Monthly Archives: July 2016

Newsletter – July 2016

================================================= THE CENTER FOR THIRD AGE LEADERSHIP NEWSLETTER – JULY 2016 1.  FATHER WILLIAM’S MUSINGS 2.  WHAT’S ‘AN EXCESS OF PATRIARCHY’? 3.  M.B.M LEADERSHIP: “REMEMBER 5-YEAR-OLDS COME IN ALL AGES” 4.  WOMEN ARE MORE COLLABORATIVE, INCLUSIVE LEADERS 5.  THIS MONTH’S LINKS ================================================= QUOTES OF THE MONTH – VOLTAIRE (1765) & MATTHEW FOX (2003) 16-07 0 Voltaire                Q:  “What do the Enron Corporation, the Catholic Church                        and the Bush Admini­stration all have in common?”                A:  “An excess of patriarchy.” ================================================= 1. FATHER WILLIAM’S MUSINGS July Greetings, Dear Friends… If Matthew Fox posed the question above in 2016, I think he would have included ISIS, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, Donald Trump, Fox News, etc., as well — but the answer would still be the same:                                                        “An excess of patriarchy.” This is why the nomination of a woman for President of the United States is such a transforming event; many, maybe even a majority, of us Americans are finally able to perceive the gifts of the Feminine as equal and complementary to the gifts of the the Masculine! This is a huge step for a society that, despite its better intentions, has discriminated against so many for so long… So please understand this newsletter is not about an American political event — it is about the celebration of a healthy, necessary and long delayed step in the evolution of our stumbling human species. These Musings are brief because they continue in each of the pieces that follow – for better or worse, you get mostly me this month… Love, FW www.FatherWilliam.org ================================================= 2. WHAT’S ‘AN EXCESS OF PATRIARCHY’? 16-07 1 Pat Rankin16-07 2 Pat Rankin                                                      What’s ‘an excess of patriarchy’?                                           And why are so many of us concerned by it?                           These are important and relevant questions in the 21st century. “An excess of patriarchy” means any form of culture – family, school, religion, busi­ness, state, nation or association – that is unbalanced toward the Masculine (not the same as male) and thereby short changes the Feminine (not the same as female). The distinction between the psychological qualities Masculine and Feminine and the biological gen­ders male and female is complex, not widely understood and still being debated across the world. I don’t want to get into that complexity or debate, so here, male and female will refer to whether we’re biologically men or women, and Masculine and Feminine will refer to traits and behav­iors historically associated with men and women, but in fact available to us all. This bears repeat­ing:                                           Male & Female are biological identities.                    Masculine & Feminine are psychological qualities available to all. Since cultural conditioning guides men toward Masculine behaviors and women toward Feminine be­haviors, the psychological can appear to be as fixed as the biological, but this is more coincidence than cause-and-effect. While it does appear men tend more toward the Masculine and women more toward the Feminine (even the sons of the most active Feminists generally prefer trucks to dolls), it’s silly and erroneous to extrapolate this to mean we are single-dimensioned. We all have a huge range of both Feminine and Masculine potentials, and the greatest part of our maturing is to dis­cover and claim our full selves.   16-07 3 Duke & Marilyn As an American born in 1938, every form of culture I’ve participated in has suffered from exces­sive patriarchy, and so have all those who shared those cultures with me, women and men alike. It took me a long time to detect the imbalance around me because, being male, I’d bought into the cultural brainwashing that patriarchy was good for my gender. That was as ridiculous as believing Shane, The Lone Ranger or any of the other isolated male heroes of my childhood actually lived lives a human being would enjoy. Of course, the women of my era were just as trapped. Imagine trying to live up to Doris Day, the eternal virgin, or June Cleaver, the perfect house wife, when your hormones are raging (in real life, Doris was married four times). I’ve been coming out from under those layers of conditioning for over 60 years, and I’m not done yet. But I’m sure having more fun than when I was taking them seriously, and I’m much more balanced for those around me in the world. Just ask my kids. I think about my kids and grandkids a lot. Including in-laws and significant others, they add up to about a baker’s dozen, and, while attitudes are evolving and there are more balanced role models for all, we still have a long way to go. Donald Trump and Kanye are not an improvement on John Wayne, and the eternal whore is no better than the eternal virgin as a model of wholeness for my daughters and granddaughters. I hope that understandings like this will make it easier for them to claim all of themselves sooner than I did. It’s the best legacy I can think of to leave them. What Does a Feminine/Masculine “Balance” Mean? 16-07 4 Shiva-Shakti                      “It seems like “balance” means having equal amounts of both qualities.                                                           Is this what you strive for?” Most people have this question at first. I did. “Balance” can mean equal weight on both sides of a scale, and it can also mean being in a stable state or equilibrium. I’m using it to mean the personal equilibrium we can establish between our Feminine and Masculine qualities at a particular moment in time. There’s no suggestion that any balance is better than any other and no implication that any balance is fixed or permanent. Only you can know what your balance is at any time and whether it’s one that will work well for you in your situation. What do I “strive for” in my personal F/M balance? Like pretty much everything else, I want the balance I develop to help me be true to myself and effective in the world, to help me be both au­thentic and successful. This means taking a number of things into account – my own nature, where I am in my life, the work I choose, the leadership roles I take on, the relationships important to me and what I value spiritually. This is intensely personal and uniquely individual work, and no one can know better than you what’s right for you. What we can do is help each other see ourselves and our options more clearly so we can make the best choices possible. What’s Your Current F/M Balance? The best way to understand anything is to experience it personally. You can try a simple exer­cise that can help us think about the differences between our Feminine and Masculine aspects. If you’d like to have a printed copy to work with, click here… 16-07 5 F:M Scale Our F/M Balances Are Fluid, Situational & Adjustable I’m naturally a “1” in “Listens” and a “5” in “Speaks.” In other words, I love to talk and find it diffi­cult to attend others for very much of the time. I have honored such a nature (as many teachers and consultants do) by choosing a career that valued my speaking the greater part of the time. To make sure my students and clients got enough air time, I’d have them discuss in pairs and small groups. This seemed to work well for all of us. But if I maintained my “Listens 1–Speaks 5” balance in all situations, I learned (painfully) I’d probably also have to forego on-going, intimate relationships. Experience has taught me such con­tinuing intimacy requires a minimum of “Listens 2–Speaks 4,” at least in the context of the rela­tionships. There were periods in my life where I enjoyed being on my own, and there were other times when I wanted connection. For the last fifteen years I’ve grown consistently more and more toward connection, and, with that growth, have worked at, and become, more of a listener and less of a speaker in my family relationships. But not that much has changed in the larger world; I’m still pretty much “Listens 1–Speaks 5” in that ball park, and I make that work by enjoying a lot of soli­tude, writing and a doing a little teaching and consulting. This works fine with me, and, it seems, with the world. It’s our overall F/M balance that needs to fit us, not the balance we have in any particular situation. I doubt I’ll ever do better overall than “Listens 2–Speaks 4,” but, if I make sure I get enough “1­-5” between my solitude, writing and teaching, then I can do some genuine “3-3” with my family. So don’t think you have to change yourself. That’s very hard work. Instead, know yourself and then manage your situations so you honor yourself and get what you want in the world. 16-07 6 Storytime It’s time for a story. Why a story? Because a major element of “excessive patriarchy” is over-­reliance on the Masculine preference for rational thinking. I think we all suffer from this affliction (if you’re reacting incredulously at this point, you’ve probably got that imbalance, too), and, if so, you can find it hard to believe intuition, a Feminine preference, is as necessary as reason. It might help to know Einstein thought intuition might be even more important:                                                       “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift                                                 and the rational mind is a faithful servant.                                           We have created a society that honors the servant                                                             and has forgotten the gift.” When one of our greatest intellects says we’re over-balanced toward the rational, we probably are. Relying only on our rational, Masculine minds to investigate this problem is like relying only on the Attorney General to investigate the President who appointed him. If we truly want to know what’s going on, we’ll have to experience “excessive patriarchy” through our Feminine (just as if the prob­lem were “excessive matriarchy,” we’d have to experience through our Masculine). But we don’t gain real experience by only reading precise, linear definitions. If we did, we’d have no need for all that wonderful physical, emotional and spiritual equipment we’ve been so extravagantly outfitted with. Still, words can be used to bring experience alive physically, emotionally and spiritually through storytelling — a creative rather than rational exercise. This happens when we share our stories…     “Since we first gathered around in fire circles to keep the night at bay we have told stories. Stories that celebrated the conquests of the day sometimes became tales of he­roes of the tribe. Stories, long before writing was invented, were the tribal memory; told repeatedly around the fire, they bore the tribal wisdom from one generation to the next.     “Stories about animals, things, heroes, and gods explained the world in ways that made it more predictable and safer. Stories imbued the world with magic, giving people hope where circumstances seemed to say there was none. Stories held out the possibility that deeds would be remembered, the prospect of immortality.     “But perhaps the most important use of stories was for teaching generations of leaders their responsibilities and in providing a guide that they could use to see past momentary threats to the tribe. At times when wise leadership meant the difference between life and death, between survival and extinction, stories offered insight. Often, the meaning was not to be had on the surface of the story, but lay in its symbols, which are the lan­guage of the human unconscious…”                                                                                       — David Swords, New Orleans, 1993 I hope these stories may resonate in your experience as they do in mine. As we live these stories together, it’s possible to find connections to our own experience, connections that will make us all more effective – and joyous – in our leadership and our search for F/M balance. “Goddammit, Donna, This Could Go on Forever!” 