There are cycles in history. We have just seen a change of the party in power. A new cycle is about to begin with Democrats ascendant. A clean slate? Hardly. Let us hope it is not the tabula rasa of the new-born. The Democrats are on a two-year probation, and the executive branch is a lame duck, but the present, Republican-led Congress is not a dead duck, and the Democratic-led Congress may be a ruptured duck.What government needs is obvious.
First, it needs an iron-clad procedure for treating ethical lapses, reporting, investigating, and correcting, relative to a code of accepted behavior for all government servants, top down, what has been called an office of public integrity. The mlitary has its Articles of War, which I heard read to us many years ago. I have taken oaths. I have been sworn in. I have made pledges. Doctors have their Hippocratic Oath, “one of the oldest binding documents in history…. Written in antiquity, its principles are held sacred by doctors to this day.” (Which see: “The Hippocratic Oath Today: Meaningless Relic or Invaluable Moral Guide?” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_today.html ) Codifying an ethical code and giving it an institutional existence that cannot be corrupted should be the first order of business.
Next, coalition-building. From a periscopic view, setting policy for future action can be a creative leap beyond the trenches of the present, a policy far-sightedness, across party lines. Any appetite for retribution, picking at the scab and breathing hard from years of frustration, should be overridden by the stronger desire for real progressive movement that might set the stage for coming out of probation into the next presidential election.
Why coalitions? Simply, the President, the cabinet and legislators are insufficient to the task, except as political leaders who can figurehead and present the results of discussion. Congresspeople and the President and the cabinet are insufficient as “generators” of policy. Take policy-making out of the so-called “smoke-filled room”! They are only sufficient to convene, support, and oversee coalitions and present results and introduce the legislation. They must have the deliberative mind.
Sources of the Coalitions. The most respected opinions are the authors of book-length emanations of deliberative minds. Some of them can be seen and heard on C-SPAN, Non-fiction Book TV programs regularly. They crowd the airwaves with comprehensive summaries of their scholarship and investigations concerning the problems facing life in the U.S. and on earth. Add to the mix all the scholars and researchers from our great institutions of higher learning who have published on the topic. A third component is the public input through the media and internet. The operations of all the coalitions should be in public. The co-chairmen of each problem-group should be a bi-partisan team from the Congress.
The gathering, in one room, of all those authors coalescing around one of the major issues confronting government could be charged with achieving consensus on the best possible solution to the problem on which they are experts. Democracy wasn’t invented by the United States, but it surely has been developed here to a high degree. That is the magnetic character of this society. But it is time to re-invent our democracy. Life on earth now has become more complicated than ever before. And acceleration in history has made it imperative to be efficiently discovering and implementing solutions. (The pendulum is swinging faster and faster. Growth and change are exponential.) The time is ripe for utilizing our intellectual resources for more than mere criticism of government. Their influence could be magnified a hundredfold through group decision-making and keep us ahead of exponential growth.
The President through the Department of State should be complementing those U.S. work-groups by building coalitions of nations on the topics being studied in the U.S. Those topics are the ones having a global import.
The Problems. The inherited situation is this: (1) U.S. involvement in extremely problematic wars in two Middle-Eastern countries; (2) for U.S., a gigantic budget deficit and an unfavorable balance of trade; (3) globally, the approach of a tipping point in the warming of the climate of earth, with drought and water shortages, deforestation, melting of the ice caps north and south; (4) nationally, natural disaster and environmental-pollution cleanups; (5) energy shortages; (6) pollution (in and from China and elsewhere, and our own); (7) globally, a radical, Islamic terrorist conspiracy to kill all the enemies of Allah; (8) rogue nations developing atomic weapons of mass destruction; (9) the religious war between Palestinian Arabs and Iraelis; (10) sub-Saharan genocides, and the AIDS epidemic; (11) the U.S. borders unprotected against illegal immigration and drug cartels; (12) reformation of U.S. health and Social Security programs. There are many more anyone can denominate. (Comments?)
Models. A current example similar to this proposal– we wait with bated breath–is the Iraq Commission, or, Iraq Study Group (Baker and Hamilton). From that model we could build this new democratic invention. I was excited to hear the (now successful) candidate for governor of Colorado say in his campaign debate that he would become one chief executive to govern in just that way.
“If the world would come together and be willing to spend, say, $50 billion over the next five years on improving the state of the world, which projects would yield the greatest net benefits?” That is the question being asked for the convening of the Copenhagen Consensus Conference 2008 meetings. The ten challenges assessed at CC04 were: hunger and malnutrition, climate change, conflicts, financial instability, water and sanitation, subsidies and trade barriers, population:migration, communicable diseases, education, governance, and corruption. See the World Future Society’s, Future Survey, covering an abundance of topics on world problems such as these: a globalized NATO maintaining stability worldwide; the wealthy CEOs earning 350 times the average worker’s pay, up from 122 times in 1990; companies going green; promoting a new ethics for the 21st century; China’s grip on world trade; women’s movements for better treatment; struggles to create a sustainable world.
The Choice: From where I sit, between the mountains to the west and the plains to the east, the choice is between staying the course with the Republicans on the flat lands to the east, or climbing with the Prograssives the mountain highs to the west.
