Street Roots • dan. 8-14, 2016
Book Review
Page 12
President Nobody
P hilip K. H oward searched fo r someone to fix society's problems, but he came up empty-handed
BY MEGAN WILDHOOD
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R .
“ ^ T A a k e any problem facing our society
today,” Philip Howard challenges,
_1_ “and ask yourself, who has the
authority to fix it? The answer is
nobody.” The courts are backed
up 10 years, it takes as long to
complete an environmental
review, billions of our tax
dollars are being squandered
due to laws written by
people long dead, and
millions more of those
dollars go to subsidizing
unhealthy foods.
Government dysfunction
is not news, but Howard’s
book, “The Rule of Nobody,”
endeavors to explore the real
reason behind the partisan
gridlock and special-interest
factions we’ve all come to expect
and even participate in, most
notably during major elections.
Howard does not blame powerful
interests with endless cash for the near
paralysis and unconscionable fiscal waste of
what is democracy in today’s America. Nor
does he blame the two-party system that
encourages one party to vote against a
perfectly reasonable piece of legislation
simply because the other party proposed it.
Howard blames “legal accretion.” The
courts are jammed because judges pride
themselves on being nonjudgmental —
they’ll hear any case, which binds ordinary
citizens in fear, constantly looking over
their shoulder for the next lawsuit. It takes
10 years to review a potential construction
project for environmental impact because
15 different and uncoordinated agencies
need to sign off on the job. And, because of
the over-complication and unintelligibility of
laws and regulations, public employees
fudge their duties simply in order to pass
inspection; teachers “teach to the test” a la
No Child Left Behind and your garden-
variety citizen is too afraid to take much
action at all.
But why so much law? Why attempt to
preempt every public decision or need by
maddeningly granular regulations and brain-
numbingly specific rules for every
organization from nursing homes to federal
insurance programs to public schools and
beyond?
“America has lost its soul,” Howard
writes, “to fear.” While I’d like to push
Howard to deepen his exposition of the
origins of this fear, his case for law being
employed as this neutral arbiter of a
crowded society’s life together is
compelling. “America no longer offers a
government for the people. Look at every
area of public law. Program by program, the
tangle of old legislation is paralyzing
society.” Freedom does not mean being
able to do or buy whatever you want, but in
using your creativity, moral judgment and
agency to find solutions to the inevitable
problems of life. From the earliest days of
our federal government, law has attempted
to “fix the problem” of human judgment in
governance.
So there is no one at the helm, no
person to hold responsible when, say, a
woman drowns in a thoroughly life-guarded
lake in the middle of the day because the
one guard who could have gotten to her in
time was assigned a certain partition of lake
to patrol and the drowning swimmer fell
just outside of it. “The law made me do it”
is the programmed response of public
employees throughout the hierarchical
chain, all the way up to the president. “The
game is rigged for powerful people and
groups ... the internal rules of Congress are
designed brilliantly to avoid action.” No,
Howard does not provide an adequate
remedy for this specific impotency, largely
because he does not sufficiently address
the role of Citizens United money, ahem,
drowning our elections.
Either way, leaving life up to The Law —
which is not self-enforcing and requires
human interpretation — no matter who
we elect, has stabbed the heart of
democracy, which is supposed
to be ruled by responsible,
moral people. Howard will
tell you in conversational
and assertive tones that
enshrining the law is a
relinquishment of
moral responsibility.
“The abdication of
moral choices has led
to moral rot in
society, manifested in
three pervasive
pathologies -
encouraging selfish
conduct, barring
responsible conduct and
fostering a relativistic
public culture.” He doesn’t
use his well-argued platform
to just pistol-whip the current
status quo, though. He does offer a
means of fixing this mess — a
necessarily ambitious one built upon
assumptions I’m not solidly certain I share.
Howard takes some unnecessary jabs at
environmentalists and is a bit too confident
in some of his assertions — such as “it has
been generations since any farmers were
starving.” Additionally, I’m more suspicious
of human goodness and the effectiveness of
civic action than Howard is, but I will agree
with him here: If the system were working
well, it wouldn’t need so much red tape to
hold it together. Big change is inevitable,
even though the current dysfunction of
government tantalizes us by removing
human responsibility. Either it will collapse
like an elderly resident in a nursing home
who subsequently dies because the only
aide who came upon her was prohibited by
assisted-living-facility rules and regulations
to perform CPR. Or we as a body will make
it happen. “Incremental change isn’t the
path of history. Incremental change doesn’t
capture public enthusiasm and is easily
blocked by special interests,” Howard
argues. Incremental change is also too
easily absorbed by the ravenous
bureaucracy that is all around. So, lest you
be, too, ask yourself this: if The System
were working so well, why would it need all
this (red) tape to hold it together? Then
consider Howard’s book.
Reprinted from Street Roots sister paper,
Real Change News in Seattle
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