The Arbiter of Righteousness

Governance and the Bible

I was reading an article by Derek Penwell, "9 Arguments From the Bible Fundamentalists Should Have to Make" about conservatives inconsistent use of the Bible to support some of their policies. The basis for the article is, if the support for a ban on same-sex marriage comes from scripture than why isn't the Bible used as the authority for other conservative policies. That naturally leads to a discussion on how to use the Bible in an effort to govern.

 

Controlling The Word

Generally I didn’t take his list as just a simple list of questions but a way to discuss the problem with the concept of picking and choosing which passage to take ‘as gospel’ if you will.  Let’s think back 50 years to when even mixed-race marriages were illegal where the idea same-sex marriage being legal would have been considered outrageous.  Basing the prohibition of same-sex marriage on a literal reading of a given Biblical passage invites the question of why not take the whole book literally, if it so aligns with society’s understanding of right and wrong than why even have a legal code other than the Bible?  Of course I’m being a bit facetious there but it is because I want to take the argument to its logical if extreme conclusion.  This makes it easier to illustrate that if we allow that some passages are not meant to be taken literally but rather as parables then we have to face the issue of selecting a person or group who gets to decide on which portions are to be exalted above the others for such treatment, and woe to those who disagree with their choices.  At the heart of it, the modern movement for Biblical inerrancy, seeing as it has only been around since the late 1800’s, is less about God’s Will than it is about control over God’s Word.  The Roman Catholic Church spent many centuries developing a consistent theology around how to apply the Bible to life on planet Earth, they didn’t attempt in all that time to claim that every single word should be taken literally.  They understood that it was a teaching tool whose power was in making people see how it could be a guide for situations that Abraham, Moses, or Matthew could never have imagined.  Since the Reformation there has been a movement to replace Catholic teachings with Protestant ones, basically an effort to replace Rome as the power deciding what God’s Word means, wishing to usurp the Pope’s theological monopoly.  In the beginning it was done in a piecemeal fashion such as Martin Luther’s Theses nailed to the church door but as each new group wished to separate from those with whom they disagreed they naturally become more and more separated theologically from the teaching of Rome and it would be logical to see how the outcome can be groups that want to disallow any interpretation because it affords too many loopholes for the unrighteous to claim piety while still living a sinful life, thus the only way to insure no interpretation is a literal reading.  There is nothing inherently wrong with a group wanting to adhere to a literal reading but it becomes a problem when that group then wants to claim it is the one true way and wish to enforce their beliefs upon the rest of society, while that is to be expected it does not excuse them from picking and choosing the passages that they want to apply; if the Bible is to be taken literally then it is everything or nothing because once you pick winners and losers you are back to allowing for human interpretation.

 

The Bible and Slavery

I’ll be honest, the Bible’s position on Slavery is one that I really have a hard time with and saying that it doesn’t condone slavery is letting it off the hook.  There are so many places where it is quick to declare sin like eating shellfish or wearing clothes of mixed fibers but there are no qualms about allowing slavery even for the devout.  There is not even a mention such as ‘it is wrong but it happens so live with it’ somewhat like ‘give unto Caesar what is Caesars’.  If you take the Bible literally than the taking of a slave is just as acceptable as forcing a rape victim to marry their rapist.  I find it hard to believe that the author(s) of the Bible would overlook such a fundamental concept when it would have been easy for Jesus to say, “No follower of mine should hold slaves.”  Whenever He spoke, he wasn’t making law but making general claims over the definition of what is right and what is wrong thus it is almost a certainty that no one back then found slavery as a concept to be morally wrong.  He spoke out about the moneylending in the Temple but was silent on slavery.  In all the litany of proscriptions and restrictions slavery is not considered to be something that disqualifies one as righteous, so much so that a claim that the Bible does not condone slavery has such weak supporting evidence as to be non-existent.

 

Righteousness

Slavery can also point out a theological quandary too.  Let’s separate it out this way with a set of statements and questions.

• The Bible doesn’t declare holding slaves as a sin, thus a righteous man may have slaves.
• If we believe that the Bible is inerrant than must we also believe that slavery is acceptable to God?
• Over millennia humanity comes to believe that slavery is wrong.
• In a country that outlaws slavery can a righteous man have slaves and remain righteous since there is no Biblical prohibition?
• If it is no longer possible to be considered righteous solely for having slaves than from what authority does righteousness come, and who decides?
• If the Bible doesn’t claim that slavery is wrong than do we have no authority to claim otherwise?
• If we conclude that slavery is wrong than how can we claim the Bible is the sole arbiter of righteousness?
• If we conclude that the Bible is the sole arbiter of righteousness than how do we support a claim that slavery, not being banned by the Bible or otherwise declared sinful, should be outlawed?

And there we have the problem on the horns of a dilemma.

 

American Localism

American Localism

In his book Timely Renewal, James W. Lucas makes a particularly effective case for decentralization of government power and placing governance as close to the people, in geographic terms, as possible. Arguing that large federal government (and its associated suffocating regulations and debt) and large corporations (and their anti-competitive monopolies) have brought declining creativity, productivity and standards of living, Lucas argues for a return of "American localism." Large-scale nationalism and mercantilism have killed the spirits of entrepreneurism and local community. The natural relationships among humans have been severed as integration at greater and ever larger scales abstract us from one another at ever increasing levels, leading to dysfunction and dehumanization. Is it any wonder Congress is so polarized and entrenched?

Politics and economics "as if people matter" demands decentralization and devolution of power. Lucas writes:

Progressive, anti-globalization activist David Korten considers it "to be a near-universal truth that diversity is the foundation of developmental progress in complex systems, and uniformity is the foundation of stagnation and decay.... Our challenge is to create a locally rooted planetary system biased toward the small, the local, the cooperative, the resource-conserving, the long-term, and the needs of everyone." Strong local economies "encourage the rich, flourishing diversity of robust local cultures and generate the variety of experience and learning that is essential to the enrichment of the whole." (David C. Korten. When Corporations Rule the World, second edition. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishers, Inc. and Kumarian Press, 200-, pp. 240-241.) A key principle in achieving these ends is that "governance authority and responsibility are

located in the smallest, most local system unit possible to maximize opportunity for direct, participatory democracy." Such communities are strongest when they have strong social capital, for which locally owned businesses are a key element. (Korten, pp. 245, 251.)

