What Threatens America - Channels for Addressing Grievances, Cont.

Someone once said that when you're driving on a highway anyone going faster than you is crazy, and anyone going slower than you is overly cautious. 

I think this is true for a lot of things - we're not objective about it.  I want to tie this into two different things, and the connection is probably not obvious at first.

In Iraq back in 2006/2007 the Sunnis and Shia were really beginning a civil war.  I remember reading about how the moderates (who I love, since they seem the very people necessary to stopping the spiral of self-destruction) were targeted.  When people actively believe something, anyone who disagrees is a threat.  Like a person going slower than you on a highway.  It's almost worse when you think they 'ought' to be a supporter, because then it can feel like a betrayal.  (Like white supremacists who think white people who support minorities are somehow race traitors.)  And so the groups fighting bring pressure to bear, creating a situation where everyone has to pick sides.  If you're not with us you're against us, and a target.  (This is also a weakness in the jihadi movement, as they can splinter into separate groups arguing over whose beliefs truly represent what they claim is God's will.) 

In situations like this people get sucked into fighting 'the enemy', and forget that the key terrain is often the people in the middle.  And so you can win the battle and lose the war.

To bring this back to American politics - activists are called that because they are passionate about a cause.  They are activated to take action...which in some ways as good, since that's the only way change happens.  In other ways it's bad, since they can find anyone who doesn't share their passion a threat. 

We've had a two-party system for a long time, and in a way the people who are most involved in their parties are activists.  That's why my political science classes said that politicians cater to their base in the primary, then tone it down and pivot to the middle in a general election.

The thing is, when you're an activist like that, when you truly believe in your cause, you will support actions to 'win' that can be destructive to the larger whole.  You forget that the key terrain is the general public and you focus on defeating 'the enemy'.  Defeating Democrats, or defeating Republicans, or whoever.  That's probably why our Founding Fathers considered parties a threat, representing factions that were dangerous to the public interest.  Didn't do much good, as political parties started almost right away.

I brought that up for a couple of reasons.  First, because parties have made choices over the course of our national history that made sense in terms of winning, but ultimately are detrimental to the public interest.  Gerrymandering is the first one that comes to mind.  So, for example, Indiana has a political system more conservative than the views of it's population.  Part of what makes this so bad is that people don't feel like voting matters.  If you're district is set up so that it's always red or always blue, what does it matter whether you vote or not? Your district is still going to reflect - or not reflect - your views.

The parties have also manipulated the system so that it's easier for them to get elected, and significantly harder for any third party or independent candidate to win.  Candidates of the major parties automatically are put on a ballot, while anyone else has to jump through hoops.  Those hoops can involve getting more signatures, petitioning state officials, and more.

I brought that up because I've noticed some of the Democratic supporters seem very offended that Bernie ran as a Democrat, since he's been an Independent so long.  There have been arguments that the primary system is biased against him, and these defenders will say "but he's not truly a Democrat, and it's our party's primary in the first place.  We can do it however we want."

If they were taking about selecting the chair of the Democratic National Committee I would agree 100%.  But we're talking about a presidential election here.  We're talking about nominating someone who is supposed to serve all of America, and not just the Democratic Party.  And we're talking about a system that has made it so hard for anyone to run who isn't a Republican or a Democrat that it's to all intents and purposes impossible.  Like activists who are so focused on defeating the enemy that they forget where the key terrain really lies.

I know they don't think their threatening the public interest.  After all, you don't get that active and involved unless you believe it truly is in the public interest.  But the interests of any political party are not necessarily the interests of the public.

This, btw, also holds true to the Republican attempts to force their political representatives to toe the party line.  It makes them more cohesive in Congress, makes it easier to push the agenda of the party...and it also means they are less representative of the people who actually live in their districts.  (and just as in Iraq, the moderates become 'the enemy' and are targeted.  Less bloody targeting, but they lose critical funding and find it harder to get re-elected.)

In the short run it doesn't seem like an obvious problem.  In the long run, you wind up with more people feeling disenfranchised, disaffected, and upset by a system that isn't very responsive.

What Threatens America - Channels for Addressing Grievances

I want to devote some thought to how we address grievances here in America.  I wanted to start, first, with the follow up to some of the issues I've posted about before.  In Flint, Michigan a couple of lawsuits are in progress as we speak, the Governor has issues a public apology and vowed to drink the water himself.  It's still an ongoing topic, not something I would say is done by any means, but things are being done to address the grievance. 

