There is a great scene in the film “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” when our hero, played by the essential everyman Jimmy Stewart, makes an all-important realization: “ lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.” This is a poignant and fairly radical thought. It is this radical notion that is the basis for what I want to propose in this post. The greatest issue facing the America, as a whole is not from terrorist or Islamic fundamentalist, rising oil prices or any other essentially external issue. The true issue facing America is more basic and fundamental: the lack of genuine, bold and pragmatic ideas at the forefront of American political policy-making and debate. The modern political climate emphasizes an adherence to knee-jerk ideology rather than discourse and genuine ideas. The downside of a world dominated by incessant news coverage and instant reaction is that popularity and positioning for elections now dominates every moment of an elected officials term. Decisions are made not based on a pragmatic understanding of what works or not, but instead on what will help you win? While it’s a distinctly American trait to distrust and blame our government and politicians, and while they make up be the public face of this issue, the problem is perpetuated by our relative inability to simply say enough is an enough.
The aversion towards potentially politically dangerous and uncomfortable public issues has led our country to overlook fundamental flaws in our economic and social systems. While America still may be, as Reagan often reminded us, a “shining city on a hill,” the illusion of that shine obscures the ruin and ongoing decay of the infrastructure within that city. Two of the most significant, and often overlooked problems revolve around our treatment of our nations poor, and more specifically, the strangulation of opportunity and hope for the minorities residing in our forgotten, war-torn inner-cities. The public education system in America has proven through its perpetual failure that the concept of equal opportunity for everyone, as a central part of the American dream, is today nothing more than a myth. The failure of the schools is merely a precursor for the uncontrollable issue of crime and drug abuse in those same neighborhoods. Furthermore, “The War on Drugs” has led to increase in crime as well as unsustainable growth in prison population and cost, while failing to make any impact in actually reducing drug use.
These are two public policy endeavors that do not require more funding or less funding, but an entirely new approach. They require we admit our mistakes in our assumptions and implementation. The numbers do not lie, but if we can examine them rationally and attempt to understand the implicit issues driving this failure, we can effect a change that goes beyond campaign slogans and stickers. There are fundamental flaws in the American system, and we have for too long attempted to attack these issues by pointing fingers at the mistakes made by others when the ultimate truth is resounding: until we actually fix the system, everyone is to blame. Going forward, we must return to a philosophy of pragmatism, a staple of the early 20th century thought, in changing the way we approach issues, the way we think about them, and ultimately our decision on how to fix them.
These issues are neither Republican nor Democratic in nature, and their resolution cannot be found in the rhetoric of either party as they are presently constructed. It is simply too dangerous for these two established behemoths of American politics to take such a radical stand anymore. Therefore, for years both liberals and conservatives have thrown dollar after dollar at problems whose flaws were never really based in the lack of funds or equity behind them, even if that appeared to be the case of the surface and in the publics mind. Money was never the answer; it has always been the problem, fueling our ignorance. It was one of many instances of American politicians merely putting lipstick on a pig. If we fail to come to terms first with the depth of certain issues, we cannot hope to try and successfully respond to them. The great flaw historically in the American political system has always been the harmful comfort we achieve simply by putting ineffectual, short-term band-aids on gushing, systematic wounds. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, as Bill Clinton once famously stated, should the entire American government be institutionalized?
The strongest condemnation of the war on drugs might come from a man who spent his life fighting it: Former drug czar General Barry Mccaffrey. Mccaffrey, appointed by Bill Clinton, is a military man, not a career politician, a career where the truth is more important than the appearance of truth. So it is telling when he makes comments like the one below:
“We have a failed social policy and it has to be re-evaluated. Otherwise we are going to bankrupt ourselves, we can’t incarcerate our way out of this problem.”
Analysis of the drug problem, and the inefficiency of our specific so-called “war” on it, transcends any moral and cultural argument. Drugs are bad, those who sell them are bad and it is undeniable that certain ethnic and economic demographics are more mired in this evil than others. Still, despite a prevalent feeling of moral superiority over the inherently vanity and weakneess of drug abusers, if we choose to address the issue, which our government has made it its mandate to, we must at least approach it in the most practical, helpful and cost-efficient way possible.
The truth is in the numbers, and the empirical evidence. Our focus as a nation since the inception of our fight, whether in Nixon’s accumulation of Silent Majority votes up until Reagan’s righteous cultural crusade during the crack epidemic, has always been an intense focus the supply side of the issue. Drugs are fairly easy to move, unlike bombs or even guns. Despite the innumerable costs we have spent in attempting to eliminate their existence on the street corners, and those costs run a budget of nearly fifty billion dollars annually, they are too profitable, and their demand is too high for their existence ever to be realistically eradicated. We have done this through a method, as Mccaffrey highlights above, of unprecedented levels of arrests and incarceration.
Yet, in doing so, and disregarding the treatment behind the lurking other half of any drug transaction, the unquenchable demand of addiction, we have created what can be viewed in economic terms as an unstoppable market force. We refuse to analyze or accept the obvious incentive and market we have created for drug dealers by attempting to crack down on street corners and suppliers. While we hold dearly to the concept of making drugs harder for people to get, in doing so, we drive up the prices for the drugs that inevitably make it through. Today, the pharmaceutical cost of cleanly produced cocaine and heroin is only a fraction of what it might cost on the street. For the dealers, the higher the penalty we employ, the more lucrative the business becomes. By making transportation more expensive, by drying up the supply and the greater the threat of prison is, the more expensive the available stuff on the street will become. The more the competition, the stronger the drugs on the street become, and the greater the incentive it is for inner-city kids to join a drug cartel or gang. If drugs were distributed legally and responsibly, what product could drug dealers sell? What would they fight, and murder over?
Draconian punishment and jail time has statistically proven not to be any sort of deterrent for true addicts. Prison guards and cells do not fix what is ultimately a biological problem rather than a psychological or criminal one. Yet, in no way is it treated as any sort of public health issue. Mayors and their police commissioners can be re-elected time and again for appearing being “tough on crime,” standing behind the increase in arrests and the continued intensity of punishment as proof of their supposed strength, yet it is our job as voters to go beyond looking at those numbers and attempt to understand the quality of those numbers, and what they actually implicate.
In this particular case, the implication behind the available numbers is undeniable. The statistics this ideology of law and order have produced are impressive mainly due to their shocking enormity: America houses a third of the world’s prisoners, while 50% of our control budget was spent on incarceration, only 10% was spent on treatment in 2000. In 1997, more people were arrested for marijuana possession than rape, murder and aggravated assault combined. As drug arrests have soared, arrests for reported violent crimes like the ones above have significantly gone down in nearly every major city. Perhaps the most alarming statistics surround exactly which ethnic group is at the center of this alarming crackdown. While African-Americans represent only 15% of reported drug users, they represent 37% of those arrested, and nearly 74% of those eventually convicted. This creates and perpetuates the cycle that is criminalizing and destroying an entire segment of our population: addiction, incarceration and unemployment. As with most other issues in our society, the strongest chance a person has to break out of that cycle is through a good and effective education. Yet, our failed public school system is instead at the very root of that cycle, the catalyst that drives the consistent failure.
The problem with education again highlights our willing ignorance towards difficult questions combined with the lack of original and complex ideas coming from our politicians. Despite spending more than double on each student as we did in the 1970s, our public school has maintained the same failing scores over that same period of time with little variation. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is catching up to us in worrisome ways. Currently, we rank 18th overall compared with 36 other top industrial nations, and in the fields that matter most for the coming “knowledge economy,” math and science, we rank far below many of those same countries. Once again, this is a socio-economic issue. The schools that are failing, and even worse, have been allowed to fail for so long are not coincidently centrally located in our urban ghettoes. Ultimately, the only way for a parent to ensure their child gets a proper education under our current system is by purchasing a home worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the right district and right part of town that feeds into a legitimate school. The level of delusion required to allow ourselves to believe this is possible for those citizens that are already severely limit is nearly impossible to imagine, but entirely too present in reality.
In placing our emphasis on testing rather than teaching we are once again focusing on the wrong element of the issue at hand, much as we have done with the drug war for too long now. Teachers who are members of powerful unions are more secure in their jobs than nearly anyone else is in the country in their given profession, even if there are major concerns about his or her performance. For almost 90% of our public school teachers there is no evaluation and no feedback on what they are good at or what they are not good at, Teachers who cannot do their jobs should not be trusted with the single most important job in any society, the one that ensures a countries future growth and success. Kids do not vote, so their well being in the eyes of politicians looking for reelection is in making their parents think they care, at least partially. Whether or not their parents care themselves is another question altogether, but the point remains the same: relative harmony among adults, regardless of whose interest they have in mind, often leads to a passivity that disregards the essential question of this entire debate: what is best for the children? The stakes are higher now more than ever because, simply put, industry as it once existed in America no longer has its place. Labor for those whom did not finish high school or who simply did not have the adequate aptitude for jobs that require a higher intellectual skill level used to make up a blue-collar middle class in our country that has vanished as the world has grown flatter, according to columnist Thomas Friedman. Those jobs have been sent over seas. And while it may be comforting to blame the authority in this case, as has always been the tendency of the American people since colonial time, it is not the fault of the businesses forced to adapt to the realities of a new economy, it is of the work force who have no adapted to their role in the new, developing realities of the world economic forecast. Furthermore, the burden of that inability to adapt is the result of the nature of the cyclical nature of destruction that we see in our worst areas. As the African-American, Hispanic and Asian communities grow rapidly to become our majority, those wealthy enough to afford a good education will become a minority in the American workforce.
How we finally take ourselves out of this cycle is a much harder question to answer, and one that certainly goes beyond the bounds of this brief analysis. The specific plan on how to fix both these issues, whether it be legalization and regulation of drugs as a whole, or the elimination of teacher tenure and a stronger emphasis on charter schools and school vouchers, is not yet important. The first step is figuring out how we can even get to the point where we can make such a bold step. Fixing a failed policy and program from the ground up takes time and patience, and above all fortitude. In looking at current trends of politics, voters and media coverage, there seems to be a dearth in nearly every one of these qualities. It is a situation further exacerbated by the lack of honest and thoughtful political discourse. Ours is a country that over the past decade has embraced a form of debate that is not so much progressive as it is regressive. The level of debate in our country has been reduced to angry rhetoric, from pseudo-intellectuals who prefer the sensational sound byte to the reasoned argument. Debate is implicit in any healthy form of Democracy. Debate is healthy. Debate is good. But debate is essentially a means to an end, nothing more and nothing else. Debate is not the end itself.
We live in the “era of the poll”. Politics has essentially become one long, never-ending racehorse, with politicians jockeying for position as we, the people, blindly keep betting regardless of how much we always seem to end up losing. In this race, however, winning and losing is dictated by approval ratings rather than successful implementation of real ideas. If you rock the boat, and try and change the status quo, more likely than not you face a greater possibility of being voted out of office than if you instead keep quiet and coast through your term. Create a ripple, not a wave. Political Scientist Brandice Canes-Wrone, in a study on the timing and effectiveness of Presidential pandering and public appeals, reached interesting conclusions, which she prefaced by stating:
“Nearly every public question is dissected, discussed and decided with less reference to its merits than to its expected bearing on the presidential election.”
Her study of the modern Presidency found that the President rarely would go public and stand behind a bill unless the majority of the public supports it. If he is either highly popular or unpopular, he will not make any sort of appeal, since there would be no real tangible political capital to be gained from doing so, regardless of how important the issue is. Finally, and most telling, was that overwhelming statistical evidence shows that the President will pander to the people regarding an issue only if the policy outcome of said issue will not be found out until after the next election. Ultimately, this proves that success in politics today is measured by the ability to know when to walk away from problems rather than how you attempt to solve them. This is a leadership style based on fear of losing votes or support from certain unions or special interest groups. In fact, it is tough to call that “leadership” at all.
