Through a Parliamentary Lens

By no means every four years but every now and ten, I can’t help but to ponder what politics might be like in the United States if we had a parliamentary democracy. In such a system the de facto “executive” is the Prime Minister. Technically only parties compete, not individuals. The leader of the party with the majority of votes becomes Prime Minister—and if no majority is achieved by any party, a coalition government is formed from two or more parties; the leader of the largest piece becomes PM.

Curious that. The public does not directly vote for the Leader but the leader has real power. In the United States, the Leader is a major celebrity by definition but may have no genuine power to carry out his or her agenda—if House or Senate are in opposition hands.

Looked at through a Parliamentary Lens, we now have five parties contending for rule in the United States: The Democratic Party (DP) headed by Hilary Clinton, the Sanders Progressive Party (SPP) led by Bernie Sanders, the Great Donald Party (GDP) lead by Donald Trump, the Grand Old Party (GOP) led by Paul Ryan, and the Libertarian Party (LP) headed by Johnson Riding. There is also the Green Party, but (as best I can determine) it has no official leader to assume that ultimate title of Commander in Chief.

Now if, instead of electing Electors in November we were electing members of parliament (MPs), the likely outcome would be the following (in order of number of seats won):

DP

SPP or GDP

GOP

LP

None would have an absolute majority. If the SPP came in second, DP could easily form a Coalition Government with Bernie Sanders naming secretaries for Treasury, Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services and Hilary Clinton selecting the secretaries of the other major departments. If Donald’s GDP won second place, the Democrats would still rule by aligning with SPP. Not any year, of course, but certainly this year. This year the GOP under Ryan would find it almost impossible to bring about an effective coalition with Donald GDP. Donald doesn’t do coalitions.

This outcome would be neat because, for the next six years or so the DP-SPP coalition would have absolute power to legislate its program—and therefore try out its policies in the actual world. Things would then seem very strange indeed. We’d get genuine change instead of institutionalized paralysis which is out current fate.

Ideological Shift

An interesting article in The American Conservative (Nov/Dec 2014), titled “‘Duck Dynasty’ vs Dante,” reminded me again that no really decent statistics on politics are available to the general public. Economic statistics are available; but you have to pay real dollars for political statistics. Therefore it is difficult to check, using numbers, opinions, as those in this article, that the shift in ideology in the United States represents a movement from urban to rural. I always marvel at the detail that CNN, for instance is able to show in its coverage. Such data must cost a ton of money—but the people’s right to know does not extend to a right easily to analyze those numbers.

Half-heartedly looking for some, I found at least a few numbers looking backward provided by the Brookings Institution (link). These show the shift in dominance of the House and Senate, between 1991 and 2013—thus excluding the results of the most recent election—by regions of the country.  Here is the tabulation:

Democratic Strength, in Percent, in House and Senate, in 1991 and 2013
	House		Senate
	1991-1992	2013-2014	1991-1992	2013-2014
	102nd	103rd	102nd	103rd
South	66.4	29.0	68.2	27.3
Border	67.4	36.6	60.0	50.0
New England	66.7	100.0	58.3	66.6
Mid-Atlantic	56.9	60.3	50.0	90.0
Midwest	61.2	38.4	70.0	60.0
Plains	54.2	33.3	58.3	41.7
Rocky Mountains	45.8	41.9	37.5	43.8
Pacific	60.6	70.4	40.0	90.0
Democratic regions	8	3	5	4

This tabulation still identifies the border states as a separate region. They are Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Delaware. Note the dominance of the Democrats in the 1991-1992 Congress (8 of 8 regions) and near dominance in the Senate (5 of 8 regions). Twenty-three years later, the dominance has swung to the other side—but four regions are still hanging on to the Democratic view of things. I show them in bold type.

I’ll look some more. One of the great puzzles, for Brigitte and me, is this general trend. People are getting poorer—and more Republican. Something’s oddly askew. Perhaps it is those gerrymandered districts. Or could it all be just Fox News?

The Court’s Logic on Campaign Contributions

In the case of McCutchem et al vs Federal Election Commission, a case decided last Wednesday, the Supreme Court, voting 5-4, decided that upper limits to contributions violate the Constitution’s First Amendment.

Let’s look at the limits first. Here I quote from the McCutchem decision’s summary (link):

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA), as amended by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), imposes two types of limits on campaign contributions. Base limits restrict how much money a donor may contribute to a particular candidate or committee while aggregate limits restrict how much money a donor may contribute in total to all candidates or committees.

