Democracy and Danger

Americans are justly proud of their democratic tradition. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offer a foundation on which we depend and useful lessons to much of the world. Yet what is familiar is not always understood, and our misunderstandings threaten real harm to others and to ourselves.

Chief among those misunderstandings is the belief that the Founders sought to establish a democracy. In fact, they were afraid of democracy, at least as viewed in the classical terms in which every citizen has a vote on issues before the public. Many of those we recall as patriot-heroes spoke contemptuously of the "rabble," and even the revolutionary Jefferson was not about to give the vote to women, African Americans, or even white men who did not own property. The framers of the Constitution were not interested in subjecting it to a popular vote, fearing quite rightly that it's dramatic alteration of the Articles of Confederation might ensure its defeat.

What the Founders gave us is a republic, whose chief goal is to constrain the self-interest of man which, unfettered, they feared would lead to tyranny of the majority and the destruction of society and civil liberty. As James Madison famously put it in Federalist 10, a republic is better than a democracy because, in the former, we may "refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations." The Constitution enshrined this view not only in creating two chambers in Congress, each based on elected representatives, but especially in the Senate, whose longer terms and larger districts (not to mention indirect election through the state legislatures) aimed to calm the passions of the lower house. Though we have vastly expanded the franchise since colonial times, we should remember that the Founders didn't trust "we, the people" enough to let them vote directly for the president either. So much for direct democracy in 1787.

Yet Americans assume that democracy and republican government are identical. This confusion led us to support "democracy" in the Middle East when it meant allowing the Palestinian people to vote, even if they ended up voting for the radical group Hamas. And democracy in Iraq meant letting the Iraqi people vote, even if they ended up voting along strictly sectarian lines and thus dividing the country into ethnic enclaves. In the U.S., "democracy" gets translated into the referendum, which has arguably done as much damage as good in more than one state. Our devotion to democracy has led repeatedly to calls to abolish the Electoral College and declare the winner of the popular vote president, despite a strong argument that this could lead to a multiparty system in which the president has an even smaller base of support than is sometimes true now. Our democratic idealism has even led some to propose a Constitutional amendment establishing direct democracy through the use of technology on all national issues now decided in representative bodies.

We do not need to agree with the restrictions on the franchise initially proposed by the Founders to remember the reasons for their concerns about direct democracy. We do need to keep the dangers of democracy in mind. We must not, for example, confuse an opinion with a reasoned argument. Americans have opinions on everything, but we should no more want government by opinion polls than we want doctoring by asking those in the waiting room what procedure they suggest.

Neither does direct democracy substitute for thoughtful dialogue and debate. Admirers of direct democracy like to point to the New England Town meeting, where each citizen could argue his point of view. But direct democracy in America thus far seems both more shallow and private. Political advertising keeps it short and oversimplified, and voting by computer hardly has the give-and-take of a town meeting.

Still another danger our confusion about democracy creates is its assumption that reason guides democratic decisions. The Founders knew better, realizing that passions often dictated positions, not the other way around.

The Founders also knew that education is essential to the health of republican government. And recent data on the civic literacy of Americans should give pause about our eagerness to turn public decision making over to direct democracy. A survey of college seniors last year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute showed a mean score of only 55.2 out of 100 on questions about the American political system. Only 45.9%, for example, knew that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” comes from the Declaration of Independence. Less than 50% answered correctly on questions about the Bill of Rights, federalism, and the concept of enumerated powers. In fact, the knowledge of college students actually decreased between their freshman and senior years, giving reason to remember Jefferson's admonition that "a society that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."
Representative government has its problems to be sure, and the Founders knew it would. They did not expect all statesmen to be enlightened, and they designed countervailing centers of power at the national level and between the central government and the states as a check on the tendency of factions to destroy liberty. But they placed a bet that representative government was still a lot safer than democracy. Upon leaving the Constitutional Convention on its last day, September 17, 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what the convention - until then shrouded in secrecy - had wrought. His answer was short yet profound: "A republic, if you can keep it." We still have that republic. Keeping it may be getting harder.

Waiting for Proof

America is a product of Enlightenment thinking. Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and many of the other founders believed in the power of reason and science (which they called natural philosophy). They held firmly to the belief that the progress of humankind went along with increases in knowledge. What science could demonstrate, people should accept and integrate into institutions, policies, and daily life.