The author quotes another historian William Appleman Williams, who proposed replacing the institutions of "American empire" with a federation of regional communities. "The price of liberty is not so much vigilance as involvement. If you want to rest, vote for a dictator. The crucial arena for such citizen groups is and will remain the states. That is where social movements have to be build."

(Lucas, pp. 60-61)

Lucas reminds us that simple arithmetic shows that states are more representative of and responsive to citizen needs than the federal government. "The 435 members of the national House of Representatives have on average more than 700,000 constituents in each of their districts.... In contrast, the more than 7,000 state legislators represent on average just over 50,000 constituents each."

Those who pine for government activism should return their efforts to the States. The federal bureaucracy has become so bloated and the Congress so plodding that change at the federal level takes decades of tireless lobbying, advertising, politicking, and horse-trading. It took 100 years to pass so-called "universal health-care." However, the states are close to the people, both in heart and geography, and there are less people across a state for which to account in the eventual compromise, making conversation more natural and participation for the average citizen possible (big money campaigns at the local level are not of concern). Change can be tried with greater ease and nimbleness, and any potential failure is contained in its scope to the state at hand. Success of experimentation is then rewarded by other states seeking to emulate the model, latching onto the successful government involvement.

Those who love freedom and limited government clamor for a more vibrant federal-state balance as well. Jefferson said, "unless the mass retains sufficient control over those entrusted with the powers of their government, these will be perverted in their own oppression, and to the perpetuation of wealth and power in the individuals and families selected for the trust." Remembering that the federal government was put in place for continental defense and cooperation, the balance of an energetic federalism has the added benefit of diffusing power across a broad number of institutions, separated by thousands of miles, making coordination difficult, even in this age of the Internet (state governments cannot coordinate to call a federal Constitutional Convention, it seems, never mind some effort more complex).

In his book, Lucas does a fantastic job of tracing the rise of federal involvement, control, and centralization. While his book is more focused on proposing constitutional amendments that would allow the People to take control of that document and reduce the tendency of the Supreme Court to continue sitting as a perpetual constitutional convention, Timely Renewal has highlighted the root of the current problems. I will look at some of those in the blog posts ahead, but first I'd like to take a sidebar to examine what this blog has repeatedly called out as the source of the modern-day federal-state imbalance of power - the Seventeenth Amendment.

Liberty's call: messy and the stuff of life

Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever.

--John Adams

Regarding the siege of Boston; Letter to Abigail Adams - Philadelphia [July 7th, 1775]

I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing by every device the public debt on the principle of its being a public blessing.

--Thomas Jefferson

Letter to Elbridge Gerry (statesman and diplomat) [1799]

Democracy is messy business because humans are messy. We hear continued lamentations over how antiquated our Constitution is (although it was good enough to rise up the most powerful and prosperous nation in history) and how dysfunctional our Congress is, yet somehow we continue to govern ourselves in freedom and respect for the law. We have seen compromise win out time and again over the past ten years, in this time of supposed hyper-partisanship and "extremists" of each Party acting as terrorists (Biden's words, not mine). The debt ceiling / deficit reduction compromise is the latest case in point. It is by no means perfect, but no compromise is. No one likes it, because every side had to give up something they desperately believe in. And it is only the first step in a very painful and protracted journey to get our financial house in order. But none of this changes the fact that our Constitution and, even if somewhat belatedly, Congress works as designed (or amended - see Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment).

If the federal government's spending spree of the past ten years (and, truth be told, of the past fifty) proves anything about our Constitution, it's not how antiquated it is. The lesson to be drawn, to those with eyes to see past their own petty paradigms and presumptions, is just how right the Founding Fathers were and how relevant their counsel still is. The Constitution in Article 1, Section 8 lays out the parameters of federal power, and the specifics were limited in their application to the whole (through the general welfare clause) so that Congressmen could not play favoritism. It is our excursions beyond the bounds of the Constitution that have gotten us into financial trouble:

• Social Security
• Medicare / Medicaid / Universal health care
• The Department of Education / No Child Left Behind
• The Department of Energy

These behemoth social welfare programs have squeezed our spending for the business the federal government should be about according to the Constitution:

• Defense
• Regulation of interstate commerce
• International affairs
• Scientific exploration
• The Post Office (and, by extension of the principle, building out and supporting the interstate infrastructure)

We have strayed from the Constitution's bounds, but it still provides the governing superstructure for us to successfully resolve our differences in a peaceful way. The fact that our political process has become more slow and more prone to gridlock is indicative only of the many different areas of governance that Congress has stuck its nose in over the years that cannot be managed on such a large level. Regulation, the police power, health care, education - these are matters for the states because these are the things people are most passionate about. These are the things that impact their lives most day-to-day and the need for decision-makers to be close to the people is real. Also, these are areas where people with different worldviews (metanarratives) most violently disagree, so providing options among states is important. If people don't like what one state is doing, they can fairly easily move to other states. It is easier to gain consensus and move into action at the state level. The machinery is more nimble and smaller scale.

The scale of the federal government is needed on matters of collective, continental interest.

To adapt the famous Chesterton quote from its original Christian context: the Constitution has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

 

 

On paradoxes: the mixing up of conservatives and liberals. Or Why the U.S. Can't deal with it's current debt crisis

Current uses of the words "conservative" and "liberal" have nothing to do with their traditional meaning. Well, that is not exactly true. They have, perhaps, too much to do with their traditional meaning given the fact that they seem to mean the same on the surface, but the animating spirit is completely different. Two hundred years ago, liberals believed in moving beyond personal government, in the form of the monarchy, to impersonal government, typically defined as what was then known as republican government. Conservatives sought to use the power of government to maintain the status quo and prop up existing power structures. There was not, however, any disagreement over the nature of man - that he needs restraint - or the proper role of that good government can play.

