Posts Tagged ‘governance’
“Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power”*…
Coleman McCormick on a framework that can help us understand change in systems– and build resiliance…
A forest is a complex ecosystem made up of thousands of organisms living, evolving, interacting with each other, and changing over time.
At the top of the hierarchy are the leaves, changing annually, growing, dying, and shedding in a year-long seasonal cycle. Next there are branches, fewer in number and slower in growth. Then the whole tree itself, changing over decades. The tree sits in a stand of dozens, and the stand in a forest of thousands of individual trees. The forest within a biome, the biome in a region with a particular climate.
You get the idea.
All natural ecosystems evolve in layers like this that connect to each other, but move at different speeds. You can imagine other systems with similar structures: your body is made up of proteins, DNA strands, organelles, cells, membranes, organs, a skeleton, and eventually, your whole body. Cells are being generated but also dying off at almost the same rate. Slower layers like the nervous system take a long time to heal (if ever) when subjected to injury.
Seeing complex systems this way — as layered collections of variable-speed elements — is a useful framework for understanding why we have a hard time changing them.
Stewart Brand [and here and here] noticed this recurring pattern in the anatomy of systems, which he called pace layering.
The concept builds on an observation made by architect Frank Duffy, who noticed a hierarchy in the components of buildings. In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand expanded this observation into a model he termed “shearing layers,” which describes how different parts of a structure change at varying speeds. Site → Structure → Skin → Services → Space plan → Stuff. Each must survive or adapt on different timelines. When architecture fails to account for the different rates at which users need to modify these layers, it results in rigid, non-functional design. Buildings where Services or the Space Plan are overly inflexible are difficult to adapt to users’ changing needs.
In his later book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand expanded the concept of shearing layers to a civilizational scale:
At the bottom, nature moves along on its own eons-level time scale. In the middle, governance and culture shift with generations. Infrastructure and commerce in the range of years. And on the surface, fashionable trends flare up and die out with sometimes daily regularity, like the turbulent wave tops in a stormy ocean. Each layer serves a function:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power...
… Seeing the world through this lens — not only of scale, but also of time — has distant reach to so many other domains. It’s a fundamental characteristic of how systems work and adapt to change.
The fast flurry of activity at the top of a pace layered system creates a testbed for new ideas. In the forest, each individual tree can try out different evolutionary adaptations. New survival strategies are tested in numbers not possible if entire ecosystems had to move together. If one tree tests a new trait that turns out not to work, only a single organism is at risk, not the whole forest.
Because upper layers move faster they can also rebound faster. A forest fire or a passing herd of elk causes some damage, but only at the surface level upper crust of our strata. The bark and branches and leaves may get eaten or burn off, but in a few weeks they bounce back.
Pace layering builds resiliency into complex systems. The fast layers shield the slower ones from shocks, while selectively transmitting changes down through the layers, allowing slower ones to incorporate those adaptations. But some changes propagate too fast.
Some of the worst cases of system shock happen when change shakes to lower levels too rapidly. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid change in the governance layer caused wreaked havoc in the layers above: massive instability on a national scale, rippling through the whole system for decades. In this case, a totalitarian government imposed rigidity on commerce, infrastructure, and even fashion, and didn’t allow for the necessary shifting and experimentation required for the system to maintain resilience.
Drawing sharp lines between layers actually draws an inaccurate picture of how a thriving system works. A more accurate diagram would show smoother gradients across the transitions between layers.
Resilience comes from allowing this gradient — this slippage — at the junctions between layers. Each layer, above and below, must allow for give and take from its neighbors. Slow layers must permit some influence at the edges, and fast layers must slow down to maintain a workable interface with the slower. The layers need to be able to negotiate with one another. If the fast ignores the constraints of the slow, you get discontinuous instability. If the slow never bends to the fast, you get stifling stagnation…
[McCormick explores the applicability of this framework to governance and to corporate activity…]
… With age, my mind seems to sink to lower levels in the hierarchy. “Current things” are more likely to hit me and bounce off. We come around to new ideas more slowly. Above us are the teenagers, trying new technologies, listening to new music, pushing new memes, on a weekly or daily basis. We parents underneath can’t keep up.
But “keeping up” isn’t our role! Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast tries things, slow preserves what works. Resilient, sustainable systems balance this learning and remembering.
Not every meme or new song or fashion trend has staying power, but some do. The ones with notable resonance absorb and influence the culture below. Youth play the role of experimenters, continuously throwing new ideas at the wall — some good, many terrible. The elders carry the torch of tradition, and provide the stable platform of time-tested solutions on top of which the innovators can explore.
Pace layering is one of those ideas with such broad reach that once you learn about it, you see it everywhere…
The hidden architecture of resilient systems: “Pace Layers,” from @colemanm.
For Stewart’s own essay on Pace Layers, see here; and for more, here.
* Stewart Brand
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As we take the long view, we might send connective birthday greetings to Alexander MacMillan; he was born on this date in 1818. MacMillan was cofounder (in 1843) with his brother Daniel, of Macmillan Publishers, one of the “Big Five” English language publishers.
