Guns and Dogs, Cows and Commons

I grew up in New York City, and I remember the day when Ed Koch announced the "pooper scooper law," whereby dog owners had to clean up the mess made by the dogs walked on city streets and in city parks. There was a $100 fine doled out to violators.

I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in rural Virginia. They farmed about 40 acres, and their dogs were important friends and assistants to my aunt and uncle as they traversed the grounds, from hog pen to chicken coop to the fields where their horses and cows grazed.

My uncle owned guns -- rifles, mostly -- and talked with my Dad about them often. They'd go hunting sometimes. Guns to them were an important part of running the farm, and of protecting my uncle's 40 acres in a town where the police aren't at your beckon call.

My father had rifles in our New York City apartment -- single- and double-barrel shotguns and a deer hunting rifle -- that scared me even to look at until his dying day, at which time my cousin graciously removed them and placed them on his mantle.

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If one were to look at voting patterns in the US for the 2004 national elections, by congressional district, one sees a high correlation between population density and blue-ness (more dense population) or red-ness (more sparse population). And, policies around guns and dogs seem to correlate accordingly. More dense populations favor gun regulation and pooper-scooper laws, while more sparse populations favor gun rights and don't sell many pooper scoopers.

So, my first observation is that in the US today, one's political ideology is largely influenced by population density.

The next question is, why?

Take a look at the impact of shared resources on a population and its views.

When one lives in a world of shared resources -- such as NYCers, who live in mostly shared space -- one's views on society is influenced greatly by the structural interdependence of the population. That is, if I own a $10M Park Avenue town house, it's still connected with Park Avenue. And I don't control Park Avenue. So I am very interested in working with others to ensure that my own home and investment is best served. I am more willing to vote for more cops on the street if it will keep me safe; better transit system, to keep the streets from being clogged with cars and smog; and stronger gun laws, to ensure that the probability is minimized that someone living in close proximity to me could ruin my life with a single bullet.

Conversely, it means that if I live in the rural Southwest, I won't be surprised to see people walking down the street brandishing a firearm -- wild west style (I have never seen this, but friends who live there have described it to me). In that part of the country, this is not seen as a criminal behavior (it certainly would be in NYC -- imagine one on the subway), but responsible protection and a way to keep bad guys in check.

It's not that the Southwesterner or the NYCer have "bad values" around guns; it's that the proximity of people in their every day lives dictates different approaches to social policies. In one Southwest town, the idea of "everyone having a gun so no one gets hurt" might work. In a crowded northeast metropolis, such a policy may not be implementable, and it may have the opposite effect.

I have found "guns and dogs" symbolic of these differences because they are so simple to understand, almost everyone has a gut-level opinion on each, and policy preferences are pretty clear to see in the regional laws enacted around them.

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In 2008, the election was about different issues: the economy (fix it), the war in Iraq (exit), healthcare (cover everyone), education (fix it), foreign policy (restore our image) change and hope (we need these badly) -- with the economy being a dominant factor and the need for change and the yearning for optimism being the consensus cries.

While the axes of the 2004 and 2008 elections seem quite different -- social conservativism vs. pragmatic government intervention -- they have something at their core in common that, I believe, will (and should) define the contrast of at least two national political parties.

This leads me to my second observation, which is a generalization of the first: the goal of political debate is to come to consensus on the nature, size and administration of the "commons."

And, what is a "commons," you may ask?

The commons, in the colonial days in Boston, farmers would bring their cows to a common field to feed -- creating the "cow paths" we now call our roads and streets. The problem was that, while each farmer benefited from being able to have their cattle and horses graze while in town, no one was responsible for the upkeep of the common, and it soon became a mudbowl. The farmers needed to agree to share the burden (i.e., levy a tax) on those who used the commons more, so that those who benefited more would share a greater burden for the upkeep of the commons. Because of this, the Boston Commons still exists today, nearly 400 years later.

Garrett Hardin made popular the discussion of the tragedy of the unregulated commons, in which he argues that the role of regulation (however much it is) is to provide adequate incentives and mechanisms for maintaining the commons.

The question now is, what is in the "commons" for America? Is healthcare in? If so, how much? Foreign relations, for sure -- but what mix military vs. diplomacy? How about a decent education for everyone? Or a financial system that functions in providing mechanisms for savings, insurance and credit -- and eliminates fraud?

As Thomas Friedman reminds us, we live in a world that is hot, flat and crowded. That means we are more interconnected than ever. And our understanding of that interconnectedness -- to other Americans and to other citizens of the world -- is fundamental to the kinds of policies we will set in defining what's in the commons, how big it should be and how it functions. The commons helps us express in policy and economic terms what we believe is the basic standard of living for every American. FDR did this with the New Deal, and it looks like the Obama administration will have to sort this out, too.

