PJ Media’s Roger L. Simon was waiting for jury duty and found the waiting room a mix of 1984 and A Brave New World which he then decided was somehow analogous to contemporary America.
He went on to philosophize on that topic:
I find the situation to be too bleak even to be angry at him [Chris Matthews]. Or at Barack Obama who appears to alternate between campaigning and vacationing while the citizens he governs sit on their couches imbibing whatever self-administered soma is a hand. What else do they have to do?
His presidency has been unquestionably the least successful of my lifetime. Its only accomplishment is a healthcare plan that nobody understands let alone wants. Americans are polarized as never before. Mass unemployment has become the new normal.
Back when I was a child of the sixties, revolution appealed to me (a little bit anyway — though not as much as Robert Redford, evidently). It seemed at the time it might be good to shake things up. Now — in my sixties — I’m rather less interested in government overthrow.
Ironically, America appears to need some kind of revolution now, much more than it did back then. But not of the kind envisioned by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin or even Bill Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn. More the type envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. After all, he was the man who said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. ”
I’m not quite ready to take Jefferson literally. I’m not even sure he took himself that way. But I do know the country I live in now is not the one in which I grew up.
In honesty, my first reaction was that Simon was allowing his surrounding to overly influence his mood. After all, a room full of persons taken from their daily lives to sit around to see if they have to serve on a jury is hardly The Happiest Place on Earth, yes? Indeed, it is, pretty much by definition, a dour and unhappy place. As such, making extrapolations about the health and well being of America seems an unwise choice when in such an environment. (This is advice I, myself, am going to have to take into personal consideration at the end of the month).
Beyond the questioning of the wisdom of connecting such a place with America writ large, my second (and stronger) reaction is that he provides here a mélange of problematic observations. There are some factual observations that strike me as simply wrong (or, at least, radically incomplete), but there is also a profound level of misunderstanding (willful, perhaps) about the way American government functions (although it is an extremely common malady).
Now, no doubt, many readers will insist on making the following into some sort of Rep. v. Dem., Con. v. Lib analysis. To me, it isn’t–at least in the sense that my goal is not to defend President Obama, or to join in an argument that sees one side as the handmaiden of the apocalypse while the other is the midwife of salvation. However, I will also say, by the way, that I am not interested in “both sides do it” false equivalencies. Rather, I find Simon’s musings to be problematic on a number of levels that I see constantly replicated throughout the commentariat (and in the political class in general). I have long argued in my academic work that one cannot find a solution until one has adequately diagnosed the problem. A major problem with most commentary is that it wholly misdiagnoses the problem.
BTW, this post is not as seamless and direct as I would like (mostly because Simon’s opining above is rather all over the place). It is, if anything, long and begs for even more elaboration, but so it goes.
So, first some specific responses and then a few words on what I think is a key issue.
Some observations generated by the above quote:
1. “His presidency has been unquestionably the least successful of my lifetime.” It is typically problematic to make such assessments in the middle of an administration, but it is also true that in historic terms, and like it or not, the PPACA is a significant piece of legislation. Beyond, however, a legislative report card, I find this observation curious because it makes a direct connection between the presidency and the health of the nation, as well as a direct connection between government policy and economic vitality. Yet this observation comes from a commentator who tends to eschew the role of government. Surely if government is the problem, then an ineffective government is a good thing, yes?
Beyond that, I am also struck by the historical context of his comment: Simon is older than I, but our lifetimes both include Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Bush 43. One can, of course, making varying arguments about what constitute success and failure in the White House, but is a president who had to resign due to scandal really more successful than Obama? Further, it isn’t as if the early 70s were the Golden Era of the US economy. President Carter had any number of issues with his administration, and really, if one is going to hang the after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis on the president who came to office in the middle of it, one kind of has to give some credit for all the fun to the president who was in office at the time, yes? And Bush does have to take some credit for the lengthy, costly involvements of the US in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq. There are other issues as well, but surely it doesn’t take much to raise serious questions about the successfulness of the Bush administration, yes?
2. “Americans are polarized as never before.” The thing is, while this is largely correct, i.e., that polarization is high, the degree to which is can be linked to the president is dubious both in terms of causality and historical trends. The current polarization started with the realignment in the mid-1990s. (See, for example, this Pew Research study: Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years: Trends in American Values: 1987-2012).
3. “Mass unemployment has become the new normal.” It may well be that have to adjust to a new normal in terms of what we, as a country, find to be normal levels of unemployment. Of course, since what we want is an unemployment rate around 5% and what we have now is 7.6%, I am not sure that we are talking as radical a change, importantly though it may be, as Simon suggests (at least when making Brave New World allusions and suggesting we may all need to be drugged to get through the horror or it all).
More importantly, I would note the following:
A. We recently suffered the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression. It takes a while to recover from that, and the trend line is at least in the right direction, even if the slope of the line is far more gradual than we would like.