Over the course of the past one hundred years or so, these definitions were turned on their heads within the American context. Liberals became those who believed in the fundamental goodness of man for whom government could be used to advance the plight of man, and conservatives were those who, in the best spirit of the old Liberals, believed in the original sin of man who needed boundaries and hedges to keep an ordered society, those in government being no different (hence, separation of powers and checks and balances). The conservative commitment to republican values was, at heart, a commitment to the constitutional values that had made the experience of government a successful one, even if inefficient and unwieldy.

Over the past fifteen years, however, a phenomenal and dangerous blurring has occurred. The conservative paradigm has been petrified to the point that government itself is seen as the root of all problems. Rather than a properly-formed government being seen as a barrier against the more destructive inclinations of men, government of any kind is now seen as the barrier to all the good inclinations of men. It's some strange hibrid of the American-liberal vision in the goodness of men and the danger inherent in the original conservative perspective that the government that governs best is the one that rises the boat of the guilded interests. The rallying cry of the day is "No new taxes!"

On the other hand, the liberal paradigm has petrified to believe that government is the source of all goodness and the only savior of humanity. Because people are not to be trusted to conduct their affairs in honorable and virtuous ways, government regulates every possible area of life. Religion is banished from the public square, conviction is seen as the sign of a fanatic, so we are left with the only moral compass available to a society whose only remaining binding institution is the government: a thing must be deemed constitutional before it can be deemed moral. And since the ever-growing government has crowded out all room for virtue and compassion, welfare and social justice must be the business of federal agencies who, ironically, deliver the exact opposite of social security and medicare. It's some strange hibrid of the American-conservative vision in the evil of men and the danger inherent in the original liberal position that the government that governs best is impersonal. The plaintive cry of the day is "If we just spent more..."

These petrifications are racing toward each other over the current debate over whether to raise the federal debt limit and threaten to spectacularly collide with one another. The resulting wreck would have far-reaching consequences for us all, as the federal government's inability to pay its bills will lead to a default on the debt, the ruining of Treasury bills as a safe-haven for investments, and the meltdown of the financial sectors all around the world. This is serious business, and it is long past time for Congressional leaders and the President to come off their respective high-horses and do what is right for the country. A mixture of spending cuts, some tax increases, and more spending cuts will be necessary to fix the country's short-term debt problems. In the longer term, our fixation with debt will only be addressed through readdressing the boundaries of the federal government and reigning its activities back within its constitutionally-prescribed mandates.

The world indeed has been turned on its head.

The one meaningful response to the BP oil spill

Thomas Friedman has a valid point in his latest article No Fooling Mother Nature.

There is only one meaningful response to the horrific oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and that is for America to stop messing around when it comes to designing its energy and environmental future.

We do need to stop messing around, but I differ with him on exactly how we are currently messing around and what we need to do to stop messing around. He thinks more government regulation and taxation is the answer to change behavior and to push the markets toward green technology. Rather than Yet Another energy bill from Congress loaded with taxation, regulation, and tax breaks that skew the market, Congress should pass an energy bill that removes tax breaks for the oil industry and keeps only regulation that guards against large-scale disasters (rather than, for example, worrying about caribou in ANWR or fish in California).

We will eventually get off oil (we will run out or some other fuel source will become more economical), but without perverse government policies in place, the market can drive what technologies can be introduced and when. The past ten years should have proven definitively the absolute inability of government bureaucrats to competently orchestrate big systems with lots of moving parts.

 

Amar's Bill of Rights: the Founder's First Amendment

Before we venture into the Bill of Rights that is familiar to us, let us examine what Akhil Reed Amar has to say in his book The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction about the amendment that James Madison listed as first in the First Congress:

Article the first.... After the first enumeration required by the first Article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which, the proportion shall be regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less that one hundred Representatives, not less that one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, not more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.

This proposed amendment was passed by the Congress and proposed to the States, but it fell one state short of the requisite three-fourths needed to ratify it. We shall examine why in a moment, but its failure to be ratified means it is obscure to many in this day and age. Nevertheless, its prominence on the list of so many weighty amendments reveals the importance the Founding generation placed on erecting proper safeguards in the government structure to ensure the liberty and rights of society. While we are used to the federal government, especially the courts, championing and advancing the rights and freedoms of the people, the federal government was still unproven in 1787. Anti-Federalist fears were centered around the small size of the House of Representatives and the lack of a Bill of Rights that would explicitly remove certain areas from Congress' purview of legislation.

Probably the deepest Anti-Federalist objection to the Constitution was that the document took the skimming principle too far: Congress was too small, too rich, too "refined." Indeed, this structural concern underlay most of the Anti-Federalists' other arguments. Because the legislature was so small, the Anti-Federalists feared that only great men with reputations spanning wide geographic areas could secure election. [Amar 10-11]

So the Anti-Federalists fell squarely in line with the views of traditional replublicanism, classically expressed by Montesquieu:

It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country.

In an extensive republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have less extent, and, of course, are less protected. [Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, Book 8, Ch. 16]

The Federalists knew that this was a legitimate concern, and Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay, famed authors of The Federalist Papers, devoted the first section of their work to this topic. Madison's Federalist No. 10 is today a great treatise on the implementation of a Republic over a great mass of land and people, but extensive republics were untried in the eighteenth century, and it was far from certain that the scheme as laid out in the new Constitution would work. So Madison sought a compromise with the Anti-Federalists and proposed his First Amendment that increased the size of the House from that prescribed in Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution: "the Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand" constituents.

So if the proposed amendment would increase the size of the House and this was such a burning concern, why did the amendment fail to obtain ratification? According to Amar, several reasons present themselves:

• The amendment's mathematical formula made little sense and introduced too great of a complexity. The word "more" was strangely substituted for the word "less" in the last sentence of the amendment: "not more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons." Unless the U.S. population rose from 8 to 10 million in the first decade, this provision would have proved inconsistent with the requirement preceding in the same clause, that there "not be less than two hundred Representatives".


• What the amendment gave in the short-run - a larger House - it took away in the longer run. The final clause established a maximum on the House's size, rather than a minimum. Whether Madison purposefully slipped in this language to enforce a maximum size, we can only speculate. His original wording did include a maximum size, but Congress had rejected that idea. Perhaps he saw an opportunity to reintroduce the maximum principle once he was on the conference committee for the twelve proposed amendments. After all, Madison was quite clear of his philosophy on the proper size of a legislative body in Federalist No. 10:
  

  
  It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects.
  



