Ethical Challenges
This is a little ‘off topic’, but the constant stream of revelations about unpaid taxes that seems to be bedeviling Obama’s various staff and cabinet nominations is embarrassing. Not necessarily for him, but for the country. I believe that one of the deeper causes of our current malaise is the intellectual and ethical failure of what I refer to as our ‘power elite’. That is the entire structure of our society’s decision making, including politicians, lobbyists, academics, business leaders, media participants, and religious groups. Each one of these categories plays a role in providing leadership. They are the ones who have the power and prominence to shape the way in which the rest of the country behaves and interacts. They are now exposed as being a whole lot less clever and well intentioned than we all thought.
A classic example of this is the relentless attack on government from right wing or philosophically individualist people. Ronald Reagan’s famous line that ‘government is the problem’ helped shape nearly thirty years of attitude towards government. It created the ‘Reagan Democrats’, that predominantly working class section of voters who switched party allegiance as a protest against government interference even while depending heavily on New Deal programs for their late in life well being. Laissez faire became the preferred solution to everything. Some people, like the more right wing elements of the Republican Party, both advocated and embraced this move, while others – the vast majority I suspect – simply went along with it as being the ‘way things ought to be’. So we followed along without fully understanding the consequences, and were thus easily swayed by an overly extreme advocacy of free market ideology that led directly to both the dotcom and real estate bubbles.
But there is a world of difference between a well thought out ideological position that advocates personal freedom and a venal disregard for any kind of ethical standards. Even the most ardent fan of John Locke and his successors would not argue that having power excludes you from having to follow the same rules as the rest of society. Nor are such lapses uncommon. History is full of periods during which elites constructed a bubble for themselves and put themselves above the law. The problem is that those circumstances were rarely in democracies.
The alarming fall in standards that left wing apologists like to smear the Bush Administration with, the lack of competency and transparency especially, are hardly exclusive attributes of that sad period. They are endemic throughout the entire upper echelon of modern America.
How else do we explain some of the absurdities of our large corporations where managers get paid fortunes even while their stock prices drop? Or the muddled attitudes of our churches who advocate single issue causes while ignoring others? Or the academics who teach theories and then do not abide by those theories [I am looking at you economists]?
The ridiculous parade of erstwhile leaders who are now apologizing profusely for ‘forgetting’, ‘overlooking’, or simply ‘miscalculating’ their taxes is symptomatic of the nature of this lapse in ethics: it is systemic. Obama’s cost cutting chief was a management consultant not a politician, so we cannot simply point at Washington. And those stupid CEOs’ in their private jets are hardly inside the Beltway types. No this is a national problem that we all are part of.
As I have argued before: the one thing we now know is that what we thought we knew before is wrong. Nothing can be unchallenged as we rebuild. That’s why the next few years will be an opportunity for us to clean out our old ideas as well as to re-establish our wealth. Dare I imagine it possible that we can combine these two and redefine what we mean by wealth? In any case the current wave of revelations is actually healthy: it is a first step towards casting daylight onto the sorry state of our national standards. Brandeis likened the effects of transparency and daylight to that of disinfectant. We need a whole lot of cleansing, not just in Washington, but everywhere. Average Americans have to hold their elites responsible and re-establish the link between responsibility and accountability that seems to have been forgotten during our laissez faire binge.
Addendum:
This was not so ‘off topic’ after all. The reframing of the national discussion that Reagan effected is having a direct impact today: it is very difficult to advocate nationalization in a society so steeped in ‘free market’ righteousness. Even when nationalization is both temporary and efficient. Be careful to advocate too much ideological purity … it might inhibit problem solving down the road!