This belief in the power of evidence-based science has led to some of our greatest advances in the past two hundred years, and it is integrated into our thinking and language. "Where's the data?" "Can you prove that? "How can you be sure?" Be "reason"able. We assume that we should need and ask for evidence - empirical data, facts, and scientifically based conclusions before we can confidently move forward.

But in addition to its great gifts, evidence-based decision making has one major drawback: sometimes the evidence is not clear, there is a debate about what the data mean, so we are not sure what the "truth" is. Take two situations we now face. First, the national debt, which is (there is clear data on this) over $9 trillion dollars. Has this reached a point where servicing the debt and trying to pay it off threatens our economic prosperity - if not immediately then in the foreseeable future? Economists disagree, as do policymakers. Second, consider the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Has this reached the point where ill effects on global climate, plant and animal life, as well as human well-being are evident and inevitable? Few scientists doubt the data on the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but some scientists and policy makers disagree on why those levels exist and what they mean for the future.

Given these disagreements among reasonable people, we seem to fall into two camps on how to respond. The first is to insist on better and more data, and more scientific thinking, before we act. Enlightenment admirers might counsel this way of proceeding. It seems the approach we are taking now. But it carries a huge risk: when we can be sure of the facts, will it be too late to take effective action? In short, could we reach a tipping point with both the debt and the atmosphere where no action can reverse the cascade of ill effects that follow?

Those who raise this question are often considered alarmists - people who seek to frighten us into (unreasonable) action. It is also worth noting, however, that buried in the "let's wait till the data are clear" line of thinking is usually an admiration for and assumption about science itself that: whatever the ill, science can overcome it. Appropriately tuned fiscal policy in the case of the debt, and such tools as carbon sequestration in the case of the atmosphere, are there ready to be used if and when we need them. We ought to acknowledge, however, that the science to justify this belief in science is absent. We are staking our believe in science on faith.

The second approach we might take toward uncertainty about the debt and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be conservative (small letter "c"). That is, we act as if the data are real and then ask: what should we do? In short, we take steps to mitigate the downstream effects before they have a chance to show up. In the case of the debt, we make fiscal and monetary adjustments now rather than waiting until severe damage to the economy and individuals is evident and unavoidable. In the case of the atmosphere, we decrease carbon emissions now rather than waiting until it may be too late to reverse the levels and their resulting damage. Some pain comes with this approach, of course, since it may mean denying current pleasures to find the resources and take the steps needed to fend off later disaster. These are clearly "pay me now" rather than "pay me later" approaches.

So the question may well be: how big a gamble are we willing to take? As a nation, we are on the path in both areas that says: "there may be a problem, but let's wait and see. If there is, (economic and atmospheric) science will confirm we need to act and also see us through."

On a personal level, this might be likened to considering what we do as parents of a child who faces the prospect of getting a deadly disease. Given the choice of waiting to see if he or she is one of the very few who will be struck down or giving a vaccination that itself carries a small risk of serious illness, the reasonable parent does not wait for the disease to strike in the hope of treating it then. The importance of preventive action is clear even though the risk of the disease appearing is uncertain or even low. Life is too precious to wait for conclusive evidence that harm has arrived.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison written while the former was in Paris as Minister to France, articulated the principle that "the world belongs in usufruct to the living generation." What Jefferson meant was that no generation had the right to encumber the next with its debts, be they monetary, environmental, or political. Jefferson, that enlightened man of science, did not derive this from scientific reasoning. He derived it from moral philosophy.

Is it possible that our reliance on science, on waiting for the proof, has insulated us from the moral thinking without which science is a neutral instrument, as likely to cause damage as do good? Waiting for proof in the case of the debt and the atmosphere may be scientifically sound but it just might also be socially suicidal. Perhaps true enlightenment blends scientific reasoning with moral imagination.

Is Iraq Another Vietnam?

As the U.S. engagement has deepened and worsened, critics are quick to cite Iraq as another Vietnam: the nation mired in a guerilla war with no hope for success. Even Henry Kissinger, no stranger to the problems of that earlier war, found a parallel: "For me, the tragedy of Vietnam was the divisions that occurred in the United Sates that made it, in the end, impossible to achieve an outcome that was compatible with the sacrifices that had been made," he said in 2005.

