Obama's State of the Union and the End of Move-Oppose

When a President uses The State of The Union to take the Supreme Court to task for a recent decision, you know not all’s right in the land below the 49th. When a President use The State of The Union to take his own party to task for having a majority and yet heading for the hills, you know not all’s right. And finally, when the President takes the other party to task because saying “no” is not leadership, well, while that’s politics as usual, it also reveals that not all is right in the U.S. of A.

The real message of Obama’s speech was the simple, unspoken and disturbing undiscussable that the structures of the American political system are no longer adequate to address 21st century problems. Poisonous partisanship has broken the back of the government’s spine that runs from the White House to the Senate and Congress. And guess what? It is the same in Canada. Pro-rogued, with opposition leaders giving speeches and teach-ins, with the Prime Minister seeking to look Prime Ministerial about Haiti and waiting for the bright lights of the Olympics, the Canadian government is not governing. It holds no pretense about tackling problems other than one’s political misfortunes. It is in absentia. Going, going, gone.

Is it possible that the long run of representative democracy that replaced the demise of monarchies needs to end because it cannot evolve sufficiently? (Bit of an ambitious question for a blog, eh?) Let me throw out a simple notion from my own work. For the past ten years at least, new ways of talking with one another are being explored in organizations, even the corporate kind. Democracies are stuck with the dysfunctional dance between the party in power and the opposition. Organizations, however, are free to avoid that structure, and governments could learn from it.

Being trapped in debate doesn’t move the agenda forward and, if it does, it leaves a wake of losers who will seek to win in the next debate. Winning, rather than arriving at the optimal solution, becomes an end in itself. Organizations, looking to avoid that fate, have been experimenting with dialogue, “Open Space”, circle conversations. One method of conversation, with its origins in family systems therapy, states that the structure of “Move-Oppose” creates dysfunction unless other roles modulate that dynamic.

Government, unfortunately, is little more than a space for playing the game of move-oppose. Some love the game, they play it for the sake of playing it, and they’re called politicians. The best ones simply win the game more than they lose. Now and then when compromise raises its nervous head and has the crown placed upon it, we see that as proof that move-oppose can work. It has been enough to delude us into honouring representative democracy as the pinnacle in the evolution of political systems. There’s nowhere better to go. Yikes! Hold on for a bumpy ride.

Is there a way out? Not yet. We’re as locked in to move-oppose in governments as we’re locked in to the QWERTY keyboard I’m typing on. (How locked in are we to that? Apple released its I-Pad yesterday, and you still have to write your email on the QWERTY keyboard that was created in 1873). The Move-Oppose system sustains itself, the architecture prevents us from questioning it (look at how they sit in the Parliament), the culture of competition reifies it. Alternative ways of engaging tough problems do exist; you can even be trained in them. But that doesn’t mean there’s a way to shift the system from within. I will let go of the political system healing itself. It will not happen, not in my lifetime.

What might happen in my lifetime is the rise of the web as a means for a new kind of democracy to appear. It is in its early stages right now. What form it will take, I can’t say. What particular dysfunctions will appear in web-based democracy, and they will appear, I won’t conjecture. As the State proves inadequate, humanity will follow the path of least resistance to solving its innumerable challenges. And that path, Dear Reader, leads directly to the medium which has you reading this.