The Aging Infrastructure Paradox

Many countries in the developed world have an infrastructure crisis. In the United States there is an avowed problem with bridges and railroads, but also with water and sewage systems and with internal governmental communications technology. There is general agreement that these aging structures need to be replaced or repaired, but the cost is tremendous and the political jockeying for funds is, and will be, intense.

There is another problem, though. With technology advancing so rapidly, how does a municipality or nation decide when to proceed in adopting technology with promised cost reductions and improvements over the horizon? Any project undertaken will necessarily be outdated and overcost compared to projects undertaken in the near future, but further deterioration in infrastructur hurts all facets of society.

It is clear that in physical infrastructure projects leaders must choose a contractor and technique and live with it, technology in this arena and costs will always fluctuate but structures must be maintained.

In communications technology any investment designed to modernize infrastructure will be rendered obsolete in a few years. Anything adopted in the public sector will immediately lag behind innovations in the private sector. This can lead to problems that are not immediately apparent, such as tech support being ended for the technology in use. If quantum cryptography or other innovations provide superior security from cyberattacks then anything not using that technology will be vulnerable to intrusion. Systems that are immediately antiquated will be vulnerable and attractive targets.

Flexibility is integral in modernity’s ever-advancing technological revolution. Skeleton structures that can be modified and updated are optimal, instead of rigid, permanent structures, in both physical and communications projects.

The Obvious Discrimination in North Carolina’s "Bathroom Bill"

It is completely apparent that North Carolina’s law restricting the use of public bathrooms to the sex listed on an individual’s birth certificate is designed to encourage and act against transphobia. There is no other logic that would require this bill to be passed now.

If the law is designed to protect children, why is it being passed how with a focused on transgendered people? Heterosexual males, who were born men, could dress up as women and enter a woman’s bathroom to assault people before any specific law was passed.

Further, heterosexual males, who are born men, are vastly more likely to be sexual predators. This ties in to one of the recurring themes of fear against the LGBT community. The idea that LGBT individuals are more likely to be promiscuous and sexually deviant is not supported by facts. It is a social panic for a problem that does not exist. Transsexual people have not been accused of assaulting people in bathrooms, and even if they did, they are such a small minority of the population that there is no overwhelming need to single them out for rigorous legal restraint. More people in the United States have had a sexual experience with an animal than there are transgendered persons. This law was only passed as transgendered people have prominently entered the public consciousness.

The final factor that makes clear that this is a discriminatory law that is designed to placate panic and demonstrate disapproval of the LGBT community is that it is unenforceable. It is a bad law. Police cannot monitor every public bathroom and demand individuals, who they suspect are transgendered to produce their birth certificates. It is unreasonable and it would seem to require some sort of invasive profiling.

Bad laws and unenforceable laws destroy respect for the law. This argument over social norms would be better litigated in other civic arenas besides the courts and legislature.

The Motivations of Leaders

Winston Churchill, in the third volume of The Second World War, offers several brief asides that betray a quizzical fact about his character. Within several pages of one another, Churchill praises the suicide of the Hungarian Count Teleki and of Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis as preserving the honor of their nations. A few pages later Churchill offers the thought that the British and Greek armies could make a heroic stand at Thermopylae, the site of a famous last stand in Ancient Greek history. Churchill’s naive notions of chivalric heroism are apparent in many of his famous speeches to the Houses of Parliament as well. Truly a man for the moment, Churchill wanted desperately to live out his dream of knightly heroism and often saw mass, industrialized slaughter as a worthy opportunity. His desire for an almost literary form of heroism (along with an ample amount of amoral Realpolitik) enabled his ascent to the pinnacle of the history of British leadership.

Vaulting ambition, the insatiable desire for power, is a well-known facet of great political leaders. But it is often this attribute with a mixture of a desire for praise and distinction that creates truly great leaders. John Adams, founding father and second American President, wrote:

“Every personal quality, and every blessing of fortune, is cherished in proportion to its capacity of gratifying this universal affection for the esteem, the sympathy, the admiration and congratulations of the public…”

He goes on to assert that government has the function of regulating these desires. This is important because it helps us to understand the process of government and of those who govern. Legislation passed and actions taken are not necessarily to solve some public issue, but to gain the esteem and adulation of the public. It also helps clarify the ends of different leaders. For instance, President Obama wishes to have a powerful liberal legacy, built on sizable achievements. He is not just seeking the moderate respect of the crowd but lionization in the historical record. That is why he was willing to forgo chances at prolonged cooperation with Republicans on lesser issues and instead focused on tremendous ones, like the Affordable Care Act, and the changes wrought by the stimulus bill.

