Presidential Power

In other Jonah Goldberg-blogging, his LA Times column makes the point that people tend to take an expansive view of presidential power if and only if the current president is one they like:

Today, the dynamic is reversed. Liberals fret over creeping fascism while conservatives give Bush the benefit of the doubt. Both sides are open to charges of hypocrisy, and neither is immune to partisan amnesia. The only consistent crowd are the Libertarians, who distrust all government power.

I wish I had some solution to offer, but my guess is there is none. Indeed, you can be sure that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, someone will denounce her as "the most radical president we've ever had" — whether it's true or not.

I think there is a solution to this, albeit an impractical one. The crux of the matter is that proponents of a strong presidency are right -- the legislature shouldn't be able to hog-tie the administration of government. But the proponents of a weak presidency are also right -- the executive shouldn't able to run amok irrespective of the legislature. The solution, as applied in all sorts of countries around the world is parliamentary government wherein the executive (i.e., the prime minister and his cabinet) are able to govern with a very free hand, but must at all times retain the confidence of the parliament.

The current war debate highlights the intrinsically problematic nature of the current structure. It really is pretty ill-advised for the congress to be attempting to dictate military strategy. At the same time, it's even more ill-advised to keep letting an incompetent president and his discredit team have a free hand to continue their failed policies. In a proper country, the result of the 2006 elections would have been a new cabinet that had the confidence of the new parliament. Alternatively, the GOP would have dumped Bush as leader rather than plunge into an election with such an unpopular, inept chief.

Comments

We've done pretty well with the present system for 200+ years, though. We've even won a war or two in that time.

Under normal circumstances - which is to say, when we don't happen to elect a total incompetent - I'm not inclined to prefer any other system to the one we have. Aren't there any downsides of a parliamentary system that you'd like to discuss?

Posted by Steve | July 18, 2007 3:22 PM

Congress doesn't hog-tie the Presidency: it passes laws. The Executive is supposed to administer them.

As for the current spate of refusals to testify, the Supreme Court ruled on that one back during Watergate.

Eheu.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 18, 2007 3:24 PM

Why does MY pay so much attention to what the hag Jonah Lucianne spits out every Tuesday?

Posted by gregor | July 18, 2007 3:27 PM

Indeed, you can be sure that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, someone will denounce her as "the most radical president we've ever had" — whether it's true or not.

It's easy to make such a prediction if you yourself are that "someone".

Posted by ~~~~ | July 18, 2007 3:27 PM

I agree with Matt. Presidentialism leads to greater authoritarianism, lack of accountability, and greater difficulty in removing unpopular, incompetent, and/or corrupt presidents.

Posted by blah | July 18, 2007 3:27 PM

You wouldn't have a two-year election cycle in a Parliamentary system. The only reason there was a 2006 election is that the President couldn't be changed by it. We'd be stuck with Bush and his parliamentary majority until 2008.

Of course, that is just one thing which would be different...

Posted by otto | July 18, 2007 3:30 PM

"We've done pretty well with the present system for 200+ years, though."

Right. That's why we have a grotesquely distorted and weak regulatory apparatus and no universal health care.

Posted by Dan Miller | July 18, 2007 3:30 PM

A parliamentary system has certain advantages, yet Britain got into this war, kept their PM until this month, and has still not withdrawn from Iraq, even while the PM's party and political base was bitterly opposed to the war. My guess is many GOP leaders, even if they had the ability to dump their candidate with a no-confidence vote or something along those lines, would still have rallied behind Bush for many of the same reasons they did in 2006 and continue to do today - speaking out against the President makes them look weak and forces them to admit their previous mistakes. For all the talk of GOP abandonment of the president, only 4 Senators voted with the Dems today on cloture for the withdrawal amendment. I doubt it would be any different with a parliament.

Posted by Benjy Sarlin | July 18, 2007 3:31 PM

I'm inclined to prefer the current system. Some claim that divided rule (one party in congress, the other in the presidency) is the best way of running things, and is associated with a strong economy, etc. I wouldn't go that far, but I do think that the current mix of unified Republican administrations, unified Democratic administrations, and divided rule is probably preferable to what we would have if we eliminated the divided rule periods and replaced them with the appropriate mix of unified Republican and unified Democratic administrations.

Posted by Julian Elson | July 18, 2007 3:37 PM

Also, come on, it's a lousy president. It happens. Our system has handled many before, this one is bad but not so extraordinarily awful as to want to blow up the system and rebuild it from the ground up. When Bush has declared himself king, reintroduced sedition acts, and dissolved Congress, these kind of ideas will be more attractive. In the meantime, yeah Bush has zero respect for checks and balances, but Congress isn't so much unable to check his excesses or impeach him as it is unwilling. Blame the GOP not the system itself. And they have (2006) and will (2008 and beyond I hope) pay for their failings, as our system intends them to.

Posted by Benjy Sarlin | July 18, 2007 3:38 PM

"Indeed, you can be sure that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, someone will denounce her as "the most radical president we've ever had" — whether it's true or not."

Well, she does is tempted by totalitarianism just like Mussolini, so who could blame them?

Posted by Ginger Yellow | July 18, 2007 3:38 PM

Pretty good points.

Posted by Mark Eichenlaub | July 18, 2007 3:40 PM

"We've done pretty well with the present system for 200+ years, though. We've even won a war or two in that time."

It's not debatable that "we've done pretty well," but it is debatable whether or not we achieved that because of our or despite our Constitution. Regardless of what government we have, the United States has enormous resource and population potential, so winning wars isn't necessarily due to presidentialism, nor is our economic growth. The American Civil War was certainly an obvious failure of our Constitution, though more plurality takes all, rather than presidentialism.

IMO, the US has worked as a democracy because we have a respect for laws. Countries in South America, the Philippines, and South Korea that have adopted our Constitutional model have done poorly with it. Third World countries that have adopted parliamentarism have usually done better than those that have gone presidential.

It's remarkable that in the UK they still talk Constitutional improvement. Brown has all these ideas to strengthen parliamentary committees. In the US Constitutional reform is the province of eccentrics, in the UK it's the province of prime ministers.

Posted by jsb | July 18, 2007 3:41 PM

It really is pretty ill-advised for the congress to be attempting to dictate military strategy.

