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Oligarchy is not good.

 ….But as soon as the people got leaders, they cooperated with them against the dynasty for the reasons I have mentioned; and then kingship and despotism were alike entirely abolished, and aristocracy once more began to revive and start afresh. For in their immediate gratitude to those who had deposed the despots, the people employed them as leaders, and entrusted their interests to them; who, looking upon this charge at first as a great privilege, made the public advantage their chief concern, and conducted all kinds of business, public or private, with diligence and caution.

16    But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.

                                                       – Polybius

I have made, from time to time, the observation that the elite in American society is trending in its favored policies toward conscious promotion of oligarchy. Over at The Committee of Public Safety, Joseph Fouche quoted a theorist, retired CIA analyst Patrick E. Kennon, who is a delighted advocate of a coming technocratic oligarchy:

“Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, the future of the nation-state is much in doubt…Indeed, tribalism has revived with a brutal savagery from Rwanda and Cambodia to the newly dissolved USSR and the newly unified Germany…At the same time, a kind of shadow empire…is being embraced by elites around the globe. UN bureaucrats and Greenpeace activists, Carlos the Jackal and Mother Theresa, Toyota and Amnesty International, the Cali drug cartel and the World Bank, people who worry about the dollar-yen ratio and people who worry about the ozone layer, all of these consciously or unconsciously look to empire for their profit or salvation. All of these have largely given up on the nation.”

Oligarchs elevate self-interest and class interest over national interest, it’s the signature of oligarchy, be it the Thirty Tyrants or the Soviet nomenklatura. Milovan Djilas knew what the hell he was writing about as much as did Thucydides.

What to do?

The proto-oligarchical class in America, the elite who are the product of “the good schools”, tend to embrace and celebrate progressive taxation and diversity as high moral principles. What if we applied them?

The gateway to membership in the elite and opportunities for fabulous wealth and power runs through the admissions offices of our best universities, the Ivy League and a few other select intitutions and a handful of old, highly exclusive, liberal arts colleges. What if we put a special surtax on the purchase of tuition on a sliding scale that correlated with how many generations that members of a family have matriculated at such schools? Plus a few other tweaks here and there.

For example, a student who is the first in their family to go to college and was accepted by Yale would not be taxed at all, perhaps instead, they would be subsidized with a free ride for four years. But someone like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a Dartmouth grad who was the son of a Dartmouth grad and a Ford Foundation executive, his kids might face a steep penalty, maybe a $ 250,000 per annum fee on top of tuition, then an additional surcharge to their income tax rates if they entered government service or certain professions like, say, hedge fund management, for the next couple of decades. Entering a different field, say becoming a social worker, a bowling alley manager or a policeman would not incur any income tax surcharge.

We can argue about the appropriate level of progressive taxation but the basic idea is that we could make it increasingly expensive for a family to continue to perpetuate itself, generation after generation, at the political and economic heart of American power. Not impossible, that would be un-American, but very, very expensive.

The net result would be far greater “diversity” at our flagship educational institutions – far more white ethnics whose last names end in vowels, Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Southerners, Midwesterners and Westerners, people hailing from small towns or blue collar socioeconomic backgrounds. Currently favored demographic groups might be markedly reduced under such a system but since most of them come from long established UMC to UC families with great connections, they’ll be ok even going to Big State U. and getting a third tier school degree.  No worries.

Thoughts?

Boyd Acolyte Franklin “Chuck” Spinney writing on the QDR ( Hat tip to Kev Hall).

The Pentagon Goes Intellectually AWOL

….Even by the dismal intellectual standards of Pentagon bureaucracy, the QDR and the FY 2011 budget, taken together, establish a new standard of analytical vacuity, psychological denial, and just plane meaningless drivel. I will keep this short by using just one important case to prove my allegation. Judge for yourself if it is necessary and sufficient to make the point.

First, I must bore you with a little background: The Pentagon has been producing FYDPs since 1962. But these FYDPs have been repeatedly criticized for producing defense budgets that were disconnected from the national military strategy — and because the dollar allocations made in any budget determine what any government’s policy really is, the critique was logically equivalent to saying there was no strategy. The congressional legislation in the mid 1990s that established the QDR was only the most recent attempt to deal with this long standing criticism. The aim of that legislation was to require the Pentagon to lay out an intellectual framework for matching its military strategy and ambitions to the resource constraints shaping those ambitions, especially budgetary constraints, but also constraints relating to people, the limitations imposed by available technologies, etc.