Though not himself a professional scientist, MacMillan did much to promote science in the Victorian times– especially when he established the journal Nature (in 1869), enabling communication between men of science. The journal had the support of many influential contributors, including Thomas Huxley. Yet, it remained a financial challenge for Macmillan. Other scientific quarterlies had short lives, but Macmillan tolerated losses for three decades, committed to the journal’s mission “to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of science to move to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.” That mission continues to the present day.
“The chief aim of Interpretation is not instruction, but provocation”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell on James Scott and technology…
The political scientist James Scott died last week. I only knew him through email – an occasional and irregular correspondence, mostly involving unsuccessful attempts to organize discussion at political science conferences around his work. As he suggested in a biographical essay, “Intellectual Diary of an Iconoclast,” which just came out a few months ago, he was semi-detached from his academic discipline.
I’ve wandered away from political science, though I could argue that political science has wandered away from me. I am honored even to be seen as a specialist, and probably as much to be embraced by anthropology and history.
The world was better for his iconoclasm. Scott wrote far more beautifully than political scientists are supposed to write and his ideas and work were too big to fit into any discipline. Although arguments were largely rooted in the past, his book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, has shaped how we think about technology.
Seeing Like a State is important because of how it sets up the problem of modernity. Scott was a critic of the vast impersonal systems – bureaucracies and markets – that modern society depends on. He believed that they prioritized the kind of thinking that comes easily to engineers over the kind that comes readily to peasants and craftsmen, and that we had lost something very important as a result.
In Scott’s account, both governments and long distance markets “see” the world through abstractions – technical standards, systems of categories and the like. A government cannot see its people directly, or what they are doing. What it can see are things like statistics measuring population, the number of people who are employed or unemployed, the percentages of citizens who work in this sector or that, and the like. These measures – in numbers, charts and categories – allow it to set policy.
Such knowledge grants its users enormous power to shape society – but often without the detailed, intimate understanding that would allow them to shape it well. There is a lot of social reality that is described poorly, or not at all, by categories or statistics. Even so, as governments and markets established their power, they not only saw the world in highly limited ways but shaped it so that it conformed better to their purblind understanding, ironing out the idiosyncrasies and apparent inefficiencies that got in the way of their vast projects. The state did not just ‘see’ its society through bureaucratic categories, but tried to remake this society so that it fit better with the government’s preconceptions.
So too for the abstractions and general categories that long distance markets depend on, as the historian William Cronon observed in his great book on nineteenth century Chicago, Nature’s Metropolis (Scott was a fan). As another scholar observed of Chicago’s late twentieth century markets, abstract seeming financial conceptions may be engines, not cameras, making the economy rather than merely reflecting them.
This abstraction of the world’s tangled complexities into simplified categories and standards underpinned vast state projects, and supported enormous gains in market efficiency. We could not live what we now consider to be acceptable lives without it, as Scott somewhat grudgingly acknowledged. It also often precipitated disaster, including Soviet collectivization and China’s Great Famine.
So what does this have to do with modern information technology? Quite straightforwardly: if you read Scott, you will see marked similarities between e.g. the ambitions of 1960s bureaucrats, convinced that they can plan out countries and cities for “abstract citizens” and the visions of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, convinced that algorithms and objective functions would create a more efficient and more harmonious world.
Scott focuses on officials in developing countries, who were starry-eyed about “planning.” Many of their notions came second-hand from the most striking example of high modernism, the effort of Soviet bureaucrats to use production statistics and linear programming to make the planned economy work. This provides the most obvious connection between what Scott talks about and the algorithmic ambitions of Silicon Valley today. A distinct whiff of “Comrades, Let’s Optimize!” lingers on, for example, in the airy optimism of Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth’s infamous “We connect people. Period” memo.
Both the old ambitions and the new are bets on the universal power of a particular kind of engineering knowledge – what Scott calls techne, the kind of knowledge that can “be expressed precisely and comprehensively in the form of hard-and-fast rules (not rules of thumb), principles, and propositions.” Scott describes the limits of techne in ways that resonate today. The grand failed projects of the mid-to-late twentieth century – vast rationalized cities like Brasilia laid out according to plans that seemed almost to be the squares of a chessboard; efforts to displace peasants and plan agriculture at scale – are close cousins to Facebook’s failed ambitions to build a world of shared connections on algorithmic foundations, and the resulting social media Brezhnevism of today.
Hence, 20th century state planning and 21st century social media evangelism are different flavors of what Scott called “high modernism … a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” High modernism was both a faith and a practice. It turned rich and diffuse social relations into something much thinner, which could be measured and observed.
Against this kind of knowledge, Scott suggested the value of metis – “the kind of knowledge that can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks, which requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances.” This is the kind of tacit knowledge that peasants come to build about their land and the weather, or that people in less regimented societies accumulate about how to live with others in tolerable peace. Scott – an anarchist – greatly preferred this latter kind of knowledge, and the societies that valued it more, to the kind of world we live in today.