I agree. But I'm not sure I see setting deadlines as dictating military strategy. I think a Congress that has the power to declare (or authorize) war should have the power to end it. Setting a time table for withdrawal is a bit clumsy, but it's the best attempt at getting out without a total mess. They could, I suppose, more properly get us out by cutting off funding or disbanding the army, but I think we can agree that those would make more a hash of available military options than this would.

Posted by Royko | July 18, 2007 3:42 PM

What Mr. Goldberg says is true but only if you live in the two-dimensional world of national opinion journalism.

If you're a middle class liberal Democrat being audited by Mrs. Clinton's IRS (who has been instructed to stretch every code to the breaking point to capture enough revenue to fund her Glorious Works of History) you're liable to have a more nuanced view of the powers of government.

Posted by Linus | July 18, 2007 3:45 PM

so, it took Jonah 7 years to come up with The Hillary Test ?

Posted by cleek | July 18, 2007 3:57 PM

"At the same time, it's even more ill-advised to keep letting an incompetent president and his discredit team have a free hand to continue their failed policies. In a proper country, the result of the 2006 elections would have been a new cabinet that had the confidence of the new parliament."

To be fair, in this 'improper' country, after the 2006 election you got:

A new Secretary of Defense, a new Centcom commander, and a new Iraq commander -- all confirmed by the Senate (the Iraq commander unanimously) -- and a new war strategy.

I would agree that a parliamentary no-confidence vote is preferable to the politically-motivated Congressional fishing expeditions/investigations we see today: better to toss the boss than to try to kill him by a death of a thousand cuts.

Posted by Fred | July 18, 2007 4:01 PM

I left out the new ambassador to Iraq too (Ryan Crocker).

Posted by Fred | July 18, 2007 4:03 PM

Major downside of the parliamentary system: the possibilitty of long-term governmental instability (see: Italy, France in the 4th Republic). A second downside: the danger of strong majorities running roughshod over minorities.

Re: yet Britain got into this war, kept their PM until this month, and has still not withdrawn from Iraq

Foreign policy almost never decides elections. Voters may have strong opiniosn on it, but what they really care about is what's going on at home ("It's the economy, stuipid"). Even in 1980, with the Iranian hostage crisis ongoing, I'm willing to bet that Carter could have kept the White House if there had been cheap and plentiful gas and a booming economy.

Posted by Jonf | July 18, 2007 4:16 PM

As has been pointed out, the parliamentary system did jack all to keep or get Britain out of Iraq, even though opposition to the war there has been stronger than it was in America until the last year or so. Any system of government only works as well as the people it represents.

Mike

Posted by MBunge | July 18, 2007 4:17 PM

There's really nothing hypocritical or inconsistent in wanting a strong presidency for a favored (competent) president and a strong Congress for a non-favored (incompetent) presidency.

The strength of the constitutional design is that it provides checks and balances but permits flexibility in their implementation, so the system can adapt to the times and personalities.

Thus, for example, whether or not the Framers ideally intended Congress to intervene in military matters, I would bet that the Framers would want and expect Congress to assert its strength particularly when the President was grossly unpopular and incompetent.

Sure, there are some issues that we can debate on the abstract level -- like whether a president should be able to assert an extreme form of executive privilege -- but most issues are more an issue of the right balance and application within the given context. Each branch acts within, and negotiates for, power vis-a-vis the other, and then we vote every 2/4 years to affect those relationships.

Posted by dc | July 18, 2007 4:32 PM

1) Political Philosophy -- as opposed to the usual bullshit philosophy -- is a serious subject. I'm not sure young Matthew is ready to drink the hard stuff. But I'll throw out a few items to consider.

2) Since we don't do controlled experiments with human societies, we have to look at observed behavior -- at history -- for empirical data to support our political theories.

3) If we do that, we see that there have been very few republics in human history -- and even fewer that have lasted for very long.

4) The Founders in 1788 looked at history, looked at the writings of political philosophers who had preceded them (Aristotle, Polybius, Machiavelli, Montesqieu, Locke, Berkeley, Hume,Hobbes,etc) and tried to design a system to last.

5) James Madison argued that the country would not survive under the Articles of Confederation -- that history showed Confederacies quickly collapsed (e.g., Sparta and Athens after the defeat of the Persians). The debate at the time is recorded --both in Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, in the Federalist, and in Anti-Federalist writings-- and describes the reasoning behind the design of the Constitution.

6) Of course, 99% of American voters today are ignorant of this whole subject because our $1 Trillion educational system is designed to produce docile morons. So if the Constitutional mechanisms are beginning to run out of whack, then we are unlikely to recognize it in time to avert disaster.

7) Historian Charles Beard produced evidence that this whole debate was somewhat of a charade -- that what really happened was rich men trying to protect their property interests. People like Forrest McDonald argued otherwise -- but look at the EMPIRICIAL evidence -- after 225 years, we have an enormous concentration of wealth and income in this country.

8)Which is relevent because concentration of wealth DESTROYS Republics -- turns them into militaristic dictatorships. We saw it happen in the ancient Roman Republic upon which ours was modeled.

We are seeing the same mechanisms at work today: massive political corruption. destruction of the middle class by cheap foreign labor and materials based upon military conquests. An economy based upon military imperialism which is actually very unprofitable but which exists because the profits go to the wealthy elites while the huge costs are dumped off onto the common citizen.

9) Plus there are the destructive mechanisms identified by Jared Diamond and Joseph Tainter:
a) An unthinking, huge increase in population which dies off when the increasingly degraded environment collapses
b) Bitter civil wars among factions as everyone realizes there are too many people -- not enough food to feed everyone
c) a government which is deeply parasitic -- which increasing bleeds the productive elements of society dry. The Italians of 450 AD probably welcomed the German invaders -- because German warlords were less greedy and rapacious than the Roman Emperor's tax collectors.

Posted by Don Williams | July 18, 2007 4:33 PM

What about Israel? Olmert has worse numbers than Bush, but he's still Prime Minister.

Posted by DaveMc | July 18, 2007 4:34 PM

Agree with Otto. Under a parliamentary system, there would not have been a 2006 vote at all. So we would still have a Republican majority.

Come to think of it, I agree with Matthew - we should have a parliamentary system!

