I’m
not especially nervous about the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong: it’s
dangerous. It’s lethal, at least for some. It exposes some fundamental
weaknesses of our systems. It threatens my family and my friends. It’s
going to get much worse before it gets better.
I’m
worried about it. I’m worried
about it in the same sense that I want to make sure my life insurance is
up to date, and the mortgage is paid, and all the fluids in my car are
at the manufacturer’s recommended levels. It’s something that, if I
don’t stay on top of it, might bring harm to me or to others.
But
I’m not especially nervous about it. That’s because for about forty
years I’ve been involved in the field of strategic studies. I’m aware of
just how vulnerable we are, to so many things, and have been for longer
than most people care to think about. I’m aware of so many things that
could bring down this civilization, and of how little attention has been
paid to so many of them by the people whose job it is to ready our
response. I know that the situation could be far, far worse. I know that
our public health officials have been anticipating that something like
COVID-19 was on its way, even though they had no way to know exactly
what form it might take, and they’ve taken the best precautions they
have been allowed to by our political leadership.
When
I watch the news today I think back to the morning of September 11th,
2001. My wife and I were watching TV as the second airliner flew into
the World Trade Center. She turned to me and said, quietly,
“Well, you told them.”
For
the rest of the world 9/11 might be “the day everything changed,” but
for those of us with a working knowledge of the problem we’d been at war
since 1979, and planning for this kind of attack for years. We’d done
war games and other simulations. We’d prevented real attacks on more
than one occasion. We knew that someday — someday — someone was going to
get something like 9/11 done. And when it happened, we knew that it
could have been worse.
(And no, don’t ask me how it could have been worse. I have no desire to give helpful tips to prospective terrorists.)
9/11
was a stress test. It took our system and pushed it towards a breaking
point. It put American social and political institutions into a crisis, a
condition when there is a perception of increased risk to what we
value, surprise, and a limited time to respond. In conditions of low
stress most people don’t perceive a problem. Nothing changes. Nothing is
learned. In conditions of moderate stress some people are too
overwhelmed to act, but some weigh the options provided by people who
seem to have workable responses. Information is exchanged. Systems
change, and adapt to the situation. We might, for example, improve
cockpit security for aircraft, or infiltrate and monitor potential
terrorist organizations. Appropriate lessons are drawn. In conditions of
extremely high stress, people are too overwhelmed to react, or they
react irrationally. Many follow the orders of the first person who seems
to have a response, whether or not it makes sense. We might, for
example, invade Iraq. Or force everyone to take off their shoes at
airports.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a stress test. So is the presidency of Donald J. Trump.
The
COVID-19 pandemic has put our medical, social, economic, and political
systems under stress. The medical and public health systems have, for
the most part, shown themselves to be capable of handling the load up
until now. They are locating the carriers, within the limits of
available testing. The experts are informing the public about what is
known, what is not known, and what can be done by individuals and
institutions to slow the rate of transmission and minimize the risks of
exposure. Research is progressing to identify modes of transmission and
to find ways to treat the symptoms. Eventually there will be a vaccine,
and perhaps a cure, and when these are found there will likely be
mechanisms to get those medicines to the people who need them. At
present, hospitals have not been swamped by cases. Whether they will
continue to do so well depends on the number of cases that have yet to
be expressed, and how quickly they arrive. That, in turn, depends on the
social, economic, and political systems.
The
social systems have, in many ways, worked better than expected. People
have been seeking out reliable information. Individuals have been taking
action, both appropriate (limiting social interactions, avoiding
unnecessary travel, stockpiling some essential non-perishables) and not
(toilet paper?). Voluntary groups have been adapting: schools have been
cancelling classes, or putting them on-line, while churches have been
telling parishioners to stay home. Businesses have been advising
employees to work from home, when possible, and to avoid unnecessary
travel. Some have been limiting operating hours, while others (not all,
to be sure) have been trying to help their employees to cope with the
unexpected financial crisis.
The
economy is not dealing well with the pandemic. But the financial system
has been on unsteady ground for well over a decade. The Obama
administration worked to prop up financial institutions and provide
needed capital to large businesses, while failing to punish the people
and organizations that enabled the 2007 financial collapse to take
place. In fact, many of those people profited from their acts.
Employment has increased since 2008, as has the accumulation of wealth
by the top one percent, but there has been no corresponding increase in
wages. Legislative reforms were enacted to limit financial speculation
by lenders and to impose artificial stress tests to identify problems
before they arose in practice. In 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted in the US following the crisis to “promote the financial stability of the United States”. Internationally, the Basel III
capital and liquidity standards were adopted by the central banks of
countries around the globe. To protect the rights of American consumers,
in 2010 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
was established. But these innovations were systematically weakened
between 2010 and 2017. In that time, the CFPB had moved from Special
Advisor Elizabeth Warren to Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. Not all the necessary lessons were learned, and some which were learned were quickly forgotten.