Scott provides intellectual ammunition for those who want to understand what Silicon Valley has in common with past grand efforts to improve the human condition. It’s a fountain of useful comparisons…
[Farrell reviews elaborations on and critiques of Scott’s thought…]
… All this suggests that you could reframe my criticisms of Scott in more positive ways. His contribution is not to provide a systematic framework for getting ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, but to plant some of the seeds for a different intellectual ecology, in which others will take up his thoughts, use them to argue, also arguing with them and arguing with each other, and hence discover aspects of the world that they would never have seen otherwise. That would be as fine a legacy as any thinker could want…
Eminently worth reading in full: “High Modernism made our world,” from @mastodon.social@henryfarrell in his wonderful newsletter Programmable Mutter.
See also: “The Art of Pretending to Govern,” from @vgr.
###
As we see like a state, we might we might recall that it was on this date in 1776 that the Declaration of Independence was actually signed (by all of the signatories except Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire, who inked it on November 4, 1776). After the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2, the final language of the document was approved on July 4– to wit our celebration of the date– and it was printed and distributed on July 4–5.
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing”*…
I don’t normally deal with current politics, and certainly not two days on a row. But these are tumultuous times. As we look forward, we’d be wise to heed Marilynne Robinson…
… I have devoted a good part of my life to studying American history and literature. And I have regretted the habit of self-disparagement that has caused things of great worth to be undervalued, including the habits of respect that make debate possible. I mention this because there is a baffled cynicism abroad in the country, a sense that we will and must fail at everything except adding wealth to wealth and influencing other countries to their harm. We have the war in Gaza to remind us how suddenly horror can descend on a region, how a provocation can unleash utter disaster, and how the contending pathologies of a few men can destroy lives by the scores of thousands. A profound alienation has set in, regularly expressed on both sides in contempt—contempt for Trumpists and those who vote with them on one side, and on the other side Trump and his allies’ contemptuous rejection of the entire project we have called America. In contemporary parlance this rejection is called conservatism…
… my subject is the rage and rejection that have emerged in America, threatening to displace politics, therefore democracy, and to supplant them with a figure whose rage and resentment excite an extreme loyalty, and disloyalty, a sort of black mass of patriotism, a business of inverted words and symbols where the idea of the sacred is turned against itself. I will suggest that one great reason for this rage is a gross maldistribution of the burdens and consequences of our wars. If I am right that this inequity has some part in the anger that has inflamed our public life, in order to vindicate democracy we must acknowledge it and try to put it right.
It is taken to be true that the Trump phenomenon reflects the feeling in a large part of the population that they are “left behind.” This view is obviously too smug to deserve the acceptance it enjoys. Why does this movement have no vision of a future, beyond the incarceration of whomever Trump chooses to vilify? Why have its members proposed no reforms to narrow the economic divide? Why is there no response to the ambitious investments President Biden has made, designed to stimulate the economies of struggling areas? A “populism” whose lieutenants have an impressive number of Yale Law degrees and whose idol is a Manhattan moneyman is not to be understood as a flaring up of aggrieved self-interest. Nothing we normally think of as profit will accrue to these foot soldiers.
An anger that is too intense and immediate to pause over possible consequences, whether desirable or not, seems to make a better account of this movement. Having no vision, it would certainly have a future. Trump is an old man, and he will soon go the way of his ancestors. But the very arbitrariness of his being chosen as the hero of the disaffected means that when he goes he is likely to be replaced in their angry adoration by someone equally improbable, perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This is truer because Trump has proved that law can be scorned without consequence. He has shown us that there is a kind of loyalty that neuters outrage, and he has established a breadth of latitude for scurrilous and threatening speech that can only be of profound use to every scoundrel who succeeds him.
This anger is entangled with resentments and revanchism and varieties of opportunism, including Trump’s, that are readily seen as discrediting the entire phenomenon of unrest. But this is the kind of mistake that comes with the idea that the old symmetry of opposed parties is in play here. The MAGA side really has no politics. Its broad appeal lies in its galvanizing resentment, which is what anger becomes when its legitimacy is not acknowledged. Trump can reverse himself on any point, and his followers will simply realign themselves as necessary. If he were dealing with his followers in good faith, Trump would be offering them policies addressed to the relief of their grievances. Instead, he recites his own.
I will suggest that, in the very fact of making no sense, the movement has enormous meaning. Something has enraged a great many Americans, and a democracy worthy of the name should make a serious effort to understand what it is. The pocketbook metric we apply to everything is not sufficiently respectful to be of use…
…
… All the flags and chants give the Trump rallies the look of traditional nationalism. Trumpism is in fact very singular, however, in its insistence that America is a failed country, a scene of hideous crime, invaded by depraved aliens and betrayed by depraved liberals, all of whom should be jailed or worse. Trump’s America is a thing of sham institutions and fake information—this should be a joke, considering, for example, Trump University and the fakery of the National Enquirer—and is altogether so fallen that it must defer to the wisdom of Vladimir Putin and autocrats in general. All this seems less like love than loathing. By every measure I know of, the country is doing well. Comparisons are always difficult. We know from the reportage of Tucker Carlson that Moscow has one highly polished grocery store. How appropriate it is to generalize from this fact we cannot tell. And, of course, what should it matter to anyone who prefers a little democratic clutter to an (apparently) immaculate authoritarianism? This choice has presented itself before.
