The first law of politics: Corruption is persistent and inevitable

I remember back in my grade school civics class, being introduced to the idea of the separation of powers, the American system of government featured three separate branches; the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. I remember the teacher going on at length about the geniuses of the founding fathers in setting up this system. Because if one branch of government was ever to become corrupted or too powerful, the remaining two branches of government could unite and purge the corruption.

That was when I raised my hand and asked a question typical of a child. What would happen if two branches of government became corrupted? I never got an answer. I wasn’t even treated to some bullshit excuse to why this wasn’t even a problem; the teacher just ignored me and moved on to the next question. Much to the bemusement of my peers I might add.

I know the answer to that question. The two corrupted branches would unite to corrupt the third branch.

So when I came of age politically, one of the things I would spend hours doing was to try and come up with a system of government that couldn’t be corrupted. But no mater how clever I thought I was, there was always some means by which my incorruptible system could be corrupted.

Today, I now know that trying to concoct and incorruptible system is a fool’s errand. Such a system is fundamentally impossible. This may seem to be just me stating the obvious, but there are many liberals and progressives out there who toil in futility at this particular mill, including more than a handful of academics who call me to task for such a bold assertion. They note, and not incorrectly so, that I fail to prove this. Some even argue that this is an improvable claim.

The reason why I have confidence in stating there is no such thing as an incorruptible system has to do with real world observation. Even stainless steel will rust can corrode given time and environmental conditions; every machine breaks down, everyone makes mistakes, planes always crash, boats always sink, and rockets always blow-up on the launch pad, despite monumental efforts and astonishing technological progress to combat the inevitability of crashes and other disasters.

I can even point to biology. Life has been on this earth for billion years and still there are pathogens such as bacteria and virus. And if it’s true for biology and technology, is safe to say it’s also true for politics and governance.

So why are many Liberals so hostile to the notion that we can’t create perfect societies? Well, many Liberals tend to invasion utopian societies, and then ask the basic question of what changes are needed to realize at their utopian vision. To say that corruption is both persistent and inevitable is tantamount to saying that there vision is fundamentally impossible. Not all Liberals have this problem with many embracing the idea of a metaphorical utopia, an ideal to strive for, rather than some sort of grand ideological destiny.

The Destiny Liberals also try to make another argument. That if you can’t beat can’t beat corruption – that the whole point of self governance becomes futile. If you can’t win, why bother at all?

Again, look at technology and biology. Humans have always had to deal with viruses, so we have inherited and evolved formidable immune systems that give us a fighting chance. Safety and maintenance protocols in technology may not be able to prevent all disasters, but they do prevent many potential disasters. In the same way, we can never truly beat corruption, but there is any number of things we can do to combat it and minimize its effect.

This is something even the Founding Fathers understood when they came up with the separations of government. They didn’t create an incorruptible system, but a system that could be more effective in combating corruption, or at least as they knew it. The Founding Fathers also left in one more tool, the power to change the constitution. Thus as new challenges would arise, later generations had the power to update and modernize the constitution to contend with new realities, and more importantly answer new forms of corruption.

So what does this have to do with creating better politics?

Well for starters, we can stop pretending we can make an incorruptible system. We can also re-examine our current reforms strategies and see if they are properly hardened against corruption. I argue that the reason why the left has so little to show with grass roots organizing is because Liberals refuse to confront the reality of corruption compromising their own institutions or that the Democratic Party itself has become corrupted, even corrupted beyond the point of rescue.

But political laws like this also help in another way. To bridge what appears to be a vast gulf between the utopian Liberal ideologies we espouse too, and are worth perusing, to the other side involving the practical application of those ideologies in the real world.

Better Politics, Part two: Living in the real world.

In part one, we discussed the need to define common set of ideas for the people to share and communicate. For example, “education reform” basically means more privatization, vouchers, high stakes testing, and braking up the teachers unions. These are the very things most Liberals and Progressives are trying to put a stop to, but end up voting for and supporting any way because – its “education reform” and because there is no alternative to “education reform.”

What we need are properly defined ideas and concepts around which a conversation can revolve, to propose and built our own notion of education reform that includes concepts we believe will actually make public education better. Instead of calling it “school reform”, call it “The Rachael Plan” in order to separate it from the popular rhetoric used by the right, and under-which we can install the polices and agendas built from our collective values as Liberals and Progressives may hold.

In short, we need to do what the Conservative think tanks are already doing.

But this is just step one. For step two, what we need to do next is precisely what Republicans can’t or wont do, and that is properly vet the ideology against reality. This is the reason and evidence part of the equation.