• Small state like Delaware (which ratified the ten amendments that did pass) might have been seeking to preserve the advantage a smaller House provided them. Since every state is guaranteed at least one Representative in the House, increasing the size of the House would have diluted the voting power of a small state.

Regardless, if Madison's First Amendment had become our First Amendment, it would be harder for us to miss the fact that the original Bill of Rights was more concerned with governmental structure than it was about individual and minority rights. If that had been the case, the Bill would begin and end (in the form of our Tenth Amendment) with articles unmistakeably added to deal with structural issues.

On Paradoxes: freedom that leads to bondage

If there is one thing that is sure about Western society, and American culture in particular as personified by the worst of Hollywood caricatures, it is that it is full of paradoxes. Chesterton pointed out a number of these that have only blossomed into full-orbed mind-benders since his day. To sample from the endless supply:

• Despite our conventional wisdom, man is the homemaker and woman is the ruler of the home, even if she is not its titular head.


• The modern matyr is discounted because their supposed sacrifices for their cause are nothing more than mere inconvenience that drunks take upon themselves for fun.


• Nothing is allowed to remain in secrecy except for those things that are too obvious to be named and those things that really are too important to bear telling.


• We look to our doctor for which well to pull water, rather than simply for the effects of drinking water to begin with.

I could go on and on, for Chesterton's essays in All Things Considered are treasure troves of insight and whit. But for this day, I want to look at a more recent paradox that has started to form on the dark horizon, one more recent (at least in its more malevolent form) than Mr. Chesterton's day. Namely, that our worship of human rights and freedom leads to debased and dehumanized bondage.

The Supreme Court yesterday in its case United States v. Stevens overturned a ten year old congressional statute that outlawed videos depicting animal cruelty. This continues a general trajectory that is at least fifty years old to analyze the morality (or, to use the terminology of our modern Republic, constitutionality) of a thing based on the most extreme case imaginable (which is usually in a different category of case anyway). Whether it really would ever happen that hunting videos would be prosecuted in Washington, D.C., where hunting is illegal, I do not have the foggiest of notions. To even ponder the scenario in the context of this case shows how far we've drifted from the vision of federalism, localism, and juries employed by the Founding Fathers. But I do have a clear notion that many pit bull and cock-fighting rings suddenly have new streams of legal revenue opened to them by virtue of this ruling.

In all our concern over whether the government ought to be able to tell someone whether they can record this or do that, we have lost all ability to know whether this or that should even be done in the first place. We protect the right of the pornographer to distribute his videos without even thinking of the dehumanization and objectification of the women he used to make the video. We concede control over to a woman to the point where a baby in the womb is not a human, but a fetus or, more sinister, a mistake. We have freed people married to each other from the "contract" of marriage in the name of privacy and they proceed to privately rip apart the lives of their children, leaving the public to help the kids pick up the pieces to their lives.

The seeds of analysis of this paradox are picked up in this excellent article by Weekend Fisher: The missing superego: removing religion from the public square. She writes:

So what happens when cultural expectations for ethical behavior are largely removed? What happens when a number of leading voices say that the ideas of "right" and "wrong" are meaningless or even destructive? What happens when prevailing voices say that morality is solely a private matter? In terms of our inner struggles, it means that the person can no longer enlist the help of the culture in taming his lower instincts. It means that the person develops a less-controlled animal side than would have developed otherwise. It leads to a stunted conscience.

The part of us that makes us communal or relational creatures - the superego, to use the Freudian term employed by Weekend Fisher - does not have the boundaries once erected by society, so we easily wander off into areas that are not safe for us. All men and women are slaves to something - jealousy, greed, passion, righteousness, demons, God. It is not an accident that we call a dastardly thing that disturbs us (even when we are not quite sure of the source of the disturbance) everything except what it truly is - wrong. In our commitment to be free, we do not recognize the shackles in which freedom binds us. Nor the binders that blind us.

For centuries, mankind struggled to overcome the license of tyranny that kings and emperors and governments claimed in order to wield arbitrary power over people. That's why the American Revolution was fought and why the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution. But never knowing when to stop, we have exchanged the license of tyranny for the tyranny of license. The sin of rulers in the distant past was their arbitrary application of power. At least they moved with purpose. In the name of freedom from control and power, we wander about aimlessly, content to have power (which abhors a vacuum afterall) applied to us arbitrarily.

America in Decline?

I like to listen to podcasts of The Diane Rehm Show every now and then. It provides a calmer, more detailed analysis than one can generally glean from Cable News shows.

This week I was listening to a podcast of one of last week's shows - "America in Decline?" Diane Rehm started off with a story that one of the country's professional organizations of engineers gave America's infrastructure the grade of "C" 20 years ago. A recent analysis by the same group updated America's infrastructure grade to "D", warning that certain parts of our infrastructure were in such disrepair that they were in imminent danger of collapse. It would take $2.2 trillion (with a "t") to bring our infrastructure up to date.

Rehm used this as a springboard to ask her guests the broader question - "Is America in decline and, if so, what do we need to be doing as a society to turn things around?" The concern was entirely focused on infrastructure - the flight control system, roads and bridges in the Northeast (especially older ones built in the 19th century), our relatively slow and spotty mobile networks, our clogged sea ports, and the declining capacity of our power grid and refining capabilities. The argument made by the guests was that American society is good at reinventing itself when it comes to business and local issues, but when it comes to large-scale systems that require national / federal coordination, it fails miserably because of our "antiquated political institutions" (read Congress).

This continues a theme among left-leaning folk that I that, frankly, baffles me. The story they are wanting to promulgate seems to be that the federal government coordinated national responses to truly national problems well through year 19XX (e.g., Eisenhower's National Highway System, Sputnik, and Arpanet research that led to the Internet). Then Corporatism, Oligarch-ism, Elitism, or some other -ism took hold 25-30 years ago, broke the consensus over the proper role of the federal government, and the U.S. has progressively developed more brittle and patch-worked responses to national issues ever since.