Note the following from Calculated Risk:
And yes, I know that the U6 rate is higher (but then again, the U6 rate is always higher because it measures something different that the standard unemployment rate). The basic trend, however, is similar. But yes, th gap is larger. This does speak, by the way, to the depth and seriousness of the crisis in question.
(Source: Macrotrends).
B. From a policy-perspective, we have been shedding government jobs during this period in the name of fiscally responsibility. This has contributed to the slow rate of job recovery.
Writing in March, Floyd Norris noted:
For the 31st consecutive month, the number of government jobs in February was less than it had been a year earlier. There is an employment recovery, but it is confined to the private sector.
The only comparable period in government data, which goes back to 1939, came after World War II, when the government was shrinking for a very good reason. The year-over-year string of declines ended in December 1947 at 30 months. So we have a new record here — a record being set largely because governments, particularly local ones, have been squeezed by a dearth of tax revenues. Year-over-year jobs have been down for 44 consecutive months in local governments.
For the most recent 12 months, private sector employment is up 1.9 percent. Government employment is down 0.5 percent.
These facts have to be taken into consideration when assessing the unemployment numbers.
4. “But I do know the country I live in now is not the one in which I grew up.” This type of things comes up from time to time (if not pretty frequently), but I am really not sure what it is exactly supposed to mean. One would expect that the country is always changing, to one degree or another, and that if the country was, in fact, exactly the same as it was five or so decades ago, that this would be a sign of stagnation. This would be bad, yes? Yes, life is different in the 2010s than it was in the 1950s. On balance, I would think that life is better nor than then (it certainly is for blacks and women, to name two groups).
A Bottom Line Issue
Fundamentally the thing that bothers me about these types of observations, beyond whatever specifics one can argue over, in that they assume massive powers in the hands of the president. The problem is: the president is not all-powerful and should not be considered a magic genie or the devil incarnate. This is especially true when we focus on domestic policy.
Separation of powers means just that: the powers to make public policy are separated and segmented. Moreover, in a system of almost total separation of legislative and executive powers into distinct institutions that have little power over one another means that one can never lay the main credit or responsibility over domestic policy outcomes at the feet of a given president. Blame increases or decreases, by the way, within the degree to which a given president gets, or does not get, what he seeks legislatively (as well in foreign policy decisions, where the president has considerable leeway).
We supposedly worship at the feet of the Framers and yet we refuse to acknowledge how the constitutional order they constructed works: the Congress makes the laws and sets the budget. Further, the power to accomplish this feat was divided, equally,* between two halves of the Congress. Then, rules and traditions in one of those chambers, the Senate, empowers the minority over the majority. In short: this is a system that makes policy-making extremely difficult. And it is, as my co-authors** and I note in out forthcoming book, A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Comparison (under contract with Yale University Press),**** a fairly rare institutional configuration. Indeed, the overall institutional feature of separation of powers and federalism are shared only with, in our data pool, with Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. (None of which elect office-holders the way we do, btw).
This is, by the way, where Simon’s reflections on change are relevant:
Ironically, America appears to need some kind of revolution now, much more than it did back then. But not of the kind envisioned by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin or even Bill Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn. More the type envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. After all, he was the man who said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. ”
I’m not quite ready to take Jefferson literally. I’m not even sure he took himself that way.
To start with an aside: I think Jefferson did, actually, take it that way at the time (Jefferson had quite the radical idealist streak—not to mention a bit of self-delusion, given that regardless of his role in the American Revolution, he was a landed aristrocrat in all but title).
To the main point: we don’t need violent revolution, nor is one likely (and yes, I know Simon is not advocating for one). We do, however, need to take a serious account of out governing institutions. We have, without a doubt, highly uncompetitive congressional elections (yes, from gerrymandering, but more from the very nature of our system) and therefore a nonresponsive legislative branch. Further, we have a legislative process that makes actual legislating incredibly difficult, which means that governing is incredibly difficult.
This post is already crazy-long, so I will stop here and with the following observation: Simon’s argument is predicated heavily on the notion that politicians (e.g., Obama) are at fault (and they, no doubt, deserve some blame). However, one of the key arguments of the Framers (especially Madison in Federalist 51) was that we cannot rely on the goodness or politicians to fix government (“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”), but rather that we need to construct institutions that would help politicians govern better. If we are having serious governance problems (and we are), then the logic of Madison should lead us not to simply blame the politicians, but make us considered the possibility that the institutions in which they operate are also at fault. However, we are not having such a conversation.
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*Yes, the House has the power to initiate money bills, but that does not change the basic point: the two chambers are co-equal in terms of legislation. The Senate has more sway, in many ways, since it is easier to bottle up legislative initiatives in that chamber.
**Matthew Shugart, Arend Lijphart, and Bernard Grofman.
***Draft chapters can be viewed here until we submit the final manuscript early this summer..