16-07 7 Cavewomen This is a story that started out being about women and men and ended up being about Feminine and Masculine. My wife, Donna, and I were reading two books together at the time. One was Deborah Tannen’s Please Understand Me which was about how men and women use communication differently. She was suggesting that men use communication primarily to get stuff done and women use it pri­marily for relationship. To illustrate the difference, she told about an interchange between a hus­band-and-wife driving home after party. The wife asked, “Do you want to stop for a drink?” the husband, taking this as a task and the task being a request for information answered, “No.” As many men would, he felt good. Task encountered, task completed. On the other hand, the wife found this interchange very unsatisfactory. Her question had not been a simple request for infor­mation; it had been the beginning of engagement about what they would do together next. For her it had been an overture to engagement that had been abruptly dismissed. Donna and I recognized ourselves in this story, and the recognition helped us. We had consistent experience of missing, and irritating, each other on this dimension of task versus relationship. Tannen’s book gave us a way to talk about it, and I was now able to regularly ask, “Have I related enough today?” Usually Donna’s answer was still, “No,” but having our difference out in the open helped us both make some small adjustments and our life a whole lot better. Another book we spent time with was Harville Hendrix’ Getting the Love You Want. (I find the title awful, but it contains a lot of useful exercises for couples to do together.) We were at the part where it was time to practice Reflective Listening. This is where one person tells the other something important to him or her, and the other listens both to the words and the feeling and then reflects both back so the other can see what’s been communicated. It’s a simple prac­tice, and I’d taught it for years. On this particular afternoon, we pulled into lovely Alabama State Park, built a campfire and opened a bottle of champagne. Life didn’t get much better than this – “No place to go, no thing to do…” We decided to do some Reflective Listening with Donna starting as the speaker and me as the lis­tener. She took a few minutes to tell me something important or her, and I listened carefully. (When listening is a task, I can do it very well.) Then I reflected what she’d said back in both con­tent and tone, and I knew I had captured it perfectly. I’m waiting for her to nod and say, “Really well done, Bill” and it’s now my turn to speak. This is not what happens. She starts talking again, elaborating even more on what she’s just said. “Okay,” I think, “I can do this.” I listen carefully again, reflect it back in both content and tone and wait for the nod. She starts talking again! I listen and reflect again. No nod, no “Good job” – she starts talking again! This is when I jumped up, pounded the table and said, “Godammit, Donna, this could go on forever!” And in that instant I saw myself and how unbalanced toward the Masculine I’d become. Here I was in a lovely setting with my best friend with nothing to do but enjoy being together – and what had I done but define our relating as a task to get over with! It was so absurd that we both burst out laughing! We’ve told this story at least a hundred times over the last fifteen years, and it’s be­come part of our relationship. About her starting to talk again over and over, Donna says, “Well, it just felt so good to be listened to that I kept finding more and more to say.” She still does this, and while I don’t sustain my attention nearly as long as her most intimate friends do, I appreciate greatly how important this ability is. On the “Listens” dimension I’ve moved from a “1” to a “2” and have aspirations of perhaps making it to ”2.5” or maybe even a “3” before my time here is up. If someone as unbalanced as I can do this, there’s hope for all of us. Excessive Patriarchy Stunts the Feminine in Both Women and Men Leadership is not over-balanced toward the Masculine because it’s primarily Masculine in nature; it’s distorted in that direction because many of us were raised in families, schools, businesses, churches and nations that all were unbalanced toward “excessive patriarchy.” And it’s not just men who are inhib­ited in the use of their Feminine; many women are just as blocked. Consider this story from Bill Sadler’s The Third Age, an eighteen year research project that documents the lives of three dozen people who made extraordinary successful transformations from their Second Age (20-45) into their Third age (45-80). This is the story of a surgeon named Barbara as she reflected on her life at fifty-four; I think it may be similar to Hillary’s, too… 16-07 8 Greer      Barbara was very autonomous as a young adult and went through several transformations be­fore she uncovered a fuller femininity after turning fifty…     “I’m changing and continually discovering things in my self that amaze me. One major thing I’ve discovered as a woman is a kind of balance of feminine and masculine elements within myself in a way I never knew possible. My journey has been to go to the edge, and as I do I find amazing dimensions to myself.”     After years of medical practice, she had begun to feel burned-out, angry, bitter, and even re­sentful. Her career had been outwardly successful but increasingly dissatisfying:     ”I felt terribly trapped in medical practice and couldn’t see any way out. Clients were de­manding more and more, and then they would turn on you. I would put in horrendous hours and feel I was really caring for them, and they would file malpractice and say I was deliber­ately trying to hurt them. It felt so unjust, and it seemed like people were trying to own me.     “I entered medicine in part because I wanted to be totally independent. In medical school I was nearly a stereotype of a male: aggressive and very competitive. In those days you had to be like that to succeed as a doctor and as a single woman in a nearly all male society.”     While battling with mixed feelings, she discovered that she had a malignant melanoma. She believed that her body was sending her important message. Feeling betrayed, stuck, and filled with doubts about the course of her life, she sensed that the cancer was a self-destructive way of reacting to her situation. Surgery eliminated the cancer. Reassessing her life and changing her medical practice and lifestyle addressed possible contributing factors… She also uncov­ered and released a hidden part of our personality to achieve greater balance:     ”A major development in my midlife has been to become aware of my feminine side. Re­covering a balance—between control and caring, being intellectual and emotional—is one way of viewing how I got out of the trap. I become a much more feeling person. I’ve realized that feelings have a very important part in medicine. You start with knowledge, but in your inter­action with patients you need compassion. An emotional level of interaction is perhaps most important in treatment. By discovering my feminine side and expressing it in medicine and with friends, I’ve been experiencing inner movement, an awareness of being feminine and vul­nerable.”     Barbara revealed that by becoming a doctor, she had deliberately undergone an identity trans­formation, repressing feminine qualities and adding masculine ones:     ”I used to be tougher than tough. I would never show emotions; I thought that would be a sign of weakness. Now I allow my emotions to show. The biggest risks for me are letting people see who I am. I wanted to be well thought-of and would act to please people. I still want to be well-thought-of, but I’m more concerned to express how I feel as openly as hon­estly as possible….”     In her fifties Barbara began reshaping her identity as a competent woman, creatively balancing qualities that she had once thought incompatible. Through her adaptation to a very stressful situation, perhaps the most difficult in her life, she became more inwardly complex. In defin­ing a new self, she has changed her definition of success, reaffirmed the girl within, and above all enlarged and revised her feminine self-image. She has become more of a woman than she ever had been. Barbara, a very successful woman in a male world inhibited her Feminine in order to succeed in that world. In her Third Age, she realized the need to open to and de­velop her Feminine in order to claim her wholeness. 16-07 9 F:M Hands The point of Barbara’s story is that “The Feminine” is not just for women, and “The Masculine” is not just for men. For most people, it’s initially difficult to keep the psychological qualities (Femi­nine and Masculine) separate from biological gender (female and male). I considered creating new words for the qualities that were less confusing, but only briefly. Feminine and Masculine are the words Carl Jung chose to describe these psychic constellations, and what’s good enough for Carl is good enough for me. (To help keep this separation clear, Feminine and Masculine are capitalized.) Neither Our Feminine Nor Masculine Is Superior Sometimes when I tell these stories, people think I’m saying Feminine qualities are superior to Masculine qualities. Nothing could be further from what I intend. Our Feminine and Masculine qualities are complements, not adversaries. Like our right and left hands, they are partners that work together to help us make the life we want. Then why not focus on “excessive matriarchy” as well as “excessive patriarchy”? “Excessive Patriarchy” Is Our Present Direction of Error (D>E) We’re talking about a “Direction of Error” here, not right or wrong. Direction of Error (D>E) is a simple concept that’s served me well for the last thirty years. I found it in a conversation with one of my early mentors. He wore an expensive watch and was very proud of its accuracy.    “I check this every day against the Naval Observatory clock,” he said. “I’m exactly six seconds fast.”     “So why don’t you set it back six seconds?” I asked.     “You don’t have to be right on,” he said, “if you know which direction you’re off in and how far.” This is how the notion of D>E came into my life. One of the great things it’s done is help me stop trying to be perfect (and right) all the time:                        “…if you know which direction you’re off in and how far…” To get the benefits of using D>E, you have to be willing to trade in righteousness for humility. Righteousness doesn’t want to accept being imperfect; it wants to notice how imperfect everyone else is and judge them for it. If you aren’t willing to see and laugh at your own absurdities, D>E won’t work for you. But let’s say your absurdities (like mine) are so blatant you’ve been tripping over them all your life, and some of the time you even think they’re funny (humor and humility go together). If so, you’re ready for D>E. Here’s how to use it: CHOOSE A SPECIFIC DIMENSION TO FOCUS ON – It’s important to make D>E very specific in terms of both content and situation. (You don’t want to fall in the masochistic trap of having a global D>E like “Good/Bad”). For example, let’s take the Feminine/Masculine dimension of “Attends to Others/Attends to Self.” Most of us look at this dimension and immediately know what our D>E is (whether we generally attend too much to others or overly focus on ourselves – think Fleetwood Mac’s “You Give Yourself Away” versus Sinatra’s “I did it my way”). But we need to be careful. Self-perception is not the most reliable of realities. GET HONEST FEEDBACK FROM THOSE WHO KNOW YOU WELL – Be sure and test whatever conclusions you come to with intimate friends and family. An easy way to do this is to draw a dia­gram like this and put an X on it where you think your general D>E is… 16-07 10 D>E Show your diagram to five or six people you trust and listen to what they say. You may simply get confirmation that affirms your self-perception, or you may get surprised. Either way you learn and understand yourself more fully. And the surprises can be pleasant, too, showing you’ve developed in ways you like more than you thought. KNOWING YOUR D>E HELPS YOU COMPENSATE FOR YOURSELF – If your diagram looks like the one above, you probably “give yourself away” to others more than is good for you. This is my partner’s D>E (mine is the reverse – I could use more Feminine on this dimension). If she says she can’t find her car keys, I think, “Well, I surely don’t know where they are,” and go on about my business. If I say something about having lost my keys, she jumps up and helps to look for them. Knowing her D>E has made a noticeable difference. Even though her first response is still to jump up, she quickly catches herself and says something like, “Oh, right – they’re your keys, aren’t they? Let me know if you really need my help,” and then goes on about her business. Knowing your D>E on different dimensions makes relationships with others and yourself easier, more productive and a lot more fun. But sometimes just knowing your D>E isn’t enough. If the imbalance is significantly inappropriate to your situation, it can become destructive, even deadly. In our time the “excessive patriarchy” D>E in our leadership is literally what’s killing us and our planet. For all our sakes, we each need to rebalance our Feminine and Masculine in ways appropriate to the high-tech, inter-dependent world we live in today. Why It’s So Important to Create a New Balance for a New Time 16-07 11 Dusty and The Duke I was one whose unconscious was imprinted with obsolete images of maleness. Born in 1938, my hero and primary model for manhood was John Wayne, and that archetype went unchallenged in me until the middle sixties. By 1970 other possibilities for being male (like Dustin Hoffman as Ben in “The Graduate”) had become so prevalent that Life Magazine’s July cover story focused on how the model for American maleness was shifting. But even with the help of a changing culture around me, it took another thirty years of psychological renovation to integrate my Feminine and Masculine qualities to support the person and leader I now want to be and the kind of life I now want to live. I don’t want this to take nearly so long for my children and grandchildren, and that’s the biggest reason for my passion about this subject. There’s another reason that looms large as well. Our world can’t much longer survive the over­balance toward the Masculine “hunter-warrior” that was so valuable when physical survival was at stake every moment. We’ve created a world where we can feed everyone, where we can provide health care for everyone, where we can educate everyone, but only if we can learn to collaborate instead of continuing our obsolete habits of suspicion, competition and conflict. A major part of this evolution is for each of us to integrate our Feminine and Masculine in ways suitable for our time. Then we will bring the leadership we truly intend to our loved ones, our enterprises and our world. ©2011 William R. Idol ================================================= 3.  M.B.M LEADERSHIP: “REMEMBER 5-YEAR-OLDS COME IN ALL AGES” This is a leadership story that happened in 1985. I’d been invited to Oslo, Norway, to present our “Visions & Systems” Leadership Program for a select group of European executives. These were world-class leaders who had enormous experience, intelligence and authority. They were used to leading, not being led. Even though I was a young punk in my forties back then, I knew enough not to start out the by speaking to them. Instead I had them open the program by each giving a talk to the group. The topic was: “What Is The Essence of Leadership?” All the talks were good, but one stood out and I remember it to this day. Ingrid was a vice president for a major airline. She began by saying:     “For me, the essence of leadership is M.B.M.” “M. B. M.,” I remember thinking, “what the hell is that?”     “M. B. M. stands for “Managing By Mothering,” she said, “because it was in raising my children I learned most of what has made me successful in my leadership, and I feel really sorry for the men around me who haven’t raised children because they’re at such a disadvantage. They make clumsy mistakes that make their leadership difficult in ways no experienced mother would dream of.” As you might imagine, this raised a few male hackles around the room, including my own. But Ingrid went right on and within minutes had at least all of us who were fathers eating right out of her hand.     “For example,” she said, “if you’ve raised a four-year-old you know you never ask the question, ‘What do you want for dinner?‘ because the answer is likely to be ‘Ice cream and cake’ or some other nonsense you’re not about to do. What you say is, ‘Do you want a ham or tuna fish sandwich for dinner?’     “In other words, you give choice only among options you’re willing to live with. This is the essence of participatory leadership. For years I’ve watched the men around me ask, ‘What do you think we should do here?’ and then have to spend enormous energy dealing with inappropriate requests that should never have been on the table. Of course there are times when you want out-of-the-box, off-the-wall thinking, but not when the point is to get dinner made and out-of-the-way. When you want creativity, you structure productive brainstorming sessions; when you want day-to-day efficiency, you structure simple, quick to the and practical choices. Any mother knows this; not enough fathers do.” 16-07 12 What Children Need I remember when I decided to get seven-year-old Matt a bicycle for his birthday. I took him up to Harry’s Discount Store where there must have been fifty bicycles on display. Of course, some were way too expensive, some were shoddily made and some were just plain inappropriate for the Vermont dirt roads where we lived. But, instead of doing my research and getting three or four pictures of bicycles I could support for him to choose from, I’d essentially said, “What do you want for a bicycle?” He answered by grabbing the most expensive racing bike with all the gears and gadgets. This began one of the major fiascoes of my fathering. Instead of what should have been a great father-son outing, Matt and I spent a very uncomfortable forty-five minutes of my manipulating him into a bike that he didn’t really want. We then had an uncomfortable forty-five minute ride back from Montpelier to our little town and another uncomfortable time when he unenthusiastically showed his new bike to his sister and mom. After that I was gone traveling a lot and forgot about the bike. Months later I learned that “something on it was broken” and Matt had never ridden it – and he didn’t want me to know. What a mess I’d made! I meant to do something with and for my son that would bring us closer, but instead spent time and money to get exactly the opposite result! I’m pretty sure this is what Ingrid meant by us men being clumsy and making our leadership difficult. What’s hardest for me to admit about this clumsiness is that it occurred four years after Ingrid gave her talk in Oslo. Being given the concept is no substitute for having the experience. But this was not Ingrid’s most powerful lesson for me. She went on to give another example of how not to do things with people, young or old:   “The most frequent and costly error I see the men around me make,” she said, “is that they resist energy instead of guiding it. If you’ve ever dealt consistently with a two-year-old, you know you only resist their energy as an absolute last resort. If the child is doing something you don’t want, you don’t tell him to stop – you just give him something more interesting to do. With two-year-olds, if you make them stop you get tantrums.” I knew what Ingrid was talking about before she finished this example. Matt had just turned three in the 1985, and I’d created more tantrums in the previous twelve months than I could count. For whatever reasons, I, like a lot of men, react very poorly to having our authority challenged. When Matt was doing something I didn’t like, I would tell him to stop. He would keep doing it. I’d tell him to stop again, adding a threat of banishment to his room. He’d keep on doing. In no time I’d have escalated us to nuclear confrontation, picked him up by his little arms, carried him to his room, plopped him solidly on his bed and said, “And you’ll stay here until you learn to do as you’re told.” The result of my actions in these cases was to make us both unhappy and negatively charge the entire atmosphere of our home. Not what I’d call inspired leadership by a long shot. As Ingrid spoke, I remembered how differently Matt’s mom, Nancy, handled these same situations. When Matt was doing something she didn’t like, she would pick up some interesting object and say, “Oh, Matt look at that this! Isn’t this amazing? Look how it…” and Matt would come over to her, get fascinated with this new possibility and the difficulty would be resolved with no escalation or crisis at all. It wasn’t until I heard Ingrid tell this story that I understood how off-base I’d been. I always thought Nancy was “weak” because she let her authority be challenged (and God knows what that might mean later when he became a teenager!). Now, instead of thinking Nancy was a weak and I was strong, I understood Nancy was smart and I was stupid. 16-07 13 Jung What You Resist For almost twenty years now I’ve told this story to remind myself that guiding energy works so much better than resisting it, and I still too often confront rather than collaborate. Again, having the concept doesn’t make up for missing the experience. I often wonder if those men now lucky enough to be raising their children are developing leadership capacities that are second nature to most mothers. The best part of Ingrid’s talk was her closing line:    “If you’ve been a mother, you already have the essence of great leadership within you. All you have to do is remember that five-year-olds come in all ages.” I knew she was right in 1985, and I know she’s still right in 2004. There are many times each day when one of my “hot buttons” gets pushed, and I am at best five years old. After 65 years of watching people closely, I know this is true for all of us.  The major difference between Ingrid and I (and maybe many women and men) is that she sees these regressions as obvious and normal whereas I still think of them as inexcusable personal failures in both myself and others. How much better my life and leadership would be if I could respond to the adult five-year-olds in my life as a loving mother responds to a child in distress! ©2011 William R. Idol ================================================= 4.  WOMEN ARE MORE COLLABORATIVE, INCLUSIVE LEADERS      BY JANET GUYON, QUARTZ.COM, JULY 30, 2012 If Hillary Clinton, now officially the Democratic candidate, wins election in November, she’ll make history, and not just as America’s first female president. It would mean that for the first time ever, three of the world’s most powerful democracies would be led by women: the US, the UK, and Germany. What might that mean? Management experts studying leadership say women are more collaborative, more inclusive leaders. They build teams; in Clinton’s words, they understand it “takes a village” to run a country, and the world. They do not believe, as Donald Trump does (and not just him: many men do), that they “alone can fix it.” The US, UK, and Germany all face the big challenges of the rich world today: immigration, terrorism at home and abroad, and a revolt against the one percent. It’s easy to imagine Clinton sitting down with Britain’s Theresa May and Germany’s Angela Merkel to hash out solutions to shared problems. It’s also easy to see this troika of women developing a cohesive approach towards Russia, Iran, China, Syria, and other countries whose interests often run counter to those of the West. A Trump in that mix? He and his associates look uncomfortably cozy with Russia, and a Trump-Putin axis would be a lot more dangerous for the world than a Clinton-Merkel-May one. Gender should not be the deciding factor in electing someone to the world’s most powerful office. But the female leadership style Clinton espouses seems more attuned to the needs of the world now. One thing’s for sure: She’s unlikely to brag about the size of her hands, or anything else. ================================================= 5.  THIS MONTH’S LINKS:       MICHELLE OBAMA’S CONVENTION SPEECH       THE CASE FOR MORE FEMALE COPS       WOMEN ARE MORE COLLABORATIVE, INCLUSIVE LEADERS       THE MYTH OF THE SELF-RELIANT INDIVIDUAL NEEDS UPDATING       SEVEN MINUTES THAT SHOOK THE CONVENTION… ================================================= © Copyright 2016, by William R. Idol, except where indicated otherwise. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprint only with permission from copyright holder(s). All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All contents provided as is. No express or implied income claims made herein. We neither use nor endorse the use of spam. Unsubscribe [Rewards] *|IF:REWARDS|* *|REWARDS|* *|END:IF|* =================================================  