Posted by Al | July 18, 2007 4:38 PM

We effectively had a parliamentary system from Jan 2001- Jan 2007. Minorities in such systems provide no check beyond rhetorical upon the executive. Take the NZ example, which I know from living there, Govt obtains votes on confidence and supply. Its in place and virtually unassailable. Any member of the ruling party who wishes to vote against Govt on most matters has to leave the party, literally by walking over to the opposition benches and becoming a member of the opposition. It happens, but not often.

On the other hand, there tends to be a much higher standard for the leader in a Parliamentary system, Olmert notwithstanding.

So we'd have the problem of the cunning politician with uncheckable powers, just like we had for most of 2001-2007, save that in a Parliamentary system the PM would likely not just be shrewd but also curious and intelligent.

Posted by jerry | July 18, 2007 5:02 PM

"Under a parliamentary system, there would not have been a 2006 vote at all. So we would still have a Republican majority."

Not necessarily. Under a UK-style parliamentary system, the 2004 election would have likely been held at some point in 2005, possibly right around the time of Hurricane Katrina, so all bets are off.

Also, if we assume a November 2008 election date, the odds are that the Republicans would sack Bush and replace him with fresh blood at some point in the next year.

Even more importantly, given that more people voted for the Democratic slate than the Republican slate in 2000, Prime Minister Al Gore would never have invaded Iraq in the first place.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 18, 2007 5:15 PM

if Hillary Clinton is elected president, someone will denounce her as "the most radical president we've ever had" — whether it's true or not.

And fortunately since there's always someone around to say it, for the both-sides-are-equally-guilty crowd, we never need to worry about whether it's true or not. All criticism can be dismissed as just partisan griping, until we're already too far down the slippery slope to keep our republic.

Posted by KCinDC | July 18, 2007 5:16 PM

JonF:

"A second downside [of parliamentary systems]: the danger of strong majorities running roughshod over minorities."

It seems the opposite is often the case: minority parties get disproportionate power when they are wooed to form coalition governments. Britain would seem to be the exception to this, because it only has three major parties.

Don Williams:

Along with a "concentration of wealth" in America you also have the world's largest middle class: more than two thirds of Americans own their own homes, diligent workers frequently retire with six-figure 401(k)s, etc. Having a large middle class is probably more relevant and more important to our political stability than how much money Peter G. Peterson or Stephen Schwarzman have.*

Also, I'm not the first one to point this out, but Jared Diamond's attempt to extrapolate broad lessons about contemporary civilization from the experience of a stone-age tribe on Easter Island is at least as dubious as his contention that Sub-Saharan Africans failed to develop civilizations rivaling those in Europe and Asia due to a lack of natural resources.

Regarding the impending famine you're worried about, you should check out the WSJ's editorial about the greatest man you never heard of (to paraphrase Penn & Teller), Norman Borlaug (Borlaug's Revolution). The WSJ has had some shitty editorials lately, but this one is an exception.

*If you had to go to Wikipedia or Google to find out that Peterson and Schwarzman are the billionaire co-founders of the private equity firm The Blackstone Group, perhaps wealth in America isn't as concentrated as you thought. There are literally hundreds of billionaires in America -- far more than any other country -- and I'd argue that their sheer number, as well as broad diversity of political views (including far-left billionaires such as Ted Turner and George Soros, center-left billionaires such as Warren Buffet, etc.) contributes to America's political stability.

Posted by Fred | July 18, 2007 5:17 PM

"4) The Founders in 1788 looked at history, looked at the writings of political philosophers who had preceded them (Aristotle, Polybius, Machiavelli, Montesqieu, Locke, Berkeley, Hume,Hobbes,etc) and tried to design a system to last."

This isn't true, the Founders thought that the Constitution *might* work for a generation. Jefferson thought that revolutions should happen every twenty years.

It's true that the Founders looked at history, but history from the perspective in 1788. At the time, cabinet was a creature of the monarch, not responsible to parliament. History has been updated. The notion that fusing the legislative and executive powers was "the very definition of tyranny" (which Madison believed to be self-evident) has been totally disproven by the European parliamentary experience.

Posted by jsb | July 18, 2007 5:27 PM

A pro-gun piece and now this?

Are there secret auditions being held to replace David Brooks?

Posted by alphie | July 18, 2007 5:29 PM

One of the things that was said when the idea of impeaching Bush first started to gain traction over a year ago was that the 'U.S. isn't a parliamentary system.' Maybe what is needed is the expansion of the circumstances under which a president can be impeached.

Posted by Mike the Mad Biologist | July 18, 2007 5:30 PM

Why are we talking about this? Is anyone about to propose a constitutional convention? If there were one, do you think parliamentary government would be on the table?

And of course, the starting point is the usual false equivalency of the wingnut posing as a moderate, who is arguing that there really is nothing uniquely power-mad about this administration- it's just politics as usual. At this late date, do we really have to be pointing out that this is dangerous nonsense? I can get this "they all do it" horseshit on any editorial page in the country. Why do I need to read a blog for it?

Posted by Bloix | July 18, 2007 5:32 PM

I think it's unfair to compare what the Bush admin. is doing to previous admins and then to say it's all politics. It's not, the Bush admin. is going far farther in their distruction of the constitution. It's completely unacceptable!

Posted by The Presidential Candidates | July 18, 2007 5:54 PM

I think MY makes a subtle error in his analysis from the get go.

In the US, congressman and senators are, well mostly, Senator Hillary! being an exception, are local people who are picked by their local parties. Given all this, how the national govt effects said locality is usually important in the election. In Britain, the two or three parties each send a man from London to each locality and the voters get to choose one of them. Here, you vote for someone to represent you in the imperial capital that is Washington DC, in the UK you get to vote for a faceless cipher of one of the preexisting London court factions.

A parliamentarian system with the 'localness' I described just won't work. In order to get the party discipline to make the system work the party leader(s) have to be able to pick the backbenchers, which they do in the UK.

As for 'votes of no confidence', I don't think there actually has been a successful one in the UK since at least WWII, probably since before 1900. To find them one has to go to the continent where some, mainly the Italians, have completely drank the parliamentarian kool aid, a PR system where you vote for a party list, you don't even get to vote for a faceless cipher of the court faction, but the court faction directly. Votes of no confidence there usually have nothing to do with anything the voters care about, since PR, unlike the British system, usually results in a coalition govt of court factions, the vote of no confidence coming when one of the faction heads gets ticked off at his rivals, maybe because he didn't get enough patronage rich ministries.