When one looks at our political discourse through the lens of "negotiating the commons," it may be helpful for us to find consensus around the things about which we must necessarily agree. Those things will certainly change over time, and the role of our political parties ought to be to represent the balancing points for our nation to thrive and prosper. Polarization and polemics may work in homogeneous, local environments. But in an interconnected, interdependent America, such politics are corrosive. They are like a magnet introduced close to a compass -- one cannot find true north. Rather, as we grow in our maturity understanding the nature of our commons and how to make it work best for our society -- whether in terms of how our free markets operation, what human rights we ensure, and how we engage with other nations -- we give ourselves the best chance to be the America we hope we can be.

Can anyone tell me what "Democrat" or "Republican" mean now?

Disclaimer: I am a self-avowed political neophyte -- not an expert or a pundit of any sort. I hope that this posting is received by the reader as thought-provoking and not polemic or ideological.

What's the difference now between Democrat and Republican? Between liberal and conservative?

Over the past several weeks since the 2008 presidential election, I have heard many Republicans bemoan the fact that George W. Bush did not represent Republican values. At the same time, I hear Karl Rove -- the architect of the "new Republican machine" consistently defend the current administration. Whatever one's views of the Republican party, it is clear that it is a party with an ideology that is in flux -- some would say, in crisis.

At the same time, there are liberal Democrats who have grown frustrated with President-Elect Obama before his first day in office because they see him as not advocating aggressively for their positions -- positions that have been kicked to the curb the last eight years.

Now I'm not a politico, and I would rather not see political parties other than that they serve a purpose in governing. But the muddying of what Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal and moderate mean have been sloshing and squirting around like Jell-O.

So I've been considering, as both parties re-consider their identities and brands, what is an outcome that benefits the country?

As an independent voter (we call it "unenrolled" in Massachusetts), I see an importance in the balance that a multi-party system brings. Without that balance -- with everyone playing to the ideological middle with no sense of the poles -- I believe America loses its bearings. (I will try to keep my fundamental assumptions to a minimum, but that is one of them). I suspect I am not alone, with a strong tendancy for the American people not to vote unilaterally for one party. This is also borne out in the observation that the Democratic landslide in November has been coupled with many stern warnings from the people (from ordinary citizens to pundits) not to swing as far left as we had swung far right.

It used to be that Republican included: fiscally conservative, small government, constitutionalist, entrepreneurial, analytical and dispassionately smart. Yet in the last eight years, all of these planks of the platform have been shattered. What remains includes a corrosive social conservatism that is better at generating hate and mistrust than at generating real solutions to serious problems.

Democrats on the other hand used to stand for: fiscally liberal, big government, progressive constitutional interpretation, labor-friendly, emotional and passionate. Clearly the Democrats have done a better job recently in growing their base of support, but they have done so by promising to return to several tenets that Republicans claimed as their own. Simply by ousting George W. Bush and hitting the reset button on his policies and governing approaches -- from the powers of the presidency (and vice-presidency) to more amiable foreign relations to fiscal responsibility to intelligent and open discourse around big decisions -- has done a lot to establish the Democrats as the party of the majority. It has also blurred the lines distinguishing the parties. And in so doing, it has made it less clear -- to me, at least -- how a two-party system makes our democracy better. Two parties trying to look the same will limit choice. Two parties that each hold valuable aspects of the American ethos -- and neither holding them all -- will necessarily need to come together, balance one another and compromise to fulfill all of what Americans will ask of their government.

The Power of the President of the US

I am riveted listening to Mickey Edwards, Director of the Aspen Institute, who is talking on C-SPAN about executive privilege and power. His assertion is that, in order to select the next president, we need to ask the candidates the most important question: what does each believe are the limits of power of the office of president?

He makes the case that , and he blames the news media and the schools for causing us to lose focus of how the Constitution has laid out governmental powers.

He emphasized the criticality of the president's reaching across the aisles to all leaders, especially in a time of gridlock. This made me recall a personal expectation I had for this time in history: that gridlock would be good for our country because it would force this kind of dialogue -- a sharing of power. Instead, President Bush has done with Congress what he has done elsewhere (especially in foreign policy): acted unilaterally.

Bush's unilateral action seems to be reflective of a core cognitive limitation to hold paradoxes in his mind. It is as if he's saying, "All this collaboration and multilateralism is too hard... I'm the decider!"

What a mess.