It seems to me, however, that this is too simple of a story. The United States is a truly federal system, and any problem that has been met with a federal response has generally been one that is defense in nature (e.g., the National Highway System and Sputnik were driven by Cold War concerns) or is so ripe that a true national consensus has formed to move Congress to action (e.g., Social Security). But these have been the exception, rather than the rule. Health care, the power grid, and the majority of the national roads and highways, among others, have always been patchwork systems, cobbled together by the states or by regional cooperative action. And it's not easy to patch or totally remake patchwork systems from the top down.

The liberals' story, I think, misses the point. They readily acknowledge that America's culture is still vibrant and the most inventive in the world. They point to the inventiveness and initiative of American citizens. But they bemoan the fact that the "antiquated" federal systems of governance were designed to stop things. They see this as a bad thing, but it is, in truth, what has been at the root of America's ability to prosper and grow for over 200 years. The traditional American view has been that government should do a few things well - defend its citizens and create a stable space within which they can chase liberty and happiness. Other than this, government should get out of the way. Let the citizens do the rest.

If any consensus has been broken over the past 25-30 years, it has been the liberal vision of an "efficient" national government. For 30 years after the 1930's, the New Deal Coalition ran the federal government more as a national government than a federal one, in which one-size-fits-all solutions were imposed upon the nation (the minimum wage law in American Somoa impacts the local population differently than in New York. Roe v. Wade is received differently in San Francisco than the Bible Belt.

The U.S. is a big, diverse Union. Rather than exposing the nature of our federal institutions as somehow problematic, perhaps the issues we are now faced with are testimony to the fact that the federal government is not the mechanism through which to deal with these types of problems.

Ungovernable Nation?

Frank Pasquale writes in Law blog Balkinization on The Tragic Sense of Health Insurance Reform. Pasquale engages in a level-headed yet anguished look at both the potential good and the potential problems / challenges that are seeded in the health care reform bill just voted out of debate by the Senate last night.

Pasquale's last paragraph is worth quoting in full, which summarizes well the more in-depth insight contained in the rest of the article:

By passing this reform bill, Democrats will jettison whatever "populist" credentials they once had, opting instead for an early-twentieth-century "progressive" vision of technocratic alliance between corporate and government experts. However many disastrous missteps the FIRE industries make, this is the only arrangement that the media will credit as responsible governance. We'll commence an endless argument (read: notice and comment rulemaking and subsequent administrative adjudications) over what constitutes an adequate baseline of coverage, what is the fair share of revenue for middlemen like insurers, and what regulatory infrastructure can best vindicate the entitlements (and impose the burdens) specified by the bill. But the fundamental victory of reform--the national commitment that no one should have to choose between death or bankruptcy when confronted with a serious illness--will also endure. The tragic paradox is that the Democrats can only achieve this great cultural and ideological victory by becoming identified with the very interests that only they are willing to confront.

While this is, I think, the best bill one could hope (if one is so inclined) that Congress could produce in this day and time (and as good of one as any Congress in the last 100 years could have produced - probably better because of all we have learned through experience with our current insurance-based system), the fact that we are having this debate (idealism vs. realism in government's accomplishing public policy aims) is telling of something more fundamentally broken.

Pasquale makes passing reference in his article of America as "an increasingly ungovernable nation." Given the premise, I don't think that this is a fair characterization of the people or the underlying constitutional system of the United States. As the only military and economic superpower in the world, we have done, and are still doing, enough things right along the way. Rather, what some have termed "ungovernable" is an observation on the overreaching omnipresence of the modern-day federal government.

Americans have been through too much history and are too enamored with natural rights to ever countenance a scheme of direct socialist governance. We are dedicated to the fundamental soundness of the free enterprise system. However, we realize that there are holes in which the free market, left unregulated, do not work for the common good in areas where such is indispensable. Namely, in the self-same areas as called out by Pasquale's reference to "FIRE industries": finance, insurance, and real estate. Of course, Pasquale's point is to add the health care industry to this pot.

So, one of the great experiments in American governance has been an attempt to have government (mostly the federal government) step in to this breech and either regulate these industries or work in collaboration with them to bring about the results needed by society as a whole. One problem (if not the problem) is that this has been done divorced of constitutional principles. In a system set up to honor and promote the energies and risk-taking of the individual (the original concept of public education was to support this bias), coordination through government of massive industries and segments of our society's economic activity can at best be only a Lernaean Hydra, remedies applied to a body that is naturally resistant to such foreign substances.

If the goal of society is to implement the policies most favorable to the common good, then twenty-first century China is an excellent case study. When the ruling Communist Party oligarchs decide that the country needs to go in a particular direction, e.g., invest in solar power technologies and infrastructure, then it gets done. But such policies are implemented with the common good in mind (as defined by the ruling elite) and not the rights of individual citizens. Such is the trade off. But the question must be posed: What good is a society that does not pursue justice and rule of law for its citizens? Even Plato concedes that the philosopher-king is who is because he is just.

Obviously, the Chinese example is the opposite extreme of what we see in American principles of governance, but that is the point. The American Constitution is dedicated to, first, individual rights and freedom and, second, limited, constrained government. In too many ways, the twentieth and twenty-first century American government has broken loose of its constitutional constraints, and it is this, more than any other factor, that has created the conditions for the current debate. If we are ungovernable, it is only because the United States were (yes, subject / verb agreement is correct in the sense I mean to here employ) not set up to be governed by an omnipresent government coordinating the various segments of our complex, energetic society.

That American businesses and markets do not in many ways act for the common good is here readily acknowledged. But the remedy for this shortcoming is not more and bigger government. Rather, the remedy is to be found in the return to the principles held by the Founders and Western political tradition: personal responsibility and one's sense of duty to neighbor and fellow man, rooted in the justice and watching eye of Providence. It is fashionable in this day and time to be suspicious of the civil religion. Nevertheless, for 200 years it performed the service of knitting Americans together to provide for the common good out of love. That it is no loner given space to do so and that our form of government can not do so is the true present crisis and what, if anything, makes us "an increasingly ungovernable nation."