Given that parliamentary systems are govt by court faction, you get lots of democratic deficits too. If they held a plebiscite in the UK on the topic the death penalty for murder would win. Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, something is the matter with a govt that purports to be democratic if they don't have it, vox populi, vox dei as it were. The EU all those European parliamentarians are building isn't democratic because parliamentarian govt isn't very democratic to begin with.

If one is a vox populi vox dei type, our system works a whole lot better the a paliamentarian one, and there is a lot more bad things one can say about parliamentary govt, like what sort of person gets to be an MP.

Posted by j mct | July 18, 2007 6:28 PM

I'd like to point out a couple of things:

1) Replacing the executive every two years would probably not be a good idea. So I don't think a parliamentary system could hold elections as often as we do.

2) B/c we hold biannual elections, when it has become apparent that the party in power has become a disaster, we can check their power.

3) There are of course limits to this. B/c only 1/3 of the senate gets re-elected it is difficult to really get a turn-around in one election cycle. Bush is only one problem the legislature faces at the moment. The extremely narrow majority is the other problem.

This system is an unusual compromise, but I think it has its merits. We hold frequent enough elections to check really bad policy on a biannual basis, but of course the turnover is limited by the desire to avoid every office from being up for grabs every 2 years.

Posted by mpowell | July 18, 2007 6:33 PM

The fallacy that legislatures can't run wars

We didn't have any executive at all when we won our most difficult war, the Revolutionary War. An ad hoc legislature, the Continental Congress, ran that one. Our most purely Presidential wars, those that the Executive has run with the least input from Congress, have been Vietnam and Iraq, our most abject failures at war-making.

This is no coincidence. We have progressively descended, with the process greatly accelerated by WWII, into Presidential dominance of our war-making in particular, and foreign policy in general, not because there is any advantage at all to that arrangement, except that it allows us to avoid public responsibility for foreign policy. Executive predominance in foreign affairs goes hand in hand with secrecy, which also has no inherent advantage for any use except the evasion of public responsibility. This secrecy for the purpose of avoiding responsibility is exactly why our foreign policy is so inept, an ineptitude most acute in our wars. Your words about it being "pretty ill-advised for the congress to be attempting to dictate military strategy" highlight the pass that keeping the conduct of our wars a secret preserve of the President has brought us to. We have no strategy in this war in Iraq for Congress to be "interfering" with. We have no strategy because no one, not the President, who we want to operate in secrecy so we won't have to take responsibility, not the Congress, no one is responsible for publicly formulating and defending anything like coherent war aims, grand strategy, or simple strategy. In the absence of the discipline that should be created by this absent public scrutiny, a petty and unscrupulous President has been allowed to start and maintain a war essentially for PR purposes. It no longer works too well as PR, so they are now up a creek.

The idea that a parliamentary system would be the answer is, it seems to me, an admission that legislatures should be running our wars. If our system was like Great Britain's, Mrs. Pelosi would be the chief executive, and senior Democratic Congresspersons would run the executive departments. We could indeed change the executive by means of internal changes in the majority party in Congress, or by that majority falling apart, triggering a new election.

But we could change the executive now, if only our legislative majority were willing to take responsibility. Even if they couldn't get to the 2/3 majority needed to remove the President and VP, and thus make Mrs. Pelosi the new President, the majority could certainly take over as close a direction of the executive depratments running the war as they cared to, certainly as much as control as Gordon Brown enjoys. The Constitution only limits Congress's power to take control of executive departements to the extent that the President can never be deprived of the power to "require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices." That's it, period. The President cannot be totally put out of the loop, for information purposes, but he can be excluded from decision-making. Bush has to remain the Kibbitzer-in-Chief until he's impeached and removed, and no one can take that away from him, but everything else can be taken away, and obviously needs to be taken away, by a simple majority vote.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | July 18, 2007 6:40 PM

I like the saying "you can make it foolproof, but not damnfoolproof". Constitutional system should not be overly crappy, but within large spectrum of parameters reasonable outcomes are possible, and they are never ensured.

In principle, Democracy is not a method of achieving the best, but of avoiding the worst.

Republicans have found a perfect method of turning USA into one party state. K-street project, privatization of government functions (and thus a horde of companies doing government contracts and contributing to political machine with money and spoils, and vestiges of regulations would secure them a river of political money and a myriad of political positions to keep a mercenary political army happy, while "red meat" issues, marketed through ads, think tanks and docile press would keep population content.

I really do not see much of a power grab by Administration, but a power grab of the Republican leadership who wanted to create a domination akin to PRI in Mexico or Liberal-Democratic Party in Japan over many decades. Presidential excesses were a part of larger picture.

I really do not see Democrats harboring similar ambitions, which is perhaps a short-term weakness, but also a long-term strength. The public wants the government to function to their benefit, and after one-sided diet of red meat, there seems to be a certain craving for other nutritional groups.

And about the perfect political method of GOP: again, it was perhaps foolproof, but not damnfoolproof. Alas, the cult of St. Ronald prompted GOP to seek leaders that appear no brighter than their iconic figure. "Rum and devil have done the rest". They still have the Presidency and the Courts, but hopefully, not the future.

Posted by piotr | July 18, 2007 6:41 PM

When I first read this post, I thought Matt had called for the establishment of paramilitary government instead of parliamentary government. Kinda gives it a different feel.

Posted by Blackadder | July 18, 2007 6:55 PM

"In Britain, the two or three parties each send a man from London to each locality and the voters get to choose one of them"

Nope. That's not how it works, for any of the main parties.

"As for 'votes of no confidence', I don't think there actually has been a successful one in the UK since at least WWII, probably since before 1900"

1979 actually.

"If they held a plebiscite in the UK on the topic the death penalty for murder would win. "
Probably not

Posted by kb | July 18, 2007 6:57 PM

"I really do not see much of a power grab by Administration, but a power grab of the Republican leadership who wanted to create a domination akin to PRI in Mexico or Liberal-Democratic Party in Japan over many decades. Presidential excesses were a part of larger picture."