Two limits are involved here, base and aggregate or cap. The base specifies the maximum that may be contributed by an individual to a candidate or a political committee in every two-year election cycle:

Note here that contributions to candidates are per election; thus if the candidate runs in a primary and then, having won it, runs for office, he/she can receive a total of $5,200. Note further that if money given to a committee is “earmarked” by the donor for a candidate, the amount earmarked affects the total that may be given to the candidate directly. The second cap applies to all party committees thus making the absolute aggregate $123,200. Note last that McCutchem does not address super PACs made possible by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; these may have unlimited donations but must spend their money without reference to candidates or parties.

Shaun McCutchem et al sued the Government and claimed that the aggregate violated the First Amendment by limiting McCutchem’s free expression as guaranteed by that amendment. He accepted the base as legitimate. This distinction is important because the Court constrained itself to deal only with the constitutionality of the aggregate, and did not address the constitutionality of the base. The court’s argument, however, declaring the imposition of an aggregate unconstitutional would also at least appear to invalidate the imposition of a base. It was simply that the Court did not address the base. Not surprisingly, McCutchem is now viewed in the media as handwriting on the wall. Next time around, someone will sue attacking the base. The court will then, presumably, lift the last limitation on campaign contributions using exactly the same arguments it used to remove the aggregate.

The distinction here is important, further, because the Government (as Federal Election Commission), regards both the base and the aggregate as functional aspects of the same object, thus to keep election contributions from corrupting politics. Thus if you remove one of the limits, you weaken if not destroy the outcome.

The Court’s logic here is that the only recognized form of corruption, in its view, is what it calls making quid pro quo contributions. Quid pro quos involve the donor explicitly stating or unambiguously signaling that it expects a certain action on the part of the recipient if the candidate is elected. A donor who only hopes for “access” or “influence” is not deemed to engage in corruption according to the logic of the Court.

The Court’s view of the role of money is expressed in the following (highlights are mine):

The First Amendment “is designed and intended to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion, putting the decision as to what views shall be voiced largely into the hands of each of us, . . . in the belief that no other approach would comport with the premise of individual dignity and choice upon which our political system rests.” Cohen v. California, 403 U. S. 15, 24 (1971). As relevant here, the First Amendment safe­guards an individual’s right to participate in the public debate through political expression and political associa­tion. See Buckley, 424 U. S., at 15. When an individual contributes money to a candidate, he exercises both of those rights: The contribution “serves as a general expres­sion of support for the candidate and his views” and “serves to affiliate a person with a candidate.” Id., at 21–22. Those First Amendment rights are important regardless whether the individual is, on the one hand, a “lone pam­phleteer[ ] or street corner orator[ ] in the Tom Paine mold,” or is, on the other, someone who spends “substantial amounts of money in order to communicate [his] political ideas through sophisticated” means.

The above suggests that any limitation of this self-expression through the medium of contributions is contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment (which only speaks of “freedom of speech” and “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”). If a limitation of the aggregate is anti-constitutional then so must be setting base limits.

Wait for the next case. In due time money will flow freely—and the quid pro quo will simply be understood. As if it isn’t already…

For Christie’s Sake!!

It strikes me as quite implausible to imagine that people delayed an hour or more because a bridge is closed would reason as follows:  “This must be my Mayor’s fault, a Democrat, who failed to endorse my Governor, a Republican. And this is what he gets. Therefore I will not ever vote for my Mayor again.” If traffic delays produced such thought, we would have recall elections all over the country every month, and nothing would get done. Come to think of it, nothing is betting done anyway.

Here is a popular Governor. His chances to run for president are now totally ruined? I’m made to think so by a press possessing the brain-size of sharks. (We learned yesterday that sharks have quite minute brains.) In 2016, yet. When I let my mind roam over attractive candidates for president, Christie does come to mind, along with Jerry Brown of California—and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With a Democratic Congress behind her, Hillary Clinton, seems to me, would also make a formidable president, but that proviso makes such an outcome unlikely. Furthermore, while certainly a wild man, but in an attractive way, Christie might just be taken at his word. He did not cause that traffic jam.

Shaking my head, moving my hands wildly. The New York Times again tells me that our Visa Card is unresponsive. We may be denied such news in the future unless we act with alacrity. Might be a good idea to let the paper lapse…

Hired Help

News comes this morning that the House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a budget that will be good enough until September 2015. So we were told by two papers that reach this house, the one with the lower-case h. Is that the end of the fiscal meltdown crisis? Well, the vote is still ahead.