For months, speculators have been waiting for a signal that it was time to grab profits and run from overvalued stock markets. The COVID-19 pandemic, followed immediately by the collapse of oil prices, have been taken as that signal, but they are not the cause. The problems with the global systems of finance and trade are structural. They existed well before the pandemic. And they have been encouraged by deeper problems in the global political systems.
Just
as the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stress test, so has the presidency
of Donald J. Trump. Like the pandemic, the deeper problems have been
there for a long time. Trump is a trigger. Trump is a symptom. Trump is
an indicator of the deeper problems. He has made things worse, but he is
not the cause.
It’s
easy to condemn Donald Trump. He’s an ass. He’s a buffoon. He’s a
narcissist. He’s a racist and a narcissist a mysoginist and a friend to
dictators. Whether or not he is in the service of some foreign master (a
question that has yet to be settled), his actions have weakened
American alliances, served American enemies, and threatened what many
people consider to be the core values of American democracy.
And that’s ok — if we learn from it.
There’s
no such thing as a perfect institution. Values and assumptions need to
be challenged, once in a while. We need to rethink what we stand for,
and what we stand against, and why. Much like the recession of 2007
highlighted the need for “stress testing” to avoid the collapse of our
banks and our financial institutions, Trump and his enablers are
providing a stress test for the American Republic. Rather than simply
condemning him, we should learn from this experience. Fix our mistakes.
Build stronger institutions. Reaffirm what we stand for.
Often,
nothing is as educational as a bad example. Trump and Trumpism are,
above all else, a bad example. Even his supporters — those with some
measure of character — admit that as a person the president is not a
“stable genius.” They accept that he is a deeply flawed individual,
morally and cognitively, and many only voted for him because they
believed the alternative was worse. They resented being ignored, being
described as “deplorables” or told they “cling
to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or
anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain
their frustrations.” These voters wanted to shake things up. They
wanted to break out of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton cycle of
establishment politicians trading chairs and reaping profits while the
ship of state sank. Many of the people who voted for Trump in 2016 did
it for the same reasons they voted for Obama in 2008. They wanted hope.
They wanted change. And, to some extent, they got it from Trump. Change,
at least.
The
Trump years have been a stress test for American democracy. They have
demonstrated how many of our problems are the result of individual
shortcomings, and how much is due to the structure itself. On the
individual side, in addition to Trump himself, we have people like Mitch McConnell,
the Majority Leader of the Senate, self-declared “Grim Reaper” of bills
from the House of Representatives, a presidential nominee to the
Supreme Court, and testimony in the impeachment trial of Trump. But it’s
not just Republicans. There are plenty of Democrats deserving of personal condemnation.
In
any case, the important point is to learn from our mistakes. The people
and the professional partisans need to develop a common understanding
of where our weaknesses lie and what are some of the things that need to
be reformed. People and parties need to be removed from power. Ideas
need to be reconsidered. Institutions need to change. It’s encouraging
that there are now more Americans who identify as “independent” than as a member of either of the two entrenched political parties.
The challenge to political institutions is more than just Trump. It’s more than just the United States,
too. Some politicians still don’t get it. Joe Biden, for example, tells
us the problem is “Trump,” and if he is removed from power we will
return to a government of bipartisan consensus, negotiating over how
best to achieve our common good. He’s wrong. Doesn’t he remember his own
experiences under Obama? And the impeachment, where a partisan Senate
fell into step to block a real trial and keep in office a man who had
clearly violated his oath of office, is evidence that the problems we
face are more than can be blamed on one noxious personality. The
obstruction of justice, backed by the appointment of a partisan Attorney
General and the replacement of judges and career civil servants with
people selected on the basis of their partisan loyalties over
demonstrated competence, underlines just how important the norms of
service to the Constitution have been, and how easily they can be
subverted by people who don’t share them.
Some
simply to blame capitalism. Bernie Sanders, for example, has
consistently positioned himself as a “democratic socialist” who
considers capitalism itself to be contrary to the principles of freedom,
and argues that if the levers of political and economic power are given
to the “right” people, they will work together to achieve our common
good. He’s also wrong. He’s wrong in his criticism because the economy
we have today has little to do with the free, fair, and open markets
proposed and fought for by Adam Smith. We have never lived under that
kind of capitalism because true capitalism is about open competition
under a set of open, transparent, unbiased rules supported by
cooperation to maintain the rule of law. Real capitalism might work, but
it would be messy, and we can’t do it with the current electoral
system. We need a government strong enough to enforce the rules,
professional enough to do it without parisanship, and open enough to
popular opinion to not fall into the hands of a billionare class.