You're thinking too cosmopolitan. Think more along the lines of the South 1890-1960 or so. Essentially one party governance, heavy dominance of agricultural/extractive industries, high levels of corruption, popular support maintained by spectacles on one hand and resigned disillusion on the other.

Posted by burritoboy | July 18, 2007 7:02 PM

Re: An unthinking, huge increase in population which dies off when the increasingly degraded environment collapses

Which has happened where? No, don't use Easter Island, because Diamond's account is totally wrong. Like all too many cultures it was destroyed by Europeans, or semi-Europeans (Latin Americans) who kidnapped much of the population for slaves and left behind deadly diseases against which the natives had no immunity. Before that they were doing just fine: no collapse, no violence (beyond what can be expected in any human society), no die-off. (If you really want I'll try to find a link to the very detailed debunking of Diamond's theory that a scholar specializing in the island's history published a couple years ago)

b) Bitter civil wars among factions as everyone realizes there are too many people -- not enough food to feed everyone

Again, where is this happening, or has it happened? The 6th, 14th and 16th centuries (all periods of global cooling, by the way) come closest to this sort of thing, with famine, pestilence, and serious wars making life quite nasty all over the globe, but even so civilization pulled through these calamitous eras. Meanwhile in the modern world, obesity is at least as much a problem as malnutrition

c) a government which is deeply parasitic -- which increasing bleeds the productive elements of society dry. The Italians of 450 AD probably welcomed the German invaders -- because German warlords were less greedy and rapacious than the Roman Emperor's tax collectors.

Ironically, the late Roman Empire became a surprisingly redistributive state, under the goad and direction of the Christian Church. The sermons of some late Roman churchmen would have warmed Karl Marx's heart. Social mobility was also quite fluid: Emperor Justinian was the grandson of a provincial peasant, and his wife Theodora started out a burlesque dancer.

__________________________________________________

Re: Also, I'm not the first one to point this out, but Jared Diamond's attempt to extrapolate broad lessons about contemporary civilization from the experience of a stone-age tribe on Easter Island is at least as dubious as his contention that Sub-Saharan Africans failed to develop civilizations rivaling those in Europe and Asia due to a lack of natural resources.

As I mentioned above Diamond was not even right about Easter Island. On Africa he's on more solid ground: the place did lack for tamable fauna, and its diseases kept one of the most important animals, the horse, from being adopted from outside.

Posted by JonF | July 18, 2007 7:15 PM

"As I mentioned above Diamond was not even right about Easter Island. On Africa he's on more solid ground: the place did lack for tamable fauna"

What about elephants?

Posted by Fred | July 18, 2007 7:26 PM

Re " The notion that fusing the legislative and executive powers was "the very definition of tyranny" (which Madison believed to be self-evident) has been totally disproven by the European parliamentary experience"
------------
As in? The Reichstag of Weimar Germany?

Posted by Don Williams | July 18, 2007 7:30 PM

I know that "Nothing succeeds like excess" is a phrase with a certain rhetorical flair, but seriously, who thinks that constant one-party rule is a good idea? Alternating back and forth between total control of the government by the Democrats and total control of the government by the Republicans strikes me as by far the worst of both worlds.

Posted by Michael B Sullivan | July 18, 2007 7:30 PM

Re JonF's comment "Re: An unthinking, huge increase in population which dies off when the increasingly degraded environment collapses

Which has happened where? No, don't use Easter Island, because Diamond's account is totally wrong. Like all too many cultures it was destroyed by Europeans, or semi-Europeans (Latin Americans) who kidnapped much of the population for slaves and left behind deadly diseases against which the natives had no immunity. Before that they were doing just fine: no collapse, no violence (beyond what can be expected in any human society), no die-off. "
-----------
1) Please give your sources. Jared Diamond cites several archaelogical studies to make the following points:
a) Easter Island's population grew up until roughly 1600, at which point most of the Islands trees had been cut down.
b)Carbon dating of deposits show that large sea animals (porpoises, tuna,etc) disappeared from the Islanders diet around that time--because they no longer had the large trees necessary to build large sea-going canoes for fishing.
c)The archaelogical picture afterward shows a rapid extinction of the island's bird species and rapid decline (70%) of occupied dwellings as well as many signs of extensive cannibalism (human bones cracked for marrow)
d) The earlier Europeans visitors described small islanders, no trees higher than 10 feet, pitible raft incapable of sea trips, etc.
e) Jared notes that the Easter Islanders were decimated by smallpox brought by Europeans and by slave traders -- but they had already declined greatly a 100 years earlier.

2) Easter Island is not the only extensive study that Jared Diamond gives of past civilizations which collapsed due to ecological damage and overpopulation. Other examples are : the loss of all human life on Pitcairn and Henderson Island circa 1600 AD due to collapse of sea trade with Mangareva (350 miles to west), the dieoff of much of the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico , the collapse of the Mayan civilization in southern Yucatan, and the death of the fairly large Viking settlements in Greenland. Go and look at the monumental ruins of some of those places.

3) It is ridiculous to criticize Jared Diamond for extrapolating from Stone Age cultures to the present. The people in those cultures knew a hell of a lot more about surviving in hostile terrain than the people of today.

Plus, Jared is pointing out the patterns of human elites.

4) When our elites allowed our population to soar from 240 Million to 300 Million in just 20 years, did they do an indepth study into whether we can feed those people for the foreseeable future?

Or did they just yield to short term expediency -- mollify campaign donors who want cheap labor, pander to the swing voters of states like California with large electoral votes???

Do our leaders show any foresight? The leaders who have stolen $4 Trillion out of the Medicare and Social Security Trust Funds? The leaders who are spending about $38 on military operations for every gallon of imported Middle Eastern gasoline?

Posted by Don Williams | July 18, 2007 8:39 PM

President Bush is definitely misusing his presidential power to prevent the public from knowing the truth about this administration. Similar to the dealings with the war in Iraq, this administration has been feeding lies to the public. Now the war has proven to be a failure and is causing more violence, terror and poverty in this world. According to the Borgen Project, it only takes $19 billion dollars annually to eradicate world hunger and poverty. However, our government has already spent more than $450 billion dollars over this fruitless war in Iraq. It is time for the Bush Administration to take a real interest in the lives of the American people as well as people who are in desperate needs around the world. Stop the lies and stop poverty now.