Newsletter – June 2016

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THE CENTER FOR THIRD AGE LEADERSHIP –  JUNE 2016 1. FATHER WILLIAM’S MUSINGS 2. HOW AMERICAN POLITICS WENT INSANE

I. IMMUNITY WHY THE POLITICAL CLASS IS A GOOD THING

II. VULNERABILITY HOW THE WAR ON MIDDLEMEN LEFT AMERICA HELPLESS   III. PATHOGENS DONALD TRUMP AND OTHER VIRUSES

IV. SYMPTOMS THE DISORDER THAT EXACERBATES ALL OTHER DISORDERS

V. PROGNOSIS & TREATMENT CHAOS SYNDROME AS A PSYCHIATRIC DISORDER

3. THIS MONTH’S LINKS ============================================ QUOTES OF THE MONTH – TONY BLAIR & MATTHEW D’ANCONA   “It was already clear before the Brexit vote that modern populist movements could take control of political parties. What wasn’t clear was whether they could take over a country like Britain. Now we know they can…”    “In leaving the world’s largest single market, Britain has resigned from the grown-ups’ table and effectively kicked out a prime minister voters had re-elected only 13 months earlier. As tantrums go, this was Olympic-class…” CS 0.1 Snort of Fear============================================       1.  FATHER WILLIAM’S MUSINGS June Greetings, Dear Friends… I know this newsletter can just seem like more about American politics, but it’s much more than that. It’s about what’s happening to all of us everywhere in this time. And it’s narrowly focused and not a fun newsletter.  But sometimes we all need a little shaking up. Brexit Racism The frightening societal forces that the combination of Brexit, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have exposed—not caused—has shaken me and many others… TONY BLAIR:  “The political center has lost its power to persuade and its essential means of connection to the people it seeks to represent. Instead, we are seeing a convergence of the far left and far right. The right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a shared hostility to globalization.” MATTHEW D’ANCONA:  “Beneath these specific imperatives lurked more general sentiments — in particular, a contempt for the political class and a disdain for the self-styled aristocracy of experts… This campaign has been pockmarked by xenophobia and thinly concealed racism: a deeply disturbing development in mainstream politics… MICHAEL PASCOE:  “The hope that most Americans are not dangerously ignorant people and that they will bother to vote against Trump should sustain us. Trump being elected President of the United States must remain unlikely – but so were Brexit and Trump winning the Republican nomination.” Jonathan Rauch’s piece contains a penetrating systems analysis of how this happened and what can be done about it. Yes, it is very long—and I hope you will read it to see if it shakes some of your prejudices about politicians as it has mine. Rauch offers profound wisdom that can, with understanding and patience, support elders everywhere to help their communities recognize and avoid the more destructive behaviors of immaturity. A flash of insight led me to substitute “marriage” for “politics” in his paragraph below. Illusions can make us very unrealistic about both politics and partnering!    “The problem is not, however, that disruptions happen. The problem is that chaos syndrome wreaks havoc on the system’s (the marriage’s) ability to absorb and channel disruptions. Trying to quash political (marital) disruptions would probably only create more of them. The trick is to be able to govern (negotiate) through them.” As the Brexit, Sanders and Trump campaigns make so clear, infatuation can plunge us into the most simplistic illusions about politics as well as partners. But whether the exhilaration of those illusions will evolve into healthy or abusive behavior is always a huge risk…

Romance & Intimacy

It’s spring again. Everything is bursting with life and hormones are flowing everywhere, most definitely in me. Every year at this time I want to be in love again. Not the mature, comfortable and continuing love I have with my beautiful wife, but that crazy, turn-your-life-upside-down kind of love only the immaturity of adolescence could indulge in. I miss those ridiculously romantic days of my youth. Don’t you? CS 0.5 Politics & RomanceBut I don’t want to act them out anymore. As exciting as I know they still could be, these romantic urges are way too destructive to the life I live and love the other eleven months of the year. If I were a researcher, I’d have some statistics about how truly destructive this annual dose of free Viagra is to on-going relationships, but I’m not and I don’t. If you’re alive, I doubt you need any. Spring IS – and it fuels the sensual, sexual, romantic fool in all of us. If this isn’t true for you, I’m sorry you’ve missed it, even though your life has likely been infinitely easier if somewhat less interesting. What I’m talking about here is the paradox of “Romance & Intimacy.” This is one paradox I haven’t figured out how to resolve, and I’ve tried more ways than most people can imagine (not bigamy and incest – I do have my limits!). The stats on that trying (I didn’t have to do research for these since they’re my life) are four marriages, six living-togethers and uncountable liaisons. Please do not dismiss me as some horny and lecherous Neanderthal proud of his conquests. Yes, I had my share of one night stands, but those were not what all these were really about. I loved being in love. I still do. I just don’t know how to put it together with the rest of my life that I also love and want to keep. What do I mean by “being in love”? I mean my whole life revolving around one other person. I mean writing and waiting for love letters every day. I mean spending money I didn’t have on telephone calls. I mean counting the days until Thanksgiving or Christmas or spring vacation came. I mean driving across the country to see that person. I mean Simon & Garfunkel’s “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her”… CS 0.7 S&G-Joni&CloudsI mean Joni Mitchell’s lyrics to “Chelsea Morning”…

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew There was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses

Oh, won’t you stay We’ll put on the day And we’ll talk in present tenses  When the curtain closes and the rainbow runs away  I will bring you incense Owls by night By candlelight By jewel-light If only you will stay…

How could the “day-after-day” of one partner ever compete with such exhilaration and ecstasy? How could we not be seduced away from our daily routines of jobs, diapers, PTA meetings and mortgage payments by a “Bridges of Madison County”? Why do we stay in the ordinariness of our small towns and suburbs and apartments? Because, ecstatic as romance can be, the maturity of intimacy offers more.