The problem with the two case studies briefly examined above is that on the surface they seem much more dangerous politically than they actually are. Our greatest fear has, and always will be, taxation or an excessively intrusive government. On the surface, the prospect of fixing these two issues, and others like them, awaken our objectivist nature that is a part of our generally shared inherent American ideology. Yet, these issues are instead examples of too much government interference, too much spending and too little adequate action. The notion that to fix schools or help the poor in the inner cities would mean to continuously raising taxes for the rich in the suburbs is absolutely not the case. As exemplified above, we spend so much money on these problems already because it perpetuates the lie that we are doing more to help these situations when in fact the only way we do can do so would be to radically change our philosophy and approach to both. If we stop spending $50 billion dollars a year on cops working overtime to inflate statistics that mean nothing, and on housing “criminals” whose crime is addiction, and replace them with the legalized sale and taxation of drugs, the profits would be undeniable. This was the belief of economist Milton Friedman, not a radical tea-party member or an ultra-leftist. If we stopped giving money to teachers who simply cannot or will not teach, and instead to more effective and potentially less costly curriculum building or engaging after-school programs, our future economic forecast and potential for productivity would be much stronger. Regardless of the party lines on both sides of the aisle, the politics of aversion and bloated governmental intrusion without any semblance of self-awareness has become a staple of administrations representing both ideologies.
Helping other people, and forcing your neighbors problem to be your own is, and never will be, a popular notion in American politics that has always been a product of our overall tendency of individualism. This tendency is the what makes up the difference between America and the nations of Europe her citizens fled from. With that individualistic appreciation in mind, it must be noted that the debate surrounded issues such as these are distinctively individual in nature. We have an obligation to solve other people’s problems because those same problems will soon become our own. We do not have to help anyone, but we certainly do owe it to ourselves to fix a system entirely within our control so that they have a better chance to help themselves. Some will, and some will not. But our country will become that much stronger, and that much more lean and flexible in the future by cleaning up a mess before it gets any larger. The theme of this entire analysis is more radical in concept than in its potential practice.
The first step we must take is toward embracing a politics and political debate that is centered on a pragmatic philosophy that is ingrained in American history. In his shrewd observation of the nature of the American people, Alexis de Tocqueville once called “a practical bent” the “philosophical method of the Americans.” Pragmatic philosophers like William James and John Dewey embraced the power of action derived from observation and the reality of outcomes representing the truth. Empirical evidence derived from experience, studied objectively, represent the foundation of making proper judgments on whether something works or not. It seems like a simple idea, but it is one that we seemingly long ago forgot. Too often, we let ideology get in the way of doing what is most sensible. Certain tenants of pragmatism that author Bruce Kimball highlights are as follows:
“ Every belief and meaning, and truth itself, are fallible and revisable;” going further to state “experience is the dynamic interaction of organism and environment, resulting in a close interrelationship between thought and action.”
A new implementation of pragmatism is what is needed to rationally go through each issue and focus on solving problems rather than creating controversial rhetoric. As Social Scientist Daniel Yankelovich, speaking directly about a possible modern reincarnation of a pragmatic approach to analysis, wisely reached the following conclusion:
“It seems to me that the new pragmatism, as a way of thinking, as a way of approaching problems, is a powerful way to transcend many negative cultural forces. I believe it provides the common ground we need to revitalize our national gift for problem solving”
Pragmatic solutions and ideas are what fuel the American democratic system, but the modern political climate creates a competition with ideas in the form of group identities, tangible interest or the influence of organization and strategy. Special interest groups and unions make politics a vote and money gathering business, rather than what it should be: a results business. Figuring what works and what does not. Once we reach this important philosophical shift, we can work not on eliminating what does not work, but instead on fixing it, not superficially, but in a systematic and enduring way. It might be a fight mired initially in inevitable failure, but as Mr. Stewart once said, at least then we can be comforted in knowing that we are doing the right thing. This is the only way that the grand experiment of ideas that is America can continue to be successful in the 21st century. As Pragmatist William James once said, “ man can alter his life by altering his thinking.”
theporkgrinder 
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