TIME TO UNWIND

Scrutinizing the world-wide assault on democratic principles, the relative inactivity in our Congress, or periods of ignorance displayed by representatives of significant segments of the population, can be intense, sometimes emotional and often challenging. Every once in a while all of us need to take some time to unwind from it all, and focus on less contentious, less controversial debating points quarreling about what bothers us. For me, one of the ways to do this is by reviewing random words of wisdom expressed by others who struggled to communicate their insights for communal consumption. Some of these are profound, some irreverent, and others just plain funny. I have made a habit of collecting these over the years as I come across them, and decided to share some in this column. Citations are added when I have them. Be inspired, or simply enjoy! - "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." (Bernard Baruch). - "If you don't like me: remember - it's mind over matter. I don't mind, and you don't matter." - "A man never steps so tall as when he stoops to help a boy." - "May those who love us, love us. And those who don't, may God turn their hearts. And if He doesn't turn their hearts, may He turn their ankles so we'll know them by their limping." (Old Irish proverb). - "Human behavioral traits are shaped by evolution and passed along genetically." (Ed Wilson - "Sociobiology") - "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." (Daniel Kahneman -"Thinking Fast and Slow") - "Don't make enemies by accident." - "Don't bother to hate what you think is contemptible." - "It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." (Mark Twain). - "If only closed minds came with closed mouths." - "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog." (Twain) - "Life is a challenge. Smile when you still have teeth." - "It is not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." (Henry David Thoreau). - "Never look back unless you are planning to go that way." (Thoreau) - "Not all who wonder are lost." - "Don't believe everything you think." - "A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is defeated when he quits." (Richard Nixon). - "When you are dead in the water, you need to rock the boat." (TW). - "Position determines perspective." - "If you have to eat a frog, do it the first thing in the morning." (Twain). - "Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance." - "You were born an original. Don't die a copy." - "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." - "There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book." - "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon). - "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." - "The opposite for love is not hate, it's indifference." (Elie Wiesel). - "One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic." - "Consequence is no coincidence." - "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness." - "Married men live longer but want to die more often." (old Russian proverb). - "Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company." (Twain). - "If your parents did not have any children, there is a good chance you won't have any. (Clarence Day). - "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." (Sam Goldwyn). - "I hate being bipolar - it's awesome." - "The closest thing to eternal life is a government program." (Ronald Reagan). - "Penicillin - A gift for the man who has everything." (Bumper sticker). - "Let's eat grandma. Let's eat, grandma - Commas save lives." Theo Wierdsma

TOXIC POLARIZATION OBSTRUCTS CONGRESSIONAL PRODUCTIVITY

Pernicious polarization, which divides society into mutually distrustful "Us versus Them" camps, in which political identity threatens to resemble social identity, is clogging up any attempt at compromise necessary to legislate in Congress. It is making a mockery of our political system. Hyper partisanship in Washington has evolved into a type of gridlock not seen since the run up to the Civil War in 1860. Today we can't agree on what pour problems are, much less on solutions. Even on infrastructure, there is a Democratic way to fill a pothole, and a Republican way to fill a pothole. Consequently, nothing gets done. In 1962, during John F. Kennedy's presidency, Congress passed 484 bills. In 2014, when Barack Obama was president, Congress passed 23 bills. If we are ever going to break through the effects of this polarized stagnation, we first ought to attempt to identify how and why we ended up here in the first place. The conservative 19th century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, who masterminded Germany's unification, used to express his belief that: "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable, the art of the next best." Even during autocratic times this country's "iron chancellor" recognized that compromise was at the core of the decision making process. If we don't compromise, nothing gets done and nobody wins. In today's political world, compromise has become a dirty word. We no longer compromise, we demonize. Member of opposing parties, and sometimes even rival factions within parties, no longer see their political adversaries as just opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the country. As that happens, support for democratic norms fade, and "winning" becomes everything. Politics collapses into an all-out war of "Us against Them." It's all about the next election and scoring political points. Part of the issue is that the characteristics of our political parties have shifted significantly over time. In 1994, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than Democrats. In 2014, that number had changed to 92%. In 1994, 70% of Democrats were more liberal than Republicans. In 2014, this shifted to 94%. We used to acknowledge that "moderates" governed, and that "extremists" disrupted. We now tend to elect extremists. Some other underlying complications provoking this debilitating radicalization of our political process are economic, social and systemic in nature. Today, our elections are virtually supported by unlimited amounts of money used to produce prime-time campaign ads telling us whatever we want to hear, or whatever candidates want their audiences to believe. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in the "Citizens United" case, holding essentially that corporations and other deep-pocket organizations can't be restricted in how much they can contribute to a campaign, undoubtedly assisted disproportionately to the accumulation of operating funds. Moreover, social media has provided convenient platforms for anyone to create, seldom fact-checked, sensationalist fake news to feed the frenzy with a complete lack of inhibition or restraint. And, since we are currently in the midst of "gerrymandering" season, political parties dominating their respective state governments are reapportioning congressional districts based on census data collected last year. This process can affect the future of sitting and prospective members of the House of Representatives. But the exercise has frequently resulted in parties redrawing district lines in a way that supports or advantages their existent constituency while restricting that of their political rivals. As a consequence, currently only 31 out of 435 House seats are competitive. The remainder are safe, limiting the potential for change. Ergo, the public no longer picks the politicians, the politicians pick the public. The economic downturn of the past decade, festering national security concerns, a growing identity crisis intensifying the divide between rural and urban population centers, fed by a destabilizing, unnerving rate of social change, have resulted in a perfect storm. Fear and paranoia have become the recurring refrain feeding hyper polarization. Fear has replaced facts and paranoia has taken the place of civility. Former Senator Daniel Moynihan used to admonish his colleagues that: "You are entitled to your own opinion, not to your own facts." Today many politicians and their constituents believe that they are, indeed, entitled to their own facts. The truth is what you want it to be. None of this serves to suggest that we have a patent on polarization. Democracies around the world have been under pressure from constituencies protesting the relative inefficiency of their respective governments. But, with arguable exception of Hungary, Poland and Turkey, polarization in other western democracies rarely reach the level of venom ubiquitous in our hyper partisan political environment. A lot of this emanates from our two-party electoral system. Most European democracies feature proportional representation, which effectively results in multi-party coalition governments in which polarization is much less pronounced or more diffused. If you dislike any of the political choices offered up to you, you could essentially start your own party, and if you manage to get 5% of the vote, you gain representation in Parliament, where you can state your case without demonizing others. During the past few decades, "Comparative Polarization" has become an active specialization in Political Science. While a complex subject, many academics agree that polarization is more intense in democratic systems with less proportional representation - like ours - than in systems where multiple parties vie for political power. The evidence suggests that breaking people into multiple groups, rather than two, tends to lessen animosity. The more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred. Our Constitution does not prescribe a two party political system. However, it developed this way. Intra party rivalry could ultimately dismantle this system for the benefit of all. Although this outcome might outwardly appear relatively inefficient, it could potentially bring civil discourse back to Washington D.C. However, we should not hold our collective breath for this to happen any time soon. Theo Wierdsma