In any case, this “nationalism” departs from tradition in that its foreign enemies are the desperate immigrants trying to cross the southern border—for all the excitement, an appropriate adversary for a bully only. Trump’s militaristic fantasies involve calling up the army to crush resistance on the part of Americans. I cannot account for these passions he seems to channel for his crowds except as a fusion of disillusionments, a sort of plasma not accessible to conventional political or economic analysis. I am far from dismissing it on these grounds. With the proviso that the part of the population that might show up at Trump rallies is small, and that many might be attracted by the febrile showmanship, even by the certainty that their own primal screams would startle no one in all that noise, opinion makers assume that these people do tell us what our future might be, beginning as soon as November.
If my analysis has any merit, one side in this opposition has a far richer and more nuanced geopolitical insight. A population more likely to provide troops for the military would have a livelier awareness of the fact that they are deployed all over the world, in places that are or at any time might become very dangerous. This might yield a different definition of globalism. On the other side, that regrettable gift for forgetting is a factor, forgetfulness of the weight of this burden. Trump’s utter lack of foreign policy beyond a resentment of Europe, his hinted readiness to capitulate in the face of what he constantly represents as superior strength and “genius,” seems never to thin his crowds. His antagonism toward NATO is expressed in mercenary terms, though the economic consequences of the fraying of the West would be unimaginably great. An era of smash-and-grab would benefit those inclined that way and well positioned for it. Trump never describes a future, which is sensible, since no policy he suggests would be less than disastrous.
All this is beside the point in the minds of his followers. Perhaps their zeal is driven by the thought of shaking the foundations of the existing order, which they passionately insist is not the legitimate order that would be restored by institutions and elections they accepted as having integrity. The problem is that they will never be satisfied as long as their resentments are channeled without definition, and without hope or purpose, into a political system that was designed and has functioned to produce a government. If their grievances could be made political, could be spoken of in terms of policy, in terms of justice and reform, of democracy, then Trump could concentrate on selling sneakers and Bibles. And the press and public should stop seeing his hectic road show performances as proof of health and vigor.
I have done the thing I deplore. I sat down to write about Joseph Biden and ended up writing about Donald Trump. President Biden is looking back on a long life, imagining a future that will return the country to its true work, of achieving fairness and mutual respect as norms of American life. The personal tragedies he has suffered are well known. It should be noted here that he lost a son to illness apparently related to military service.
Why does President Biden not receive credit for his remarkable legislative achievements? Whenever he announces a policy that is designed to benefit a particular region, this is interpreted in the press as a lure meant to attract swing state voters, which if true would only mean that the policy is welcome and likely to produce good results. Cynicism is an excuse for the failure to actually look at the substance of a presidency, and can only be a major contributor to the general sense that the country is adrift. Add to this the erasure of differences between parties and candidates that comes with cynicism, and the idea that voting is an empty exercise is reinforced. All this tends to delegitimize government, making it a thing of ploys and impositions no matter how wise and well-intentioned it may in fact be.
There is a tone of implied dissatisfaction among the commentators, in the absence of specifics, that functions in the public discourse as if it were weighty and considered objection. It is an attitude, not a reaction to actual circumstance, so there is no possibility of rebuttal. Jimmy Carter, now revered, his brilliance acknowledged, fell victim to this same hectoring. It is fair to wonder what the state of the environment might be if the press then were not so distracted by his cardigans and his southernisms. President Biden is old, and there is concern that his health might decline, leading to some disruption. But this consideration should be weighed against the fact that Trump promises only disruption. That he might pursue bad policies with enormous vigor should reassure no one.
The twentieth century left the world in a parlous state. Our foreign entanglements have passed through permutations that have made them truly baffling. We have always supported Israel. Now our strength is shackled to its weakness. The consequences of our even seeming to be about to abandon Israel could be cataclysmic, for it and for that region, at very least. So Netanyahu has a free hand, to the world’s grief and, it must be feared, ultimately to Israel’s. This state of things has been developing over many years. There is no simple, obvious solution available to an American president.
Americans have special obligations to reality. It is true and manifest that we will have an outsize part in determining the fate of the planet. If it should be that big problems cannot be solved and that we are left with the tedious business of managing them, we should discipline ourselves to patience and deliberation, the old courtesies that have made democracy possible. We have at hand the best resources that can be had to deal with our situation, if we can agree to respect them…
Eminently worth reading in full. We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters: “Agreeing to Our Harm,” in @nybooks. (With apologies to The New York Review of Books, to which I subscribe, I have broken my usual habit of sharing direct links, even when the source is behind a pay wall. Because I hope that everyone will click through and read the entire essay, I have linked to an archived copy, freely available to all.)
See also: Richard Slotkin‘s “The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies” from @yalereview.
* Allen Ginsberg, “America”
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As we take stock, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the Supreme Court– a very different Supreme Court than today’s– unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and ordered him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
“I’m not a member of any organized political party…. I’m a Democrat”*…
As we face the prospect of a post-Biden election, a consideration of the mechanics that will come into play. Much ink has been (justifiably) spilled dissecting the differences in the Republican and Democratic approaches to governance, their goals, and their potential implications for our future. Tanner Greer suggests that there are other important differences too– more specifically, he explains the difference between patronage (Republican) and constituent (Democratic) parties…
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own convention next month—reflect these asymmetries. Nevertheless, many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.
