Afterword

 

Elephants in the Sky

Let me finish with a personal note. For years, a couple things have bothered me about American politics. This in depth essay about saving America has finally cleared them up for me. I hope by writing this afterword that others might share in this clarity.

The thing that has bothered me so much is the seemingly impregnable wall of apathy most folks erect around themselves regarding politics. Most folks refuse to care about any of it. Then the other puzzlement has been that those who will engage in political discussion seem to be waging war against some kind of invisible elephants in the sky, terribly impassioned about issues that have almost no relation to their lived lives or that can't really be changed.

In the course of researching this essay, I came across the writings of Walter Lippmann. He seems to have been the intellectual driving force behind the sentiment that governing had become so complex by the early 20^th Century that we had to hand the real business of governing over to experts. In his “Preface to Politics,” (1914) he bemoans the “disinterest” (apathy) of the public in politics, and then takes it as his task to find a way to define and categorize society in a way that makes the situation clear to the masses. He set out to re-imagine how they might deal with “democracy” and hence how they could be encouraged to once again engage in politics.

By 1922, in his most famous book, “Public Opinion,” he notes that the masses think politically, not in logic or words, but in pictures in their minds. He then redoubles his efforts to find that perfect way to categorize, make mental pictures of, the whole of society so as to make sense of democracy to the uninformed, yet voting, public. Later, in 1925, he despairs of the whole effort, concluding his least popular book “The Phantom Public,” with a final statement referring to self interested public opinion. Speaking of the public he writes;

“For it is the pursuit of their special affairs that they are most interested in. It is by the private labors of individuals that life is enhanced. I set no great store on what can be done by public opinion and the action of masses”

“I have no legislative program to offer, no new institutions to propose. There are, I believe, immense confusions in the current theory of democracy which frustrate and pervert its actions.....It is enough if with Bentham we know that 'the perplexity of ambiguous discourse. . . distracts and eludes the apprehension, stimulates and inflames the passions'.”

This sounds like an echo of what despotism might look like in a “democracy” from DeToqueville, cited earlier, where he warned us of becoming timid, self absorbed and industrious animals, with the government as shepherd. Unfortunately, Mr. Lippmann, born into an arrogant generation who thought itself smugly superior to previous generations, probably did not set much store by DeToqueville, if he had even read him. Certainly, Mr. Lippmann dismissed the US Constitution as an obsolete political relic which was of no real use to social thinkers of the nineteen teens and twenties.

Far worse, Lippmann seemed completely unaware of the advent of corporate personhood, and so when he did take note of the rise of trusts and monopolies, he seemed to approve of them as just a natural development of a free market which no one had thought of trying before. So “good for the Robber Barons,” seemed to be his thought, even though he did devote his early years to resisting the onset of the servile state such corporate dominance presaged.

Thus Walter Lippmann (make no mistake he was an intellectual of the first order) missed the real narrative. He did not recognize how much the basic nature of our republic had been perverted by the advent of corporate personhood, how it had decimated the forms of our democratic republic. By first obviating local government, and then centralizing those powers, the basic driving dynamic of democracy had been extinguished. He spent his life futilely trying to revive democratic thinking within that ruined, centralized husk of a dead democracy.

The best metaphor to explain the defect in this centrally planned politics is to resort to a useful analysis that was presented in the 1990's criticizing centrally planned economies. In a centrally planned economy, the analysis goes, one person, or more likely one central government agency with its many bureaucrats, has to make all the decisions about where to send supplies, how to manufacture goods, how to transport them, how to provide enough workers, and maintain them, what goods must cost to keep the whole project going, and all the other decisions that must be made to keep an economy functioning.

In a free market those decisions, and many more like them, are made by innumerable people; CEO's, managers, shift foremen, workers and customers. No one on high has to set a price, the free market does that. Customers decide what they will and won't buy, and managers order more of what is in demand and set prices based on what will get folks to buy their products. Thus the amount of human brain power given over to the issues of production, human resources, transport and marketing is far greater in a market economy, and the results are, for that reason, far more efficient and desirable.

When a new way to build the product is invented, the change can be made on the spot, and doesn't have to go through a stilted bureaucratic process to get approval. When a factory runs out of a material needed for the manufacture of its' products, the manager gets on the phone and locates another supplier, and thus ensures little or no interruption to production. In a centrally planned economy, such modifications and resupplies can take much longer, especially if the official who made the original plan misjudged, and might suffer negative repercussions if the mistake is found out.

In other words, a free market acts in an organic, unplanned, supple and flexible way, whereas that centralized planning approach is stiff, calcified, slow, and probably burdened by (corrupt) political influence. In the real world, the free market approach out competes the planned market approach by such a large margin that it has changed the course of modern nation state relations. Almost no purely centrally planned economies are still in operation..

Which brings us back to politics. With the centralized, top down approach that Lippmann,(and Woodrow Wilson, and even the esteemed William Allen White) called for, and that we have been stuck with ever since, politics is divorced from the real lived experience of most people. Therefore, apathy is a reasonable political stance. As Detoqueville said in another place, patriotism does not long endure in a conquered country. Most people don't then see where their political involvement might have any real impact on their lives. Nor do they see where they can do much when the big national issues of politics do impact their lives.

Moreover, for those who stubbornly insist that they should have some input in the political life of the nation, most have bought into, or been indoctrinated into, the categories of thinking that Lippmann and those thinkers and journalists who came in his wake generated to conceptualize how a modern democracy must work. These are large scale analyses of human nature, stilted opinions formed regarding millions of strangers. These fantasies and mental images, which the experts rely on, and which have little or no connection to real lived lives, are grabbed up by little people desperate to have some influence over events.. In other words, many of those little people given over to this kind of political thinking come to see themselves as mental giants, striding over the planet, engaging in battle with equally giant invisible elephants. It doesn't get much done, but it does feel nice to pretend to that kind of Olympian, demigod like significance.

Lippmann even bemoaned the fact that the elites he rubbed shoulders with were burdened with this artificial analysis, and had no way of knowing, or incorporating information about the real life experience of the people for whom the decisions were being made. But he could not imagine how such information could be acquired or made useful.

The solution, just like in the free market solution, is to return the business of democracy to the people in their local communities. Then we, as citizens; as individuals, teachers, parents, policemen, city council members and mayors, could recover that more intimate, person to person, flexible, supple, responsive and dare we dream it, organic way of running our democracy. Which, incidentally, every one of the great thinkers told us could only be done well by keeping it at that local level. We might end up thinking about, and working with politics a lot more than we do today. In fact, just as in the case of free versus planned economics, this local political structure will work much better precisely because it will engage so much more human intelligence than the elitist central government model.

It can be analogized by considering a centipede, an insect with a hundred legs. If that bug must control each leg with its' conscious mind, it will stumble and fall all the time. If, however, that central brain gives over the function of the legs to each individual leg, assuming it knows for itself what to do, then the whole creature can move with amazing speed. That is how decentralizing both economics and politics will help us.

With this investigation I have come to realize why so many of my fellow citizens are either passionately apathetic, or given to fighting about invisible elephants in the sky. It is because we have lost our politics of real democracy. It will not be recovered by taking any path recommended by Walter Lippmann, or any other modern elitist “thinker.” Rather, a healthy democratic consciousness can be recovered only by returning to the decentralized architecture of government laid out in this essay, a constitutionally empowered and defined structure of Local Community Moral Self Government.