In Ferguson, Missouri even though the specific officer involved was not indicted the federal Dept of Justice investigated the police department and determined that it had engaged in misconduct against the citizens of Ferguson.  Again, this is still an ongoing issue...and there are people who think not enough was done (and others who think too much was done).  I'm not trying to judge how it was addressed, so much as pointing out that various groups are trying to address it.

So it sounds good, right?  We have grievances, they're being addressed, nothing to worry about?

Except that these specific instances are also examples of deeper underlying grievances.  Racial differences.  Class tension.  Elitism.  Leadership that fails to address a problem before it blows up into a full-blown crisis.  (This last one is not the best point, since who knows how many situations were addressed before they became a crisis?)

Note that I said "racial differences" instead of "racism".  That's because the different opinions about incidents like this reflect different cultures as well as actual racism.  "Law-abiding" primarily white citizens who support and respect law enforcement (and I count myself and most everyone I know in this category) have a hard time understanding why people - people who used to get arrested for loitering and other minor offenses in order to force them to work on various projects; who saw law enforcement bring out dogs and hoses against men, women and children - don't trust the police.  Are some of these incidents truly about criminal behavior?  Or is some of it because an officer doesn't feel they are given the respect due as a representative of the law?

Yet I actually want to focus more on class grievances - in part because that is what Trump appears to be tapping into.  I've seen article after article over the last decade that has talked about the shrinking of the middle class.  Stagnant wages.  Greater disparity in income.  We know this is happening.  You have to be living under a rock to be unaware of this...

And yet nothing serious is being done.  During the Great Depression we had the Public Works Administration, during the Great Recession we had austerity.  We have respected economists saying we actually should have had even more stimulus, we have article after article talking about our aging infrastructure...and none of it seems to translate into actual policy changes. 

I read economic articles talking about 'recovery', how the companies who were bailed out during the financial crisis were able to pay everything back, how things are better...yet none of it seems to trickle down to the average person.  Getting by is just as much of a struggle now than it was 8 years ago.  (and then we get articles saying "we need consumer spending to grow the economy", and I have to laugh.  Where do you think the consumers get the money to spend?  They're tapped out...they're going to keep being tapped out until debts are paid off or wages grow.)

I can get into nitty gritty details more at a later time, I kind of wanted to point out a few other things first.

A few years ago a study showed that the collective preferences of ordinary citizens has almost no effect on policy, whereas the collective preferences of our wealthiest citizens have a much greater impact. 

In other words - the wealthy don't seem to care about the struggles of the everyone else, and they're the ones who actually make policy. 

This is a pretty massive and difficult topic, so I'll probably post some more later.

A Side Note on Counter-insurgency and Leadership

Before I went on to the next topic I wanted to touch briefly on the third condition for an insurgency - leadership.

Just as you can put out a fire by targeting any one of the three parts of the fire triangle, so you can try to fight an insurgency by targeting leadership.  This, however, has some serious drawbacks and I don't recommend it as the sole course of action.

The basic problem is that if you get rid of leaders without addressing the underlying grievances all you are doing is postponing the problem until another leader crops up.  Spending resources constantly looking out for that next leader is exhausting, and any potential leader only has to succeed once.

I think that's what some of the more tyrannical rulers try to do.  Some may even be aware that it's only a temporary fix, and may try to address the underlying issues...but it's hard to say whether or not they will succeed.

Going this route seems a bit like catching a tiger by the tail. 

What Threatens America - Internal Cleavage Points

So how does my previous post tie into the threats facing America today?


The concepts of grievances, how grievances are addressed, and insurgencies apply to much of our current political world.  We just (mostly) have agreed by certain rules that prevent it from turning into actual war.  It's interesting how political commentary will use some of the same terms, except it'll be a "political insurgency" that gets played out in votes and rallies.


So - grievances, ways to have those grievances addressed, and leadership.


You have to remember what Europe was like back when America was colonized...this was at the height of Europe's religious wars.   The Thirty Years War was just one example.  Many people immigrated to the United States to get away from it all, and most accepted a live and let live approach.  Or tried to...that's why we created a Bill of Rights.  It helps set clear limitations on what the government can do, so that people don't get forced to worship in some other religion, or get stomped on for speaking their minds.


Our history is a bit more troubled than that, of course.  The anti-Catholic history of the United States is really a rather interesting example, especially given how much attitudes have changed since then.  Consider Maryland's state history, or anti-immigration attitudes towards the Irish and Italians, or the campaign worries about JFK's Catholicism.