Enlightenment is just intimacy with all things. Eihei Dogan

We are woefully unprepared to resolve the paradox of romance and intimacy, particularly when we embark on serious commitments like marriage. I probably qualify as some sort of expert here having been married four times (a very dubious distinction). Something that helped clarify the complexity involved came to me years ago in the Parade Magazine supplement to our Sunday paper. (Wisdom comes in the most unlikely places – I certainly didn’t expect it in Parade Magazine). There was an article written by a French woman, and it was about how funny we Americans are in the way we try to do our relationships with our significant others. She said there are fundamentally two kinds of relationships between partners, and they’re very, very different. In fact, she suggested they are to some extent mutually exclusive. One form these relationships take is romance. Romance is steeped in mystique which is based on unfamiliarity, newness and all the kinds of unknowing that lets you project your romantic ideal (Doris Day, Denzel Washington, Jennifer Lopez, Leo DiCaprio, whoever…) onto the other person. You haven’t yet got enough experience with your beloved to have your projection smashed on the rocks of reality. That’s romantic infatuation, and it never survives real intimacy. The other form these relationships take is the true intimacy of companionship. Intimacy grows in sharing life together and is rooted in the familiarity of day-to-day closeness (including underwear left on the floor, shaving stubble in the sink and “Oh, I forgot to tell you…”) and all the other kinds of knowing that make maintaining projected ideals impossible. (If you want to be an ideal, stay away from intimacy – this is why our politicians are so careful never to let you see these all-too-human sides of them). Intimacy means knowing our partners on all their dimensions, and this raises hell with the romantic illusions we often start out with. This wise French lady (whose name I wish I could remember) went on to say, “How strange you Americans are! You think you can have both romantic illusion and intimate companionship in the same relationship. In France we understand and honor the differences between these two. We have our marriages for companionship and our affairs for romance.” Now I’m not suggesting we should plan to have affairs, but what her article did for me was raise up this apparent paradox between romantic exhilaration and intimate companionship, for, of course, any alive person wants both. To me this means once I pass the borders of infatuation (where I can project my romantic ideal on the other person), I’m going to have to redefine romance. It can no longer be infatuation based on lack of familiarity; it has to be something else. I do know that companionship and its intimacy has become much more important than romance as I’ve gotten older, whereas romance was much more important when I was younger. Now Donna (my fourth and last wife) would certainly object more than a little to my saying intimacy’s so important to me. She says I rarely tell her anything of significance without her asking, and I admit that’s largely true (I’m convinced it’s a gender thing more than a personal defect). But at sixty-five our being together and around each other has become the heart of our relationship for me. This is true even though I have always been, and still am, a romantic by nature. Romance is conceptually still attractive, but not with anywhere near the power it used to have… CS 0.9 Purity Church:Govt The ideal of “political purity” is conceptually still attractive to me, but, after reading Rauch’s article, I know it’s time to mature into supporting the necessity of “political intimacy”… Much love, FW PS: Many thanks to Don Rhoades for getting me to read this long piece! PPS: If you can stand more, there are two articles in THIS MONTH’S LINKS that present very different views… www.FatherWilliam.org ============================================       2.  HOW AMERICAN POLITICS BECAME SO INEFFECTIVE       BY JONATHAN RAUCH, THE ATLANTIC.COM, JUNE 23, 2016   FW Note:  *There is a medical definition of Congenital High Airway Obstruction Syndrome (C.H.A.O.S.), but Rauch seems to use this term in a more colloquial way. It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse. CS 1 Uncle Sam It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve. On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it. As the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes. I could continue, but you get the gist. Yes, the political future I’ve described is unreal. But it is also a linear extrapolation of several trends on vivid display right now. Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move. CS 2 Demonstrators The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays. Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it. And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon. No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him. CS 3 Tattooed Head Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome. Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

CS 4 They Said What!TAKE THE QUIZ

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick. The disorder has other causes, too: developments such as ideological polarization, the rise of social media, and the radicalization of the Republican base. But chaos syndrome compounds the effects of those developments, by impeding the task of organizing to counteract them. Insurgencies in presidential races and on Capitol Hill are nothing new, and they are not necessarily bad, as long as the governing process can accommodate them. Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying. Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction. Reversing the spiral will require understanding it. Consider, then, the etiology of a political disease: the immune system that defended the body politic for two centuries; the gradual dismantling of that immune system; the emergence of pathogens capable of exploiting the new vulnerability; the symptoms of the disorder; and, finally, its prognosis and treatment.

I. Immunity   Why the political class is a good thing

The Founders knew all too well about chaos. It was the condition that brought them together in 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. The central government had too few powers and powers of the wrong kinds, so they gave it more powers, and also multiple power centers. The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise. The Framers worried about demagogic excess and populist caprice, so they created buffers and gatekeepers between voters and the government. Only one chamber, the House of Representatives, would be directly elected. A radical who wanted to get into the Senate would need to get past the state legislature, which selected senators; a usurper who wanted to seize the presidency would need to get past the Electoral College, a convocation of elders who chose the president; and so on. They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be “fired” by his party leaders, as a member of Parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can. By and large, American politicians are independent operators, and they became even more independent when later reforms, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, neutered the Electoral College and established direct election to the Senate. CS 5 Cruz&McConnell The Constitution makes no mention of many of the essential political structures that we take for granted, such as political parties and congressional committees. If the Constitution were all we had, politicians would be incapable of getting organized to accomplish even routine tasks. Every day, for every bill or compromise, they would have to start from scratch, rounding up hundreds of individual politicians and answering to thousands of squabbling constituencies and millions of voters. By itself, the Constitution is a recipe for chaos. So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties. In the 1830s, under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the parties established patronage machines and grass-roots bases. The machines and parties used rewards and the occasional punishment to encourage politicians to work together. Meanwhile, Congress developed its seniority and committee systems, rewarding reliability and establishing cooperative routines. Parties, leaders, machines, and congressional hierarchies built densely woven incentive structures that bound politicians into coherent teams. Personal alliances, financial contributions, promotions and prestige, political perks, pork-barrel spending, endorsements, and sometimes a trip to the woodshed or the wilderness: All of those incentives and others, including some of dubious respectability, came into play. If the Constitution was the system’s DNA, the parties and machines and political brokers were its RNA, translating the Founders’ bare-bones framework into dynamic organizations and thus converting conflict into action. The informal constitution’s intermediaries have many names and faces: state and national party committees, county party chairs, congressional subcommittees, leadership pacs, convention delegates, bundlers, and countless more. For purposes of this essay, I’ll call them all middlemen, because all of them mediated between disorganized swarms of politicians and disorganized swarms of voters, thereby performing the indispensable task that the great political scientist James Q. Wilson called “assembling power in the formal government.” The middlemen could be undemocratic, high-handed, devious, secretive. But they had one great virtue: They brought order from chaos. They encouraged coordination, interdependency, and mutual accountability. They discouraged solipsistic and antisocial political behavior. A loyal, time-serving member of Congress could expect easy renomination, financial help, promotion through the ranks of committees and leadership jobs, and a new airport or research center for his district. A turncoat or troublemaker, by contrast, could expect to encounter ostracism, marginalization, and difficulties with fund-raising. The system was hierarchical, but it was not authoritarian. Even the lowliest precinct walker or officeholder had a role and a voice and could expect a reward for loyalty; even the highest party boss had to cater to multiple constituencies and fend off periodic challengers. CS 6 Ryan Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them. Politics seemed almost to organize itself, but only because the middlemen recruited and nurtured political talent, vetted candidates for competence and loyalty, gathered and dispensed money, built bases of donors and supporters, forged coalitions, bought off antagonists, mediated disputes, brokered compromises, and greased the skids to turn those compromises into law. Though sometimes arrogant, middlemen were not generally elitist. They excelled at organizing and representing unsophisticated voters, as Tammany Hall famously did for the working-class Irish of New York, to the horror of many Progressives who viewed the Irish working class as unfit to govern or even to vote. The old machines were inclusive only by the standards of their day, of course. They were bad on race—but then, so were Progressives such as Woodrow Wilson. The more intrinsic hazard with middlemen and machines is the ever-present potential for corruption, which is a real problem. On the other hand, overreacting to the threat of corruption by stamping out influence-peddling (as distinct from bribery and extortion) is just as harmful. Political contributions, for example, look unseemly, but they play a vital role as political bonding agents. When a party raised a soft-money donation from a millionaire and used it to support a candidate’s campaign (a common practice until the 2002 McCain-Feingold law banned it in federal elections), the exchange of favors tied a knot of mutual accountability that linked candidate, party, and donor together and forced each to think about the interests of the others. Such transactions may not have comported with the Platonic ideal of democracy, but in the real world they did much to stabilize the system and discourage selfish behavior. Middlemen have a characteristic that is essential in politics: They stick around. Because careerists and hacks make their living off the system, they have a stake in assembling durable coalitions, in retaining power over time, and in keeping the government in functioning order. Slash-and-burn protests and quixotic ideological crusades are luxuries they can’t afford. Insurgents and renegades have a role, which is to jolt the system with new energy and ideas; but professionals also have a role, which is to safely absorb the energy that insurgents unleash. Think of them as analogous to antibodies and white blood cells, establishing and patrolling the barriers between the body politic and would-be hijackers on the outside. As with biology, so with politics: When the immune system works, it is largely invisible. Only when it breaks down do we become aware of its importance.