Our Debt to Machiavelli

In reading Machiavelli's "Discourses on Livy" - chapter II, I found the following,

...because when there is in the same City (government) a Principality, an Aristocracy, and a Popular Government (Democracy), one watches the other.

This sounds suspiciously like our three branches and their checks and balances. In his study of human forms of government and his theory on how each form degenerates into the next, he covers much ground which hopefully wasn't unfamiliar to our founders.

My question is, why is Machiavelli not more widely read, and what evidence is there of his influence on the Founding of the United States of America? The obstacles toward forming a government of the people were rigorously debated during the Continental Congress (and the Constitutional Congress that followed). Were the lessons of Machiavelli ever credited to him or were they borrowed for the convenience of the general discussion?

Whence the compromise?

The passing of Senator Ted Kennedy this past week has elicited much commentary on the apparent passing of the old political skill of Compromise. The standard refrain is something like this:

Senator Kennedy was from an old era of Senate politics, an era that engendered bipartisan deals and encouraged the art of compromise, dominated by moderate senators from both parties. Over the past twenty to thirty years, radicals from both parties have increasingly dominated the ranks of the Senate, leaving moderates to fill only about 10% of the chamber. As a result, the Opposition party seeks only to delay and obstruct and the Majority party pushes through its legislation on party-line votes.

Professor Sandy Levinson even go on to blame this state of affairs on our "undemocratic Constitution," pointing out statistics like the six senators on the Senate Finance Committee negotiating health care reform (an illustrative irony in itself - many who have lameted the loss of compromise have been the same ones impatiently demanding that the Senate Finance Committee drop its negotiations and "just approve a plan") represent a mere 2.77% of the U.S. population. This charge, however, seems to miss the point. The Senate was never meant to represent the American population as a whole, rather Senators represent their individual states. Besides this, the Constitution has governed the United States for well over 200 years and the Senate has been considered "the world's most deliberative body" for much of that time, admired by many around the world as one of the most august legislative chambers in history.

So if we have indeed lost the art of compromise in our politics and assuming our Constitution is not to blame (indeed, we have argued here that the Constitution engenders compromise), what has caused our supposed decline in bipartisan bills facilitated by compromise? It seems to me that this decline correlates with the rise of conservatives in the Republican Party during and following the time of President Reagan and the disappearance of that strange politician truly of a bygone era, the Southern Democrat. The Republican Party has become much more monolithic, dominated completely by the conservative movement, while the Democrats have been all over the map between moderate to liberal (or progressive to use the current label of choice).

Nevertheless, the Republican and Democratic Parties were both largely dominated by moderate and liberal politicians prior to the last generation's rise of conservatives. President Nixon, who fought for universal health care and Employer Mandates and instituted wage and price controls, was hardly a conservative by today's standards (or any era's standards, for that matter). President Ford nominated John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court, one of the most liberal justices in the history of the Court. Conservatives had no voice in the government prior to Reagan's election to the presidency, so they were effectively locked out of the debate and ignored.

So when one side is completely sidelined, how is the resulting federal legislation the result of compromise? One side (liberals) and moderates agreeing among themselves might be compromise, but not to the degree that these fellows pining for the good old days would like to believe. For all their acrimony, true compromises were struck in the 1990's between President Clinton and the Republican Congress time and time again: the 1996 welfare reform law, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the balanced budgets in 1997 and onward, to name a few.

The process of compromise is always ugly when one is in the middle of it, and it never looks like compromise (remember the cries of deadlock and obstructionism when Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans forced a shut down of the federal government in 1995?). But given the time for the political process to work itself out, the end result is ALWAYS better than a partisan wish-list crammed down the collective throats of the electorate. Voters might swallow the bitter pill of such a legislative maneuver, but the majority party will be short-lived in their majority status. Americans have longer memories than Talking Heads give them credit for.

Things are not always as they seem

When I first heard of the Honduran military's disposition of Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, I assumed it was a typical, Third World-style coup d'etat and that the reaction of President Obama and the OAS calling for immediate reinstatement of President Zelaya was the right and proper response. However, after having researched the chain of events behind the removal of Zelaya, it is obvious that the Honduran governmental institutions and civil society were actually defending the Honduran constitution from the hatchet-work of Zelaya.

Many Americans do not realize that in Latin American countries, the military is the national police force. U.S. law does not allow the military to enforce laws. This is why we have civilian organizations like the Coast Guard and the FBI. Whereas the FBI in the U.S. would arrest officials accused of a crime, the military performs those actions in South America. If it was the military acting under its own initiative in disposing the President, then that is obviously unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court of Honduras and the Congress both approved this action and followed Honduran constitutional procedures in appointing a presidential successor.

The Obama Administration needs to wake up and begin to defend principled positions on the world stage. Dialogue with tin-pot dictators is fine, but actively supporting their positions only serves to degrade our own moral authority. As we have said on this blog in the past in the context of the excesses of the Bush Administration, constitutional fidelity is more than just blindly following your leaders, even if those leaders were duly elected. Extra-constitutional maneuvering can never be allowed to stand, especially on the part of a President, who is charged to faithfully execute the duly-enacted laws.

UPDATE 10/12/2009: Negotiations on Honduras Continue

Our Brothers' Keepers

Once, during a discussion about abortion, I made the argument that if we allow the government to tell citizens that they can not abort a pregnancy, philosophically it was similar to allowing the government the power to tell citizens that they must abort a pregnancy. Needless to say, that discussion did not resolve the issue; we'll probably eradicate world hunger or achieve world peace first.

In reexamining this argument, I wondered how easy it would be to reword a given prohibition to reverse the wording while keeping the dictate intact. For instance if we passed a law stating "No citizen shall be allowed to abort a pregnancy"; assume for the sake of argument that we've already agreed on the definition of the term abortion. The exact procedures are moot because we want to focus on the wording of the prohibition and not on the technicalities of the definitions or shades of grey. Picking abortion is done solely to start with an issue that is easily construed in terms of black and white.

If the law says, "You shall not abort" it could just as easily have been written as "You shall carry to term regardless". So even though the wording only states an action which can not be taken, it implicitly mandates the opposite action.

China already condones abortion through euphemistically named "One Child" policy. While China does not officially force abortions, there continue to be reports nonetheless. "You shall have up to one child" turns into "You shall not have more than one child".