Just yesterday Brigitte wrote as follows in one of her notebooks; she keeps up several, each on a different major aspect of our lives:

I have become more and more aware of how speculation is the major content of news reports:  “should, may/might, plans, expects, soon, near, suggests, etc.” are operative words. Those definitive words “is/are, will, etc.” are used only in reports of little if any impact on any real action, rules, and described facts!

If House members and senators actually bless this agreement soon, we will be able to say that the hired help has finally gotten around to doing its job.

Yes, the paradox of democratic government. We the People hire the people we hope will govern us. But democracy is either unnatural or Janus-faced. Those hired in this way cannot help but think that they are now our masters—and free to spend their time quarreling with one another.

Truth  to tell, the news caught me by surprise. I made what might have been a very costly error recently. I bought a laptop (called “Tyke” hereabouts). Getting it up and running right has cost lots of time, money, and stress—enough so that all those mountain-sized public problems had entirely disappeared from my view. This is the first post composed on Tyke—whom I am constantly having to remind that it is the servant and I am (at least titularly) its Lord and Master.

Sequester Day

What was the last crisis all about—and when was it exactly? Quickly now, spit it out. When was the last Winterstorm Warning? Give me the date. This morning, asking the first question, I suddenly had a total lapse of memory. That may be because of my age—or because we get very used to people crying wolf—and can’t remember what color the wolf was last time. I had to search around for it. Ah, yes. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. Passed January 2, 2013. In which, assaulting our sense of language, payroll tax cuts were rolled back, no doubt to the relief of the working masses, and tax rates were nudged up for the uppermost layers. Now it comes to me. That was the Fiscal Cliff!

Today is Sequester Day. It was scheduled, originally—in the Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted August 2, 2011—to take effect January 1, 2013, but, to our great “relief” it was postponed by the above-mentioned Taxpayer Relief Act to March 1, 2013.

Now, today, a big meeting looms at the White House in course of which, possibly, a path will be paved to Sequester Lite, and the next crisis, at present due, roughly, on April 1st, will come into better focus. No name has been established yet, but that’ll come soon. Ceiling Crash II? Stop Government Day II? We’ve had such movable feasts before, in the past, hence my use of the Roman two. In wake of today’s meeting, every congress-person, of course, will rise to speak, be given his or her two minutes, hold forth about the Ceiling Crash, pro or con, and then “yield back the balance of my time.” Those speeches alone will take us to April 1st and, having built us up for it, we shall be prepared for the festive slamming of government doors when we can Bo-No-Mo, the Bo standing for borrow, the Mo for more. And the No? Well, which part of N and O don’t you understand?

Average Rationality

If we take a large number of actions and classify them as arbitrary and as rational, and let us say that the rational exceed 50 percent, then we might say that the society in which these actions take place is, on average, rational. Supposing that one-person, one vote is a rational arrangement. Then presumably the members of the Senate are rationally elected—assuming that voter fraud is minor and largely the same percentile in each party. But let us now take the case of cloture in the U.S. Senate. It requires 60 votes to invoke it. All legislation falling below that number fails, even if the majority are for it. Here is a case where rationality is compromised—and looking at the Senate, we can say that, on average, it is rational—but not really.

In today’s senate the Democrats have 51 seats, the Republicans 47. Two independents caucus with the democrats, producing a majority of 53—well short of the required 60 votes for cloture. This then means that every democrat who voted for a senator only counted as 85 percent of a voter (thus 51 / 60). And if we add those who voted for left-leaning independents, Okay, they all counted as 88 percent. That’s a real consolation, isn’t it?

Now the rationale for supermajorities is what, exactly? That in important cases, thus beyond routine, the majority may be deprived of its vote because the case is important? But importance is not something one can measure rationally. It will vary with individuals and is just a feeling. Therefore, at least in one institution of our society, we embrace average rationality. Must we stop there. Nah. Plenty of other regions of our collective life where rationality is totally ignored.

