New York Times (Opinion)
By Thomas Friedman
March 2, 2016
When
the U.S. military trains fighter pilots, it uses a concept called the
OODA loop. It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. The idea is that
if your ability to observe,
orient, decide and act in a dogfight at 30,000 feet is faster than the
other pilot’s, you’ll shoot his plane out of the sky. If the other
pilot’s OODA loop is faster, he’ll shoot you out of the sky. For a while
now, it’s been obvious that our national OODA
loop is broken — and it couldn’t be happening at a worse time.
Our
OODA loop is busted right when the three largest forces on the planet —
technology, globalization and climate change — are in simultaneous
nonlinear acceleration.
Climate change is intensifying. Technology is making everything faster
and amplifying every voice. And globalization is making the world more
interdependent than ever, so we are impacted by others more than ever.
These
accelerations are raising all the requirements for the American dream —
they are raising the skill level and lifelong learning requirements for
every good job; they
are raising the bar on governance, the speed at which governments need
to make decisions and the need for hybrid solutions that produce both
stronger safety nets and more entrepreneurship to spawn more good jobs.
They are also raising the bar on leadership,
requiring leaders who can navigate this complexity and foster a
resilient country.
My
own view is that these three accelerations have begun blowing up weak
countries — see parts of the Middle East and Africa — and they’re just
beginning to blow up the
politics of strong ones. You can see it in America, Britain and Europe.
The challenges posed by these accelerations, and what will be required
to produce resilient citizens and communities, are forcing a politics
that is much more of a hybrid of left and right.
It
is the kind of politics you already see practiced in successful
communities and towns in America — places like Minneapolis; Austin,
Tex.; Louisville, Ky.; Chattanooga,
Tenn.; and Portland, Ore. — where coalitions made up of the business
community, educators and local government come together to forge hybrid
solutions to improve their competitiveness and resilience. We can’t get
there at the national level since one of our
two major parties has gone nuts and we have designed paralysis into our
politics.
The
G.O.P. fell into the grip of a coalition of far-right media and money
people who have created a closed loop of incentives for bad behavior and
never getting to hybrid:
Deny climate change. Spurn immigration reform. Shut down the Congress.
Block Obamacare (even though it was based on an idea first implemented
by a Republican governor). Do so, and you get rewarded by Fox TV and the
G.O.P. cash machine. Stray from those principles,
and you get purged.
That
purging eventually produced a collection of G.O.P. presidential
candidates who, when they gathered on stage for their first debate,
resembled nothing more than the
“Star Wars” bar scene at the Mos Eisley Cantina on the remote planet of
Tatooine — that assortment of alien species, each more bizarre than the
last, from a “galaxy far, far away.”
At
the same time, as the political scientist Gidi Grinstein points out, at
the national level, because of the way congressional districts have
been gerrymandered by both
parties to produce either more liberal Democrats or more conservative
Republicans, we’ve shifted to a system that nationally incentivizes
polarization and prevents hybrid solutions. America, argues Grinstein,
is making itself “structurally polarized at the
national level and therefore collectively stupid.”
We
have major issues that Congress needs to resolve via politics, and the
failure to do so will really hurt us: How do we balance privacy and
security? How do we expand
free trade and cushion our workers hurt from the effects? How do we
make the fixes in Obamacare to make it more sustainable? These will all
require hybrid compromises, not dogmatism.
The
guy who actually understands this is President Obama. He’s never been
as strong on entrepreneurship as I would like, but he’s also never been
the radical lefty the
G.O.P. invented. His instinct has become hybrid — to combine support
for free trade and immigration, to implement a Common Core to upgrade
education, to provide health care so workers can be more mobile, to fund
more Pell grants so more students can afford
college, to make investments in clean tech, to make changes in the tax
code to narrow income gaps — all to make the country more resilient. We
could have done so much more with his presidency.
What
is fascinating about Donald Trump is that he is blowing up the
Republican Party by offering a totally new hybrid politics. In that
regard he is a pioneer — socially
liberal in some ways, isolationist in others. He is almost Democratic
in his approach to Social Security, yet he is anti-immigrant, bigoted
and fearmongering in other ways. And he is positively irresponsible in
his budget proposals. His hybrid is an incoherent
mess, designed more to appeal to the G.O.P. base than to govern. But if
Trump uses it to explode this Republican Party and to open the way for a
new, mature, hybrid center-right version, he will have done the Lord’s
work.
But please, Lord, keep him away from the White House.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment