The Next Blueprint

When constructing a new building, a great deal of thought is distilled into an architectural blueprint. The blueprint is the bridge between a vision and its tangible manifestation. Although it is relatively flimsy – often only a few sheets of paper – its power is vast because it provides the conceptual lines along which permanent and substantial structures will be laid down.

A blueprint starts the process of embedding our values into external reality. What activities do we prioritize? How sustainable will the structure be? How safe and resistant to disaster? The decisions that underpin a blueprint have lasting ramifications, since remodels and additions largely work within the constraints laid down by the original design.

Every manmade structure has a useful lifetime, ranging from a few years to several hundred and in rare cases, a few thousand. At some point, the ravages of time take their toll or the design proves inadequate for current requirements. It becomes unsafe, outdated, or unwieldy. A new design cycle is then required, beginning with a time of deep reflection and visioning that aims towards a new blueprint to serve the practical and aesthetic needs of occupants.

The reason I bring this analogy up is that I believe we are reaching the point of needing a new blueprint for both the United States and the world, one that adequately meets the environmental, political, social, and global challenges of today. The old paradigms and blueprints are failing in the face of current needs. What used to be slight cracks in our systems are threatening to create dangerous collapses.

The Constitution of the United States has served as the political blueprint for our country for 219 years. However, it was not the first blueprint. It was version two of our American blueprint, created in response to the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation that preceded it. The main problem of version one was that the central government was too weak – there was no central executive to enforce legislation and no power to raise taxes, create currencies, or enforce treaties. After an era of too much power centered in England, the states erred on the side of keeping more power local. The result was an ineffective new nation because it lacked sufficient power at the national level to address national problems.

The Framers thus embarked upon the task of creating something more thoughtful and enduring – a better blueprint that could more adequately balance power between different levels and branches of government. The Constitution emerged from intense debate and long working sessions spread over years. It drew from many lineages of thought and study of the shortcomings previous forms of government. The resulting Constitution, with the amendments that followed almost immediately, has been so wonderfully successful that it has inspired similar blueprints the world over. It is treated with great reverence, almost like a sacred text, creating a strong foundation on which to build a nation.

The Framers, though, did not necessarily intend that this document would serve as the permanent blueprint for our country. They had seen that mistakes were made with the Articles of Confederation and assumed that the Constitution itself would always remain imperfect. They thus built in mechanisms to amend the Constitution and to eventually supplant it with a new Constitution if required. Thomas Jefferson even remarked that every generation should write its own Constitution.

The main problem faced by the Articles of the Confederation was that they did not give enough power to a centralized government to solve shared problems. The problems with version two, the Constitution, have arisen more slowly since the blueprint was more thoughtfully designed. However, we now face deep, systemic threats to the foundation of American democracy. We also live in a time when some of our primary challenges are now global challenges, while the current Constitution affords almost no power to global governing structures. There are distinct parallels between the uncoordinated thirteen states in the 1780s and the uncoordinated network of nations in 2006.

As the most powerful nation on Earth, America has an increasingly essential role to play in empowering the world’s nations to act together to solve global problems. But we are saddled with an increasingly corrupt federal government, unchecked military power, and the manipulation of legislation by elites with narrow agendas.

All of that leads to my conclusion that we’re nearing the end of the useful lifespan of our current Constitution. What I believe is required is to take that wondrous document and the learnings from 219 years and forge a new blueprint that thoughtfully addresses current power dynamics, the requirement for new checks and balances, and our relationship to trans-national challenges and global structures of governance.

What if we were to convene a convention of the brightest lights of today to frame a new blueprint, one that honors what has gone before while drawing from centuries of experience and diverse sources of wisdom and insight? Perhaps such a blueprint could help guide our entire world into the next level of its evolution.

Originally published at OpEdNews.com:

Sacred America Series #16
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Towards a Strategic Political Movement

Few people would argue that our current political process is balanced and fair. Big money and special interests skew the decision-making of both major parties. Third parties that are focused on fundamental reforms of the system may inadvertently play the role of spoilers when they attempt to draw voters away from the duopoly. The way the political game is currently architected, the best we can often do is to put our energy behind the party that we believe will do a moderately better job.

This approach, though, almost guarantees that we will not see a major upgrade of the whole paradigm of politics. Neither major party has an interest in seeing the nature of the political process change in a way that threatens their base of influence. Each electoral season, they corral reform-oriented groups into voting within the duopoly by threats of how dire the situation will be if the other party assumes power. Thus we remain in the Democratic-Republican tug-of-war, which doesn’t allow for more significant forms of collective evolution. Alternatively, if we become a third-party voter, we may undermine our goals in the short term by helping the other political wing, as happened with progressives who supported Nader in 2000.

What do we do, as concerned citizens who know something much better is possible and even required for us to address current planetary challenges?

