A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the
historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of
civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security:
no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the
barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became
serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding
on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through
constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to
take risks.”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
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It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it
sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.
I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this
region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to
be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party
system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a
transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a
serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him
or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.
There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing
but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East
Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our
stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady
incremental decline.
President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real
accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation
expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative
and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.
But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping
political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of
both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever
hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care
that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will
work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a
limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure,
and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators
because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an
energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not
have an energy bill until 2013.
Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current
two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our
economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a
huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary
times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to
do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough
today.
“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford
University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is
ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or
high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the
things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests
that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think
about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are
trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as
the other’s losses.
We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious
third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending
unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street;
corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the
far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right
and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about
offending insurers and drug companies.
“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our
politics?”
We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look
Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell
you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am
not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need
to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.” |