Posted by Mstessyrue | July 18, 2007 10:27 PM

The only consistent crowd are the Libertarians, who distrust all government power.

Yeah, I guess that's true, and...

*voice behind shoulder whispers: "Instapundit..."

...'scuze me, I've got some Barq's to clean off my keyboard.

Posted by scarshapedstar | July 18, 2007 11:51 PM

A parliamentary system has certain advantages, yet Britain got into this war, kept their PM until this month, and has still not withdrawn from Iraq, even while the PM's party and political base was bitterly opposed to the war.

Comparing the US presidential system to the UK parliamentary system is a bit useless if you disregard the fact that the UK has a "winner takes all" system, as opposed to the more common system of proportional representation. Blair got elected with ridiculously low numbers in the last election.

It seems the opposite is often the case: minority parties get disproportionate power when they are wooed to form coalition governments. Britain would seem to be the exception to this, because it only has three major parties.

That's quite wrong headed too, see above.

Posted by novakant | July 19, 2007 5:17 AM

Re: Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, something is the matter with a govt that purports to be democratic if they don't have it, vox populi, vox dei as it were.

This is a problem in the US as well. If popular will ruled here we would be out of Iraq and we would have universal healthcare, to name only two issues where the government flatly ignores the publci's wishes.

Re: What about elephants?

African elephants (nulike their Indian cousins) are only marginally domesticable. The problem with African animals seems to be that they know us too well: we evolved among them and they want nothing to do with us. The zebra is so close to the horse the two caninterbreed, but you'd have better luck domesticating lions than you would zebras.

Re: Easter Island's population grew up until roughly 1600, at which point most of the Islands trees had been cut down.

Diamond's is simply wrong on all these, as are his sources. I will look for a link, assuming the debunking is still posted. But to start with Easter Island's trees were NOT all cut down in the 1600s. One species, the giant palm, went extinct there (in the 1400s); the island was still supported forests until the 19th century when its tres cover was destroyed by its new Peruvian overlords, and the people they replaced the natives with.

Re: The archaelogical picture afterward shows a rapid extinction of the island's bird species and rapid decline (70%) of occupied dwellings as well as many signs of extensive cannibalism

This is inaccurate. There are no evidences of cannibalism in the archaeological record. Burned bones are evidence of creation. Also the legends of violence Diamond cites refer to the era when the island was settled (apparently by two rival clans) not to its later history

Re:

Early European records are curiously comtardictory in what they describe. It seems to have dependded on what part of the island was visited and what the visitor thought of native cultures (noble savage POV vs primitive barbarian view)

Re: Easter Island is not the only extensive study that Jared Diamond gives of past civilizations which collapsed due to ecological damage and overpopulation. Other examples are : the loss of all human life on Pitcairn and Henderson Island circa 1600 AD due to collapse of sea trade with Mangareva (350 miles to west), the dieoff of much of the Anasazi Indians in New Mexico , the collapse of the Mayan civilization in southern Yucatan, and the death of the fairly large Viking settlements in Greenland.

Each of these other cases involve cultures that perished not because of something they did but because of changes in climate or other circumstances over which they had no control. That is definitely true of Greenland whose Norse colonies succumbed to the Little Ice Age that (as far as we know) was not human-produced. The Anasazi may have been a victim of that cliamte change as well. As for the Mayans, they survived quite handily: Mayan languages are widely spoken even today throghout the region. And at least one Mayan kingdom was strong enough to hold off the Spanish for over a century.

Re: When our elites allowed our population to soar from 240 Million to 300 Million in just 20 years

Um, since when do elites control breeding in this country? This is not China, nor are we ruled by Bene Gesserit witches.

Posted by JonF | July 19, 2007 6:42 AM

Re "Um, since when do elites control breeding in this country?"
-------
They control immigration --which has been the source of much of our population growth. Not only because of the numbers admitted but also because our elites admit people who have huge families because the Baby Jesus told them that they shouldn't take birth control pills or use condoms/diaphrams.

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 7:43 AM

Re "As for the Mayans, they survived quite handily"
--------
1)No one questions that there can be survivors after a civilization collapses and the population dies off. There are many survivors in Rwanda, for example.

2) And the Mayan collapse of which Jared speaks occurred in the southern Yucatan. He notes that SOME of the Mayans managed to emigrate farther to the North, where the water table is closer to the surface.

3) As for climate change being the SOLE cause of the collapses, that doesn't seem to be the case. The Anasazi lived for centuries in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico --from around 600 AD up until 1150 AD.
They had endured droughts before.

The problem is that when a drought hit circa 1150, the Anasazi were no longer in a position to handle it. Their population was much larger AND their resources were far more depleted: Earlier flood waters cutting through irrigation ditchs had cut deep arroyos which had lowered the water table.

4) For example, if the USA was hit with a nuclear attack or avian flu pandemic today, the immediate survivors would later die off from starvation at a high rate -- instead of simply recovering to an earlier, more primitive technological stage.

Because we are in a FAR WORST position today than we were 150 years ago.

Our easily accessible coal deposits have all been mined, our oil has all been extracted and burned and our iron ore deposits have been largely exploited.

How many people have a plow and a mule to pull it? How many people have the slightest idea of how to grow their own food?

(NOTE: Much of the popular gardening techniques don't work if you can haul fertilizer from Home Depot and if water doesn't come out the hose when you turn the spigot.

Plus most of the seed varieties are totally wrong if you want to store a harvest to live on over the winter. )

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 8:06 AM

Correction: Above should have read "Most of the popular gardening techniques don't work if you can NOT haul fertilizer from Home Depot "

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 8:42 AM

Would you really have rather had a parliamentary system since 9/11? I can imagine Bush calling a snap election in October 2001 with some quite plausible line about "In order to go to war, I need to know that I have the confidence of the people and the parliament."

And of course the result would have been a highly dominant Republican parliament, which wouldn't have needed to hold another election for 5-6 years (assuming a system similar to European systems). I fail to see how that makes things better now.

And don't forget the Republicans actually won seats in both houses as recently as 2004. So while Bush is currently unpopular, I think you're vastly overstating the chances that he would be gone in a parliamentary system, and forgetting that things like his Social Security "reform" and other domestic atrocities would have been much easier to pass given the powers of a Prime Minister rather than those of a president.

