Today's dog-walk reading was a thoughtful essay by Jonathan Clark in The Times. Clark is the Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas. The essay is about the way that the male genetic urge-for-power is still largely unrestrained by modern institutions -- something I've tried to draw attention to many times on FW.
Prof Clark is saying much the same (though without mentioning "genetic" or "male") though more eloquently than I've been able to do. The following is a superb distillation of one of the basic faults of the American and English systems of governance (as representative of other developed countries) as well containing several brilliant aperçus: <<<< ENRON IS THE SYMPTOM OF A DEEPER SICKNESS Jonathan Clark Enron, Andersen, WorldCom, Xerox, Qwest, Dick Cheney and Halliburton: the US public is quickly satiated by such stories. Like the private peccadillos of politicians, they soon seem obvious. As the man in the American street often said of Clinton, we knew about it before we elected him. Corporate malfeasance has already been priced into a market that was anyway in decline. When George W. Bush promised “a new era of integrity”, the markets fell; not because of what they learnt from him about the state of the economy, but because of what they always suspected about the President. Panic is remarkably absent. Yet just what is so oddly familiar? Not the technical details of accounting conventions, which are known to few. Not the creative abilities of capitalism, to which all but anti-globalisation extremists regularly turn a blind eye. Not even professional criminality strictly defined, which is probably not widespread and seldom visible to the ordinary voter. What is at issue is a larger question of governance, of corporate culture. And not in business alone, but in structured organisations, from firms through universities and charities to bureaucracies and governments. What is at issue is the much older question of how executive power can be controlled by representative or judicial institutions. Because we have forgotten this question’s history, its modern forms are seldom recognised. They are, indeed, not always apparent. At all levels of Western societies, formal structures of governance are apparently adhered to as never before; nevertheless, as individuals subliminally know, accountability counts for less and less in more and more areas. Increasingly, executive power acts as it sees fit, beyond effective control or redress from shareholders, customers, members, or voters. This problem has recently had two main symptoms: increasing litigation, and diminishing participation through the ballot box. We notice these as separate problems; they are in reality evidence for the same phenomenon. Individuals can and do have recourse to law. But in the US lawyers increasingly prefer to work for rich employers rather than poor employees; powerful corporate defendants, not weak private plaintiffs. In the absence of the English “cab rank” convention, the frequent inability of the US system to offer affordable redress to all but the very wealthy is causing concern even to lawyers themselves. Law generally provides an inadequate substitute for politics. The US has, famously, a high concentration of lawyers and a high incidence of litigation. The paradox is apparent only to those who discover from personal experience that Americans are not more criminally inclined than Europeans (indeed, often the reverse). Litigation is, however, the only recourse where formal mechanisms of governance fail, and executives act without sufficient restraint either from a structure of accountability or from codes of honour. Litigation is an index of injustice more than of lawyers’ avarice. The US electoral system is scrupulous in seeking to guarantee all individuals the right to vote; yet the political parties so carve up the electoral geography of constituencies that the ballot box decides less and less. This remarkable shortcoming of US politics hardly matters since the focus of attention is elsewhere, on the executive’s image in the media. Like most social problems in the West, this was true first, and is most true, of the US. Its public culture admires the vigorous use of power. This is normally blamed as a glorification of violence; but underlying it is a fetish of executive power itself. Power, which the Puritans oddly idealised (in the hands of God), becomes the new pornography. Hollywood regularly and appropriately holds up the aggressive, uncontrolled policeman, businessman, lawyer, soldier or politician for ratification. American ideals (including, ironically, cleaning up accountancy) are to be realised by more vigorous executive action. Authority, once it has been defined as good, should be unconstrained. Tom Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities was interpreted in the 1980s as being about money: its audience wallowed in Puritan guilt about greed. But what it showed was a man enjoying power, for whom wealth was just numbers: it was this that made its US audience empathise with its leading character. Outside business, too, the buzz word is “managerialism”. Those who use it seldom know from the inside how successful businesses are built up and made to flourish. Instead, it is now a code word for swift, slick, decisive executive action, unconstrained by inconvenient promises, expectations, commitments, loyalties, duties. Managerialism is a common currency. The 1960s generation which has risen to positions of corporate authority had never condemned power. Indeed, it was always the means by which they were to achieve their ideals, violently sweeping away the cobwebs. There is none so authoritarian as a 1960s radical turned present-day administrator. The American university, a world in miniature, ought to be a model community of altruists; but this institution too is divided between executives (chancellors, provosts, deans) and faculty. The result is too often long lines of communication, distrust, conflict, misunderstanding and even litigation. Nor is it a problem confined by party: universities, largely populated by Democrats, behave in this respect very like corporations, dominated by Republicans. Britain has such problems, with local variations. The establishment has always been cleverer at brushing its unpleasantnesses under the carpet, although a more vigorous tradition of investigative journalism and a widespread lowmindedness weighs in the balance against the executive. Here too, however, activists miss the point. Democratic reformers have focused on other systemic questions, such as the extension of the franchise, proportional representation, and devolution. The theme that preoccupied our ancestors for centuries has fallen from public view, a theme to which PR and devolution are only tangentially relevant: the control of the executive. The executive initially meant the monarchy, and constitutional thought was long devoted to solving a conundrum: a stable, coherent State meant a strong monarchy, yet how could this be legally defined without leaving subjects without effective redress? Today the problem takes a form only superficially new. Creative accountancy, spin-doctoring and “special advisers” are but names for the same thing. The old problem is unresolved: how is executive power to be constrained within formal structures of governance? The US Constitution hardly helps. It must be the flagship of democracy, but is in its essentials unreformable. Convinced of its democratic credentials, it seems unaware of why it might appear otherwise from the outside; with the world’s largest intelligentsia, it has thrown up no John Stuart Mill, no Lenin, to explain its libertarian message in terms other than the vigorous executive promotion of liberty. Executive unaccountability is more remarkable since colonial Americans were preoccupied by the question of executive power and the threat that it might pose to their liberties. So sensitive, indeed, that they inflated that conventional Hanoverian Whig, George III, into an agent of “Popery and arbitrary power”, like his Stuart forerunners. To remedy this imagined evil, a key principle of the US Constitution of 1787 was the separation of powers, and this principle is still formulaically praised by loyal US citizens. An executive carefully isolated from the legislature and the judiciary, however, is not necessarily better regulated by them than an executive closely implicated in those functions and restrained more by conventions, interactions and common decencies than by rules. The US is also a political experiment built to an unprecedented degree on ideas of natural rights. Yet we currently see it reject membership of the International Criminal Court as self-evidently unacceptable, and so it will appear to American minds: a righteous executive is not to be held answerable, in this case to ideas of natural rights as determined by a wider community. Business scandals in the US, or spin-doctoring in the UK, in turn seem trivial compared to the weak checks on the executive built into the emergent United States of Europe; and here too protests are unsurprisingly ineffective. Managerialists make natural europhiles, and the old traditions of constitutional law are silent. Corporate malpractice is no doubt as serious as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has warned. But if this problem were everywhere solved, and the stream of accounting ran crystal clear, the wider problem would remain. The political question of our time is one so widespread that it does not have a name, and the renewed ascendancy of the over-mighty executive is a problem without a solution in sight. ©The Times 15 July 2002 >>>> Keith Hudson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