When we better understand the psychological and emotional motives of or most consequential leaders, it provides a framework for understanding their actions.

Succesful Institutions and the Republican Party

With Ted Cruz dropping out of the Republican race for the President, Donald Trump is left as the only truly viable candidate for the nomination. While this may be the will of the American voter, it is a failure of the Republican Party as an institution.

The Republican Party guides conservative thought into a useful and effective organization which seeks to advance those political interests, or it did at one time. The arc of this presidential election so far has mirrored the destruction of the Republican Party as an effective institution. As the party’s split, largely along racial lines in the 1960’s, as discussed in an earlier post, the GOP became the sole political party advocating conservativism. Since that time they have had an increasingly catastrophic failure in branding and while at the same time becoming sclerotic. While Republicans won national elections 7 times since 1968, they have failed to expand their party, they have stood still while the country has not.

They have failed to counter the argument that they are a party for wealthy white men. The evolution of American demographics have doomed the party due to its lack of foresight. Republicans were going to have a difficult time winning the Presidential election regardless of who there candidate was, simply because homosexuals, young people, women, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans do not vote Republican in large enough numbers.

There other major failure is more recent. In an effort to overcome their demographic challenges the Republican Party co-opted and then ignored grassroots conservatives. The Tea Party was a robust movement with both major funding and an active and motivated core of supporters. Republicans gleefully allowed Tea Party candidates to run on Republican tickets in order to win seats in local and statewide elections and then failed (and over-promised) to enact their reforms. This has led to disillusionment with the Republican “establishment”.

The final major failure of the Republican Party has been cowardice. Key figures in the Party have allowed someone who represents both of their major flaws to become the front runner without disavowing him. Donald Trump has doubled down on their branding failure by representing the GOP’s old base of constituents with xenophobia and racism AND by railing against the Establishnent’s failure to take seriously the reforms demanded by conservative activists.

Some responsibility lies with the Obama administration for failing to take the Republican view into consideration and passing the Stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act without many and any Republican votes, thus alienating the group further. But the majority of the blame falls squarely on the Republican Party for allowing a duplicitous demagogue to hijack their institution.

The GOP is a failed institution, one which now, with the face of their Party as Donald Trump, no longer even supports reasonable conservative values. The real problem here is that it is bad for the nation to not have an organization that can properly harness major political thought but also to not have any counter for the Democratic Party. It is not good to have large swaths of the government controlled by a single party that does not have to refine its message, or moderate its most extreme impulses. Democrats will not win on the strength of their ideals, but on the basis of having no organized opposition. Ted Cruz was a poor candidate in this sense as well, but Donald Trump has signaled the death-knell of the Republican Party, and we will not have to wait until Election Day to discover that.

Slavery and Congressional Gridlock

There is a direct link between slavery and congressional gridlock. Looking back at the arc of American history, its original sin has shaped its curve. Embedded in the constitution and eventually splitting the country apart in a bloody war, slavery gave way to institutionalized and social and cultural racism. And racism became more exclusive to one party.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Voting Rights initiatives moved conservatives out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. Before this, as noted in the Economist article, conservatives and liberals has existed in both parties and had allowed members to find common ground more easily, reducing gridlock. This partisanship has been a major factor in increasing polarization and gridlock in Congress.

Race is still a great dividing factor in America and talking about race is difficult, especially for white people, who can become defensive very quickly when discussing white privilege or institutional racism. So how can we heal this divide, and therefore remove a host of divisive social issues from party politics?

Without certain social divisions people could once again move among parties to find common ground on individual policy issues. Support Black Lives Matter and reducing the corporate tax rate? Vote for Republicans. Want to end affirmative action but support a single-payer option for health care? Vote for Democrats. If this were the case so many regular problems tied to the actual smooth running of the nation, which is the chief victim of polarized gridlock, could and would be addressed.

The salient fact in engaging in this sort of thought experiment is to note how many divisive issues surround race and America’s attempts to reconcile with its (more) racist past. Affirmative action, our view of police and policing, welfare and tax redistribution, the war on drugs. Race has gotten in the way of making policy decisions solely on the facts, and on Utilitarian principles of governing for the greatest good for the greatest number. The practice of dividing people on a granular level, especially with the rise of big data and analysis, has the effect of dividing people even further into a Republican/Conservative camp and a Democratic/Liberal camp where policy and social and cultural views are all linked, where they do not necessarily need to be. It is a dangerous path that risks dividing people from one another where even if they share some similar, broad principles, they are utterly separated.