My answer is that we have to become really good at strategy. Strategy often takes a bad rap in new paradigm circles: it’s not idealistic or pure enough. Far better, purists say, to just speak our vision in a way that magnetizes the future. But strategic thinking done well entails a grounded respect for the reality of the moment. Strategy provides a pathway forward that takes into account people’s human motivations, the nature of power dynamics, and an understanding of organizations, politics, and movement-building. Strategy illuminates how vision can become reality.

Most people don’t know that Rosa Parks’ famed bus protest in Montgomery was part of a much larger strategy for the civil rights movement. She had trained at the Highlander Folk School for nonviolent change only months before her protest galvanized the movement. For those who want real evolution of the United States’ political system, we must become better at long-term strategy, or we will continue being relegated to the sidelines, either voicing torrid critiques of the “system” or waxing about idealistic visions of the future without having any real impact on power dynamics today.

Developing a strategic approach to major political change requires a number of things. First, we’ve got to be willing to believe that a major change is possible. If we’re fixated in believing the system is stuck and unfixable, it saps our energy and creativity from finding the evolutionary path forward. Instead, we can see stuck areas as opportunities – each is a point of pain that can help galvanize people to work together on creating a shift.

After we’ve opened ourselves to larger possibilities, the next step is gathering leaders or potential leaders who share a common vision of what an evolution of our political system will look like –perhaps including elements like a commitment to sustainability, reduction in the military, health care reform, instant run-off voting, clean money elections, global accords, etc. When these leaders can find enough common ground – a vision of the most essential reforms required to create the next “blueprint” – then we can create a movement guided by strategy.

Given the current duopoly’s tight reins on power and the nature of the “spoiler effect” without instant run-off voting, a precondition for such a new movement is that it cannot be located within either political party OR exist separately as a third party that runs its own candidates. It will emerge as a political force that is committed to creating a new political paradigm and willing to work with leaders across the political spectrum. Serving as an antidote to the power of special interest lobbies, it will resemble a collective interest group that is willing, just like more narrow special interest groups, to cast support behind those political leaders who are willing to advance its blueprint for a new society.

Such a political force sees everyone as a potential collaborator but is also willing to be tough with those that undermine key goals. If a particular candidate vows to back a specific reform, such as instant runoff-voting, and then backs out, such a political movement would be willing to expose this vocally and publicly, as well as fund opposing candidates in future elections. Being willing to play hardball is a form of respect for the change we’re trying to create.

An evolutionary political movement could become an influential lever to gain commitments to major reform planks from both sides of the aisle in D.C., eventually opening the door to a truly multi-party system. In order to do this, though, the evolutionary movement will require a robust infrastructure, including media, think tanks, organizing groups, technical infrastructure, PR expertise, organizers, strategists, fundraising mechanisms, and coordinated actions. It will also require a sizable base of support. However, if such a political swing force gains the support of even a few percent of the United States population and use that effectively, it could act as a major tipping force in elections from local to national.

Originally published at OpEdNews.com

Sacred America Series #14
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Wielding Godlike Powers

Political leadership involves some of the highest powers available to humans on earth: the ability to forcefully dictate what others can or can’t do, to demand money and time for the good of the collective, to wage war, and to legislate the relations between millions of people. The level of power over others is staggering.

Politics allows men and women to play with forces normally reserved for the gods, which is part of why political leaders were historically seen as divine representatives. They literally wielded godlike power over the lives of their subjects and were thus treated with reverence, even when badly abusing that power.

The founders of our country recognized the corrosive effect that godlike powers have on men and women who are not consistently operating from a godlike consciousness. Their political actions can turn to self-indulgence, inflation, and tyranny rather than service. In creating a new system of governance, America’s founders had the opportunity to conduct an experiment away from the rigid political hierarchies of Europe. In this experiment, appropriate checks were put on the godlike powers so that normal humans could create a decent and workable government even when the leaders were behaving in self-interested, power-hungry ways.

The basic structure of governance enacted by our Constitution involves the separation of power into three domains: executive, legislative, and judicial, each with checks and balances upon the others. In addition, the legislative branch was created with the checks and balances that result from two separate houses. The founders also created America as a representative democracy rather than a full democracy: leaders chosen by a majority of voters, they felt, would be more likely to make wise decisions in the service of the whole than would the average voter. The need for re-election would keep politicians more honest and accountable and ensure some degree of representing the needs of the whole.

At every level, the system was built on a recognition that we need to be protected from the distorting effects of power. The Founding Father’s structure has done a reasonably good job of protecting us from the worst political excesses and allowing for incremental evolution of the system itself. However, the power landscape has shifted in many ways that our founders could not have anticipated, which has meant that the corrosive effects of new power centers have seriously undermined the integrity of the whole.

Like a computer operating system that starts crashing when the code that runs it is no longer adequate to deal with new demands, America’s current political infrastructure has begun crashing. We will need to go through a major upgrade of our political system to adequately address the distorting effects that the new powers on our cultural landscape wield. Without such an upgrade, our self-congratulatory rhetoric about democracy will increasingly be out of sync with the truth of the moment.