Advocates of our commitment in Iraq are just as quick to debunk the "myth" that it is another Vietnam. President Bush has scoffed at the analogy many times, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in November 2006: "This is a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States." She noted that Iraq is a fight between an elected government and insurgents and that we are fighting now with a volunteer army, not one based on a military draft. The analogy is "not only faulty, but also unhealthy" she added.

The argument about whether Iraq is another Vietnam, based as it is on similarities and differences in outward events - geography, geopolitics, public opinion, and military tactics - can never be settled. It is also an argument that diverts us from looking inward, at the thinking that underlies the actions in both wars. In the nature of the decision-making and judgment of America's leaders, Iraq is another Vietnam. Without seeing that, it will not be the last Vietnam either.

The similarities are brought to light by returning to Barbara Tuchman's 1984 classic, The March to Folly. In analyzing government miscalculations from Troy to the British loss of America to the U.S. failure in Vietnam, she offered conclusions that seem disturbingly valid to Iraq.

In regard to Vietnam specifically, Tuchman found the rationale for going to war filled with misjudgments. As for the Vietnamese desire for democracy, she noted that "The presumption that humanity at large shared the democratic Western idea of freedom was an American delusion." As for the effort to install democratic values and institutions that would protect the average citizen, she reminded us that it took the West 25 centuries to reach its present point. ""Nation-building" was the most presumptuous of the illusions," she said. And as for the belief that the loss of Vietnam would mean the loss of all of Southeast Asia, an argument that four presidents used to continually (and as it turned out quite inaccurately) raise the stakes of the conflict, she concluded that "The melding of the several countries of East Asia as if they had no individuality, no history, no differences of circumstances of their own was thinking, either uninformed and shallow or knowingly false..." The "domino theory" in Southeast Asia has parallels in the concern about the spread of "Islamic terrorism" today.

Tuchman also found folly in the thinking about how to prosecute the war. The illusion of omnipotence, that U.S. power could ensure its desired outcome, was a critical misjudgment in Vietnam. "Americans took it for granted that they could impose their will and the might of their resources," she noted. And once the commitment of those resources had been made, "The stake had become America's exercise of power and its manifestation called "credibility."" "Enormity of the stakes was the new self-hypnosis" that prevented reconsideration about whether the commitment was worth the cost. "War is a procedure from which there can be no turning back without acknowledging defeat," she said about Vietnam. "This was the self-laid trap into which American had walked." Once engaged, she noted, America's leaders could find no way to disengage without the loss of face and power, at home as well as abroad. "Support of Humpty-Dumpty was chosen instead, and once a policy has been adopted and implemented, all subsequent activity becomes an effort to justify it."

But perhaps the greatest folly was the thinking that created long-term damage to U.S. society itself. Of President Johnson, she noted, "Long accustomed to normal political lying, he forgot that his office made a difference, and that when lies come to light, as under the greater spotlight of the White House they were bound to, it was the presidency and public faith that suffered." A part of that lying was surely the choking off of dissent, Tuchman found. "Johnson wanted his policies to be ratified, not questioned." "Disgrace of a ruler is not a great matter in world history," Tuchman said, "but disgrace of government is traumatic, for government cannot function without respect."

America lost a lot in Vietnam. In addition to 55,000 combat deaths, and many more injuries, we lost part of our belief in who we are. Tuchman quotes Ambassador George Kennan who said of the American spectacle in Vietnam that it was "inflicting grievous damage on the lives of a poor and helpless people... This spectacle produces reactions among millions of people throughout the world profoundly detrimental to the image we would like them to hold of this country." Some of those reactions were right here at home. The current Administration may wish to point out that Iraq is not Vietnam because we have suffered far lighter casualties. But that misses the point. For what we have lost in Iraq goes far beyond numbers. We might easily say of Iraq what Tuchman said of Vietnam: "What America lost in Vietnam was, to put it in one word, virtue."

Contrary to what Secretary Rice claims, the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam is worthwhile if it helps us examine the decision making still taking place. Contrary to what Secretary Kissinger maintains, the divisions of opinion in the United States are the working of democracy and representative government, not a danger to it. Indeed, the lack of those divisions before and in the early days of the Iraq war represents a major failure of both the White House and the Congress.