II. Vulnerability   How the war on middlemen left America defenseless

Beginning early in the 20th century, and continuing right up to the present, reformers and the public turned against every aspect of insider politics: professional politicians, closed-door negotiations, personal favors, party bosses, financial ties, all of it. Progressives accused middlemen of subverting the public interest; populists accused them of obstructing the people’s will; conservatives accused them of protecting and expanding big government. To some extent, the reformers were right. They had good intentions and valid complaints. Back in the 1970s, as a teenager in the post-Watergate era, I was on their side. Why allow politicians ever to meet behind closed doors? Sunshine is the best disinfectant! Why allow private money to buy favors and distort policy making? Ban it and use Treasury funds to finance elections! It was easy, in those days, to see that there was dirty water in the tub. What was not so evident was the reason the water was dirty, which was the baby. So we started reforming. We reformed the nominating process. The use of primary elections instead of conventions, caucuses, and other insider-dominated processes dates to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, but primary elections and party influence coexisted through the 1960s; especially in congressional and state races, party leaders had many ways to influence nominations and vet candidates. According to Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H. W. Bush, here is how Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, got started in politics: “Samuel F. Pryor, a top Pan Am executive and a mover in Connecticut politics, called Prescott to ask whether Bush might like to run for Congress. ‘If you would,’ Pryor said, ‘I think we can assure you that you’ll be the nominee.’ ” Today, party insiders can still jawbone a little bit, but, as the 2016 presidential race has made all too clear, there is startlingly little they can do to influence the nominating process. Primary races now tend to be dominated by highly motivated extremists and interest groups, with the perverse result of leaving moderates and broader, less well-organized constituencies underrepresented. According to the Pew Research Center, in the first 12 presidential-primary contests of 2016, only 17 percent of eligible voters participated in Republican primaries, and only 12 percent in Democratic primaries. In other words, Donald Trump seized the lead in the primary process by winning a mere plurality of a mere fraction of the electorate. In off-year congressional primaries, when turnout is even lower, it’s even easier for the tail to wag the dog. In the 2010 Delaware Senate race, Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell secured the Republican nomination by winning just a sixth of the state’s registered Republicans, thereby handing a competitive seat to the Democrats. Surveying congressional primaries for a 2014 Brookings Institution report, the journalists Jill Lawrence and Walter Shapiro observed: “The universe of those who actually cast primary ballots is small and hyper-partisan, and rewards candidates who hew to ideological orthodoxy.” By contrast, party hacks tend to shop for candidates who exert broad appeal in a general election and who will sustain and build the party’s brand, so they generally lean toward relative moderates and team players.

Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but they did their job — so well that the country forgot why it needed them.

Moreover, recent research by the political scientists Jamie L. Carson and Jason M. Roberts finds that party leaders of yore did a better job of encouraging qualified mainstream candidates to challenge incumbents. “In congressional districts across the country, party leaders were able to carefully select candidates who would contribute to the collective good of the ticket,” Carson and Roberts write in their 2013 book, Ambition, Competition, and Electoral Reform: The Politics of Congressional Elections Across Time. “This led to a plentiful supply of quality candidates willing to enter races, since the potential costs of running and losing were largely underwritten by the party organization.” The switch to direct primaries, in which contenders generally self-recruit and succeed or fail on their own account, has produced more oddball and extreme challengers and thereby made general elections less competitive. “A series of reforms that were intended to create more open and less ‘insider’ dominated elections actually produced more entrenched politicians,” Carson and Roberts write. The paradoxical result is that members of Congress today are simultaneously less responsive to mainstream interests and harder to dislodge. Was the switch to direct public nomination a net benefit or drawback? The answer to that question is subjective. But one effect is not in doubt: Institutionalists have less power than ever before to protect loyalists who play well with other politicians, or who take a tough congressional vote for the team, or who dare to cross single-issue voters and interests; and they have little capacity to fend off insurgents who owe nothing to anybody. Walled safely inside their gerrymandered districts, incumbents are insulated from general-election challenges that might pull them toward the political center, but they are perpetually vulnerable to primary challenges from extremists who pull them toward the fringes. Everyone worries about being the next Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader who, in a shocking upset, lost to an unknown Tea Partier in his 2014 primary. Legislators are scared of voting for anything that might increase the odds of a primary challenge, which is one reason it is so hard to raise the debt limit or pass a budget. In March, when Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas told a Rotary Club meeting that he thought President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee deserved a Senate hearing, the Tea Party Patriots immediately responded with what has become activists’ go-to threat: “It’s this kind of outrageous behavior that leads Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund activists and supporters to think seriously about encouraging Dr. Milton Wolf”—a physician and Tea Party activist—“to run against Sen. Moran in the August GOP primary.” (Moran hastened to issue a statement saying that he would oppose Obama’s nominee regardless.) Purist issue groups often have the whip hand now, and unlike the elected bosses of yore, they are accountable only to themselves and are able merely to prevent legislative action, not to organize it. We reformed political money. Starting in the 1970s, large-dollar donations to candidates and parties were subject to a tightening web of regulations. The idea was to reduce corruption (or its appearance) and curtail the power of special interests—certainly laudable goals. Campaign-finance rules did stop some egregious transactions, but at a cost: Instead of eliminating money from politics (which is impossible), the rules diverted much of it to private channels. Whereas the parties themselves were once largely responsible for raising and spending political money, in their place has arisen a burgeoning ecology of deep-pocketed donors, super pacs, 501(c)(4)s, and so-called 527 groups that now spend hundreds of millions of dollars each cycle. The result has been the creation of an array of private political machines across the country: for instance, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads on the right, and Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate on the left. Private groups are much harder to regulate, less transparent, and less accountable than are the parties and candidates, who do, at the end of the day, have to face the voters. Because they thrive on purism, protest, and parochialism, the outside groups are driving politics toward polarization, extremism, and short-term gain. “You may win or lose, but at least you have been intellectually consistent—your principles haven’t been defeated,” an official with Americans for Prosperity told The Economist in October 2014. The parties, despite being called to judgment by voters for their performance, face all kinds of constraints and regulations that the private groups don’t, tilting the playing field against them. “The internal conversation we’ve been having is ‘How do we keep state parties alive?’ ” the director of a mountain-state Democratic Party organization told me and Raymond J. La Raja recently for a Brookings Institution report. Republicans told us the same story. “We believe we are fighting for our lives in the current legal and judicial framework, and the super pacs and (c)(4)s really present a direct threat to the state parties’ existence,” a southern state’s Republican Party director said. The state parties also told us they can’t begin to match the advertising money flowing from outside groups and candidates. Weakened by regulations and resource constraints, they have been reduced to spectators, while candidates and groups form circular firing squads and alienate voters. At the national level, the situation is even more chaotic—and ripe for exploitation by a savvy demagogue who can make himself heard above the din, as Donald Trump has so shrewdly proved. We reformed Congress. For a long time, seniority ruled on Capitol Hill. To exercise power, you had to wait for years, and chairs ran their committees like fiefs. It was an arrangement that hardly seemed either meritocratic or democratic. Starting with a rebellion by the liberal post-Watergate class in the ’70s, and then accelerating with the rise of Newt Gingrich and his conservative revolutionaries in the ’90s, the seniority and committee systems came under attack and withered. Power on the Hill has flowed both up to a few top leaders and down to individual members. Unfortunately, the reformers overlooked something important: Seniority and committee spots rewarded teamwork and loyalty, they ensured that people at the top were experienced, and they harnessed hundreds of middle-ranking members of Congress to the tasks of legislating. Compounding the problem, Gingrich’s Republican revolutionaries, eager to prove their anti-Washington bona fides, cut committee staffs by a third, further diminishing Congress’s institutional horsepower.

Smoke-filled rooms were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled.

