
2. Stephen Castle and Liz Alderman, “Under a New Prime Minister, Italy’s Star May Rise at the European Union,” The New York Times, November 23, 2011.