As someone once said in defining madness, it is doing something that does not work over and over again but expecting a different outcome. And so with the Administration's thinking process about Iraq. Or as Tuchman put it in closing her book, quoting from Samuel Coleridge: "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us." After two failed wars, fought with the same thinking, it is time to shine the light onto the ship of state itself.

The Politics of Protection

Shortly before Karl Wallenda, of the famous Flying Wallendas high-wire act, plunged to his death in 1978, he made what proved an apocryphal comment. He said that throughout his career he had always focused on doing the next great performance but that, lately, he had found himself thinking increasingly about not falling. The Flying Wallendas worked without a safety net.

Much of our discourse as a nation these days seems to be the language of not falling, in a dangerous world without a safety net. But Karl Wallenda may have something to teach us. Like him, we may find that trying to prevent disaster may serve us less well than trying to imagine success.

Since 9/11, our public conversation has centered on how to stop another terrorist attack. For years, our policy debates have centered on how to prevent depletion of the social security trust fund, how to stem the damage from global warming, how to arrest moral decline, and how to ensure we don’t run out of fossil fuels. Our language has been the rhetoric of fighting disease, fighting crime, fighting terrorists, fighting inflation, fighting illegal immigration, and fighting drugs.

We are engaged in the politics of protection. We have focused on not losing what we have. But our standard of living, our vibrant democracy, our culturally diverse and creative society in the performing, mechanical, social and healing arts, and our advances in spreading democracy in other parts of the world are the products of a politics of hope. They are the result of Karl Wallenda looking out across the thin wire connecting him to the future not looking down into the chasm that separates him from it.

It is not a question of whether we need to fight terrorists. Nor is it a question of whether we need social insurance to guard against the ravages of disease, old age, or natural disasters. It is a question of balance. What ultimately drives our imaginations and our collective endeavors must be a belief in success as much as a concern for failure. We must guide ourselves by looking toward the horizon as well as in the rear view mirror.

We have spent over $500 billion fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our defense and homeland security budget is another $500 billion for the 2007 fiscal year alone. By contrast, the State Department will spend only $34 billion in 2007 for all of its staff and foreign assistance programs. Just $1.2 billion of this will be devoted to food aid.

A politics of hope may seem fuzzy, perhaps because we lack positive pictures of the future. What would a healthy country look like? A clean environment with flourishing biodiversity? An America that is dependent only on its own energy resources? What would a world look like in which every child is vaccinated and educated? Our leaders promise to cushion the blows but lack an engaging story of a future where they are largely absent. Said another way, consider where we would be if Martin Luther King, Jr. had focused on the nightmare instead of on the dream.

Perhaps we need a blue ribbon Study Group on Building a Health Care Delivery System in Africa along with a Study Group on Iraq. Perhaps we need a “Marshall Plan” for the Middle East along with a National Defense Strategy. Perhaps we need a Presidential Address on an America in harmony with nature and preserving its biodiversity. Perhaps we need an Inter-American Conference on Building Jobs in Central America as an alternative to building a wall to stop immigration. Perhaps we need an International Conference on Religious Respect and Toleration.

On Christmas Eve, there was a story on NBC news about a Palestinian father’s disappointment that he could not buy toys to put under the family’s tree because he had not been paid in ten months. Why were there no photos of American ships carrying toys to the Middle East?

The plea for a more hopeful picture of the future should not be dismissed as an exercise in Pollyannaish sentimentalism. There is considerable psychological and organizational research on the power of the positive in driving human affairs and achievements. There is also considerable experience in American affairs at home and abroad. Thomas Jefferson knew the power of the politics of hope when he said that he always approached the future “with hope in the bow leaving fear astern.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew this when he said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Karl Wallenda knew it at the height of his success, when his mind’s eye saw him walkin

What We Agree Upon - A July 4th Reflection

America seems an angry land as we celebrate the Declaration of Independence. Rather than uniting to fight a common enemy as we did in 1776, we seem driven in 2006 by disagreement, determined to define ourselves by our differences. We disagree on when our life begins and whether we have the right to end it when suffering a terminal disease. We differ on what marriage means, who has the right to marry, and even who has the authority to decide the answers to these questions. We cannot agree on how humans came to walk the planet and even if life evolved. Consensus on whether the world is warming and if it is, why and what to do about it, proves as illusive as fog that flees with the morning sun. Some of us would arrest those who burn the flag. Others are appalled at a proposal to do so. We want our president to protect us against terrorists, but we argue about whether he has gone too far.