Posted by TW Andrews | July 19, 2007 9:06 AM

It's remarkable that in the UK they still talk Constitutional improvement. Brown has all these ideas to strengthen parliamentary committees. In the US Constitutional reform is the province of eccentrics, in the UK it's the province of prime ministers.

I think that's a feature of our system, rather than a bug. I'd just as soon that our leaders didn't spend any more of their time than they already do figuring out new ways to arrogate power.

Can you imagine the ridiculous centralization of power that would have occurred under Bush/Cheney and six years of a subservient GOP Congress if they didn't at least need to go through the motions of caring about the courts and congress?

Posted by TW Andrews | July 19, 2007 9:15 AM

Don't know if anyone else mentioned this, but another solution is for each side to take each little matter they deem trespassing on their turf through the courts to the Supreme Court for a decision. Doesn't really matter if the SCOTUS is conservative or liberal for the most part. For example, the current SCOTUS might support the current WH on such issues (expanding executive power) now, but they do so knowing that there is a strong possibility of a Dem WH come 2009 and that the Dem WH will then have those same powers. One would hope that the SCOTUS, then, regardless of whether it is liberal or conservative, will underttake analysis of the issues seriously.

Posted by bubba | July 19, 2007 9:55 AM

JonF:

"African elephants (nulike their Indian cousins) are only marginally domesticable."

Do you have any evidence that African elephants are less 'domesticable' than Indian elephants? My understanding is that both are 'marginally' so. In any case, great empires and kingdoms from the Persians, to the Indians, to the Greeks, to Hannibal's Carthaginians employed elephants in their armies. Diamond's claim that sub-Saharan African civilization lagged because of a lack of natural resources remains dubious. Even today, sub-Saharan Africa is awash in natural resources -- vast mineral wealth and agricultural potential -- but continues to lag the rest of the world.

Don Williams:

"Our easily accessible coal deposits have all been mined, our oil has all been extracted and burned and our iron ore deposits have been largely exploited."

Where do you get this stuff from? We have more coal than anyone else in the world, and even today we get about 40% of our oil from domestic sources. We could increase that if there weren't political restrictions against further drilling offshore (particularly off the coasts of CA and FL) and in Alaska. Those political restrictions have been a boon for those of us with the common sense to invest in companies such as BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust (BPT), Teck Cominco (TCK; Canadian, but has significant operations in the U.S.), Frontier Oil (FTO), etc.

Posted by Fred | July 19, 2007 1:09 PM

Re "Where do you get this stuff from? We have more coal than anyone else in the world "
-----------
1) I said "easily accessible coal deposits". I grew up in Appalachia and worked in a coal mine for over a year to get money for college. I have relatives still in the coal business. So I know what's "easily accessible" --versus what requires huge earth moving equipment or high-capital shaft mines with plenty of electicity to pump out water and air. There's a lot of important details that don't show up on those balance sheets and prospectus.

"Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results "

Hee hee They ain't kidding.

2) We passed Peak Oil in the USA in what ?? 1972? There's still some oil here -- but it gets more difficult to extract all the time -- as your remark about "offshore drilling" shows.

3) My remarks above were in the context of recovery from a national disaster in which our economy had been badly crippled. Our economy is far more vulnerable to disruptions today than 150 years ago.

Could you pump oil if the complex supporting infrastructure collapsed ? If there was no electrical power? If you had to MAKE the parts for your drilling equipment using the local blacksmith because you could no longer find/contact the specialist original manufacturer?

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 1:41 PM

The elephants used by the Carthaginians and Egyptians appear to have been a different African species or subspecies (now extinct) from the African Savannah elephant, which, as has been rightly noted, is hardly worth trying to tame.

Posted by SqueakyRat | July 19, 2007 2:08 PM

Re: I think you're vastly overstating the chances that he would be gone in a parliamentary system, and forgetting that things like his Social Security "reform" and other domestic atrocities would have been much easier to pass given the powers of a Prime Minister rather than those of a president.

Ask Margaret Thatcher, she of the poll tax, how easy it is to pass wildly unpopular programs even with a solid parliamentary majority.

__________________________________________

Re: No one questions that there can be survivors after a civilization collapses and the population dies off.

The Mayans did not just survive: they flourished. The very fact that Mayan languages survived the European conquest (when most native language have gone extinct or are on the road to extinction) is evidence that the Mayans were never in danger of being wiped out; they even survived European diseases, more deadly in this hemisphere than any Diamondian collapse.

Re: As for climate change being the SOLE cause of the collapses, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Climate change probably was not the sole cause (though in Greenland it almost certainly was at the root of everything that doomed the Norse). However I suspect it was the necessary element without which the Anazsazi woudl have pulled through whatever difficult period they encountered. Moreover, Pueblo culture in general did survive in the Southwest.

Re: For example, if the USA was hit with a nuclear attack or avian flu pandemic today, the immediate survivors would later die off from starvation at a high rate -- instead of simply recovering to an earlier, more primitive technological stage.

A mass nuclear attack, perhaps, most especially if it were world-wide. Avian flu, no-- because a plague leaves the physical infrastructure of a society and its capital base untouched. This was the lesson of the Black Death, probably the most time-compact mortality event ever to strike a major culture. There was economic and political disruption in its immediate wake, but the Europeans of the 15th century enjoyed a standard of living much higher than their grandparents precisely because of the die-off, inheriting capital and infrastructure that had been supporting far more people.

Re: Our easily accessible coal deposits have all been mined, our oil has all been extracted and burned and our iron ore deposits have been largely exploited.

Assuming non-total physical destruction (in which case almost everyone is already dead too), you're going to have a much smaller population base to support and a whole lot of stuff (metals and plastics in particular) just sitting around for the taking and recycling. And the knowledge to use them would be intact. The nuclear attack scenario introduces two other very negative variables (long-term radioactivity and climate perturbation), but other "end of the world" scenarios do not, and I can easily see civilziation simply pulling itself back together again after a generation or three. For a real-world historical example conisder the climate calamity of the 6th century (caused by a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the Sunda Strait). Famine and freezing temperatures for two years resulted worldwide. There was a massive plague outbreak in the Mediterranean region and Middle East. But recovery was rapid. India and China (both of which had suffered frost and snowfall even in mid summer) were back up and running after barely a generation, as were the New World civilizations. Europe, already in bad shape for other reasons, needed two centuries to regain its previous population levels.