Anyways.  There's been intolerance, prejudice, and widespread support for laws against one group or another.  There's been violence, lynch mobs and riots.  There's been civil unrest.  In short, some sectors of our society have grievances. And yet it's not, generally, been a clear case of one entire group against another. 


The Civil War was not a slave rebellion against white rulers.  There were abolitionists fighting for the end of slavery, Unionists who were still prejudiced against blacks but didn't want the country to disintegrate, and various other motivators.  And so the Civil War was more white vs. white with support from former slaves.  In a sense, you could say that the grievances were being addressed...slowly, painfully, and not always well.  Yet they were addressed well enough that people kept trying to make the system work.


Our tradition of civil liberties and our Bill of Rights means that there are people who will support a group that isn't their own.  And that's good, because our political fights are less about one ethnic or religious group fighting another, and more about what laws are in keeping with our evolving social norms...particularly with regards to civil rights.  The schooling a naturalized citizen has to go through means many are even more familiar with our history and rights than our own native-born citizens...and many accept the beliefs laid out in the Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights as their own.


This, btw, is something people don't always understand.  We have a long and ugly racial history, and it looks like a pretty obvious cleavage point.  (In the right - or wrong - environment, it could be).  And so enemies like al Qaeda try to weaken us by inciting racial conflict.  And just as al Qaeda may have incited violence in Iraq by bombing the al-Askari mosque, we have people in the States who launch attacks hoping to start a race war in the US.


To bring this back to threats facing us today - we are not at the point where we're going to have a race war.  Yet.  Thank God we're not!  There are definitely grievances tied to racial issues, but so far we're addressing them through accepted channels.


There are other grievances, though...grievances tied class issues, the shrinking of the middle class, globalization, economic change, etc.  Since I'm keeping this at a more general level I won't get into the specifics of those grievances, just pointing out that they exist.  And that it's when accepted channels for grievances fail that you really have to worry.  Which brings me to my next topic.


(to be continued)

What Threatens America - Some Background Info

I promised specifics, what we can do to hasten or halt a decline, what specifically is threatening America today.  But my first attempt was still too broad, and I have to narrow this down to something reasonable.  (I don't want to get stuck postulating and philosophizing on a grand scale, not right now.)


So I'll think I'll start with terrorism, actually.  One of my classes asked a question I still sometimes think over - what's the difference between terrorism and an insurgency?  This isn't the age old "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" type of statement, though I do believe there's a difference between the two.  (Terrorism is, in some ways, a tactic.  They deliberately target civilians in an attempt to create terror).  This question is less about the tactical differences and more about what the difference is between the two, when both can involve violent attempts to overthrow a government.


Every society has it's tensions.  Every. Single. One.  That's part of why it's such a miscalculation to assume the 'enemy other' is somehow monolithic and perfect.  (Communist China and Communist Russia had cleavage points.  China itself is hardly monolithic, though I'm sort of ashamed to admit it took a while before I realized that.  It's not just the Uighurs to the west, either.)


How a society resolves those tensions has a lot to do with whether it's a success or failure.  When we talked about what creates an insurgency (as opposed to a terrorist), there were a couple of elements required.  There had to be grievances felt by the population, those grievances were not being addressed through accepted channels, and there had to be leadership for the insurgency.  Kind of reminds me of the fire triangle, actually.  Grievances are the fuel.  The inability to address those grievances through accepted channels is the oxidizing agent...and leadership adds the heat (obviously, different leaders can take the insurgency in different directions...away from violence and towards civil rights, for example.  Or away from terrorist tactics and more towards military and government targets).


So the difference between a terrorist and an insurgent may have something to do with the success (or failure) of their efforts.  A terrorist is basically operating from weakness.  There aren't really enough of them to act in a conventional way...so they do these dramatic acts in order to gain attention to their cause, provoke a counter-reaction, and recruit more people.  Sometimes the government forces add more oxygen to the fight, like France in Algeria.  Rounding up the innocent in an attempt to get a small portion of the guilty led to the radicalization of people who were previously neutral, and created more support for Algerian independence.


When a group reaches the limit of their support, they're faced with a choice - accept that they don't have the support they need?   Accept, basically, that they've lost?  Or decide that their goal is too important to give up on now, and to push on.  This is when a proto-insurgency may move more towards terrorism.  Let's say they don't have enough support, refuse to give up, and thus resort to dramatic and violent attacks.  (And so the dividing line between one and the other is fluid, and throughout history an organization may change from one to the other and back again.)


The founding basis for our democracy is that we had a system that allowed grievances to be addressed through accepted channels.  Don't like what you see?  Vote.  Feel like your needs aren't being addressed?  Vote.  Have a grievance?  Vote.


Your ability to make a difference is not guaranteed.  Not everyone will agree with you, and you may lose an election or ballot proposition.  But there's always next election, next year.  And if you're tapping into a real cause, more and more people will be persuaded.  (Without disruptive and painful things like insurgencies and terrorists.)

Modern America

Some days it seems like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and anything we try to do will just make things worse.  (There are assumptions in that statement, such as that it's bad for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.  Let's not digress into whether these things are good or bad at the moment.)


I do, however, keep remembering that history often winds up surprising us.  That just when it seems like the powers-that-be have gained some sort of lock on control, the unexpected happens.  Consider how ruling families in Europe regained control after Napoleon, only to lose it again almost 100 years later.  Or the labor movement, which somehow managed to create a 40 hr workweek (with 1.5 pay for overtime) even though the odds seemed stacked against them.  You could make a similar story regarding Tammany Hall, and other situations where the powerful seem to have everything in their favor.


So all hope is not lost, even when things seem darkest.  A reminder I feel I need to make, particularly in this day and age.


I bring this up because the America I know and love seems threatened by a variety of factors.  This is probably not a controversial statement, as survey after survey shows that Americans are unhappy with the direction we are going.  What makes my statement different, I think, is that I disagree on what those threats are.  It's not Islam, it's not our growing diversity, it's not gay marriage.  It's not globalization, or immigration, or the loss of manufacturing jobs in and of itself (though all of those things contribute to the hard times faced by many in America today.)


I have had a fascination with history, with what helps a nation rise or makes a nation fall, in part because I feel America is at a crucial point right now.  The decisions we make now can hasten or halt our decline.


Again, on the generic level, I think a lot of people agree with me here.  It's the specifics that differ.  I think I'll do a couple posts to discuss those specifics, with the caveat that I'm by no means a professional historian.  These are just some thoughts or trends I've noticed in the course of reading up on things, and should not be considered rigorous by any means.

The Establishment, News Sources, Difference Making

I had planned one other follow up post - mainly to explain why I said the Establishment suffered from groupthink.

My thoughts have gone in a different direction, however.  If there's one thing I've struggled with in making a life in the civilian world, it's that I know at least a little bit of what's going on in the rest of the world.  I can't turn a blind eye, can't pretend it isn't happening. 

I feel out of step, because so many others are focused on daily living...and yet I'm hunting up articles on the Yazidi or reading up on modern slavery. 

I suppose it does tie in to groupthink, at least a little bit.  See...I've noticed that my news sources have different topics and serve different purposes.  Facebook tends to cover what the average person is really thinking, even if it's some quick little meme.

I like memeorandum just to keep tabs on the major news media, even though a lot of it never shows up on facebook and only matters to the few news wonks (like myself) who follow this sort of thing.

And I originally had some feeds going to Google Reader, when Google Reader went away I wound up transferring them to Digg. I select ones that are thought provoking, that force me to consider another point of view.  Or they're just fun bits of history that introduce me to things I never knew. :)  They do not always reflect my own views, but they're worth reading.  So here's a sample of articles I found and saved, whether through my own feeds or through the Digg engine.  Some of these are long and dry, not well suited to the quick memes we see on Facebook or the short tweats on twitter.  They're more substantive, thought-provoking, and often touch on issues that I think are deeply important.  And so I find myself wondering, when all this other stuff is going on, why the news is so full of 'issues' that seem so trivial and unimportant.

Some of these, btw, seem truly concerning.  Like Chicago's Homan Square, where people are detained in violation of everything I'd ever heard about the legal process. 

So anyways.  I'm rather disturbed by how often I find an article that truly seems important, and it comes to be via Digg or Facebook and hardly makes a blip on the mainstream news.  I've heard the phrase 'echo chamber', and I've unfortunately come to conclude it's pretty apt.  I keep tabs on what they say, but I don't think they're truly covering the important issues of our time.  Which is pretty disturbing, when you think about it.

Yet I don't feel I have much to do with that.  I'm not in a position to make any of it change.  I'm more concerned with finding a way to get involved, to do something about the things I am aware of...and hopefully, do something in a way that lets me keep paying my mortgage.