For all of its cacophony, however, America has a solution crafted as a master symphony. The fight over amendments to ban flag burning and gay marriage, the push and pull to shape the Supreme Court for the battle over abortion, the decision on whether to pass legislation to address global warming, and the controversy over whether the President has over-stepped his authority all share a common denominator. The Constitutional process will enable us to find an answer. The Constitution is the touchstone and a gyroscope. It gives us a common faith and a source of stability.

This is a remarkable achievement. We are a “people of the parchment.” While at times we seem to agree on little else, we agree that the Constitution offers a means to resolve our disagreements. We may distrust each other, but we trust this document and the machinery of government it established, both so fragile and uncertain in 1787.

The framers understood that, as Madison said, “men are not angels” and that a “factious spirit” was the price of liberty. They would not be surprised that we differ as we do. They would be pleased that the Constitutional process for peaceably resolving our differences is invoked so readily by so many and that it has earned the respect that only history and fidelity could give it.

The framers would be quick to remind us, however, that a working Constitution requires an underlying set of shared civic values. Without a commitment to something broader and more important than winning a political argument, the Constitution becomes just an instrument for waging ideological warfare.

The willingness to compromise is one of these civic values. When our national dialogue goes too far toward “either-or” and seeks too little of “yes-and,” we risk a polarization that does injustice to our founders’ hopes. The framers created the nation in a masterful set of compromises. They understood that reasoned, heated debate would at some point be resolved through an electoral majority, but they also understood that the majority had obligations to those with divergent views. Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency in the first American election where political parties contested the outcome. After a savage battle decided only when thrown into the House of Representatives, he reminded his inaugural audience that: “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” Compromise is not, as some would have it today, a source of weakness and failure. It is an essential recognition that, in the end, we must find common ground if we wish to avoid paralysis on one hand or paroxysm on the other.

The humility essential to acknowledging our own fallibility is a second civic value the founders would have us remember. These men of the Enlightenment expected knowledge to progress and show them the errors of their earlier thinking. They had faults to be sure, but hubris was not one of them. Benjamin Franklin, in asking for a unanimous vote to adopt the Constitution at the close of the 1787 convention from which many angry delegates walked out, modeled this behavior: “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve,” he said, “but I am not sure I shall never approve them; for having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Humility in the face of opposition is not cowardice. It is the courage to admit the possibility of error, which in the end is essential for compromise.
Such civic values make for good government. They also make for the foundation of social trust on which any good government must be erected. Since the 1960s, Americans’ trust in their elected leaders has plummeted. Their trust in “the system,” the Constitutional architecture that supports the house of government, has not.

Social trust is fragile, however. It can be destroyed. The passionate activists of both the left and the right would do well to understand this. E pluribus unum always depends on a delicate balance between the pluribus and the unum, between the desires of diverse interests and the need for community. If we forget the art and importance of compromise, if we demonize the opposition in our love affair with our own certainty, and especially if we forget the ends of the Constitution – a more perfect Union - and view it solely as a means, then we could destroy the vehicle we all depend on to see us through our differences.

The Darkening Mind?

“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” – Thomas Paine

Our nation is awash in outrage. In this country, liberals and conservatives have been shouting at each for at least a quarter century. Secularists and fundamentalist Christians have been at it nearly as long. Whether the topic is abortion, gay marriage, fiscal policy, immigration, gun control, or family values, we have become adept at casting blame and polarizing arguments. We are as sure that “we” are right as we are sure that “they” are wrong.

The world has its share of outrage as well. The “clash of civilizations” seems increasingly likely as extremist Muslims, Christians, and Jews push both rapturous visions and apocalyptic nightmares that will attend the success or failure of man’s work on earth and God’s justified response. Too many engage in fervent prayers that seem to provoke equally fervent prayers from others for just the opposite results.

As wildly different as we contentious humans seem, however, our outward anger, frustration, and religious justifications may mask an underlying and disturbing similarity. Are we afraid of the future? Have we lost confidence in our ability to shape our own destiny? Does our anger mask an inner hopelessness?