In looking up “cloture” on Online Etymology Dictionary, I came across this interesting quote from the nineteenth century:

In foreign countries the Clôture has been used notoriously to barricade up a majority against the “pestilent”" criticism of a minority, and in this country every “whip” and force is employed by the majority to re-assert its continued supremacy and to keep its ranks intact whenever attacked. How this one-sided struggle to maintain solidarity can be construed into “good for all” is inexplicable in the sense uttered. [“The clôture and the Recent Debate, a Letter to Sir J. Lubbock,” London, 1882]

Evidently cloture has “evolved.” Now it is used, in our Senate, by a minority to get its way—and the will of the people be damned. But when children are taught their Civics (unless all civics has been swallowed by Social Studies, as I expect it has), I bet the teachers do not go into conniption fits of stress trying to explain to their students how you average rationality.

Times in Upheaval?

Might it be that as we age time compresses, as it were? What for the young seems ages ago is for the old but yesterday. This observation is prompted by noticing that after each election, if you believe the sage pronunciamentos of the pundits, a New Age has just been proclaimed, and what ruled yesterday is fallen, indeed forever, as Everything’s Changed. But the last time that time reversed was just two years ago. And in two or four more years to follow, a mere eyewink for the septuagenarian, the same will happen once again. Similarly, no science fiction movie these  days ever has its heroine just save a city from a raid by nasty saucers. No. Each time the entire  Cosmos must be saved. Pundits thus seem grander, delivering on a cataclysmic Time of Reversal for all Ages—than merely noting the start of a new, ho-hum, and brief interval.

Du Calme, Du Calme

An early trip to Kroger this morning (no milk, no pudding), the lovely weather, and something in the air—was it an absence of tension?—made me reflect, as I already did in reaction to a comment on this site yesterday, that elections clear the air and always (even in those years when the other side wins) tell me that the collective, when it comes down to a decision, behaves with reasonably good sense. But then, returning, I saw that the DOW is still seeking some bottom. And it shocked me to discover the Maverick Philosopher mentioning civil war, Red v. Blue. God help us if it comes to that, he tells us, but then advises Leftists to be careful. Red-Staters, he tells us, will clean our clock—because they have the guns. Du calme, mon ami, du calme…

Elation, Despond, Sobriety

We are not, like Britain, a parliamentary democracy. There a national election decides the party that will really take power, and its leader then becomes the chief executive. With victory goes the right to rule. Not so in our case. Our presidential elections decide who, under the Constitution, “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The power, in our case, is most clearly present in the House and in the Senate, and these bodies, their members elected separately, may split it. That, in effect, is the outcome of yesterday’s elections. Republicans retain their control over the House; the Democrats still hold the Senate. But with a plurality of 53, the Democrats lack the supermajority (60) to dominate unimpeded even just in the Senate. Power is dispersed. Effective governance requires something beyond the blue and red coloration of maps.

Looking at those maps in closer resolution reveals the Two Americas John Edwards used to talk about. The red areas are from the suburbs of urban centers outward, the blue from the suburbs of urban centers inward. In terms of actual acreage covered, red is everywhere but blue, which is but spots on every map, holds a slender majority of the population. Going by last night’s vote, 62.0 million live in Blue America, at least in their convictions; 58.8 million in the Red America [these numbers will keep changing for a while.]

Now emotions dominated the politically engaged last night as, at 11:18 p.m., CNN projected President Obama’s victory. Elation and Despond. But what follows now is the sober realization that, alas, higher sorts of human qualities, like responsibility and cooperation, will be demanded of us to run this country for at least the next two years. And at about the halfway point in that brief spell, the passions will once more gather into fervent seething as Congressional elections will begin to be fought all over again. We’ve spent the last year-and-a-half, minimally, whipping up the passions and bringing them to a towering peak—to achieve the status quo ante.

Making the Right Connection

An automated call came yesterday from Clint Eastwood. Brigitte alertly grasped the evident intent. She put the phone down on an empty chair and let it lie there until the Telephone Company’s little beep-beep-beep announced that Mr. Eastwood had finished his conversation.

Simply a Paradox

Watching the political campaigns evolve, it occurred to me that the striving for a simple message is very good in politics—whereas striving to master complexity is at the very heart of policy. Simple derives from the Latin for singular, uncompounded, unmixed (simplex). Amusingly for me, inveterate student of cultural change, the meaning of simple to mean “humble, ignorant,” later “lowly, common” developed beginning in the thirteenth century. The decline of simplicity from meaning singleness, singularity (God is simple) dates from the sixteenth century. To reach the great masses, therefore, we must keep it simple, as in “it’s the economy, stupid.” Here that “stupid” refers not to the simple but to those who see complexity. The word contains a paradox in that two meanings abide within the word; one points up as in singular, never seen before, unique; the other points down at lack of complexity. The slogan modified should be: “Keep it simple for the stupid; its all about public spending.” And if you can frame things in this way, you’ll be labeled a wonk or an intellectual—two other words well worth unpacking.