Using another example, capital punishment, we could conceive of a law which says, "Thou Shall Not Kill" it implicitly demands "Thou Shall Protect Life". A capital punishment law which allows the State to kill someone could state "Causing the death of a person (through means described as "In the first degree") is punishable by death" is effectively saying, "The State shall kill those who commit first degree murder." If we really believe in the principle of "Thou shall not kill" then capital punishment must by necessity claim an exception in the definition of what the term 'kill' means. Killing usually means ending a living persons life. Allowing the State the power to define exceptions makes the commandment not to kill into a morally relative value "Thou shall not kill... unless the State says it's ok" which could include self-defense, war, defense of others, or the state ordering the killing of a citizen which it feels is deserving of the ultimate punishment. One counter argument has been "they don't deserve to live" or "they lost their right to life when they took another's". If I don't deserve to live, then I deserve to die. If a State uses it's sovereign power to execute someone unjustly, upon whose soul does the responsibility for a wrongful death rest? Since a State does not have a soul in and of itself, then evil done by the State must then be shared by the people of that State, unless it can be determined to have a singular responsible ruler, a 'Unitary Executive' if you will. If the State can not be held responsible for it's own moral failings, then that leaves the people who actually carry out the misdeeds. The hooded executioner,for example, who either cares not about such metaphysical questions or uses their faith in the infallibility of their leaders judgement as a shield against the possibility of personal guilt.


"Thou shall not covet" (stealing is illegal) becomes "Thou shall be content with what you have and your opportunities to change what you have." (No short-cuts to wealth, only follow the culturally acceptable avenues." Of course I'm paraphrasing here but I'm wandering through examples, trying them on for size to see whether there is an example which disproves the idea.

Summary: You must do X is equivalent to You shall not do non-X, or You must not do X becomes You must do non-X.

In programming-speak, (X == true) is the same as (X != false) .

The Great Debate: liberty or death?

I have been listening to a course from The Teaching Company on the debate over the proposed Constitution between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Professsor Thomas L. Pangle (University of Texas at Austin) teaches the course, The Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution , which does an outstanding job of framing the debate between the two sides in its historical context and presenting the give-and-take discussion. The Federalist Papers are often presented as a self-contained treatise on the Constitution, but they were, in reality, part of a broader conversation, reacting to accusations and questions from the Anti-Federalists and lodging accusations and questions on behalf of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay (their authors).

The Anti-Federalists also presented some salient concerns in their opposition to the proposed Constitution. Among them:

• the proposed Constitution would lead to the establishment of a military industrial complex (not their words, of course), which would lead to America drawing unto itself the trappings of empire and shedding her commitment to republican virtue;


• juries would lose their right to interpret the law under the proposed Constitution and the federal judiciary would become an unaccountable aristocracy; and


• the states would eventually become mere administrative subdivisions of the federal government because states do not have an effective constitutional check against the federal government (Madison pointed to the fact that the states appointed senators under the design of the proposed Constitution, but this effective check was removed with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment).

The Federalists consistently seek to recast Anti-Federalist concerns by focusing on the need for a strong central government to protect the national security of the United States. Whereas the Anti-Federalists were concerned to protect the classical republican freedom of the United States, which called for small communities governed by like-minded, virtuous citizens, the Federalists called for society to include a broader, more diverse territory whose sheer size would draw in competing interests (factions, to use Madison's term) to protect republican freedom at home and from attack from abroad.

I will spend a few upcoming blog posts looking at these debates in more detail, but what intrigues me from a birds'-eye view is the same basic question that we still deal with today, most recently in the days since 9/11. The Bush Administration thought it was necessary to engage in torture to protect America from further terrorist attacks after 9/11. While there is some circumstantial evidence that this policy protected the U.S. from further attacks, the brutality and dehumanizing consequences of these "enhanced interrogation techniques" are highlighted by Mark Danner in his piece US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites. Now the Obama Administration has prohibited these techniques from being used by U.S. governmental agencies because, as the new president has said, they violate America's core principles of liberty and commitment to human rights. But the President has said he'll do what is necessary to protect the United States, so one wonders what that would mean if another terrorist attack should befall the U.S.

So the question becomes - can a love and commitment of freedom and liberty coexist with institutions required to defend and make war? In the spirit of the Governance Imperative, these are two competing principles that must be balanced, but can the balance truly be maintained without detriment to either principle? Peace and security can be easily maintained through the use of excessive force, but freedom and liberty will suffer and be snuffed out. Witness Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Iran and North Korea. Liberty and openness can flourish, but society is then left vulnerable to attack and domination from the outside. Witness the classical Greek city-states, the Roman Republic, and the medieval Italian cities. In the latter cases, the republics were only able to save themselves by giving up liberty for ever more powerful militaries and dictators. Patrick Henry insisted on being given liberty or death, but most people will take security and peace over anything.

Whatever the prescient warnings of the Anti-Federalists, the Constitution has enabled the United States to strike an uneasy, if ever-correcting, balance between liberty and security. The ability of Americans to maintain this balance will be directly dependent on our continued fidelity to republican principles and the constitutional order.

Bonhoeffer on Bush

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his writings published as "Letters and Papers From Prison", provides mankind with a strong statement on morality and the relationship between a citizen and the State. While Germany was under Hitler's grip, there were well educated men who understood that their duty was to follow orders, unlike Bonhoeffer who understood that to allow an evil to be committed was morally the same as to commit the evil yourself. We can't blame this divide on education or its lack. Otto Thorbeck, the judge over Bonhoeffer's trial, had the same classical education as Bonhoeffer; studying Antigone, Iliad, The Oddyssy, and The Bible. Works which provide guidance as to the meaning of good vs evil, justice, wisdom, and duty. If you don't believe in absolute good or evil, you could easily make the case that it is permissible to act in a normally unjust manner when the circumstances permit, that enacting the injustice on the orders of others does not sully ones own soul, or in other words sometimes it's ok to kill.

