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A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell: A Must-Read for anyone serious about informed participation in our political system

8/12/2015

This is a classic that has had a profound impact on my leadership style as well as on my political philosophy. The beauty of this book lies in its exposition of two fundamentally different, yet plausible, conceptions of the human condition, and Sowell's use of these two conceptions to illuminate how reasonable people can disagree on fundamental issues. In my own book, Accountability Citizenship, I describe Sowell's work as follows:

Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is the most elegant expression I have encountered of how intelligent people can reason to fundamentally different conclusions on the same issue. Sowell proposes that each of us reason from different “visions” of human nature. He presents two ends of the spectrum as the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision but is careful to note that each of us may apply different parts of the spectrum to various aspects of our set of values and beliefs. Basically, the constrained vision is the sense of human beings as being limited by our self-interest. On this view, people will behave selfishly by nature. Government must craft trade-offs and establish incentives for actions that are desirable for optimal social harmony. The unconstrained vision is the sense of human beings as capable of rising above self-interest to act for the greatest good of all. From this perspective, the role of government is to enable people to achieve their potential by eliminating incentives and trade-offs that encourage constrained behavior. Reasoning from different starting points on the spectrum of visions leads reasonable people to different conclusions.

Sowell’s work allowed me to acknowledge the rationality of others’ views without giving in to the popular temptation to demonize those with different beliefs and values as evil or stupid or selfish. While not a cure for political and social disagreement,I believe Sowell's distinction between constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature offers a path to restore a higher level of civility in our discourse. It may be the case that seemingly intractable problems can be advanced or resolved by leaders willing to discuss solutions and compromises without the emotional handcuffs of strict partisan ideology.

I have recommended this book since I first read it in 1992, and I still feel it should be mandatory reading for all first year college students... maybe even seniors in high school.

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All Quiet on the Western Front Still Demands our attention

8/10/2015

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All Quiet on the Western Front is an important work for all of us to read, and perhaps to re-read. I finished my third reading of the book last year, motivated by the fact that 2014 was the centennial of the start of the First World War and my trip to France in June of that year to visit some of the battlefields and cemeteries of that war. Without a doubt, All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic fully deserving the praise it has received.

The author, Erich Remarque, was in combat in the First World War, and was wounded five times. His prose is beautiful. He powerfully conveys the intimate bonds that grow between the soldiers in his squad, which magnifies the impact as each, in turn, becomes a casualty. His vivid description of combat in the trenches is all the more horrifying because it is an eye-witness account. Remarque's description of the alienation he feels while returning home is also worthy of review.

As with my recent review of Tuchman's The Guns of August, I was particularly interested in considering the author's view of the causes of the war. There are several points where he touches on this topic. In general, he conveys the view that the people who suffer with him, regardless of the uniform they wear, have no tangible connection to the abstractions for which they fight.

For me, All Quiet on the Western Front is another powerful reason for each of us to insist on accountability from our government. We in the United States live in a time and place where we have unprecedented abilities to influence our government, yet we do not seem willing or able to exercise those abilities. We allow the members of Congress who can vote to send our sons and daughters into harm’s way to tell us that they will not take a political courage test because it exposes them to too much political risk. Certainly one of the causes of the First World War is that the leaders who committed their nations to the fighting had little or no political risk or accountability. From my perspective, we should read accounts such as All Quiet on the Western Front to remind ourselves of our duty to demand a high standard of accountability from each of our elected officials.

Reading, or re-reading, this book is a great resolution at any time.

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Accountability Citizenship Review: Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists

8/7/2015

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This is a powerful history of the lives of five women who were leaders in the struggle for women's rights in the United States. But Baker's project is more than just a retelling of key moments in this struggle. Rather, she reveals details from the personal lives of the women about whom she writes that serve to illuminate the struggle for women's rights in our country.

I particularly liked the chapter on Alice Paul: her leadership of the National Women's Party and subsequent efforts to get President Wilson to support a constitutional amendment giving women the vote make her one of the most noble figures in American history in my view. Baker is able to root Paul's deep commitment To justice in her Quaker upbringing. The Quaker tradition holds that souls have no gender, and therefore women had an equal role as men in Paul's upbring. This deep philosophical point is one we can learn from today; I am surprised it hasn't been used or publicized more in the ongoing struggle for marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.

