Today’s Thought

Cue the music: O beautiful for Oligarchs… .Do you get requests every day for money from candidates and political parties? I get at least ten a day. The requests I get never tell me what they’re going to do with the money, they just want money. I’ve stopped giving.

You would think the Dems and Independents would learn from the Republican example. Those guys worked for years to create “Project 2025”, full of plans for how they would turn the country into an oligarchy. The Plan contained details on how they would eliminate the checks and balances now in our Constitution and substitute executive “emergency” whims for Congressional legislation. There’s lots to say about Project 2025, but the short story is that it worked. The Republicans managed to elect a Republican dominated government, which is now in the process of destroying our Constitutional democracy.

The Dems and Independents apparently haven’t learned anything from their humiliation. They appear not to be planning how to take control back from the Project 2025 guys. They just want us to give money, which I guess they’ll use to take out ads pushing their candidates in the next election. It won’t work — money doesn’t change minds, concrete plans do. I wish they’ed ask me for reactions to actual plans for how they will get democracy back. When that happens I may start giving money again.

Thoughts

Occasional daydreams — a blog —about real world problems that might benefit from a system dynamics perspective..

The structure and dynamics of returning to Democracy

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Antidote model picture

The current U.S. President, Donald Trump, has turned our 250-year old representative democracy upside down. We are now ruled by executive actions invented by Trump and his believers, rather than by legislation enacted by Congress, as our Constitution dictates in its first Article. Many of us are thinking about how to turn us back to a well-structured government with legislative, executive, and judicial branches balanced by a wise system of checks and balances.

The structure sketched in the paper on this website, titled ‘Can Systems Thinking be an Antidote to Extensive Evil?’,may be a good starting place. There is the question of whether Trump and his followers are, or will become, an “extensive evil” — we are a divided nation on that question. To avoid getting sidetracked into what’s evil and what’s not, let’s refer to that paper as ‘Antidote’, and note that the structure it develops and the early stages it traces (e.g., up to Figure 3 or 4) are much like our current U.S. dynamic situation.

‘Antidote’ has a section on counter-revolutionary structure and behavior. Could we use the ‘Antidote’ structure and these potential leverage points to study how the U.S. could return to Democracy?

• Refusal to be open to the rhetoric of the new order

• Refusal to accept the goals and traditions of the new order

• Refusal to accept the new goals, customs, and habits of speech

• Refusal to accept the new regulations, manners, and mores

• Refusal to accept the belief that the new order is inevitable

• Willingness, even headstrong choice, to be left behind

• Unwillingness to downplay or ignore signs of danger

• Refusal to succumb to coercion

Note that ‘Antidote’ has not been quantified — it’s a map, not a model. That would be our first step, and we could turn the map into a model using quantities that make sense in the current U.S. situation. Or better: we could follow Forrester’s wise choice in Urban Dynamics and set it to start before Trump’s first term, e.g., 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan. That’s where a variety of trends and forces began to move in the Trump direction. We could watch it transition into the Trump era, as Forrester watched his city grow, stagnate and decline. And then we could explore how to turn us back into a Democracy.

It’s a good thing to think about.