Short-Term Thinking Is Killing the United States — Are None of Our Leaders Brave Enough to Slap Some Sense into Us?

27 January 2011

The President’s State of the Union speech was notable for its bland evasion of painful necessities

So was the Republican Party’s rebuttal given by Representative Paul Ryan.

With the country floundering, especially as compared to China’s progress toward the future, these two purported leaders apparently have decided that we should devote the next two years to substance-less rhetoric that avoids dealing with anything genuinely problematic.

Commentator Matt Miller summed the situation well:

Neither party has a political strategy that includes solving the country's biggest problems. Both major parties have strategies for winning elections while pretending to solve them, which is something very different.

The historian Richard Hofstadter argued that the role of third-party movements in America is to sting like a bee and then die -- because after proving a big enough constituency exists for needed reform, their agenda gets co-opted.

Forward-looking China is creating the future that short-term-thinking Americans are going to have to operate in

My essay a few days ago pointed to the challenge that China’s authoritarian capitalism is posing our single-minded devotion to maximizing short-term shareholder profits at the expense of every other critically necessary democratic principle.

Neither political party wants to come to grips with the draining away of the nation’s economic strength. Both are content to re-spout principles so emptily abstract that they have no relationship to anything happening.

We engage in partisan jousting that benefits only the egocentric people who hold political office.

It appears that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to make good on his boast that all the Republican Party is going to do for the next two years is to work on unseating the President. It is equally apparent that all the President is going to do is to resist Senator McConnell.

Isn’t that a nice recipe for national survival in difficult economic times?

An aside regarding Senator McConnell:

Senator McConnell’s professional persona, which is exclusively about gaining political power for its own sake — and not even for the purpose of doing anything constructive with it — represents virtually everything that is wrong in American politics today.

Senator McConnell was subject of an overview published in The Atlantic published this month. It is worth reading for the insight it gives into the cynically nihilistic ways of many our highest-ranking political leaders.

Citation

Joshua Green, Strict Obstructionist, the Atlantic 307(1): 64-70 (January-February 2011)

“Going first” is the difference between politically-commanding leadership and routine politics

Leadership is about getting out in front of the population, recognizing what’s on the horizon, planning to meet change constructively, and then selling the plan to the public.

One leads from the front of the pack. A leader deliberately steps into controversy, with sound solutions, even if the unavoidable unpopularity of change eventually means that he/she is going to be fired.

Leadership has to be about strength, courage, and sacrifice. It is always about serving something larger than oneself.

Not much of that orientation was visible in the President’s State of the Union performance, or in Representative Ryan’s.

These two men, and almost the entire Congress, are playing childish pie-slice games at the nation’s expense.

Democrats and Republicans are daring each other to go first in making the pain-filled proposals necessary to building a ladder out of our economic and military messes.

They cower in non-specific rhetoric because they know that the person who goes first in making substantive proposals immediately becomes a dartboard for self-interested whiners.

But that’s what leaders do, they go first.

Why is President Obama always trailing the pack?

Carrying up the rear of a complacently self-indulgent society may be good politics, but it’s cringingly bad leadership.

If today’s political leaders are too cowardly to do anything substantial, they should at least start working the fringes of our nation’s problems

Columnist Harold Meyerson echoed my criticisms of post-State of the Union American political thinking.

He wrote about the President’s failure to consider the use of carrots and sticks as a nation-preserving tool:

To put America's multinationals on a homeward-bound course requires more than simply the nominal lowering of taxes, building better roads and rails, and turning out more scientists and engineers.

We need to either raise tariffs on unfair foreign competition or reduce taxes on companies that keep, bring or create jobs at home.

Neither solution addresses the fundamental problem, which is that the model of capitalism in the United States (as in Britain) prioritizes short-term shareholder value over all other concerns - a prescription for domestic disinvestment if ever there was one.

In Germany, where share value is just one concern of corporate boards, which consist of an equal number of management and employee representatives, gross investment in plants and equipment increased 9.4 percent last year amid a booming economy.

The United States is hardly about to alter our fundamental corporate structures, necessary though that may be to engender a full-blown economic renaissance.

But we can at least use tariffs and taxes to reward those corporations that invest at home and penalize those that disinvest in this nation's future.

We’re drowning in a boat filled with the political playground’s manipulative wimps

Wimps are annoying. Politically powerful wimps are dangerous. Wimps who won’t even bail a sinking boat are deadly.

Congress and the executive branch appear to be filled with all three.

Backbone, where are you?

Much of America yearns for someone with outspoken spine.

Many of us are so starved for political courage in our leaders that we would vote for someone with a backbone, even if we disagreed with most of what they stood for. We would even vote for a third party candidate who displays vertebrae, rather than noodles.

Is anyone with political ambition and personal honor listening?

PeteFree.com

Short-Term Thinking Is Killing the United States — Are None of Our Leaders Brave Enough to Slap Some Sense into Us?