WHY DO WE FAIL TO EXPORT DEMOCRACY?

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States had to enter World War I to "make the world safe for democracy." Ever since, our foreign policy has included efforts to encourage democratic developments in foreign countries. In 2004, President George W. Bush announced that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." And, more recently, President Joe Biden told world leaders at the Munich Security Conference that "we must demonstrate that democracy can still deliver for our people in this changed world." It is not much of a stretch to claim that ever since the Cold War our foreign policy establishment has used "democracy" as an export commodity, convinced that it is a substitute for violence, and, hence, a desirable objective to pursue. We favor democratic regime types because stable democracies tend to have better long-term economic growth records, and do much better in terms of protecting basic human rights. Democracies are less likely to kill vast numbers of their own citizens through famine or ill-planned acts of social engineering, because corrective information is more readily accessible, and officials can be held accountable. And even though democracies are just as likely to start wars as any other state, there is some (contested) evidence that they tend to not fight each other. On balance, many politicians believe that it would be better for most human beings if the number of democracies in the world increased. Lofty language and repetitively articulated political objectives aside, our efforts at transitioning undemocratic governments, including during our 20 year endeavor in Afghanistan, have largely failed. Political scientist Abraham Lowenthal, professor of international relations at U.S.C, stated the obvious when he concluded that "U.S. attempts to export democracy have been [unsuccessful], often counterproductive, and only occasionally positive." If we are convinced that pursuing such a policy objective should be dominant and desirable, we ought to question why we have such a poor success rate accomplishing it. The answers percolating to the surface include that these goals are largely naive, ignoring essential preconditions in target countries, and that our execution appears ill considered and even duplicitous. Critics have long recognized our ineffectiveness, lack of consistency, and a one-size-fits-all approach, while suspecting that we callously use "democracy" as justification for military intervention abroad. Over and over again we discovered that military involvement does not foster enduring regime change. The idea that the U.S. could march in, depose a despot-in-chief and his henchmen, write a new constitution, hold a few elections, and produce a stable democracy was always delusional. However, a lot of smart people bought the idea despite overwhelming evidence against it. If we are unwilling to believe that all of these are hopelessly naive, we must assume that much of the rhetoric is designed for domestic consumption. Otherwise, why would policy makers continue to attempt the same, mostly military, pursuits with a history of predictable negative outcomes, somehow expecting a different result every time? Policy wonks need to recognize that there is no quick, cheap or reliable way for outsiders to engineer a democratic transition, especially when the country in question has little or no prior experience with it and contains deep social divisions. A successful liberal democracy depends on a lot more than a written constitution and elections. To have any chance for success in another country, the prospective state needs to possess effective legal systems, have an established, broad commitment to pluralism - a system in which multiple sources of authority coexist, a decent level of income and education, and widespread confidence that political groups that lose out in a particular election have a decent chance of doing better in the future, and thus have an incentive to keep working within the system. Creating reasonably effective democracies took centuries in the West, and it was often a highly contentious, even violent process. Using force to spread democracy almost always triggers violent resistance from groups that have lost power, wealth or status in the course of democratic transition. Violence tends to empower leaders who are good at stopping the transition instead of those skilled at building institutions or promoting democratic values. Three decades after the end of the Cold War it is no longer clear that American style democracy has carried the day. Multiple studies suggest that many countries still want democracy, but not necessarily the American version. Research completed by the Eurasia Group Foundation, based on a survey of citizens in eight countries, concluded that we would be more successful if we promoted democracy around the world without the explicit American package, often delivered by our military. We should accept that each country will need to find its own path to adopt democracy. "Attraction" will prove more effective than "promotion" as a way to help the concept expand. In other words, we should lead by example. Former president Jimmy Carter put it succinctly: "The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation." Our democratic ideals are more likely emulated by others if we are widely regarded as just, prosperous, vibrant and tolerant, instead of displaying rampant inequality, the world's largest prison population, a decaying infrastructure, millions of qualified citizens excluded from voting and exhibiting one of the greatest income inequality in the developed world. Theo Wierdsma