With
the current first-past-the-post electoral system, the system of rewards
leads to nothing better than a an ineffective system of two parties,
each seeking the means to make permanent its own rule. The trend may be
more obvious for the Republicans now, because demographic trends mean
they have to work harder and break more laws to keep themselves in
power. But the reward structure affects Democrats, too. And as more
economic power resides in the state — either by military spending or
public welfare — the pressure grows to be (in fact, if not in name) a
one-party state. Neither capitalism or socialism requires democracy.
To
the extent money is treated as “speech” it subverts the voices of the
citizens of the Republic. Money is not speech: money is a bullhorn. And
while money can’t buy an election (see Bloomberg), it can drown out
alternatives. The treatment of money as speech, as taken to its
apotheosis in Citizen’s United and McCutcheon means the death of representative democracy. It took a Civil War to overturn the Dred Scott
decision. Let’s hope it doesn’t take anything like that to reverse our
more recent mistakes. But until these decisions are reversed, there is a
structural problem lying at the heart of the Republic.
A
related problem was one anticipated by the anti-federalists, and their
proposed solution remains open for ratification as an amendment to the
US Constitution. Although the first ten amendments are now known as the
“Bill of Rights,” there were in fact twelve amendments proposed. The
first two were rejected, largely because they blocked the personal power
and privileges of the legislators themselves. The second proposal was
finally ratified by the states in 1992, and is now known as the 27th
Amendment:
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened
In
other words, if Congress votes itself a pay raise, all of the members
of the House (and one-third of the Senate) must face reelection before
that raise will go into effect. If members of the Congress are seen as
getting too greedy, they can be voted out of office before they get
their raise.
The first proposal, now commonly known as the “Congressional Apportionment Amendment” remains open for ratification. Its effect on the structure of the government of the United States would be profound. The operative clause that applies once it becomes law is
there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
Today
the House of Representatives is capped by law at 430 Representatives.
Under the new/old rule, given the current population of the United
States, the House of Representatives would have more than six thousand!
Consider
some of the consequences. As the number of Congressional districts
increases, the size of each district — in land area and in population —
declines. Each citizen finds it easier to contact and influence his
Congressperson, and easier to run for Federal office herself. It is more
difficult for a very wealthy person (or organization) to buy a
sufficient number of elections to affect policy (especially if there are
also limits to corporate and PAC spending). We would be closer to the
ideal of one person-one vote. As the number of members of the Electoral
College is related to the size of the House plus the Senate, even if the
College can’t be abolished its results would be far more likely to
reflect the popular vote. There would be no repeat of the presidential
elections of 2000 and 2016.
The
current number of Representatives is set by an Act of Congress, and
with each census the members of the House grow farther apart from their
supposed constituents. Given that most citizen’s votes would be worth
more after the ratification of the proposed amendment, in terms of their
proportional weight in the selection of Representatives, there would be
more reason for citizens to get involved in local issues and elections.
To
be sure, a 6500 member House would present difficulties for
administration and negotiation, but today’s technology would make it
easier to operate than it was to run the legislature when Congress had
to always meet face-to-face and the transportation of people and
information was limited to the speed of a horse. It would also open up
more opportunities for private negotiations between members, more
subcommittees, and more specialization by members on issues of
importance to themselves and their constituents. Loyalties to
constituents would be more influential than loyalties to Parties.
Finally, as staff would grow to work with the larger, decentralized,
body they would also be more available to monitor and influence the
enormous bureaucratic apparatus of the Executive Branch. The Legislative
Branch would have the resources it needs to better balance the
Executive, and less need to make fundraising more important policy and
constitutent service.
Maybe
we should thank Trump. His stress test identifies real problems, and
forces us to consider needs that would otherwise be ignored. His years
in office are highlighting flaws in the American financial system, the
electoral system, and the structure of American government. Maybe we
should thank him for the unintentioned gift of his bad example — but I
won’t.
Like
COVID-19, the Trump presidency is a stress test. It’s unpleasant. It’s
dangerous. It’s potentially deadly. But what’s important is what we
learn from it and what we do about it. If we withdraw, we learn nothing.
If we are stampeded, we may institutionalize changes that make things
worse. But if we take this as an opportunity — to raise awareness, to
mobilize emotion, to consider options, and to make useful changes —
these are tragedies we can learn from. These are opportunities to do
better. To be better. To be ready to better anticipate and deal with
whatever is the next disaster to come along.