In America, whether it is big government, the global economy, intractable social problems, terrorism, bird flu, global warming, or a host of other worries, many of us seem to accept that there is little we can do – or at least not much prospect of success even as we try. We seem ready to accept as well that those in charge are either out of or have the wrong ideas. So we blame “them,” retire within ourselves (or our gated communities or enclaves of faith), tell pollsters that the country is headed in the wrong direction, or seek a “savior” in the form of a pundit, politician, or priest.

Fear of the future is not new. A collective lack of confidence in our ability to affect it may be. Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers would be surprised and take issue with this American hopelessness and helplessness. The Founders were, after all, children of the Enlightenment. They had emerged from what they considered the Dark Ages of superstition. They had become men of science, trusting in progress guided by human reason. They would have rejected the thought that our problems could be beyond our understanding or ability just as readily as some of us seem to accept that thought today.

Why have so many lost faith in reason? Unfortunately, there can be great comfort in being a victim of an out-of-control world. If we are helpless, we don’t have to help. If reason cannot solve our problems, we don’t have to think. We can be free to engage in complaint, conflict and of course conspicuous consumption.

This is a prescription for an escalating nightmare. It is a nightmare that will not end through following the path of religion alone. Rejecting reason for divine revelation is as dangerous as rejecting faith on the assumption that science will solve all our ills. Finding our way in a complex and confusing world will require both reason and faith. Rejecting either – or placing sole reliance on either – leads to unbalanced lives as well as unbalanced nations.

We need to restore balance to our heads and our hearts. We need to acknowledge that careful science and caring religion have both enhanced our lives, just as we acknowledge that irresponsible science and intolerant religion have damaged them. While science did not create global warming or family disintegration, scientists who acted like their sole responsibility was to their hypotheses and not the hypothetical implications of their creations have surely contributed to many of our current problems. While religion did not create violence or poverty, people of faith who acted like their sole responsibility was to the holy book and not to eradicating poverty with holy practice surely contributed to the social disparities that breed the ill-clothed and ill-fed who see violence as essential if not justified.

We need to restore faith in our reason even as we restore reason in our faith. If the Founding Fathers sought to enshrine reason in the guidance of our lives, they also accepted that faith would give us the moral framework to guide the exercise of that reason. Either without the other leads to inner and ultimately outer terror.

“We are really another people,” Thomas Paine said in the same letter to the Abbe Raynal in 1782, “and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice.” Let us hope he was correct.

The Unnatural Tragedy of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina was an unavoidable natural disaster. How we are dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is an avoidable unnatural disaster. Most of the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast emerged from what raw nature has done. Wider and more long lasting damage to our nation can only result from what human nature is doing.

The typically human tendency to find and fix blame is as dangerous as it is destined to fail. The “blame game,” which we all seem to decry even as we participate in it, has no winners. It does have losers, plenty of them. They will not be from just one political party, race, religion or administrative level or arm of government.

As we engage in the cathartic if unproductive search for who to blame, perhaps we can find some guidance in our Constitution. It begins, as all schoolchildren know, with “We, the people…” This is not just semantics. The Constitution proclaimed the fundamental principle, unique in history at the time, that this would be a nation where all power – and ultimately all responsibility – comes from and must be exercised by the people. So if we want to blame anyone for what has happened in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, perhaps we should blame ourselves. After all, Thomas Jefferson reminded us, our leaders serve only with the “consent of the governed.”

And we have given our consent, by our silence as well as by our votes.

We have consented to the tendency to accept short-term solutions where long-term ones were needed. How else do we explain our willingness to tolerate the weakening of New Orleans natural storm barriers as well as the failure to strengthen its man-made ones? Our leaders at all levels ignored long-term infrastructure needs because we let them.

We have consented to consumption rather than investment, a decades-long rush for material comfort that has, in the end, lowered our ability to preserve that very standard of living we so avidly purchased. No one made us save less, spend more, and so end up with a national and personal debt that makes finding the money to prevent and recover from disasters so hard.

We have consented to approach our world with hubris rather than humility, assuming that the unthinkable was also impossible and that planning and organizational structures could hold back the forces of nature. We can’t blame our leaders for turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the same warnings that caused us to do the same, because what happened in New Orleans was forecast, more than once.

