Reaching the ‘critical mass’

I studied political science, once many years ago, only to discover it isn’t a science and or even an art. It was an easy enough course, once I cracked the code; forget about research and rigour, follow the bouncing ball, stick with the current paradigm at all costs.

Just like politics really, even if things are demonstrably, disastrously wrong, just stick with the program.

I didn’t point out then, and risk being marked down, that the current paradigm fails to take credence of the big picture, the historical records. There could be an element of science, though I’m no scientist. There are historic cycles; clear and definable cycles which are probably related to the human response to power, to greed and hubris. Those parts of the human mind which blind people to visible, provable fact.

Forget the masses, watch the collapsing mass!

The Bush Administration is proving my thesis, just as the Howard’s Liberal’s in Australia and Blair’s New Labour in Britain. President Roh in South Korea is wallowing in the same inevidble trend, as is Chen in Taiwan.

Canada’s Liberals have already been there, allowing the anomaly of a conservative government to be elected at a time when the trend is moving away from conservatism. Berlusconi’s right wing conservatives in Italy have already flared out.

Roh, it should be pointed out, is not conservative, but simply another electoral anomaly.

It is ‘the critical mass’ of political failures; the inevitable build up of wrong minded policy, of incompetence in high places, of unfathomable greed and the greatest failure of all – forgetting the people who vote.

We have been tracking the signs of collapse over the past few months. Those signs now seem to be spinning with a dizzying effect.

Devouring their own

The problematic commitment to Iraq has locked Bush and others into a ready made political disaster. The voter might not really care much about governments making a bad thing worse in Iraq, but mounting deaths, and worse, the revelations of awful, needless massacres do bite after a time.

Then there is the cumulative effect of those ‘entitlements’; the screw you, I’m going to line my pockets while I can’ effect. In the US, the list of ongoing investigations, grand jury proceedings, current trials and politicians under a cloud of suspicion is mind blowing.

Even supposedly resolved issues like Enron contain the seeds of future revelations. Then, every week there seems to be a new expose, a new name to conjure with, another greedy lawmaker caught out dipping into the trough.

Well as that old disappointment once said, “You don’t need a weatherman…” Now we have the fourth most influential lawmaker on the hill, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Jerry Lewis, facing investigators. Where will it stop?

It doesn’t stop with the obvious manifestations of bad governance, it moves to another level when the politicos start devouring their own. As meltdown moves steadily closer so does the time to settle old scores.

The power elite lose focus on the main job, governing, and turn to jockeying for access to one of the broken deck chairs which might survive the coming disaster. Instead of targeting electoral opposition they turn in on their own, pull down destroy in order to gain some small advantage in the future.

Or even more base and juvenile, start the process of paying back for real and supposed slights and snubs, those creatures which thrive in the political hurly burly.

"If they can't get something like this right, how can we trust them to get anything right?" House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King is lashing out at his fellow Republicans in Washington.

Like the US, this process is well advance in Australia and Britain. Like the US, those governments are unassailable in their respective legislatures, but their majorities are collapsing from within. The weight of accumulated scandal, the fatigue stemming from one failed policy after the next and the hurt and bruised egos of these political heavyweights are all the ingredients of the classic political meltdown. Now we just watch for those mushroom clouds to form.