My perspective on all this has been strongly shaped by two research articles penned by political scientist Jo Freeman. In her youth Freeman was a new left activist, one of the founding activist-intellectuals of feminism’s second wave. She is perhaps most famous today for two essays she wrote in her activist days (both under her movement name “Joreen”). The first, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” is a biting critique of the counterculture dream of eliminating hierarchy from activist organizations. The second, “Trashing: the Dark Side of Sisterhood,” is one of the original descriptions of “Cancel Culture.” There Freeman provides a psychological account of how cancellation (she calls it “trashing”) works and the paralyzing effect it has within leftist organizations, where cancellations are most common. If you have never read these essays I recommend you do. Freeman’s internal critiques of left-wing movements at work are more insightful than most rightwing jeremiads against them.
Neither of these essays shed much light on the Republican Party. For that we must turn to her later, more academic work. In particular, her 1987 article “Who You Know vs. Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” and her 1986 “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties.”
Freeman’s academic interests were framed by her activist experiences. She was deeply involved in the seventies attempts to get feminist planks onto the Democratic and Republican party platforms. Up to that juncture the Republican Party had far stronger feminist credentials than the Democrats did; had the feminist of 1960 been forced to predict which party would champion her cause thirty years later, she would have guessed the GOP.
This is not what happened. That is the mystery that drives much of Freeman’s late ‘80s work: why did the feminist movement succeed so brilliantly with the Democrats, but fail so miserably with the Republicans? Freeman argues that this had less to do with demographics or deep ideological alignment than with the structures and operational culture of each party. Although both parties have changed in the days since Freeman stalked the convention floors, many of the differences she observed between the two parties still hold true today.
The place to start is a 1980 vote on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. That year the primary feminist organizations working the convention hall were the National Woman’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). Their pet cause was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Democrats had already endorsed the amendment, so NOW and the NWPC decided to up the ante: they would support a party plank that read “the Democratic Party shall offer no financial support and technical campaign assistance to candidates who do not support the ERA.” This measure, known as Minority Report #10, became the focus of their efforts.
Jimmy Carter’s delegates controlled the floor. Though no enemy to feminism, his team thought Ten was ill advised. The Democrat’s existing support for the ERA was robust, Carter balked at draconian single-issue “loyalty tests” that might erode his shaky coalition, and he did not wish to make feminist issues central to his campaign. He had the numbers to defeat this change. NOW and the NWPC understood this. They decided to push for a floor vote anyway. As expected, they lost that vote decisively. The platform was not changed.
What did this public defeat portend for the movement? Victory. Losing the fight on the floor did not set the movement back an inch. Far from it: at the next convention these same women’s organizations were given a greater share of decision making authority. All potential presidential candidates courted NOW’s endorsement months before the 1984 convention began; their preferred amendments were incorporated into the platform without issue. “Because feminists got pretty much everything they wanted prior to the Democratic Convention,” Freeman comments, “there wasn’t much to do there except celebrate.”
This is somewhat mysterious. The feminist movement leaders sought an intentional defeat—but only gained power because of it.
We still see this story play out on the left today. Though the contest for clout has shifted out of the convention halls and out onto social media, when you look at the trajectory of leftist movements over the 2010s—such as the Black Lives Matters movement—you find a similar pattern. Protests that closed with policy defeat, changing nothing but media coverage, did not lead to the marginalization of protest leaders or their moment. Quite the opposite: with each defeat the influence these movements held over the Democratic establishment grew.
Why does this happen? Freeman argues that peculiar features of Democratic Party organization and political culture allow activists to profit from defeat. Here is how she describes the salient Democratic Party features:
Both parties are composed of numerous units, which have a superficial similarity… In addition to these formal bodies, the Democratic Party, especially on the national level, is composed of constituencies. These constituencies see themselves as having a salient characteristic creating a common agenda which they feel the party must respond to. Virtually all of these groups exist in organized form independent of the Party and seek to act on the elected officials of both parties. They are recognized by Democratic Party officials as representing the interests of important blocs of voters which the Party must respond to as a Party. Some groups have been recognized parts of the Democratic coalition since the New Deal (e.g. blacks and labor); others are relatively new (e.g. women and gays). Still others which participated in State and local Democratic politics when those were the only significant Party units have not been active as organized groups on the national level (e.g. farmers ethnics).
