Barack Obama, in his 2012 re-election campaign, stated that his biggest failure to date was was not fulfilling his 2008 campaign promise to address Washington's dysfunctional culture.
"The most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside."
Agree? Disagree?
If you agree, can it be fixed from the outside? If so, how?
Effecting change from within:
Well, seeing as one part of my job is to effect change, I am certain that any organization can be "fixed" from within or without. The thing is that it takes an empowered coalition of individuals of stellar intellect, high objectivity, irreproachable ethics, balanced self-confidence, excellent communication skills, excellent inspirational skills, and a willingness to put themselves at risk -- be it their position, power, wealth, reputation, all of those, some of those, etc. -- to effect change from within. That combination of individuals imbued with such traits and skills is very hard to come by. Moreover, it's equally hard to come by their peers and supporters who have the prudence to see the change is necessary and who will in turn accord the authority needed to allow "the coalition" to design, validate and implement the changes.
When the U.S. was founded, such a coalition was obtained. What made it possible to do so was the size of the the country and the number of people involved in forming the nation. Distance and numbers made it possible for the individuals charged with effecting the change to personally know one another and thereby come to trust them. The same was so for the business leaders -- essentially other wealthy landowners -- who supported the politicians whose names you and I now see on our founding documents.
It wasn't that those men were all that different from men now, although in some ways they were. For example, then politics wasn't seen as a career but rather as a duty. That's not surprising for the men in question were often in the prime earning period of their lives. They took office to serve for a while, the reality of their lives was that they needed to get back to their business and farms to generate income. They couldn't be federal politicians indefinitely because it just cost too much to do so. When one recalls the role the land and environment played in the lives of colonial leaders, most of whom were farmers even if only to sustain their own households, it's all the more clear that serving in office was not what they really wanted to do for decades on end.
These days, we certainly have plenty of bright individuals holding federally elected office, and IMO that applies to the ones with whom I agree politically and to those with whom I disagree. The main difficulty these days is that even though we have plenty of smart folks in the House and Senate, along with in the Executive branch, (
including, despite the frequent "he's an idiot" remarks seen on this forum, Mr. Obama) the population is too damn big for the electorate to develop any real sense of trust in its elected leaders.
Trust is something that is earned only by showing one's true self to others, and that takes time; it requires more than an appearance at a stump speech, or a few minutes at a political fundraiser. In a nation as large and dispersed as ours, it's just not possible, for a variety of reasons, for leaders to be that transparent to most of their voters. Furthermore, holding political office has become an end, a career, in and of itself.
Power's sway is a big problem because it is intoxicating, and it's a problem because our nation is now so much more diverse than it was in the 17th through 19th centuries, yet human nature is no different now than it was 5K years ago. The simple fact is that most folks have no real basis for trusting their leaders. Sure, we give them our votes, but rarely do we give them, and the folks who elected them, the benefit of the doubt.
Why? Because we don't know those people, and very few among us really understand human nature, yet all of us have experience with at least one human subverting human nature and using it to manipulate or abuse others. Additionally, in the corporate world, executives engage consultants to help them catalyze change. A company's stakeholders necessarily will trust their bosses, and if they don't they can leave, whereas few Americans want to yield their citizenship. The thing is that no government official has the kind of (near) absolute power, and nowhere near the degree of implied and actual trust from those they lead, that a company president or CEO has in their organization, and barring a Constitutional amendment, nobody is ever going to.
Taken with the considerable ease with which one can make choices based on gut instinct rather than rational investigation, circumstances today make it highly unlikely that anyone (or group) inside the government is going to fix anything. Moreover, it's unlikely that the electorate trusts any of them to do so. More likely is that change can be effected from within, but that change will merely result in a new paradigm that is just different, not better, much as happens when power shifts from one party to the other.
Side note:
For readers who for some reason infer that by identifying diversity as a problem I also think it's one that needs to be fixed/changed...I'm not remotely intimating that the nation and/or its population should be less diverse. The great diversity among us is a problem in the sense that it makes it very hard for leaders' to become well known and understood by most citizens. Diversity, in an of itself, is not something I see as a problem.
End of side note.
Effecting change from without:
Sure as it's unlikely that we can obtain change effected from within. It's basically impossible for it to happen from outside the government. Why? Because for as improbable as it be that someone (or a group) in the government is going to be given the authority to effect the needed changes, it's certain that nobody (or a group) outside the government will ever be given that level of authority.
The government is not a huge corporation. A corporation's board can replace the CEO (or temporarily subordinate her/him to a panel charged with effecting the "fixes"), bring a new one from outside, someone who lacks company "cultural baggage," and make change happen. That just can't happen, at least not right now, given the way we have organized our government.
So how do we "fix" things?
Having written the preceding, I do think it's conceivable that we can fix a lot, if not everything, that's wrong, but to do so, we first have to identify what is wrong. When it comes to government, what's wrong is the way the political process functions (some may say fails to function). We voters have demonstrated by our voting patterns that we want politicians who tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. We have shown that for them to obtain our votes, they must pander to us.
Believe it or not, even though many citizens may feel as though they don't have any real and great political power, the U.S. is indeed a nation of and by the people. In order to change the political process, in order to change the way the government works, we, the people, need to change ourselves. The government and its officials will change in turn.