On Persuasion

One knows, of course, that war will be the product of the political intercourse of governments and peoples; but one is accustomed to think that, with war, all interaction will cease and an entirely different situation will begin, a situation dominated by its own laws. We assert, to the contrary, that war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means.

     [Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book Eight, Chapter 5]

Clausewitz here extends politics to encompass war. It is equally valid to extend politics in the other direction to include persuasion. That might be formulated as follows: “Persuasion is nothing but the most efficient form of war; it gets the desired results with words, music, and images.”  At the root of all three is conflict, therefore resistance, and knowing where on the persuasion-war spectrum something is situated is readily measured by the amount of resistance present. Therefore the entire spectrum is related to the exercise of power. It strikes me that in 1831, when Clausewitz died with his book on war not quite finished, persuasion in its modern form was still largely concentrated in the political realm—and that realm was relatively small. It has spread since then, suggesting a widespread institutionalization of conflict, read struggle for power, across all aspects of social life. Measuring the relative presence of persuasion and how deeply it penetrates down to everyday life is to measure the state of a society. Culture means a suspension of the war of all against all that nature is supposed to be. Roughly to date the beginnings of modernity may be accomplished by discovering that that phrase comes from Thomas Hobbes. Seventeenth century.

The Search for Unity

The endless electioneering battle reminded me that I have no memories of elections taking place in my childhood in Hungary. To be sure, I arrived roughly in the middle of a period when Hungary was titularly a kingdom, ruled by a regent, 1920-1946. But there was a diet in that time, and it held regular elections—indeed eight times in that period. Some 14 parties ran for office in 1920. The winner was a lash-up of interests, thus the Christian, Christian Farmer’s, Smallholders’, and Citizens’ Party. The name was a bit cumbersome; the party operated under various names until settling for Unity Party. This party also managed to win every other national parliamentary election after that—until Hungary’s Nazi party, called Nyilas or Arrow Party, took over as the country was under German occupation. And I saw that occupation, too, from the third-floor living room window of a tall corner building, standing there on a sunny morning with my Mother, and the German army was moving down the main artery of a city then called Szabadka. A green-white public toilet occupied one corner of the intersection, and soldiers were breaking away from the column to enter it. I didn’t know the purpose of that structure, and asked my Mother why they were going in there, and why only some… But that was later.

Unity had become very desirable by 1920. In the wake of World War I, the Communist Red Terror captured the state and, in its four-month rule, managed to bring both of my grandfathers in genuine physical danger by the gangs that enforced its will. This led to the regency of Admiral Miklós Horthy, and I spent my childhood under a royal regent—who had powers to call forth and to close the diet and to appoint the prime ministers. Elections, therefore, were not of much interest to a military family.

As I was looking recalling all of this, a vague memory did surface—particularly of those “smallholders.” Language evidently interested me from childhood on. When we lived in Minnesota the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) was dominant almost across the board—and that was the last time I remembered Hungary’s Unity Party and its farmers and smallholders.

Politics is ultimately sublimated war. The rhetoric on both sides (and on each side during primaries) is strongly marked by words of conflict. They fight, fight, fight for us. Defeat of the candidate or party is, in every case, the end of civilization. But in efforts to involves us, virtual warriors benefits by exaggerating the role of politics in our life. For me it amounted to, this year, about four hours spent in communing with the IRS with TurboTax by my side. When the sublimation fails, as it has in Syria, politics takes off its mask. But even combat without real casualties (assassinations aside), when institutionalized and heightened in intensity (end of civilization, etc.), can slip down the slippery slope. In our case majorities rarely much exceed 51 percent; elections thus produce victories for half and mark the other half as losers. The wise convention that after the elections we should all be united and, friendly in every way, pursue our real lives—that convention is looking ever more like a Ghost of Elections Past.

Genuine monarchies have advantages. The next ruler is largely selected by the dice-throw of genetic succession; where elected bodies help to frame the laws, their elections tend to be of less moment, thus a notch lower down. The inevitable wars also tend to be on a smaller scale. And, in general, such regimes tend to leave us, the smallholders, more or less in peace.