Congress’s attempts to replace hierarchies and middlemen with top-down diktat and ad hoc working groups have mostly failed. More than perhaps ever before, Congress today is a collection of individual entrepreneurs and pressure groups. In the House, disintermediation has shifted the balance of power toward a small but cohesive minority of conservative Freedom Caucus members who think nothing of wielding their power against their own leaders. Last year, as House Republicans struggled to agree on a new speaker, the conservatives did not blush at demanding “the right to oppose their leaders and vote down legislation without repercussions,” as Time magazine reported. In the Senate, Ted Cruz made himself a leading presidential contender by engaging in debt-limit brinkmanship and deriding the party’s leadership, going so far as to call Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. “The rhetoric—and confrontational stance—are classic Cruz,” wrote Burgess Everett in Politico last October: “Stake out a position to the right of where his leaders will end up, criticize them for ignoring him and conservative grass-roots voters, then use the ensuing internecine fight to stoke his presidential bid.” No wonder his colleagues detest him. But Cruz was doing what makes sense in an age of maximal political individualism, and we can safely bet that his success will inspire imitation. We reformed closed-door negotiations. As recently as the early 1970s, congressional committees could easily retreat behind closed doors and members could vote on many bills anonymously, with only the final tallies reported. Federal advisory committees, too, could meet off the record. Understandably, in the wake of Watergate, those practices came to be viewed as suspect. Today, federal law, congressional rules, and public expectations have placed almost all formal deliberations and many informal ones in full public view. One result is greater transparency, which is good. But another result is that finding space for delicate negotiations and candid deliberations can be difficult. Smoke-filled rooms, whatever their disadvantages, were good for brokering complex compromises in which nothing was settled until everything was settled; once gone, they turned out to be difficult to replace. In public, interest groups and grandstanding politicians can tear apart a compromise before it is halfway settled. Despite promising to televise negotiations over health-care reform, President Obama went behind closed doors with interest groups to put the package together; no sane person would have negotiated in full public view. In 2013, Congress succeeded in approving a modest bipartisan budget deal in large measure because the House and Senate Budget Committee chairs were empowered to “figure it out themselves, very, very privately,” as one Democratic aide told Jill Lawrence for a 2015 Brookings report. TV cameras, recorded votes, and public markups do increase transparency, but they come at the cost of complicating candid conversations. “The idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong,” the Democratic former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle wrote in 2014, in his foreword to the book City of Rivals. “The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.” We reformed pork. For most of American history, a principal goal of any member of Congress was to bring home bacon for his district. Pork-barrel spending never really cost very much, and it helped glue Congress together by giving members a kind of currency to trade: You support my pork, and I’ll support yours. Also, because pork was dispensed by powerful appropriations committees with input from senior congressional leaders, it provided a handy way for the leadership to buy votes and reward loyalists. Starting in the ’70s, however, and then snowballing in the ’90s, the regular appropriations process broke down, a casualty of reforms that weakened appropriators’ power, of “sunshine laws” that reduced their autonomy, and of polarization that complicated negotiations. Conservatives and liberals alike attacked pork-barreling as corrupt, culminating in early 2011, when a strange-bedfellows coalition of Tea Partiers and progressives banned earmarking, the practice of dropping goodies into bills as a way to attract votes—including, ironically, votes for politically painful spending reductions. Congress has not passed all its annual appropriations bills in 20 years, and more than $300 billion a year in federal spending goes out the door without proper authorization. Routine business such as passing a farm bill or a surface-transportation bill now takes years instead of weeks or months to complete. Today two-thirds of federal-program spending (excluding interest on the national debt) runs on formula-driven autopilot. This automatic spending by so-called entitlement programs eludes the discipline of being regularly voted on, dwarfs old-fashioned pork in magnitude, and is so hard to restrain that it’s often called the “third rail” of politics. The political cost has also been high: Congressional leaders lost one of their last remaining tools to induce followership and team play. “Trying to be a leader where you have no sticks and very few carrots is dang near impossible,” the Republican former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told CNN in 2013, shortly after renegade Republicans pointlessly shut down the government. “Members don’t get anything from you and leaders don’t give anything. They don’t feel like you can reward them or punish them.” CS 7 Trump Like campaign contributions and smoke-filled rooms, pork is a tool of democratic governance, not a violation of it. It can be used for corrupt purposes but also, very often, for vital ones. As the political scientist Diana Evans wrote in a 2004 book, Greasing the Wheels: Using Pork Barrel Projects to Build Majority Coalitions in Congress, “The irony is this: pork barreling, despite its much maligned status, gets things done.” In 1964, to cite one famous example, Lyndon Johnson could not have passed his landmark civil-rights bill without support from House Republican leader Charles Halleck of Indiana, who named his price: a nasa research grant for his district, which LBJ was glad to provide. Just last year, Republican Senator John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked how his committee managed to pass bipartisan authorization bills year after year, even as the rest of Congress ground to a legislative standstill. In part, McCain explained, it was because “there’s a lot in there for members of the committees.” Party-dominated nominating processes, soft money, congressional seniority, closed-door negotiations, pork-barrel spending—put each practice under a microscope in isolation, and it seems an unsavory way of doing political business. But sweep them all away, and one finds that business is not getting done at all. The political reforms of the past 40 or so years have pushed toward disintermediation—by favoring amateurs and outsiders over professionals and insiders; by privileging populism and self-expression over mediation and mutual restraint; by stripping middlemen of tools they need to organize the political system. All of the reforms promote an individualistic, atomized model of politics in which there are candidates and there are voters, but there is nothing in between. Other, larger trends, to be sure, have also contributed to political disorganization, but the war on middlemen has amplified and accelerated them.

III. Pathogens     Donald Trump and other viruses

By the beginning of this decade, the political system’s organic defenses against outsiders and insurgents were visibly crumbling. All that was needed was for the right virus to come along and exploit the opening. As it happened, two came along. In 2009, on the heels of President Obama’s election and the economic-bailout packages, angry fiscal conservatives launched the Tea Party insurgency and watched, somewhat to their own astonishment, as it swept the country. Tea Partiers shared some of the policy predilections of loyal Republican partisans, but their mind-set was angrily anti-establishment. In a 2013 Pew Research poll, more than 70 percent of them disapproved of Republican leaders in Congress. In a 2010 Pew poll, they had rejected compromise by similar margins. They thought nothing of mounting primary challenges against Republican incumbents, and they made a special point of targeting Republicans who compromised with Democrats or even with Republican leaders. In Congress, the Republican House leadership soon found itself facing a GOP caucus whose members were too worried about “getting primaried” to vote for the compromises necessary to govern—or even to keep the government open. Threats from the Tea Party and other purist factions often outweigh any blandishments or protection that leaders can offer. So far the Democrats have been mostly spared the anti-compromise insurrection, but their defenses are not much stronger. Molly Ball recently reported for The Atlantic’s Web site on the Working Families Party, whose purpose is “to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans.” Because African Americans and union members still mostly behave like party loyalists, and because the Democratic base does not want to see President Obama fail, the Tea Party trick hasn’t yet worked on the left. But the Democrats are vulnerable structurally, and the anti-compromise virus is out there. A second virus was initially identified in 2002, by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln political scientists John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, in their book Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work. It’s a shocking book, one whose implications other scholars were understandably reluctant to engage with. The rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, however, makes confronting its thesis unavoidable. Using polls and focus groups, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse found that between 25 and 40 percent of Americans (depending on how one measures) have a severely distorted view of how government and politics are supposed to work. I think of these people as “politiphobes,” because they see the contentious give-and-take of politics as unnecessary and distasteful. Specifically, they believe that obvious, commonsense solutions to the country’s problems are out there for the plucking. The reason these obvious solutions are not enacted is that politicians are corrupt, or self-interested, or addicted to unnecessary partisan feuding. Not surprisingly, politiphobes think the obvious, commonsense solutions are the sorts of solutions that they themselves prefer. But the more important point is that they do not acknowledge that meaningful policy disagreement even exists. From that premise, they conclude that all the arguing and partisanship and horse-trading that go on in American politics are entirely unnecessary. Politicians could easily solve all our problems if they would only set aside their craven personal agendas. If politicians won’t do the job, then who will? Politiphobes, according to Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, believe policy should be made not by messy political conflict and negotiations but by ensids: empathetic, non-self-interested decision makers. These are leaders who will step forward, cast aside cowardly politicians and venal special interests, and implement long-overdue solutions. ensids can be politicians, technocrats, or autocrats—whatever works. Whether the process is democratic is not particularly important. Chances are that politiphobes have been out there since long before Hibbing and Theiss-Morse identified them in 2002. Unlike the Tea Party or the Working Families Party, they aren’t particularly ideological: They have popped up left, right, and center. Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacies of 1992 and 1996 appealed to the idea that any sensible businessman could knock heads together and fix Washington. In 2008, Barack Obama pandered to a center-left version of the same fantasy, promising to magically transcend partisan politics and implement the best solutions from both parties. No previous outbreak, however, compares with the latest one, which draws unprecedented virulence from two developments. One is a steep rise in antipolitical sentiment, especially on the right. According to polling by Pew, from 2007 to early 2016 the percentage of Americans saying they would be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who had been an elected official in Washington for many years than for an outsider candidate more than doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. Republican opinion has shifted more sharply still: The percentage of Republicans preferring “new ideas and a different approach” over “experience and a proven record” almost doubled in just the six months from March to September of 2015. The other development, of course, was Donald Trump, the perfect vector to concentrate politiphobic sentiment, intensify it, and inject it into presidential politics. He had too much money and free media to be spent out of the race. He had no political record to defend. He had no political debts or party loyalty. He had no compunctions. There was nothing to restrain him from sounding every note of the politiphobic fantasy with perfect pitch. Democrats have not been immune, either. Like Trump, Bernie Sanders appealed to the antipolitical idea that the mere act of voting for him would prompt a “revolution” that would somehow clear up such knotty problems as health-care coverage, financial reform, and money in politics. Like Trump, he was a self-sufficient outsider without customary political debts or party loyalty. Like Trump, he neither acknowledged nor cared—because his supporters neither acknowledged nor cared—that his plans for governing were delusional. Trump, Sanders, and Ted Cruz have in common that they are political sociopaths—meaning not that they are crazy, but that they don’t care what other politicians think about their behavior and they don’t need to care. That three of the four final presidential contenders in 2016 were political sociopaths is a sign of how far chaos syndrome has gone. The old, mediated system selected such people out. The new, disintermediated system seems to be selecting them in.