Good history makes events of long ago accessible and pertinent to the reader. In Sisters, Baker has given us some very good history.

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The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track

8/5/2015

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This is a terrific discussion of Congress for people who are willing to learn the lingo of insiders. The authors, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, are veteran political scientists who have spent decades working on congressional staffs or on think tanks dealing with congressional issues. Their assessment, therefore, benefits from their perspective of having watched the good, the bad and the ugly in Congress over an extended period of time.

A key point made by Mann and Ornstein is that sustaining the prerogatives and powers of the legislative branch in tension with those of the executive and judicial branches is absolutely essential to our form of government. It has also been a natural counterbalance to excessive partisanship for much of our history. One of the key concerns raised by the authors is that this balance has been significantly undermined by current era of excessive partisanship. One of their proposed remedies to this disease is the same as what I propose in Accountability Citizenship: a grassroots effort to restore balance and compromise.

Mann and Ornstein also highlight how gerrymandering and self selection have led to almost all of the congressional districts being predominantly single party districts. This allows candidates to cater to the extremes of each party’s philosophy and makes it hard for centrists to get elected or stay in office. In Accountability Citizenship, I highlight the intellectual polarization that results from people choosing only those information sources that are in their “comfort zone.” Combined with a lack of participation by voters in the center, the result is the same: an institution where it appears many representatives and senators place loyalty to party ahead of doing the best thing for the country.

Another important thread in the book deals with the tension between allowing appropriate deliberation on legislation while still getting things done. If one allows endless use of all of the procedural mechanisms for extending debate or delaying consideration of a bill, then it can slow down the agenda so much that important things are left undone. With rising partisanship, majority party leaders have felt it necessary to change the rules under which legislation is processed, considered and voted upon. Use of so-called “closed rules” prevent use of delaying techniques and can shut out the minority party and deny appropriate time for debate and deliberation. Traditionally, voluntary adherence by members of both parties to customary restrictions on such tactics made excessive use of “closed rules” unnecessary. The current level of partisanship has eroded this tradition and led to almost reflexive use of closed rules.

There are a number of other important topics and trends discussed in the book. For me, as pervasive as the problems described by the authors seem to be, the bottom line remains that we have the power to replace 87% of Congress in November of 2014 if enough of us vote against incumbents. That may be the fastest way to break the unhealthy level of partisan politics in Washington and restore the power of the political center.
Accountability Citizenship

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August 03rd, 2015

8/3/2015

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I think Leadership and Self Deception is an enormously powerful book because it forces us to look for solutions that are within our personal control rather than simply blame our problems on others.

In my book, Accountability Citizenship, I write:

The book Leadership and Self-Deception explores the thesis that people tend to find it easier to blame others than to accept personal responsibility for the problems they experience. The book makes a convincing case that we all need great discipline and focus to overcome this natural tendency.

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The Guns of August--a must read as we march past the centennials of world war i events and prepare for 2016 elections

8/1/2015

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The American Cemetery at Belleau Wood in France, near where my grandfather was wounded in WWI.

The Guns of August is Barbara Tuchman’s classic description of the events of the first month of World War I. Having first read parts of the book while studying military history as a cadet at West Point in 1981, I had long wanted to revisit Guns cover to cover. Anticipating the centennial of the tragic events of August 1914, I completed this long-awaited reading of Guns in December 2013 and found it well worth my time. Indeed, my conviction that even greater catastrophes await us if we fail to engage our governments with all the tools of information-age citizenship—a conviction to which I give voice in my book Accountability Citizenship—was reinforced by this endeavor.

The enormity of the tragedy of World War I was that so many millions of people’s lives were utterly destroyed by the autocratic inertia of regimes in Germany, Austria and Russia. The architects of the Schlieffen Plan understood that victory in 1914 would require complete mobilization of population and industry and complete destruction of the Allies military capacity to resist. That the foreseeable human cost of this endeavor, even on the short war scenario envisioned by some at the outset, was ever considered acceptable is a testament to the worst consequences of power: in 1914, leaders with absolute power, insulated from the reality of human suffering, utterly failed to exercise the most basic moral judgment. Nor were the leaders of France and Britain without blame: pathological nationalism and naïve refusal to consider alternative solutions likely increased the magnitude and duration of the conflict. Leaders on both sides used the psychological and physical power of the state to compel mass participation in the tragedy. Tuchman outlines the enormity of the evil wrought in 1914, articulates the hollow nationalistic rationales for the fateful decisions that enabled this evil, and evokes with terrifying power the sense that too much power concentrated in the hands of all-too-fallible leaders created a destructive momentum no one could stop.