Formal Chaos

My attempt is to give a suitable name to a contradictory tendency. It is contradictory to aim for Virtuous Vice, Dirty Cleanliness, Clear Murky Windshields, or the Still Small Uproar. Our culture, however, is forever trying to achieve this tottering balance. For a long time now I’ve chuckled over the Informal Formality of dress when thirty-something celebs appear on some show in a formal jacket, buttoned white shirt, maybe even wearing a tie—but they’re also sporting artfully cuffed and torn ancient blue jeans and a day’s growth of beard.

                

Order and disorder are clashing. We want both. We believe in artful compromise. We believe that nature knows best, read “free market,” but we also need certain degree of predictability. So we create stock markets with strict opening and closing hours, bells that ring, trading rules, and very tight qualifications for those who may play. Meanwhile these markets are ruled by collective emotions and panics—but the television pictures of trading from up close reveal that it’s a deadly serious business: not a smile anywhere in sight. But sometimes quite conscious collective efforts shape the behavior. Yesterday the markets were quiet. Why? Well, this morning at 8:30 am (it is now 8:26 as I write), the Bureau of Labor Statistics will reveal January employment numbers. And traders stayed inactive yesterday awaiting this news. Institutionalized emotions. Today it will be time to roar and rage. (Indeed I’m writing this to fill the time until 8:30. On the first Friday morning of each month, I post those unemployment numbers on LaMarotte.)

It is true, is it not, that the promises of a presidential candidate are entirely dependent for fulfillment on another body, the Congress. Yet we treat campaign promises as meaningful. If we were serious, we’d institute a parliamentary democracy where the “president” becomes a function of a party’s victory. In our case we have Institutionalized Contradiction. Chance may deliver a president and a Congress of the same party, but then the party may be so interlaced with Blue Dogs or Tea Drinkers that the outcome still remains random.

Well, it’s 8:35. Enough of this. Time to see what Randomness has Wrought on the Employment Front last month.

Kaleidoscopy

Kaleidoscopes produce their beautiful images by causing bits of colored glass to move about in a restricted field. The source of their movement is gravity as the device is turned. The pleasing images are caused when two or more mirrors multiply a single image and create a symmetrical composite. Now what interests me here is that the bits of colored glass (or whatever else is used) never change—except their locations relative to each other. The only energy entering the system is the turning of the device; that invokes the pull of gravity. Yet the image appears to be perpetually new. But what we’re really looking at is something rather static.

The kaleidoscope, for me, serves as a wonderful analog to politics. Here the pieces are “interests” of every conceivable kind—economic, ideological, religious, philosophical, social. They arise from unchanging human characteristics; only such characteristics—never anything creative or original—ever become visible within collectives. The gravity is self-assertion. The mirrors are the media. The kaleidoscope of politics is, to be sure, many-fold more complex. The pieces are capable of changing color, size, and shape, but the moving force behind them remains the same. Each election is yet another turn of the device—but afterwards, although the image changes, nothing else ever does.

Those poor little pieces of glass. I bet, deep down, strange yearnings make them long for the ocean beach. They would, if they could, escape and return to nature, once more moved, when moved at all, by the surging surf. And at vast intervals in glass-bead time they would see, say, the brief visit of a gull and the even more rare descent of an exploring beak.

Grown Ups

My grasp of democratic politics is virtually nil, and of such politics in Greece and Italy even weaker. But from a kind of child’s perspective and at a great distance, the changes at the top in these two countries, formalized in Greece, close to accomplished in Italy, look very interesting.

In Greece Lucas Papademos has become Prime Minister. Serious business; the NYT signals that by showing high clergymen in traditional Greek Orthodox garments administering the oath of office. Interesting figure. Papademos has degrees in physics, in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in economics all earned at MIT. He spent a decade teaching economics at Columbia University. He worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston. He was also a visiting professor at the Kennedy School of Government and at Harvard. Thus far his career in the United States alone. In Europe he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Financial Studies at the University of Frankfurt. Next he rose from a position as chief economist at the Bank of Greece to become its governor a decade later. He went on from there to the European Central Bank as vice president. Last year he left that position to become an advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou. Last, not least, he is a member of the Trilateral Commission. This is a high-level discussion group founded by David Rockefeller and organized (along with others) by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The “three” in that trilateral arrangement are the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Let me turn next to Mario Monti, most likely to become the new leader of Italy. Monti has degrees in economics and management from Bocconi University in Milan. He completed his graduate studies at Yale University under James Tobin, Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1981). (Tobin himself was on the Council of Economic Advisors and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.) Monti began an academic career at the University of Turin. After five years there he returned to Bocconi University as a rector and then became its president. He is also first chairman of Bruegel, a Brussels-based economics think tank and is the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission. He has served two terms as a member of the European Commission.