We need not see this as a failure. Rather, it’s remarkable that our system was built so well as to last this long without a major overhaul. We just need to be honest that the checks and balances are no longer robust enough to deal with current realities. So what are some of these forces that the founders could not have anticipated and which are rendering our current checks and balances inadequate?

1. Size of population – When founded, our nation was between 1.5 and 2 million people, or about the population of current-day Manhattan. At that size, political representation was a more intimate process in which people could make a more accurate appraisal of someone’s integrity, wisdom, and leadership capacity. With the vast expansion of population, the number of people who are represented by each political official at the national level has ballooned. It is now rare for an average citizen to have any personal connection to their Representative or Senators. This change in scale means that only those with privileged amounts of power tend to get personal audiences with their political representatives. The result is that officials are no longer adequately connected to their base and unduly influenced by the powerful. An intermediate level of political power between constituencies and their representatives would be one strategy to mitigate this situation.
   
2. Corporations – With the rise of corporate personhood via a dubious judicial decision in the 19th century (granting them the same rights as individuals) , corporations have gained enormous money, status, and power to influence political processes. They do so with relentless self-interest. Their founding mission, after all, is to maximize the returns for their investors, which makes them predatory by design and conscious only by choice. With the advent of multi-national corporations, they are now even able to play different governments off each other. They fund large numbers of lobbyists that hover, like wasps, around Washington politics. This power base did not exist in 1789 and thus our current system does not adequately address its distorting influences.
   
3. Mass media – Our mass media have become extremely talented at shaping public consciousness through visual imagery, music, soundbites, and rhetoric. The advertising industry is, at the root, a science of mind control. This science of mind control can now be used with unprecedented effect upon viewers, who often take delight in being controlled. The mass media become politically problematic when their amplified power becomes consolidated under fewer corporate umbrellas. The fewer people who make decisions about how the media is portraying public events, the more potentially distorted a picture they can paint. The barriers to entry for independent mass media ensure that the average American gets less truly independent coverage each year, although this is being offset somewhat now by the Internet.
   
4. Defense distorions – The speed and devastating impact with which war can now be waged reduces the time available for considered decision-making . The specter of nuclear warfare and terrorism chills progressives and conservatives alike. Advances in weaponry have produced an escalation of fear, which translates into an inflated war-making and defense apparatus. The sheer size of our military and the corporations that profit could not have been anticipated by our Founding Fathers. This exacerbates the glaring problem of the combination of the role of President and Commander-in-Chief into one role. The consolidation of those two powers have ensured that the war-making function of our chief executive is prone to misuse. In the case of Bush, one way we can see him is as someone better designed to be a Commander-in-Chief than a President. As the saying goes, if we only have a hammer, we see nothing but nails. As a warrior, Bush primarily sees a world of enemies. And he thus may end up as the only President in history to wage three wars, if the current speculation on US military action versus Iran proves correct. The combination of two vast powers under one job description means that the distortions brought about by an inflated military sector becomes exaggerated and the President plays a more hypermasculine role than should be the case.
   
5. The rise of shadow government – While leaving office, President Eisenhower warned of the emergence of an unaccountable and powerful force in the governance of the United States – a mixture of covert intelligence groups and the military-industrial complex, popularly known as black-budget operations. The movie JFK discussed this “shadow” government, which has often been implicated in JFK’s assassination and the darker aspects of our foreign policy, including overthrowing foreign politicians not aligned with our economic interests. The threads of this shadow government are difficult to untangle, from Cold War covert task forces to gun running by the CIA to secretive societies. Whatever the actual details, the truth is that this “shadow government” has an enormous influence on our elected government, largely out of view of the public. The secrecy with which these forces operate amplify the naturally corrosive effects of power.
   
6. Non-verifiable electronic voting - As long as elections have been held, politicians and the people who support them have been tempted to cheat – and often do. The intoxicating drug of power is often sought at any price. That’s why the recent rise in non-verifiable electronic voting, combined with the forces ennumerated above, create the most immediate threat to American democracy. Unlike citizens of other countries, Americans seems to be particularly naïve about the tendency to use whatever means is necessary to “win” elections, including stealing them. Both the 2000 and 2004 elections have abundant, demonstrable evidence of fraud. The corporations that wield increasing power in the process, such as Diebold, are deeply suspect. Without the checks and balances that come with a paper trail, this situation will only worsen.

All of these changes have resulted in an increasing mismatch between the checks and balances that were created 230 years ago and the expanded sources of power now seeking to manipulate our system of governance. Simply put, today’s powerhouses have overrun the political defenses erected by our Founding Fathers. The end result, if we are not able to arrest the process and create a true political upgrade that integrates all the reflective wisdom earned in the last two centuries, will be that America’s political operating system will crash into a more archaic form.

Do we have the courage to admit the truth of the situation and the will to undertake the work of reform at all levels? That’s the challenge set before the American people in the coming years.

Originally published at OpEdNews.com:


Sacred America Series #13
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