The problem of course is most people are particularly bad at logic, reason, and evidence. Indeed, its been my observation that many Liberals and Progressives simply do not understand skepticism, let alone to be able to apply it in the sort of systematic way one would need to consistently craft policy. And to be fair, skepticism is hard. None of us likes having our cherished beliefs challenged, dismantled, or discredited.

Let’s also be realistic about this too, the sort of research needed to make this happen demands a life time dedication. Something that most of us simply can not offer – for the very simple reason that most of us have already dedicated our lives to other pursuits that are just as important.

At some, we have to take our nascent-ideology and hand it to the scientific and academics. They have to pick our ideas apart and running them through the ringer. And many of our cherished and inspired ideas will not survive scrutiny. Those that do will come with a long list of caveats, conditions, and consequences that still managed to shatter any thoughts of miracles or perfect solutions.

But its the only way to not fall into the same trap as the Republicans have, who are all but slaves to failed ideologies that are counter productive and even self destructive.

Understand that I am also not arguing that scientists and academics should or will get to dictate what we believe about politics or ideologies. For that mater, the first step of defining ideology is not about dictating what we believe ether. Step one is about establishing common ideas to start the conversation. Step two is simply testing those ideas to make certain the are realistic. And yet we still have step four, five, six, seven… and further in order to making a better political landscape.

So what is Science and Academics?

Science is a methodology by which is used to understand the world around us. The scientific process starts with making observations of the world we live in. Step two is to try and draw conclusions from those observations, called a hypothesis. But an important component of all hypothesis is the ability to be falsified – that is a means to prove that the hypothesis is not true. This takes us to step three, attempting to falsify the hypothesis by using some sort of means; mainly experimentation or through predictions.

Step three takes place in a system called “peer review,” where other peers in your field get to look over your work, sift through your data, repeat your experiments, and affirm your predictions. And they will let you know if you have made a mistake.

Any hypothesis that survives falsification through peer review is then integrated into the larger body of knowledge which consists of all the other hypotheses that have been tested before it. This body of knowledge is called the theory.

But even once an idea makes it to theory doesn’t mean its over. Ideas and concepts are tested, over, and over, and over again. In science, nothing is ever amused to be true, it must always be tested and retested. And theories are always being re-examined as new observations or evidence comes to lite.

Over time, as theories are tested repeatedly, and as our body of knowledge grows to slowly map out more and more of the universe, we have a growing confidence that our theories do actually work, and can produce predictable results.

While all scientists are academics, not all academics is necessary science. There are other non-scientific branches of academia; there is philosophy, mathematics, law, history, technology and engineering. However, they all still have their own peer review process where the claims is evaluated against the evidence. The only real difference is non-scientific works tends to be far more subjective, and where falsification is far less conclusive.

Never the less, the non-scientific branches still bring a lot to our reformed political table.

You got science all over my politics!

As the main tittle suggest, this is all about “the real world”. And that means producing something that is real and concrete.

Step one and step two are not actual steps, but an ongoing and long term conversation. Just about any one can participate on the political side, no real credentials are necessary. In fact, the point is to have the main from the street to have a say in the process. However, in practice they will not be “common persons” but citizens who manage to amass some degree of popularity and influence in party. They basically publish opinion pieces, sit in on conferences, man call in talk shows, even perform art or write fiction.

Academics and scientists are inveighed to participate by publishing counter articles offering an academic perspective responding to these opinion pieces or even to other academics on any given subject. In addition to just doing pure education pieces where members can be given speed courses on the what the science really says and how we came to understand it.

But at some point we need to bring in the academics to do a very different task, to collect the conversations and start hammering out some sort of conclusion. This is surprisingly hard work and will take real man-hours to accomplish, and not unpaid interns ether.

And the end of the process, we should end up with a set of publications, a nascent-manifesto if you would, that start to spell out ether the Liberal and Progressive ideologies as well as define some of the policy initiatives that each would advocate.

Also note that I am treating Liberalism and Progressivism separately here, they are still separate ideologies and will come up with different conclusions and agenda goals. However, I seen no reason why a political party needs to be constrained to serving one particular ideology. Heck, I see no reason why Conservatism and Libertarianism couldn’t have their own compartments in the party. In fact, this might be a great way to openly appeal to Conservatism and Libertarianism who currently vote mostly Republican. Don’t forget that they go through their own academic vetting process as well.

However, the nascent-manifesto is still not ready for prime time. What we will have at this point would likely amount to little more than a refined version of thinking out loud. A lot of goals and ideas that while vetted for practicality are still competing. Not all ideas can be carried out.

Still more steps are needed.