Election Round Table 2.0 Proceedings
Our political innovations continue to the surprise of many. Comfortable, established conventions seem to fall away bit by bit every day; relationships break and rhetoric in the media and with many activists escalates in intemperance and extremism. Lines are drawn and few protagonists seem willing to back down from asserting their principles.
Americans are divided into two tribes and a large group of bystanders. Hillary Clinton won the votes of nearly 30% of all Americans eligible to vote. Donald Trump’s vote was a bit smaller. Some 40% of Americans eligible to vote did not support either candidate.
Commentators are writing about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” destabilizing one side and the appeal to “alternate facts” by the other.
One tribe takes its identity from core American values; the other is escalating its attempt to change the presumptions which shape those values, focusing mostly on identity politics and the personal self-actualization permitted by modern Western culture.
One side seeks to use government for its protection; the other as an agent of the changes they want to make in the culture.
The country is divided as never before in modern times, with social media deepening the antagonism and accentuating the differences.
When Caux Round Table participants here in Minnesota met for the second round table after our November 8th elections, they did not speak of politics as usual. Rather, they began a new and unsteady process of reaching out for new ways of thinking about what is going on.
Their presumption seemed to be that analysis must come before remedial actions can be recommended.
The proceedings (below), drafted with skill by Richard Broderick, puts before you the concerns of the participants. It is one way we can keep you more thoughtfully informed of the points of view among thoughtful Americans.
“How to Move forward? A Post-Election Discussion, 2.0”
Proceedings
Chair and Facilitator: Stephen B. Young, Global Executive Director, Caux Round Table
Attendees: Grant Abbott, Rich Broderick, John Buettner, David Casper, Jerry Finnerty, Sharon Fortunak, John Hasselberg, Richard Hendrickson, Todd Lefko, Kathryn Linafelter-Johnson, Ken McAuliffe, Chuck Perkins, Peter Sammond, Don Samuels, Rob Scarlett, Kathy Sullivan, Kevin Terrell
Staff: Jed Ipsen
The questions under discussion: was the Presidential election of 2016 a sign that the United States is sinking deeper into a period of decay or can the country find its way to the threshold of a new beginning? In either case, how should citizens, institutions, and other organizations react to the rise of Donald Trump to the White House?
Discussion
One participant proposed that the country is currently experiencing a “systematic assault on democracy in which our political institutions have lost the trust of the people and, largely as result, the nation has become prey to ‘the appeals of propaganda.’” That propaganda, in turn, makes us almost blind to the underlying causes of the dilemma. “For example, the Chinese wonder why we would blame them for economic troubles when we have wasted some $14 trillion over the past 30 years on military expenditures?”
The election, another participant said, was about “change, leadership and trust.” Have Americans fallen prey to the psychological ills which come with family dysfunction? Have too many lost faith in institutions so that turning to a “messiah” seems reasonable? Rather than focus on such personalities, discussants gravitated to culture as the arena for successful remediation of what seems to be broken, the seeking of a common standard of judgment — based on some broadly acceptable theology of fairness and logic.
One discussant commented that we are watching management of the absurd; the devolution of politics into a spectator sport. Another spoke of a national therapy session in process.
“A high percentage of the electorate were not ‘deplorable,’ but voters across the political spectrum do see the way the establishment talks about ‘helping people’” while working to enrich itself and their parties. Donald Trump, this year — and for better or worse — “broke the mold and created a political brand as an outsider who will change things for the better.”
The celebration of capitalism as an agent of “creative destruction” is no longer acceptable. “The job of society is to provide a social safety net.” Donald Trump, in this view, is “blowback” caused by the declining influence of white male Christians in the social and political scheme of things — this in a country where, by mid-century, today’s “minorities” will be in the ascendancy.
Other suggested causes of anxiety were the growing scope of “scale” in business and bureaucracies so that more and more feel marginalized and moved into a realm beyond touch and intimacy. The personal has become robotized and our interfaces with one another mostly digital.
The election also reflected the so-called “Rise of the Precariat” — a class of citizens living in conditions so lacking in predictability or security that it affects material or psychological welfare. These are the growing number of Americans whose jobs and social status are at risk. This phenomenon is one of the main factors in the loss of trust in our democratic institutions — a loss that paved the way for Trump’s election.
Of the above point toward the need for the business community to embrace the idea of a “social impact inventory” in which the concept of profitability includes the creation of social good. Already there are corporations around the world, like 3M in Minnesota, which have adopted this goal and are incorporating it into their operations.
We must also recognize what Peter Drucker identified more than 30 years ago: the critical difference between “efficiency” (doing things right) and “effectiveness” (doing the right thing).
The political and corporate systems in the United States today stress the need to increase “efficiency,” failing to recognize that if what is being done is wrong, doing it more efficiently will only magnify the extent of damage that is caused. What we need now is an examination not just of how to do things but what needs to be done to make things better. This concept is related to the distinction between “problems,” which can be solved, and “predicaments,” which can be managed but not “solved.”
We cannot, for example, “solve” the predicament of “poverty” and efforts to do so will only cause resistance and end in failure. We can, however, “manage” the predicament of income distribution and growing wealth inequality through a number of practical, though never definitive steps, such as adjustments to tax codes and regulations. Throughout our history, the United States has proceeded, for the most part, in acting upon (even if not consciously acknowledging) this distinction. We have proceeded functionally rather than ideologically. That was possible — indeed made necessary — by the fact that we were a much smaller society, rapidly expanding, with new opportunities opening up, like large swathes of empty land or the discovery of new resources in remote places that relieved the pressure to “solve” problems by imposing predetermined ideological convictions.
That situation, obviously, has changed and it is now vital that we, as a country, sit down and study what is happening, listen and apply effective methods to address predicaments that will not yield to preconceived “solutions” of any kind. The concern with President Trump is not just about his leadership. It is about our national capacity for followership. A high percentage of the electorate do not trust him — neither his temperament nor his judgment — and so, as a nation, are feeling very dysfunctional.
Meanwhile, if we wish to look for a set of principles that can guide the country (and the world) out of the social, political and economic morass created by an unregulated — and predatory — version of capitalism, we need look no further than the Caux Round Table’s Principles for Business. These are guidelines and rules — not solutions.
If our country’s leading economic, social and, yes, political institutions were to adopt some version of these Principles; if they worked toward applying these Principles to the predicaments we face, it is likely that the our current state of dysfunction and borderline dystopia might subside: not achieve a state of perfection, of course, because the pursuit (or even longing for) perfection is a guarantee of failure and even more profound despair but a well-balanced and continually self-measured sense that some of our predicaments are becoming easier to handle, thus freeing up energy — and optimism — to move us forward into a brighter future.
