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The End of America's Genius?
It’s said that the genius of the American system as created by the founders is that it can survive incompetent, venal or malign office holders. The system includes checks and balances precisely so that the actions of any one or a few individuals can’t capsize it. In this it is superior to either monarchical systems or parliamentary systems (which have fewer checks – Prime Ministers are often very close to elected dictators).
There’s a fair bit of truth to the statement – or there was.
The Imperial Presidency. The founders relied upon the jealousy of prerogatives of the other branches of government. They gave the Senate significant checks on Presidential power, for example, and assumed that whoever was in power in the Senate would protect those powers even against a judiciary or president they agreed with because they would want to protect their own power even against their own. That has broken down – the Senate is only too eager to give up power, because when it gives up power its members also give up responsibility. It’s the calculus of electibility. When Congress gave up its oversight on war making, for example, it also gave up responsibility for how the war was played out.
More than that there is a sort of information war that has occurred between the Presidency and the legislative bodies. One of the findings of organizational theory is that a major source of power in a big organization is controlling who gets what information and when they get it. The Presidency has de-facto control of the information gathered by government and it uses it aggressively and denies it to Congress aggressively. It’s true that in theory Congress can get information but they have to go after it – much of it isn’t given to them automatically. Members of Congress not on the intelligence committee don’t automatically get intelligence info – even those on it are managed – the Presidency does. When they do demand information Senators and the Senate as a whole are often stonewalled by the executive. As such the Senate has authority over areas (war making is just one) where it lacks the information to make decisions. Easier then to just let the President make such decisions – which is what the President wants.
Executive power always increases in wartime. Presidents recognize this and have become adept at making everything into a war. You had “the cold war.” You had the “war on poverty,” you had “the war on drugs” and now you have the “war on terror.” None of these were wars in the formal sense – not even the Cold War. All were played as such to centralize power, information and decision making. A legislature cannot run a war – if the war is to be run effectively it must be run by an executive. And so they have been.
American success. The US was so rich that failure was unimaginable. Huge rivers of money could be diverted from productive uses to unproductive ones (military spending, prisons, pork of various kinds, subsidies) and yet the system could take it and would continue producing more money, more success, more good years and booms. It seemed America was unique – no matter what you did it continued to provide bountiful year after bountiful year. And in specific departments or organizations – if someone was put in charge who was unconcerned with the business and only wanted to send some money to his favoured causes; well the bureaucracy would work around him to get the mission done while funneling some money to his favoured causes. If he was outright incompetent it would likewise work around him and his appointees.
Bureaucracies and other big organizations have their own momentum. This is often bewailed by new governments, but it also has advantages. But while they do have momentum, they can be slowly steered and they have been. The most radical in recent memory has been the Bush administration, which has placed huge chunks of the federal bureaucracy under direct presidential control. The new “performance incentive” program coming on line is just part of that – a chance to control the high ranking bureaucrats by making up to a third of their pay bonuses – which means subject to review by political appointees every single year.
Likewise departments have been subject to purges. Both State and the CIA, for example, where the message has been “get in line, or get out.” People have been punished, in effect, for saying “uh, I don’t think that’s going to work.” They have been punished for putting their organization’s goals (gathering accurate intelligence for the CIA or having good foreign relationships for State) above the President's goals (having intelligence that supports his agenda, or bullying nations into doing what he wants). In both cases, and many others (Treasury moving to lower duration securities to reduce short term borrowing costs is another) long term institutional goals and culture have suffered for short term political goals.
The sense is that no matter what anyone does the US will be rich and powerful. You can see it in the NeoCons blasé assumption that the US is the world’s only superpower and that there is nothing anyone else can do about it and that it will never change unless the US stops bullying other nations. It’s a breathtaking assumption that ignores the fact that superpower or great power status is always under girded by economic power.
The Gaming Culture In a system in perpetual surplus the way you get ahead is not by creating more surplus – it's by diverting the surplus to your friends, family, supporters and yourself (usually through them). It’s the old question – make the pie bigger, or make your slice bigger? The answer for many years now has been to make your slice bigger. Government officials, appointees and elected representatives run government to give money and power to private interests. They then leave government to work for the private interests and then sometimes come back to government.
These people, and there is an entire large class of them, aren’t working to make America as a whole richer or more powerful. They are working to make their benefactors richer and more powerful. The math of it is simple – lets say you make up .01% of the American population and you can divert 1 million of income to yourself. Lets further assume that if America as a whole does worse you’ll lose income proportionally. How much would America have to lose for you to only break even on your diversion? Ten billion dollars. And that’s peanuts – people regularly write themselves laws that save or earn themselves billions – the cost to the American economy would have to be hundreds of trillions for it not to be worth it to them.
When economists such as Mancur Olson rail against special interests – it’s that math they have in mind. You can’t serve two masters is an ancient law and in Washington, in state capitals, in city halls – a large chunk, if not a majority, of political appointees and elected officials serve two masters.
And they serve the one who pays them most – best.
In large part this is because the consequences of failure aren’t obvious. I’ve long said that China has been playing a very bad hand very well, while the US has been playing a very good hand extraordinarily badly. In China not only, despite all the corruption, are there fewer special interests (yes, I know what I’m saying and yes I stand by it) but failure can’t be tolerated. They’re too close to the edge. Entire provinces are on the edge of famine. Entire provinces are under martial law. There is no room for incompetents – if you want to enrich your friends and family, that’s fine, but you’d better be sure you make the society and economy as a whole work – or else. You have to be able to play the political game but you also have to be able to actually do your ostensible job.
In the US that hasn’t been true for a long time. A politician only has to be able to play the game, not do his or her ostensible job. Most legislators don’t read the legislation they’re voting up or down except to ensure that their little piece favouring their donor base is in there. Most judges have their assistants write most of their decisions. Most executives don’t even review the budgets they submit for ratification except to be sure the pork they ordered to appease their paymasters is in.
As a result you have omnibus bills that are nothing but one piece of business ostensibly for the public good, with hundreds of tacked on bills serving someone’s interest –but not the public's.
That’s simply the way business is done. It’s government for those who can loot it, by those who have been bought by those who can afford them.
And for a long time it sort of worked. The grunts doing the day labor wrote decent opinions, made the budget provide money where it was needed and so on. But by doing so, they were, effectively, getting in the way of even more money being fed out of the government to those who had paid to own government.
And so, step by step, they’re being bought, intimidated or purged. At one time only most of the elected reps and their direct employees were owned. Now the BLS, the CBO, the CIA – they’re all being taken over so they can serve their true masters – and if you don’t like it – you’re out.
No system is of such genius that it can survive both incompetence and outright looting. The problem is, that not content to merely loot today’s surplus, the looting has continued into tomorrow’s surplus. Borrowing against the future prosperity of America because today’s is not sufficient is the name of the game.
No society that is not led well over long periods can prosper. The US appears to be in the last frenzy of looting of Empire. The end days are nigh, the looting has extended to eating the seed corn and twenty years from now, seed corn gone, Americans will find that America is not unique and that the sun does set on every great nation. As usual they will have been destroyed from within by the home grown rats, fat upon the grain of their fellow citizens.