Some of the Party’s current constituencies have staff members of the Democratic National Committee identified as their liaisons. In addition, in the last few years an informal understanding has arisen that one of each of the three Vice-Chairs will be a member of and represent women, blacks and hispanics. Labor — still the largest and most important constituency — does not feel the need for a liaison as it has direct contact with the party chair. However, a majority of the 25 at-large seats on the DNC, as well as seats on the Executive Committee and the Rules and Credentials Committees at the conventions are reserved for union representatives. Party constituencies generally meet as separate caucuses at the national conventions. Space for these meetings is usually arranged by the DNC. While caucuses are usually open to anyone, the people who attend are generally those for whom that constituency is a primary reference group; i.e. a group with which they identify and which gives them a sense of purpose. With an occasional exception the power of group leaders derives from their ability to accurately reflect the interests of constituency members to the Party leaders. Therefore, while leaders are rarely chosen by the participants, they nonetheless feel compelled to have their decisions ratified by them through debate and votes in the caucuses. The votes usually go the way the leaders direct, but they are symbolically important.
For Freeman the most important fact about the Democratic Party is that its representative constituent groups exist in an organized form independent of the party apparatus proper. This means that the position (and to a lesser extent the power) of the men and women who lead these constituencies is not dependent on the favor of party leaders. To the contrary, Democratic Party leaders tend to think of their personal power as being dependent on the support of the constituencies the activist leaders represent.
This has two important implications. The first is that the power and career success of Democrats who either lead or strongly identify with a minority constituency “is tied to that of [their minority] group as a whole. They succeed as the group succeeds. When the group obtains more power, individuals within that group get more positions.” Democratic leaders think of their party as a bargaining table: various groups looking for representation in the Democratic Party come to this table, demonstrate what they can do for the party, demand that the party do something for them in turn, and negotiate with competing constituencies on matters of policy and personnel. The more electorally important an identity group is, the more personnel slots it will generally receive.
The preceding paragraph is an imperfect model of actually existing Democratic politics—but it is the mental model of Democratic politics that Democratic politicians use as a reference point when evaluating the real thing. Ideals shape behavior…
…
… This leads to the second implication of the Democrats bottom-up structure. It is not always obvious who speaks for a given constituency. Activists and group leaders thus not only need to pick fights that demonstrate the importance of their group, but also need to pick fights that cement their legitimacy as representatives of this constituency…
This is why the feminist maneuvers in the 1980 convention made sense: whether the feminists won the floor fight was less important than demonstrating that the women’s groups were a constituency capable of forcing a floor fight in the first place. The activists lost their battle, but successfully proved that their army could be mustered, and that its soldiers looked to them for marching orders. They demonstrated that they deserved a larger spot at the negotiating table—and during the next convention they were given one.
The Republicans are different. In the ‘70s and ‘80s Republican feminists refused to bring losing battles to the floor. Where most Democratic activists view their constituency identity as primary and their party identity as secondary, most of the Republican feminists Freeman worked with saw themselves as Republicans first. Many were the wives of sitting Republican officials. They were not outsiders clamoring for clout but insiders maneuvering for influence. Their party worked in a very different way from the Democrats:
The basic components of the Republican Party are geographic units and ideological factions. Unlike the Democratic groups, these entities exist only as internal party mechanisms. The geographic units—state and local parties— are primarily channels for mobilizing support and distributing information on what the Party leaders want. They are not separate and distinct levels of operation.
Ideological factions are also not power centers independent of their relationship to Party leaders. Unlike Democratic caucus leaders, Republican faction leaders do not feel themselves accountable to their followers. Sometimes there are no identifiable followers… The purpose of ideological factions—at least those that are organized— is to generate new ideas and test their appeal. Initially these new ideas are for internal consumption. Their concept of success is not winning benefits, symbolic or otherwise, for their group, so much as being able to provide overall direction to the Party.
…The Republican Party does have several organized groups within it such as the National Federation of Republican Women, National Black Republican Council and the Jewish Coalition, but their purpose is not to represent the views of these groups to the party. Their function is to recruit and organize group members into the Republican Party as workers and contributors. They carry the party’s message outward, not the group’s message inward. Democratic constituency group members generally have a primary identification with their group, and only a secondary one with the Party. The primary identification of Republican activists is with the Republican Party. They view other strong group attachments as disloyal and unnecessary…
…
… the Republican party is fundamentally a leader oriented political organization. Power flows from the top down. Convention battles were not contests between constituencies, but contests between patronage networks. The party is organized around powerful leaders and those who fly their colors under their patron’s banner:
Legitimacy within the Republican Party is dependent on having a personal connection to the leadership. Consequently, supporting the wrong candidate can have disastrous effects on one’s ability to influence decisions. Republican Presidents exercise a monolithic power over their party that Democratic Presidents do not have. With the nomination of Ronald Reagan, many life-long Republicans active on the national level who had supported Ford or Bush had to quickly change their views to conform to those of the winner or find themselves completely cut off. Mavericks, who do not have any personal attachments to identified leaders, may be able to operate as gadflies, but can rarely build an independent power base. Since legitimacy in the Democratic Party is based on the existence of just such a power base, real or imagined, one does not lose all of one’s influence within the Party with a change in leaders as long as one can credibly argue that one represents a legitimate group.