Bonhoeffer suffered the punishment of the State rather than acquiesce to the idea that the State is the arbiter of what is Absolutely Good or Absolutely Evil. If the State says that a prisoner is a traitor and needs to be sentenced to death, it isn't the individual's place to disagree. That is what Thorbeck believed, he was just doing his duty. Bonhoeffer didn't have to be imprisoned but faced certain persecution with the conviction that what Germany was doing was wrong and to not speak or act out would be equally wrong of him, a sin of omission.

So, what questions does this pose?

- Whose place is it to determine what is good or evil?
- Does a State have a soul? a conscience?
- If a State is soulless, upon whose soul falls the burden of evil acts done in the State name?
- If an action is evil when committed by an individual, can a State, on its own authority, declare that act to be just and legal when done in the State's name?
- When is it the duty of a Citizen to disobey the State?
- How should we feel about a society that allows the State to commit evil acts?

I expect to follow this piece with others where the lessons of various books that have made history can teach us about life in the modern age. Next would be Homer's Iliad.

Truth and Power

Politicians are afraid of the truth. Truth is an absolute, something which does not sway in the wind, something that can not be possessed or subverted to private purpose. Politicians deal in perception which can be manipulated, twisted, changed; used as a shield, e.g. "wrapping themselves in the flag" or as a weapon, e.g. "Saddam has WMDs" or McCarthyisms "Better dead than Red".

The most a politician can do with Truth is to reveal or conceal it which includes half-truths and such. Truth becomes like the rock upon which a lighthouse is built. We could tell a story about politicians and Truth.

A long time ago on a long forgotten coastline, there was a dangerous outcropping of rock near a small fishing village. Many ships, loaded with their catch bound for the sailors families, had been sunk coming back from their time at sea. The village can ill-afford building a lighthouse to warn sailors of the dangerous rocks but reject the notion of risking more ships on a known danger. And so the lighthouse is built. The people are proud of their accomplishment, they've made their world a better, safer place.

Nature, having setup the rocks as a deadly game of chance between incoming ships and the rocks, sees the completed lighthouse and feels thwarted by the puny men; cheated of the spoils of it's "game". Angry now, Nature decides to strike back against the hubris of men, sending rain, wind, and waves to batter the lighthouse, to blind the revealing light and tear down the tower that deigns to signal danger to the unwary. The lighthouse, being a product of man, cannot withstand the relentless attack of the elements and falls, its light no longer shining, its building no longer standing guard.

The rocks remain, ships continue to sink, the widows continue to weep, the people continue to lament their losses. Nature continues to enjoy the offerings of the village, safe in the knowledge that its capricious nature is again safe from the light of the truth.

To those who seek power, that which does not empower them further is an obstacle to further power whether by being a hindrance directly or by being a distraction indirectly; thus Truth which does not support is concealed to guard against being used as a weapon against the power-seeker. Perception is the currency of power and a people distracted by a tangential Truth is a threat to those to covet the power of crowds willing to believe and follow. The lighthouse is not the Truth but only the marker of it. Nature may be able to destroy the marker but the rocks, like the Truth, remain.

The Moral Instinct

The Moral Instinct is an intriguing article in The Times Magazine from back in January. The author argues that studying the "moral sense" of human beings can help us "see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend." While there is much for me to quibble with in this article, it does bring out some helpful perspectives that would advance societal debates and relations in this country, along with how Americans see other cultures around the world.

For all the different moral concerns and perspectives found around the world, the article argues there are five themes that are common across all cultures: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity. The differences in morality can be reduced to the emphasis placed on each of these themes by each culture.

The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

Of course, harm and fairness are the moral themes that dominate the United States: both historically and in the present day. While we don't completely ignore the other three (indeed, community, authority, and purity are much more important themes among more conservative-leaning and religious Americans), these two themes inform our collective sense of morality to the point that they guide our sense of Government's role in our lives, i.e., that the Government should enforce laws equally (fairness) and defend us from attack (harm). These are also the competing themes that tear us apart in the abortion debate: protecting innocent life from harm versus treating women fairly. If we don't realize this, it is all too easy to see "the Opposition" as amoral and unprincipled.

We wrote the Governance Imperative thesis three years ago, and our moral categorization (what is right vs. what is fair) differs from that of this article. However, the important distinction is present in both categorizations. There are competing moral themes that we must consider as we approach any major societal question, and the Founders were well aware of these competing moral themes when they wrote the Constitution.

Throwing the First Stone

This article about the influence of the physical world and the structure of moral perception [www.sciam.com] was very interesting.

Is this a case of "Thou doth protest too much"? What can we take from this study and apply to our search for better government?

What possibility is there that those who relish the role of morality police have secrets of their own which make them judge others more harshly?

Would you notice a difference in the sermon at your church if the pastor ritually cleansed him or herself before speaking?

The Truth is so Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

Truth and Politics. Normally the truth is black or white. I'm beginning to wonder if politics is the art of not stating the obvious. The current economic crisis provides for an easy example. Economists are saying that nationalizing the banks is a valid remedy for a failing banking system. The Secretary of the Treasury is avoiding mentioning the term even off the record. If asked point blank, it is a good bet that he would not admit that it is a potential action worth exploring. Here is where the political truth comes in. If you asked him why he won't discuss it, he will actively avoid admitting that the political cost is too high. Not giving the opposition a chance to score points then becomes the elephant in the room.

Everyone knows why we don't talk about the solution openly, making it ever so difficult to face our problems, hog-tying ourselves for the sake of political strategy.

Irrational Rationales

It's always been frustrating to me to hear supporters of a U.S. Administration dismiss criticism with nothing more than a perfunctory evaluation. I've become convinced that it is very easy for a leader's supporters to consider counter-arguments as somehow attacks on the President himself and therefore a sign of disloyalty. Paul Graham discusses how identity influences a debate and I'm inclined to agree with him.

What the fan-boys, which I'm wondering whether may be an appropriate term for the most extreme devotees, of an administration should understand is there are plenty of people who need to see the administration debate an issue; when they come out with a position and defend it as if it was perfect those people feel like they are being dictated too, cut off from the idea evaluation process. Do they expect the public to praise the announced policy as in, "Yea! We don't have to think anymore, the President will save us!"? There is something to be said for public debate, the collaboration towards a better idea.