About Plain Meaning

by Jeremy C.

I've spent my entire adult life either thinking about government or being in government. I've even spent a good bit of my childhood doing the same--well, at least the thinking part. From my formal education--composed of political science as an undergrad and public policy in graduate school--I was exposed to the methodology of measuring and comparing political power. In other words, the academic world made it seem that political power was more like a math problem where you plug in an equation and you get a solution. In my various civilian and military positions actually in government, I gained exposure to how the theoretical met the actual day-to-day functioning. This is also where the neat, clean lines of political theory dissolved away into the messy world of human affairs. Only after facing situations where officials and institutions made obvious and undeniable deviations from the authority they officially had, and seeing that this happened far more than either academia acknowledges, I gained much greater appreciation for what the founders of the United States of America understood.

They had laid out basically the only theory that has ever worked--checks and balances. They derived from their classical education of human affairs going back through the Greeks and to Saxon Kings the over-arching human pattern to strive for self-interest, and how this brings both good and bad. Self-interest is a natural thing and part of our evolutionary growth but also can be dangerous when left unbounded. So to provide for general welfare, as the Constitution termed it, and safeguard individual liberty at the same time, the founders created a system of deliberate limitations through institutional checks and balances. And the periods where the checks were loosened or became non-existent were where America experienced its biggest failures. From the "imperial" presidency of Richard Nixon perpetuating a system of surveillance of American citizens in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to an intelligence agency being given the power of "plausible deniability" resulting in nearly full unaccountability, every time we've moved away from the check, we've moved away from the balance.

With that understanding, my aim is to take a critical look at what is happening in America and across the world. I'll use all my experience, formal education, and personal reading to put things into perspective. And occassionally, I'll even propose solutions to improve a situation or alleviate a problematic effect. I am careful to view any proposed solution in the world of politics as merely an improvement at best. If I've learned one thing it's that the human condition for self-interest adapts and always does so to increase the self at the expense of the others. To that end, we have to keep reviewing the checks to make sure the balance between self-interest and the general welfare is maintained. It's a tug of war that never ends. It's why political suceess or failure should be measured on the rate of correcting failure instead of believing that failure can be prevented in the first place.