IV. Symptoms   The disorder that exacerbates all other disorders

There is nothing new about political insurgencies in the United States—nor anything inherently wrong with them. Just the opposite, in fact: Insurgencies have brought fresh ideas and renewed participation to the political system since at least the time of Andrew Jackson. There is also nothing new about insiders losing control of the presidential nominating process. In 1964 and 1972, to the dismay of party regulars, nominations went to unelectable candidates—Barry Goldwater for the Republicans in 1964 and George McGovern for the Democrats in 1972—who thrilled the parties’ activist bases and went on to predictably epic defeats. So it’s tempting to say, “Democracy is messy. Insurgents have fair gripes. Incumbents should be challenged. Who are you, Mr. Establishment, to say the system is broken merely because you don’t like the people it is pushing forward?” The problem is not, however, that disruptions happen. The problem is that chaos syndrome wreaks havoc on the system’s ability to absorb and channel disruptions. Trying to quash political disruptions would probably only create more of them. The trick is to be able to govern through them. Leave aside the fact that Goldwater and McGovern, although ideologues, were estimable figures within their parties. (McGovern actually co-chaired a Democratic Party commission that rewrote the nominating rules after 1968, opening the way for his own campaign.) Neither of them, either as senator or candidate, wanted to or did disrupt the ordinary workings of government. Jason Grumet, the president of the Bipartisan Policy Center and the author of City of Rivals, likes to point out that within three weeks of Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, the president was signing new laws again. “While they were impeaching him they were negotiating, they were talking, they were having committee hearings,” Grumet said in a recent speech. “And so we have to ask ourselves, what is it that not long ago allowed our government to metabolize the aggression that is inherent in any pluralistic society and still get things done?” I have been covering Washington since the early 1980s, and I’ve seen a lot of gridlock. Sometimes I’ve been grateful for gridlock, which is an appropriate outcome when there is no working majority for a particular policy. For me, however, 2011 brought a wake-up call. The system was failing even when there was a working majority. That year, President Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner, in intense personal negotiations, tried to clinch a budget agreement that touched both parties’ sacred cows, curtailing growth in the major entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security by hundreds of billions of dollars and increasing revenues by $800 billion or more over 10 years, as well as reducing defense and nondefense discretionary spending by more than $1 trillion. Though it was less grand than previous budgetary “grand bargains,” the package represented the kind of bipartisan accommodation that constitutes the federal government’s best and perhaps only path to long-term fiscal stability. CS 8 Boehner People still debate why the package fell apart, and there is blame enough to go around. My own reading at the time, however, concurred with Matt Bai’s postmortem in The New York Times: Democratic leaders could have found the rank-and-file support they needed to pass the bargain, but Boehner could not get the deal past conservatives in his own caucus. “What’s undeniable, despite all the furious efforts to peddle a different story,” Bai wrote, “is that Obama managed to persuade his closest allies to sign off on what he wanted them to do, and Boehner didn’t, or couldn’t.” We’ll never know, but I believe that the kind of budget compromise Boehner and Obama tried to shake hands on, had it reached a vote, would have passed with solid majorities in both chambers and been signed into law. The problem was not polarization; it was disorganization. A latent majority could not muster and assert itself. As soon became apparent, Boehner’s 2011 debacle was not a glitch but part of an emerging pattern. Two years later, the House’s conservative faction shut down the government with the connivance of Ted Cruz, the very last thing most Republicans wanted to happen. When Boehner was asked by Jay Leno why he had permitted what the speaker himself called a “very predictable disaster,” he replied, rather poignantly: “When I looked up, I saw my colleagues going this way. You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” Boehner was right. Washington doesn’t have a crisis of leadership; it has a crisis of followership. One can argue about particulars, and Congress does better on some occasions than on others. Overall, though, minority factions and veto groups are becoming ever more dominant on Capitol Hill as leaders watch their organizational capacity dribble away. Helpless to do much more than beg for support, and hostage to his own party’s far right, an exhausted Boehner finally gave up and quit last year. Almost immediately, his heir apparent, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, was shot to pieces too. No wonder Paul Ryan, in his first act as speaker, remonstrated with his own colleagues against chaos. Nevertheless, by spring the new speaker was bogged down. “Almost six months into the job, Ryan and his top lieutenants face questions about whether the Wisconsin Republican’s tenure atop the House is any more effective than his predecessor,” Politico’s Web site reported in April. The House Republican Conference, an unnamed Republican told Politico, is “unwhippable and unleadable. Ryan is as talented as you can be: There’s nobody better. But even he can’t do anything. Who could?” Of course, Congress’s incompetence makes the electorate even more disgusted, which leads to even greater political volatility. In a Republican presidential debate in March, Ohio Governor John Kasich described the cycle this way: The people, he said, “want change, and they keep putting outsiders in to bring about the change. Then the change doesn’t come … because we’re putting people in that don’t understand compromise.” Disruption in politics and dysfunction in government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal. Being a disorder of the immune system, chaos syndrome magnifies other problems, turning political head colds into pneumonia. Take polarization. Over the past few decades, the public has become sharply divided across partisan and ideological lines. Chaos syndrome compounds the problem, because even when Republicans and Democrats do find something to work together on, the threat of an extremist primary challenge funded by a flood of outside money makes them think twice—or not at all. Opportunities to make bipartisan legislative advances slip away. Or take the new technologies that are revolutionizing the media. Today, a figure like Trump can reach millions through Twitter without needing to pass network‑TV gatekeepers or spend a dime. A figure like Sanders can use the Internet to reach millions of donors without recourse to traditional fund-raising sources. Outside groups, friendly and unfriendly alike, can drown out political candidates in their own races. (As a frustrated Cruz told a supporter about outside groups ostensibly backing his presidential campaign, “I’m left to just hope that what they say bears some resemblance to what I actually believe.”) Disruptive media technologies are nothing new in American politics; they have arisen periodically since the early 19th century, as the historian Jill Lepore noted in a February article in The New Yorker. What is new is the system’s difficulty in coping with them. Disintermediating technologies bring fresh voices into the fray, but they also bring atomization and cacophony. To organize coherent plays amid swarms of attack ads, middlemen need to be able to coordinate the fund-raising and messaging of candidates and parties and activists—which is what they are increasingly hard-pressed to do. Assembling power to govern a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly divided democracy is inevitably hard. Chaos syndrome makes it all the harder. For Democrats, the disorder is merely chronic; for the Republican Party, it is acute. Finding no precedent for what he called Trump’s hijacking of an entire political party, Jon Meacham went so far as to tell Joe Scarborough in The Washington Post that George W. Bush might prove to be the last Republican president. Nearly everyone panned party regulars for not stopping Trump much earlier, but no one explained just how the party regulars were supposed to have done that. Stopping an insurgency requires organizing a coalition against it, but an incapacity to organize is the whole problem. The reality is that the levers and buttons parties and political professionals might once have pulled and pushed had long since been disconnected.

CS 9 Chaos. Panic. Fear

V. Prognosis and Treatment   Chaos syndrome as a psychiatric disorder

I don’t have a quick solution to the current mess, but I do think it would be easy, in principle, to start moving in a better direction. Although returning parties and middlemen to anything like their 19th-century glory is not conceivable—or, in today’s America, even desirable—strengthening parties and middlemen is very doable. Restrictions inhibiting the parties from coordinating with their own candidates serve to encourage political wildcatting, so repeal them. Limits on donations to the parties drive money to unaccountable outsiders, so lift them. Restoring the earmarks that help grease legislative success requires nothing more than a change in congressional rules. And there are all kinds of ways the parties could move insiders back to the center of the nomination process. If they wanted to, they could require would-be candidates to get petition signatures from elected officials and county party chairs, or they could send unbound delegates to their conventions (as several state parties are doing this year), or they could enhance the role of middlemen in a host of other ways. Building party machines and political networks is what career politicians naturally do, if they’re allowed to do it. So let them. I’m not talking about rigging the system to exclude challengers or prevent insurgencies. I’m talking about de-rigging the system to reduce its pervasive bias against middlemen. Then they can do their job, thereby making the world safe for challengers and insurgencies. Unfortunately, although the mechanics of de-rigging are fairly straightforward, the politics of it are hard. The public is wedded to an anti-establishment narrative. The political-reform community is invested in direct participation, transparency, fund-raising limits on parties, and other elements of the anti-intermediation worldview. The establishment, to the extent that there still is such a thing, is demoralized and shattered, barely able to muster an argument for its own existence. But there are optimistic signs, too. Liberals in the campaign-finance-reform community are showing new interest in strengthening the parties. Academics and commentators are getting a good look at politics without effective organizers and cohesive organizations, and they are terrified. On Capitol Hill, conservatives and liberals alike are on board with restoring regular order in Congress. In Washington, insiders have had some success at reorganizing and pushing back. No Senate Republican was defeated by a primary challenger in 2014, in part because then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a machine politician par excellence, created a network of business allies to counterpunch against the Tea Party. The biggest obstacle, I think, is the general public’s reflexive, unreasoning hostility to politicians and the process of politics. Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry. Because that problem is mental, not mechanical, it really is hard to remedy. In March, a Trump supporter told The New York Times, “I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party.” Another said, “We know who Donald Trump is, and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.” That kind of anti-establishment nihilism deserves no respect or accommodation in American public life. Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven’t heard anyone say this, but it’s time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around. ============================================   3. THIS MONTH’S LINKS:      WHY YOU CAN’T DISMISS THE POPULISM BEHIND THE BREXIT      MARINE LE PEN: AFTER BREXIT THE PEOPLE’S SPRING IS INEVITABLE      BRITISH LOSE RIGHT TO CLAIM AMERICANS ARE DUMBER      WHY GROUP BERNIE WITH BREXIT & TRUMP? ============================================   © Copyright 2015, by William R. Idol, except where indicated otherwise. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprint only with permission from copyright holder(s). All trademarks are property of their respective owners. All contents provided as is. No express or implied income claims made herein. We neither use nor endorse the use of spam.   Please feel free to use excerpts from this blog as long as you give credit with a link to our page: http://fatherwilliam.org/blog/. Thank you!   ============================================