It may be comforting now, in the wake of the storm, to think that it was all the fault of the federal government, or the state government, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, or those who run FEMA or those who serve in State capitols. Comforting but wrong. Because in our democracy, those who lead us are chosen by us and answerable to us. If they did wrong, so did we.

In the despair of the winter of 1776, when the American Revolution looked so hopelessly lost, Thomas Paine, an immigrant writer who had failed at everything he tried in the Old World reminded those of us just starting in the New World that “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Perhaps it’s time to look into our souls as Americans and accept that until we change, those who lead us will not change. Perhaps it is time to demand long-term solutions not short-term fixes, save more than we spend so as to put our fiscal house in the order needed to invest in the infrastructure of America, and recognize that we would do far better living within nature’s laws than trying to ignore them.

The Scarlett Syndrome

The U.S. contributes 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases but, except at the state level in selected parts of the nation, the government has determined that voluntary efforts and market incentives are the chief vehicles to use in contributing to worldwide reductions. At the personal level, we continue to favor style, power, and size in our vehicles over fuel efficiency and rank high gas prices among the top problems the nation faces. We acknowledge that there may be a global warming problem, but we do not share an urgency for a comprehensive and effective solution.

The U.S. national debt ceiling now tops $8 trillion, with annual budget deficits running near or above $300 billion for possibly years to come. At a personal level, Americans charged $1.5 trillion to credit cards in 2003, up 350 percent from the amount charged in 1990. In the second quarter of 2005, American households spent $350 billion more than they took in. Both the national debt and consumer debt are viewed as serious problems, but they are not matched with serious solutions.

Scarlett O’Hara had an approach to pervasive problems that many Americans seem to share. When faced with the fact that Rhett Butler was finally leaving her, she agonizingly proclaims: “I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow.”

There are many reasons we put off tough choices and necessary measures. Sometimes, as with global warming, we argue that the empirical evidence requiring action is inconclusive. Sometimes, as with the national debt, we cite more urgent matters, such as the need to stimulate economic growth or help disaster victims. Sometimes, as with personal debt, we just rationalize our behavior with an appeal to our own self-interest. After all, we work hard and owe it to ourselves to enjoy life too. Sometimes we count on historical experience and time to take care of things. Americans, we know, always respond best when a crisis comes.

But many of the problems we face, from global warming to national and personal financial debt, from failing to provide for our own retirement to glaring infrastructure problems in our roads, rails, and bridges, may never rise to the definition of “crisis” – a time when something must be done to avoid total breakdown or disaster. It is at least conceivable in many of these cases that irreversible damage may be done before we acknowledge a crisis has been reached. Many of these problems will instead continue to get worse as we continue to ignore the symptoms, much as Scarlett does through all the years of Rhett’s pleading. When she finally acknowledges the problem, she can no longer solve it.

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison in 1789, had a point of view on this tendency to ignore big problems and put them off until later. "The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another. . . is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every government. . . . I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living' . . .." Jefferson meant that the current generation had a right to make decisions about the use of resources as long as they did not damage the substance of them for the next generation. While Jefferson was concerned primarily with land, he also abhorred financial debt for the same reason, commenting to John Taylor in 1816 that “I sincerely believe...that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

It’s not clear what it will take to change our preference to “think about that tomorrow.” Despite his theory, Jefferson was terrible in practice, dying over $100,000 in debt. Some evolutionary biologists have even suggested that paying less attention to the future has been bred into us, since those who were most fit to survive no doubt had to pay attention to immediate needs rather than sit in their caves and ponder long term ones.

Bit it is also clear that we cannot continue to ignore our most intractable societal problems. Political leadership on the national level, religious and civic leadership at the local level, and personal leadership, especially leadership by example, at the family level will all be needed. The first task will be to have honest conversations about our current predicament, where we are heading if nothing is done, and what it may take to change course. The second task will be to formulate action agendas at all levels and to marshal public opinion and personal will to demand a change. This will include not only an honest and massive campaign of personal and public education but a forceful re-ordering of laws and moral imperatives. We must arrive at the point where cutting greenhouse gases and retiring our personal and public debt, to name just two examples, are goals that are both morally and legally compelling and compelled.

The film Gone with the Wind ends before we get a chance to see if Scarlett does think about it tomorrow. The betting money is not in her favor. But at least she will only hurt herself by her inability to face life head-on. We will not be so lucky.