MANIFESTO: A Call For An Emergency Taskforce On The Broken Presidency

By Harvey Wheeler

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" - Ronald Reagan

Ronnie, you broke it. Not Bill Clinton.

And we've got to fix it.

Did you know that under President Reagan we had an unconstitutional "Second State" and an American Prime Minister? The Reagan Presidency, celebrated unstintingly by Republicans and Conservatives, is the least-understood Administration in our history. Ignore the alleged "October Surprise"--an unconstitutional private conduct of foreign policy by a presidential candidate to contrive his own election. Reagan as President conducted a secret foreign policy in Nicaragua, Bolivia and Salvador and financed it with income diverted from arms and drug sales.

This amounted to the creation of an unconstitutional "Second State," apparently like the one used to destroy Weimar Germany. [For more on this parallel, see Ernst Frankel's, The Dual State] Ollie North even considered emergency concentration camps to cope with potential protests. Coincidence: Among industrial nations in the past 40 years America has had the largest number of CPD's--convenient political deaths. (Political scientist Hans Speier long ago described the population dynamics of reactionary politics: a white collar lower middle class suffering a long term decline into working class status, and responsive to an "Evll Empire" scapegoat. It was 'Aw Shucks', cowboy 'Dutch' who insisted on visiting the Bitburg SS cemetery in Germany.).

The appointment of Howard Baker as what came to be known as the President's chief of staff pointed to a structural flaw in the way our constitutional system works. The Tower Report was about the studied neglect with which Ronald Reagan treated the Office of President. His executive nonfeasance was of a piece with the policy of deferred maintenance he applied to the nation's cultural and intellectual resources.

We now know that Reagan's nonfeasance went far beyond his widely advertised policy of authority delegation. His ContraGate "Second State" practically gave away the Office of President. The President's anagram, Donald Regan, it was revealed, was informally referred to in Washington as the Prime Minister. At his dismissal a crisis of confidence swept through Washington and the world's major capitals. A grave functional defect of our Constitution became apparent. It has long been known to constitutional theorists but not much noticed outside their circles:

Our government is catastrophe-prone.

It is highly vulnerable to crisis. Political scientists refer to the last six administrations as "Broken Presidencies."

It is not merely that the incumbents themselves were flawed. Rather, the way our constitution works--or fails to work--almost automatically produces Broken Presidencies. The causes lie deeply embedded in our modern governmental practices. They can be plainly stated:

We have no built-in institutionalized way of resolving a grave constitutional (read here Presidential) crisis short of "breaking" the presidency to pieces.

Bill Clinton narrowly escaped conviction; just as the three prior Presidents should have been impeached.

It should be superfluous to add that in a bomb-laden world this is literally intolerable.

Howard Baker understood this. His sense of constitutional crisis led him to subordinate his own personal interests to try to salvage an administration he previously found revolting (intestinally rather than politically. The Baker episode reveals how dangerously dependent our entire governmental machinery is on the accidental availability of a statesman of quality at exactly the time a presidential crisis occurs.

Some propose adoption of the British parliamentary system. The British parliamentary model does not recommend itself. It no longer works in Britain. It would not work in America. The Reagan ContraGate Crisis proved that.

Other Presidents merely declared Presidential Wars and so escaped congressional deadlocks. Yet Presidential Wars are unconstitutional!

Presidential Wars are exactly the wrong way to fix constitutional crises. They court the Jay Forrester counter-intuitive syndrome. Jay Forrester was an MIT professor of Systems Theory who proved that large complex systems are intrinsically crisis-prone. The Presidential War expert is Bill Clinton. He's played Nacht music from American bombers all over the world.

The need to institutionalize crisis- resolving procedures is urgent. These are parlous times. A new world economic crisis, for example, would make ContraGate look like boys pinching from the cookie jar.

Repeat: Crisis is the built-in characteristic of all large and complex organizations. They are:

a) crisis- producing, and

b) Intuition defying.

Intuitively plausible crisis- resolutions are certain to worsen rather than ameliorate the crisis. Jay Forrester proved this mathematically. And demonstrated it in many large systems.

One thing can be said: It is very difficult but it is now theoretically possible to make models of the way our governmental institutions actually work--and fail.

It is possible to model them as a complex, interactive system. It is then possible to determine how a change in one sector would affect all others, individually; and how their concatenating effects would disrupt the whole system.

This is possible.

But it is not being done.

A massive national taskforce project is required along these lines- like the one Reagan mobilized behind the Strategic Defense Initiative. A project to model our mal-functioning governmental system is far more important for our national survival than is the chimerical Star Wars project. Not merely for us. Global Security depends on it.

Harvey Wheeler, author of Fail Safe with Eugene Burdick, is a frequent contributor to The Idler.