While the importance of personal connections works against those Republicans who have the wrong connections it rewards those who spend years toiling in the fields for the Party and its candidates. The longer one spends in any organization the more personal connections one has an opportunity to make. These aren’t lost when one’s Party or leaders are out of power, and thus can be “banked” for future use. Occasionally a dedicated party worker can develop sufficient ties even to competing leaders to assure continued access, if not always influence, regardless of who’s in power. Those Democrats whose legitimacy derives from leadership of a coalition group find it is quite transitory when they can no longer credibly represent the group. The greater willingness of the Republican Party to reward loyalty and dedication to the Party in preference to any other group makes it is easier for the Party to discourage extra-Party attachments…
…
… There are advantages and disadvantages to both operational cultures. “In the short run [Democratic political culture] appears disruptive,” Freeman argues, but in the long run “it is more stable. Once a consensus develops about the desirability of a particular course of action, whether it be programmatic or procedural, it is accepted as right and proper and is not easily thwarted by party leaders, even when one of them is the President.” In contrast, “the Republican Party is more likely to change directions when it changes leaders.”
Is there a better example than the ascension of Donald Trump? The GOP was once a party of full of men like J.D. Vance, eager to condemn Trump as the American Hitler. The GOP is now a party full of men… like J.D. Vance, eager to fête Trump as the savior of the Republic. How could this happen? The Republican Party offers neither power nor refuge to those who have not hitched their cart to its reigning star. A Republican Party that won in 2012 or lost in 2016 would look fundamentally different—much more fundamentally different than a Democratic Party helmed by Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders instead Obama or Biden. The ability of democratic presidents to reshape their party is limited unless, like FDR, they bring in a new suite of constituencies to the coalition…
… It is possible this structure may change in the future. From the 1860s forward Republican Party leaders governed secure in the belief that they defended the American mainstream. In the late 20th century that meant middle and upper-middle class white families. That demographic is not as aligned with the Republicans as it was in the pre-Trump era; the upper-middle class now defaults Democrat. Moreover, the relative share of the population occupied by the old American core is shrinking. In many states it is already a plurality demographic. Increasingly, Republicans see themselves not as defenders of the American mainstream but as the tribunes of the American outcasts.
Some on the right wing would prefer if the GOP adopted Democratic forms. This would mean framing itself as a coalitional party like the Democrats with formally recognized constituencies whose interests must be explicitly catered to. In this vision the white working class would become the most important of these constituencies.
Freeman’s analysis suggests why it will be difficult for the Republicans to follow this path. It will be hard enough for the GOP to abandon an operational culture a century and a half old. It will be harder still to restructure the party apparatus itself, building out caucus-like civic organizations to represent the interests of its constituencies. At the moment it simply is not clear which organizations or individuals might represent the white working class within party circles; with the exception of the evangelicals, most of the potential Republican constituencies lack the group-consciousness needed for Democratic style politics. No GOP leader would wish to create these groups himself—it would mean siphoning away his power. As long as power flows downwards in Republican politics there will be little incentive for Republican leaders to change the system.
It is not clear the party as a whole would benefit from doing so. The Biden succession drama points to the weaknesses of a bottom-up party structure. Unity is much more difficult to achieve in the Democratic Party. The structure and culture of the party encourages small disputes to metastasize. Democratic Party leaders do not want to abandon Biden for the same reasons no one wanted to run against him in the primaries: when fissures in the Democratic Party open, they are difficult to close again. After fighting, the Republicans get back in line; those who will not do so are sidelined. They lack an external base of power to keep up the fight. For Democrats things are different—only the threat of electoral defeat keeps them cohesive. “Ridin’ with Biden” is an easy Schelling point. Remove that point and the knives will come out. Few Democratic politicians imagine they will fare well in a late season knife fight. With a party structure this fissiparous, they are probably right…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones,” from @Scholars_Stage.
Apposite (albeit from an orthogonal point of view): “Vance, Trump and the shifting coalitions behind Republican economic policy” from @adam_tooze.
* Will Rogers
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As we muse on mechanisms, we might send harmonic birthday greetings to John Hall; he was born on this date in 1948. After serving in the legislature of Ulster County, New York and on the Saugerties, New York Board of Education, he was the (Democratic) U.S. representative for New York’s 19th congressional district from 2007 to 2011.
Earlier in his varied career he co-founded and led the pop rock group Orleans (“Dance With Me,” “Still the One”), with whom he performed until his retirement in 2019.
“The good of man must be the end of the science of politics”*…
Democracy is an easy ideal to embrace (at least for most). But the devil’s in the details. Mohamed Kheir Omer and Parselelo Kantai review the history of democracy in post-colonial Africa and wonder if it’s not time to revisit some of those “details”…
The first peaceful transfer of power in post-colonial Africa was in Somalia in 1967 when Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke defeated incumbent President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar. The second would only follow a quarter of a century later, when in November 1991 trade union leader, Frederick Chiluba defeated incumbent Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda in the country’s first multiparty election since 1972 when single party rule had been introduced.
For Africa’s Big Men, news of Kaunda’s defeat was yet another signal of what threatened to become Africa’s second Wind of Change after the one that had swept away colonial rule and brought them into power at the end of the 1950s. In the streets of the capitals, the people were in revolt. Dakar, Abidjan, Cotonou, Kinshasa, Yaounde, Nairobi, Harare and several others – all rocked by youth demanding the end of single-party rule and the return of pluralism. Having previously only worried about coups sanctioned and financed in Western metropolises, the dawning realisation that they now had to fear popular revolts – both in the street and at the ballot box – suggested, even to the least paranoid of them, that their former patrons were abandoning them.