Posted by JonF | July 19, 2007 2:14 PM

Do you have any evidence that African elephants are less 'domesticable' than Indian elephants?

Neither species of elephant is domesticable. Both may be tamed, though the African elephant much less so than the Indian. Indian elephants breed in the wild, are captured, and tamed. They are not domesticated.

Diamond makes this distinction, as do other writers on domestication.

Posted by DaveL | July 19, 2007 2:46 PM

Do you have any evidence that African elephants are less 'domesticable' than Indian elephants?

Well, I've never tried to tame either species of elephant. I'm just goingg on what I've read, combined with the fact that Indian elephants are routinely tamed, African ones rarely so. Moroever the elephants used in the Hellenistic era were Indian ones, not African. Seleukos (a general and successor of Alexander the Great) traded away two whole provinces to the Maurya Indian king in return for a large herd of domesticated elephants, and these were bred for several centuries in the Middle East. As for Africa's natural resources, yes it had them. so does Australia. So does Siberia for that matter. But African civilization lacked the lower rungs needed to reach the point where higher technologies are possible. Plus it was off the beaten path for trading with cultures that did have such benefits. (ditto for Australia, Siberia, etc.) However West Africa was one of three plaecs (China and the Middle East being the others) where iron-working was invented independently.

Re: Could you pump oil if the complex supporting infrastructure collapsed ? If there was no electrical power? If you had to MAKE the parts for your drilling equipment using the local blacksmith because you could no longer find/contact the specialist original manufacturer?

The only likely circumstances (ignoring wild scifi stuff) that could produce the pre-condition you cite would be A) nuclear war B) asteroid or comet impact. An economic depression alone would not do it (see: Great Depression), and an epidemic certainly would not (see: Spanish flu of 1918, Black Death, etc). Nor would a local or regional war, no matter how fierce and destructive (see: Eurasian recovery after WWII). It's also worth noting that periods of shortage that last a while are often periods of considerable technological innovation. Euroep in the so-called Dark Ages produced several low-key but important improvemenst in agriculture andf metallurgy (and the rigid horse collar, perhaps the most important inevntion of the Middle Ages after gunpowder). Agriculture itself appears to have originated in the period of ecological upheaval that followed the end of the last Ice Age.

Posted by JonF | July 19, 2007 2:53 PM

Re "The very fact that Mayan languages survived the European conquest "
---------
My understanding is that Mayan survival of the Spanish invasions was largely due to their relative lack of Gold --compared to the Incas and Aztecs. After initial contact, the Spanish were largely focused elsewhere for a century or so.

By the way, the Mayan collapse that Jared Diamond speaks of is the Classic Collapse circa 800 AD --the massive depopulation of the southern highland area of southern Yucatan. It is true that Mayans to the north managed to survive. Nonetheless, the collapse in the south was more severe than ,say, the shift of automotive jobs from Detroit to Tennessee (with consequent effects on the cities).

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 2:58 PM

PS I looked at the New Scientist article re different views of Easter Island's decline and was not convinced. The article acknowledged the decimiation of the giant palm forests of Easter.

What was interesting was a LATER, unrelated article in New Scientist , which talked about how the waters around Easter are largely sterile --empty of marine life -- because Easter lies in the center of a calm area similar to the doldrums in the Atlantic -- where ocean currents do not reach.

This would indicate that Jared Diamond was wrong about loss of large trees leading to loss of fish in the diet--and hence being the cause of population dieoff from starvation. The fish probably declined because there never was that many of them to begin with -- so the Easter Island people had no need to build ocean canoes for fishing after a certain point -- the fishing grounds had already been depleted.
See http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn12162-found-the-clearest-ocean-waters-on-earth.html

The archaelogists like Jared Diamond don't seem to yet realize the significance of this finding by the oceanographers. Like many landlubbers, Jared has probably never looked at a marine pilot chart.
(shows prevailing ocean currents and winds).

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 3:02 PM

"The only likely circumstances (ignoring wild scifi stuff) that could produce the pre-condition you cite would be A) nuclear war B) asteroid or comet impact. An economic depression alone would not do it (see: Great Depression), and an epidemic certainly would not (see: Spanish flu of 1918, Black Death, etc). Nor would a local or regional war, no matter how fierce and destructive (see: Eurasian recovery after WWII). "
--------

This is the essence of the question.

Past recoveries are not necessarily a guide to the future because (a) the population was MUCH smaller in the past and (b) the natural resources were far more abundant.

For example, how long would the national economy survive if trucking traffic could no longer move on the interstate highways because masses of starving people were ambushing all trucks looking for food?

The federal government can deal with insurrection and emergencies happening in any one location in the country -- it can not easily deal with an outbreak of violence,looting etc happening everywhere at once. Think of EVERYWHERE in the USA suddenly looking like New Orleans after the Hurricane.

Re avian flu, what happens if people in the rural countryside start blowing up interstate highway bridges in order to block an influx of infected refugees from the cities?

Posted by Don Williams | July 19, 2007 3:14 PM

Would someone like Bush ever become prime minister? Westminster parliamentary systems are pretty debate heavy, so why would any party choose to be led by someone so inarticulate? I think an advantage of parliamentary government is that campaigns are more policy oriented than personality oriented. Consider the low profile of PMs' wives compared to presidents'wives.

I think in an American parliamentary system, both parties would 1) choose to be highly intelligent people 2) bereft of the amiability of a Reagan and Bush, the Republicans would have to run on different policies to stand a chance.

"in the UK you get to vote for a faceless cipher of one of the preexisting London court factions"

This is true, but is it bad? With party discipline comes accountability and consistency. Is it a good thing in our system that moderates can take turns voting against their party leadership? Where's accountability when a Congressman or Senator only votes against something only when that bill is going to pass anyway?

Also, freedom of action is expensive. Oftentimes a pres or party leader has to buy a Congressman or Senator's vote with pork.

Posted by jsb | July 19, 2007 3:27 PM

A parliamentary system is the worst of all possible worlds. In theory, the PM is responsible to the legislature. In the real world, people vote in the PM as a plebiscitary dictator, and he's got an automatic built-in majority already in place to rubber stamp his whole program.

Posted by Kevin Carson | July 19, 2007 11:56 PM