The new FY 2011 budget and its accompanying FYDP, therefore, are supposed to attach budgetary and programmatic meat to the strategic skeleton that is the QDR, both of which were completed at the same time and made public on 1 February — itself a somewhat illogical sequence, given that one is supposed to precede the other. In theory, these documents should permit an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses implicit in the matchup between resources and strategy. Therefore, these documents should enable the Secretary of Defense to send the President and the Congress a comprehensive set of priorities, opportunity costs, and risks associated with his strategic plan. This information would then become the grist for a rational national debate by linking strategic considerations to the inevitable compromises made in the sausage making factory that is Congress. Moreover, as this is President Obama’s first budget, and because it represents $700+ billion that Mr. Obama just put off limits in the coming national debate over whether or how to shrink the federal deficit, it was crucially important for the Pentagon to get the QDR and the accompanying FY 2011-2015 FYDP right in a logically consistent and transparent manner.

If we apply this standard to the Pentagon’s recently completed handiwork, only one conclusion is possible: the Pentagon flunked the test by being intellectually absent without leave.

Read the rest here.

Defense acquisitions and budgeting process arcana are not my forte, but Spinney is not the only defense analyst giving the QDR a thumbs down for being insufficient on important issues. If the process is rigidly determinative of the kinds of outcomes generated and if that process is dysfunctional or broken, then even a talented top DoD civilian staff armed with an ocean of money and a deep reservoir of political capital will not be able to translate our national security priorities into concrete military results.

“Methods are the masters of masters.” – Talleyrand

I am reposting Lex’s post in full. Basically, Illinois needs a thorough housecleaning of both parties – it’s a cataclysmic mess here.

Adam Andrzejewski

Adam Andrzejewski is the only person running for the Republican nomination for Governor of Illinois who presents any hope of turning around the dire decline we are facing.

I had the pleasure of meeting Adam recently, and he confirmed the positive impression I got from his website. He is very smart, aware of the gravity of the problems facing Illinois, and has some concrete plans to change the way business is done here.

I was most impressed with his proposals to take on the culture of corruption that has made the once-great State of Illinois a national and even global joke.

Take a look at the issues pages on Adam’s site. Then compare the specifics he offers with, for example, the nonexistent proposals on Jim Ryan’s site, or the comparatively vague proposals of the long-time insider, and purported front-runner, Andy McKenna.

The insiders in both parties are so tightly wound in Illinois that they are referred to as “The Combine.” The GOP serves as nothing more than the junior partners in a combined Machine, and appears to have no principled differences whatsoever from the Democrats.

Adam’s candidacy presents a chance to move toward a genuine two-party political process in Illinois, and to start getting the financial mess under control.

Let me also address the cynical response that he “can’t win.” There is a large field, turnout will probably not be huge, and it won’t take much for one of the GOP candidates to pull ahead. So, vote for the best guy.

Plus, as Lech Walesa – an Adam supporter – put it: “Nobody gave us a chance to win over the communists. Nobody. And we proved them wrong.” The Combine can also be beaten.

Please take a look at Adam’s site if you are an Illinois voter.

To the legacy society of the nation-state and the hierarchical transnational corporation:

MILESTONE

….It’s time to up the ante and move onto the next phase:  the birth and rapid growth of new societal networks.*  This is going to be a fun ride!

* As in, new societal networks that can outcompete (trounce evolutionarily) all existing status quo organizational forms  (this should not be confused with the diminutive form of ‘social networking,’ as in Facebook and Twitter).

Long term, I think this is correct and that Robb is, as usual,  ahead of the curve on what will become the zeitgeist in the next few decades ( I will add that this evolutionary path appears to be happening much faster than I had considered, by at least 15-20 years). The movement in the 21st century will be toward networked civilizations on one end of the spectrum that will be pretty nice places to be and on the other, a kind of emergent, hypermobile, barbarism where life is hell on Earth. 