[Those Cold War-era autocrats had been] agents of the neocolonial system that had guaranteed the expropriation of Africa’s resources since the moment of flag independence; for them, ‘democracy’ was the ultimate betrayal. Since it was their friends in Washington, London and Paris who had won the Cold War, why were they abandoning their faithful clients? Why was a new dispensation being organised without their participation?…
…
African governments were forced into accepting political liberalisation – that is, the re-introduction of opposition parties – as part of a set of conditions on balance of payments support, itself necessitated by the structural adjustment austerity programmes initiated in the mid-1980s following the debt crisis of circa 1982. With the Cold War over, a vernacular of “good governance”, “transparency” and “accountability” became the mediating language of relations between the rich OECD countries and their aid recipients in Africa. In many African countries, the adoption of multiparty democracy was mandated by Western creditors as a precondition for continued assistance.
Democracy, therefore, was more a creature of the market than of popular citizen aspirations. Western media commentators referred to the package of conditional aid as “market democracy”. In many cases across the continent, the original campaigners for pluralism found themselves side-lined in favour of a new set of actors with closer links to Western embassies and who espoused reformist visions in line with neoliberal orthodoxy. In time, it would dawn on even the more radical political actors that unless they toed the new line, they would lose their place on the donor gravy train…
[The authors review the history and offer some observations that point in the direction of moving from an inherited one-size-fits-all democracy towards a set of culturally-specific applications of the democratic principle…]
… Consider the Gada system, a traditional socio-political system practiced by the Oromo people in Ethiopia and parts of northern Kenya. It is a complex form of social organisation that governs the political, social, economic, and religious life of the community. This indigenous institution predates many modern forms of governance and democracy, showcasing elements of direct democracy, checks and balances, and the peaceful transition of power. Leaders are elected through a democratic process which includes term limits. It also includes a legislative assembly and mechanism for conflict resolution. It has been recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
A number of countries in Africa such as Rwanda, Senegal, Madagascar, Lesotho and Morocco employ a mixed electoral system, blending elements of proportional representation with majoritarian or plural systems, which highlight the diversity of electoral systems across Africa, with each country tailoring the mixed electoral model to its specific political, social, and historical context.
Somalia currently uses the 4.5 model, based on a power-sharing model among the four major clans, while giving minority clans a half share to improve inclusivity. Some argue the move killed the possibility of a national identity. The system got corrupted, failed to reform and with foreign regional interference, is struggling to perform. These mixed electoral systems offer a means to promote inclusivity and representation while striving for effective governance. However, the specific design and implementation of these systems can significantly impact their effectiveness and the extent to which they achieve these goals.
Other indigenous systems include the philosophy of Ubuntu (consensus building) in Southern Africa where its cultural and philosophical ethos indirectly influences the values foundational to democratic processes in societies where it’s integral to cultural heritage. Its emphasis on inclusivity, communal conflict resolution, collective participation, and ethical conduct shapes the spirit and objectives of governance and elections, impacting not the technical aspects of how votes are cast and counted, but the overarching principles guiding democratic engagement and policymaking.
These traditional models, which often involve direct democracy and community consensus, might offer valuable insights for creating more effective governance structures in Africa.
30 years since electoral democracy was re-introduced, a re-evaluation of election strategies is required – one that considers a mixed approach that incorporates local traditions with modern electoral processes. This approach may better serve the interests of the African populace, addressing the endemic issues of violence, corruption, and inefficacy plaguing the current system.
This would necessitate recognition and legitimation of both systems within African cultural, historical, and political contexts. Key to this approach is engaging a broad spectrum of stakeholders to ensure the model accurately reflects Africa’s diverse societies. Utilising traditional networks for voter education and mobilization can enhance participation and reduce costs. Forming electoral committees composed of both contemporary officials and traditional leaders will ensure the electoral process is transparent, fair, and locally relevant. Incorporating traditional elements into state ceremonies related to elections can also deepen the process’s legitimacy and cultural resonance. Promoting decentralization through local governance structures that combine traditional and elected authority is crucial. Continuous dialogue for model refinement and the necessity of legal and constitutional adjustments to support this hybrid model are essential for its success. Implementing this model demands careful planning, extensive consultation, and phased introduction, aligning it legally and functionally within each country’s governance framework…
Learning from our mistakes: “Africa’s democratic dividend,” from @africaarguments.
While there are lessons here we can apply to more “mature” democracies, we should remember that getting democracy “right,” in the various ways that might be accomplished, across Africa is the primary point. See, for example, “This Will Finish Us” (“How Gulf princes, the safari industry, and conservation groups are displacing the Maasai from the last of their Serengeti homeland”).
* Aristotle
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As we ponder political process, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Puntland inaugurated its constitution, 14 years after declaring itself an autonomous region within the Somalia federation. The constitution established the Puntland Electoral Commission, which has been guiding the region’s gradual shift from a parliament-based vote system to multi-party elections.
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