What are we seeing here? We’re looking at serious credentials, solid academic and administrative careers ending in executive positions. Independence. Appointed service to high level posts with international bearing in banking, finance, and economics.

When things have really, really ground to a halt, at last the call goes out to the grown ups. But can they sail the boiling oceans of greed, panic, and passion? These men, one feels, will give it the old college try.

A Name Emerges

The nation’s editorial, headline, and slogan-forming powers overnight created a new name for what began as the Wall Street Protest. That name is OCCUPY, and the movement that it represents has now also been baptized the OCCUPY MOVEMENT. I sat down this morning wondering how many protests had taken place yesterday and began by using the search phrase “city protests.” Google then undertook to educate me. The search phrase of choice is, well, occupy. I put in that word and then a letter of the alphabet. Google now has a facility that displays a “News for occupy __________” headline followed by links. Thus:

Following this technique, I was able to build the following list:

The facility also provided content for some of the blank letters, but these were foreign or tongue in cheek. For E: Everything. For F: Frankfurt (Germany), G: Greece/Germany, I: Israel, J: Japan, Q: Qatar, R: Rome, T: Toronto, and for Y: Yourself. Only X and Z were left out in the dark. (I notice now, too late, that Vancouver really belongs in this paragraph, not in the table...)

It also appeared that the old designation, Silent Majority, has been renamed The 99 Percent. Visibly troubled spokes-types on the right tried their best to suggests that among the 99 Percent were people making as much as $500,000 a year and more, but the mood on TV news was not very open to such correctives and these were met with faint, dismissive, and sometimes contemptuous smiles.

That 99 Percent has legs, I tell you—in a season when numerical slogans like 9-9-9 have legs, in the age of Tweets, something shorter is even better. Now, it seems to me, the election campaign is turning interesting.

Primary Debates as Mating Ritual

The female courted is the party’s hard core constituency, that is to say the female “in heat.” The candidates engage in ritual combat, its real aim trans-rational, biological. Doesn’t matter diddly what they say. It’s the aura, stupid, the “charisma.” (When I came to this country most people in politics didn’t even know that word, now it is as well known as “environment,” another newcomer. And that, I suppose, is “progress.”) Funny how rapidly Michelle “Straw Vote Winner” Bachman faded from the scene as soon as two viable male contenders finally surfaced, Mitt and Rick. My Job-Creation is bigger than yours. The media aswarm around them are the eunuchs or other kinds of neuters, famed throughout history for loving to groom those who have real potency; they also fancy themselves, secretly, to be the real dispensers of power.

Cultural Indicator: The Opposition Response

Since 1790 U.S. presidents gave a State of the Union report—and no response from any opposition followed. For much of our history, these reports were written rather than spoken. This repeated for 176 years until, in 1966, with Lyndon Johnson president, began the practice of an opposition response. Since then, with but one exception, Lyndon Johnson’s last State of the Union, every oral presentation of this report has been followed by negative congressional echoes.

I still remember, when the first one came (and every time after) thinking that this was somehow wrong. We don’t have two or three presidents. Why two or three states of the union? The Constitution, Article II, Section 3, requires the president to give such reports. There’s nothing in the Constitution about an Opposition Response. The response demeans the office, degrades the symbol—and when the symbols are tarnished, look out.

Certain kinds of opposition are out of place. When the Queen of England Speaks—to be sure echoing sentiments approved by the majority in Parliament—the opposition keeps mum. My perception is that respect for the office of president in our country has been visibly declining, and ever-increasing “opposition responses” to every major presidential address are the formal sign of that. The actual signs are many and increasing—thus behavior that actual signals contempt for the president, done by a nod and a wink, but clearly understood by vast constituencies. But therein lies genuine danger.

Grim although the prospect is—and unlikely that I’ll actually live to see it—this too shall pass. A time will come when some future president will speak and no one will rise to give a response—because it might prove lethal. And after that future presidents won’t bother giving states of the union, either, because there will no longer be a union in our current sense. Time is on my side. Whatever rises is sure to fall; whatever sinks is sure to rise again. And when it does, it won’t be pretty. Pay me now or pay me later.