In praise of oligarchy and the smoke-filled room

Kicking the can: Buckskin Bill and America’s caustic gun culture

Not too long ago in Idaho, along the banks of the Salmon River, lived a man who went by the name of Buckskin Bill. He lived off the land, and was something of a hermit, often accompanied by only his 30-millimeter rifle in the gun tower he built overlooking the river. His sworn enemy was the National Forest Service, and had fortified his land—on which he was allegedly squatting—to defend against its agents. Nothing and no one would take away his freedom, he swore. He liked his way of life and would stop at nothing to retain it.
Buckskin Bill and his miniature cannon are illustrative of the gun culture that grips much of America today. Whether it is reasonable or not, reactionary citizens believe the government is attempting to subvert their values and way of life, and believe that their guns—large, scary guns, of the sort seen in Arnold Schwarzenegger films—are the only things standing between them and a progressive, totalitarian government.
When politicians, especially the liberal variety, start talking about gun control, these reactionaries get very skittish. Rather than seeing a good-natured effort to reduce the availability of guns to criminals, they view it as a sinister plot to rid “real” Americans of their guns and thus relieve “the people” of their last recourse against the government.

Kicking the can: Wire tapping allies risks U.S. global reputation

Ever since Edward Snowden became a household name this past summer, the new status quo is to hate the NSA. The programs revealed by Snowden’s leaks have garnered near-universal criticism, from the ACLU to France to China—seemingly everyone except for David Cameron and Peter King.
Americans are having, and will continue to have, a conversation about what is proper and what is necessary in terms of communications surveillance. The rest of the Western world will continue to express disbelief at being spied on by Washington while Michigan Representative Mike Rogers suggests that the French sip a glass of Dom to celebrate 70 million of the nation’s calls tracked in one month. Wherever the conversation will lead, a couple of things are clear: there is absolutely no excuse for tapping Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel’s phone, and the NSA’s programs have almost certainly done some good.
Many officials maintain that Snowden’s leaks have done damage to American national security, and have created some serious questions at home and abroad about the propriety of the surveillance and the intentions of the NSA and the federal government.

Kicking the can

In praise of oligarchy and the smoke-filled room

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

October 18, 2013

For an Orient columnist, the timing of the debt ceiling deadline is inopportune. Columns are due Tuesday at 5 p.m. before publication on Friday, leaving a two-day gap in which many exciting things can happen. In the time between my deadline and the time this issue is printed, either House Republicans, Senate Democrats, and the White House will work out a deal to raise the debt ceiling or the United States will default on its debt obligations. Nothing too exciting.

But from the uneasy vantage point of Tuesday afternoon, I think I can say the apocalypse is not nigh, and I hope I am not proven wrong by the time this is published. There’s no panic setting into the markets yet, though yields on short-term debt have spiked. Despite fiery rhetoric from both sides, there will probably be at least a short term resolution. But enough speculation—if what I write now isn’t outdated in a matter of hours, it certainly will be by Friday.

The question is how the resolution will play out. For that answer, I look to history. Serious problems have rarely been solved by bellyaching, whining, and tactics remarkably similar to those used by kidnappers. Negotiations have much more potential to take place when reasonable representatives of each party sit down in closed-door meetings and talk.

Just last year, the “fiscal cliff” crisis was averted thanks in large part to eleventh-hour negotiations between two heavy hitters in the senate, Mitch McConnell and Joe Biden. When large-scale negotiations didn’t work out, thanks largely to a take-no-prisoners strategy by the Tea Party caucus, the two men met outside the gaze of the firebreathers in either party and cut a deal. The trend lately has moved away from the backroom deals and towards public appeals and noisemaking. Insurgent candidates run on the platform of “cleaning up Washington,” being an outsider, and eliminating the culture that results in deals being made behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms. Real deals and real progress require communication and flexibility, and it’s difficult to make a deal in public with interest groups on both sides demanding ideological purity.

Accountability, like all things, is good in moderation. Legislators must be responsible for their actions, but often they have much more potential to get things done out of the public eye. Also contributing to the decline of the productive backroom negotiation is the long-standing phenomenon of decreased trust among colleagues in Washington.

Legislators now tend to commute to Washington rather than permanently live there. They do not know each other. Their children do not go to school together and they do not go out for drinks after a long day at the Capitol. According to what was once described to me as the Bourbon Theory, bourbon consumption among members of congress and mutual trust are positively correlated. The idea is that when members of congress spend downtime together (this, as you might have guessed, usually took the form of quaffing bourbon and playing poker), they get to know and trust each other and transcend ideological differences in favor of collegiality and a can-do attitude.

Politicians don’t need to agree in order to be productive. People from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum can meet somewhere in the middle and reach a maddening but effective compromise if they are willing to work together.

There is currently no electoral incentive for Tea Partiers to work with Democrats to resolve impasses—their constituents tend to believe such lunacies like the idea that a default would actually be good for the economy. They do not trust Democrats or moderate Republicans, and view them as components of the despised Washington establishment. Backroom negotiations are unpalatable to their ethics of sticking to their ideological guns, not giving an inch, and demolishing the establishment power structure in Washington.

Washington needs to learn once again that calmly working together is more productive than extracting concessions via extortion and ranting on cable TV about one’s opponents. Members of congress need to learn to trust one another again, and that no-one who makes it into the halls of Congress is trying to destroy America.

A spirit of trust and geniality will easily turn into a spirit of compromise. John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid should sit down in some leather chairs, light up a cigar, tell a joke, and get down to the business of governing the nation.

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