In one sense, people in the autocracies embroiled in the war at its outset suffered because their only recourse to change the power of the state was revolution. If you disobeyed the Kaiser or the Czar or the Emperor, you could expect to be punished severely. Information for the masses was still delivered mostly in newspapers, and was susceptible to manipulation behind the barriers of borders, language, privilege and ignorance. The masses marched blindly into industrial-age warfare, obedient to the only authority accessible to them and trusting that the path to security was to act in concert with their fellow subjects.

On the other hand, citizens of France and Britain also suffered from the tyranny of misinformation and ignorance. The French, eager to avenge the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, clung to an unrealistic view of German intentions and their own capabilities. The British were curiously muddled, with successive governments allowing detailed military planning with France to presume an alliance in the event of war, while the Cabinets hid behind vaguely worded agreements and clung to the illusion that Britain was under no real commitment to fight in the event war broke out between Germany and France.

With the exception of the pacifist members in the British government, both sides seemed to accept the war between Germany and France as a future certainty in the decade before the fateful summer of 1914. Perhaps, given the ambitions of the Kaiser and the near-religious conviction that Germany’s destiny was to conquer and rule, war at some level was indeed unavoidable. But the historical fact is that the First World War was triggered, not by direct provocation between Germany and France, but rather by the almost-unrelated assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. And it is hard to see how that event, even with the cumbersome alliances in place at the time, could not have been addressed with diplomacy rather than force had there been the will to preserve the peace. Instead, some seized upon it as a trigger, others watched in helpless horror, but most marched willfully into an abyss they could neither imagine nor avoid. One completes a reading of Tuchman’s masterpiece with a fearful appreciation for the power of our preconceptions and the social structures we allow to grow around us.

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AccountabilityCitizenship Review: Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended The Cold War

7/31/2015

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Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended The Cold War, is one of the best books I read in 2014. The author, Ken Adelman, is an amazing statesman and scholar. Ken was Director of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Reykjavik Summit, so he observed and participated in the events of which he writes. Also, having served previously as the Deputy Ambassador to the UN during Reagan’s first term in office, Ken brings a unique perspective to his observations of Reagan during the summit: this was a man he had observed up close on many occasions over several years. More than anything, this perspective makes Reagan at Reykjavik an engaging look at a president in action.

Reagan at Reykjavik is an important book for all of us to read. The events at the summit and those that unfolded as a result of the summit are a real-world reminder that our perceptions of the monolithic character of other nations and peoples are almost always illusions. When we have the courage to meet and speak and work with the people representing those other nations in settings that allow our mutual humanity to assert itself, we can achieve great things. Ken paints a picture of Reagan as a man whose faith gave him this courage. We see Reagan as one who believed he could reason with Gorbachev. In spite of the limited gains at the summit itself, the humanizing effect of intense work among key leaders on both sides allowed the process to continue and ultimately bear fruit. There are lessons here, I think, for how we approach other seemingly intractable diplomatic issues.

My favorite anecdote from the book was Ken’s description of the basement of Hofdi House, the building where the negotiations took place. This space was necessarily shared by both CIA and KGB communications teams. A dispute arose over which team would get the larger of two bathrooms, and the KGB station chief ultimately pointed out the silliness of the dispute and suggested both sides share both facilities. Ken writes, “Thus, while intelligence agencies normally operate on a need-to-know basis, for this weekend in Reykjavik, the world’s two main intelligence agencies operated on a need-to-go basis.”

I would encourage everyone to read Reagan a Reykjavik. It is more than a historical description of a key diplomatic event. Indeed, as we prepare to select our next president, this book affords us a personal account of a president ranked in the top tier of all presidents by many recent polls of historians and scholars. In this light, we may find here some insights into the kind of leader we should seek as we approach the 2016 elections.

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Book Reviews

A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell: A Must-Read for anyone serious about informed participation in our political system

All Quiet on the Western Front Still Demands our attention

Accountability Citizenship Review: Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists

The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track

August 03rd, 2015

The Guns of August--a must read as we march past the centennials of world war i events and prepare for 2016 elections

AccountabilityCitizenship Review: Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended The Cold War

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