The proper response for existing institutions is to swing their resources, their mass and their remaining legitimacy behind the triumph of the former and gracefully adapt and acclimate rather than be disintegrated by the latter. I considered this in the essay ” A Grand Strategy for a Networked Civilization” that I wrote for Threats in the Age of Obama (p.208):

….Nation-states in the 21^st century will face a complex international ecosystem of players rather than just the society of states envisioned by traditional Realpolitik. If the predictions offered by serious thinkers such as Ray Kurzweill, Fred Ikle or John Robb prove true, then  technological breakthroughs will ensure the emergence of “Superempowered Individuals”[1] on a sizable scale in the near future.  At that moment, the reliance of the State on its’ punitive powers as a weapon of first resort comes to an end.  Superemepowered individuals, separatist groups, insurgents and an “opting-out” citizenry will nibble recalcitrant and unpopular states to death, hollowing them out and transferring their allegiance elsewhere.

While successful states will retain punitive powers, their primary focus will become attracting followers and clients in whom they can generate intense or at least dependable, loyalty and leverage as a networked system to pursue national interests.  This represents a  shift from worldview of enforcement  to one of empowerment, coordination and collaboration. States will be forced to narrow their scope of activity from trying to supervise everything  to  flexibly providing or facilitating core services, platforms, rule-sets and opportunities – critical public goods – that the private sector or social groups cannot easily replicate or replace.  Outside of a vital core of activity, the state becomes an arbiter among the lesser, interdependent, quasi-autonomous, powers to which it is connected.”

In other words, America and our “leaders” need a Boydian strategy and a ruthless commitment to honest clarity and sacrifice in order to weather the transition and retain some relevance. This is what makes the current cultural trend toward a political economy of oligarchy among the elite so worrisome. Their careerist self-interest and class values will push them to make all the wrong choices at critical junctures.

Matt Armstrong has sent out a call to arms on our most important structural problem in foreign policy – that the Department of State is broken as an institution and needs a complete overhaul on the lines of The Goldwater Nichols Act:

The State of State: A Proposal for Reorganization at Foggy Bottom

….The last major reorganization of the State Department was in 1944. That reshuffling was internally driven, and today’s change could occur within the bureaucracy’s walls as well. But the complexity of the department today likely requires a major realignment of fundamentals, something on the order of magnitude of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. That landmark legislation shifted the Defense Department’s operational focus from the services (Army, Navy, Air Force) to the regional commands (Central Command, Pacific Command, etc.).

Foggy Bottom’s regional bureaus are, on their face, like the Defense Department’s combatant commands. But in reality, they are merely support staff for the embassies (the “country teams”). If Defense were to mimic State’s structure, it would be akin to making European Command subservient to individual U.S. military bases in Europe.

Each of State’s regional bureaus are led by an assistant secretary who reports to the under secretary for political affairs. (The under secretary also has other responsibilities, such as overseeing development and implementation of U.S. government policies with the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, as well as the fight against international narcotics and crime.) The under secretary, in turn, reports to the Secretary of State. By contrast, the combatant commander, the assistant secretary’s ostensible counterpart in Defense, has a direct line to the Secretary of Defense.¹

The State Department’s hierarchy was fine for another era when issues were confined within state borders by local authority, geography, and technology. But in recent years, the structure’s flaws have become conspicuous. The department’s ability to respond to crisis is fragmented and sclerotic. When successes do happen, they tend to be the result of individuals working around or outside the bureaucracy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has circumvented the current system with crisis-specific czars called Special Representatives. These Special Representatives, like Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, operate like super ambassadors with regional powers that should reside – but don’t – in the regional bureaus.²

For State to be a viable national security actor, the old hierarchy must be flattened and power should be redistributed. It is hard to imagine isolating a combatant commander by reducing his rank to three-star general and having him report to a four-star general – who then decides what the Secretary of Defense should be bothered with.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a subject on which I have written many times and I am in complete agremeent with Matt.

We might even go beyond Goldwater-Nichols and think in terms of the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947 under Truman which saw the end of the Department of War and the absorbtion of the Department of the Navy into Defense along with the other armed services.  State’s perverse dysfunctionality and empty pockets budget ( blame Congress here) has crippled public diplomacy, international development aid and the interagency process in which State too often plays the role of bureaucratic obstruction or hapless bystander.

What are the civilian foreign policy tasks we need to accomplish as a country and how can we streamline and empower our agencies so that we can advance our national interests ?