Institutional Thinking

Dwayne Booth, Mr. Fish

--I don't know anything about public relations.
--Who does? You've got a clean shirt and you bathe everyday.
That's all there is to it
--The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)

The centrists insist on comforting the comfortable
while afflicting the afflicted
--The Destructive Center, Paul Krugman

We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle,
having blundered in the control of a delicate machine,
the working of which we do not understand
--John Maynard Keynes (1930)
_______________

In the USA there is a quaint notion that we elect our government, and we thereby can control policy via the exercise of the franchise.

However, there is a large bureaucracy called the Civil Service System, along with the excepted service of the spook and legal agencies. Add to this the burgeoning Homeland Security Agency and the Department of Defense (DoD) and you have an amoebic-like mass of entrenched power.

The President is supposed to be our chief foreign policy authority, yet DoD and the Department of State implement long-term programs which dictate policy and often hamstring any new directions the leader may wish to take.

The DoS and DoD are influenced by their members' institutional biases, specifically, Ivy League Schools and West Point, Annapolis and other military affiliations. Because of these standardized influences, policy mindset is entrenched, and very little shifts over time (Obama Assembles an Ivy-Tinged League.)

While the Ivy League outlook is more liberal than that of the military academies, there remains the belief that the U.S. is always right, is the best, and is obliged to exert influence upon one and all, like missionaries spreading the gospel.

It is also accepted that our actions are always based in certitude. The military take adds the idea of thoroughly stomping any country that gets in our way. Morality is sometimes subjugated to fealty to execution of orders.

In the last century, the preponderance of judicial, executive and DoS and DoD leaders were products of this system. All of our Presidents were former military officers, Ivy League and/or West Point Point grads. While Obama promises change, he is just the next link in a long chain:

FDR: Ivy League (IL)
Truman: Former Officer (FO)
Eisenhower: West Point (WP) + FO
Kennedy: IL + FO
LBJ: FO Nixon: FO
Ford: FO Carter: Annapolis + FO
Reagan: FO [sort of]
GHWB: IL + FO
Clinton: IL
GWB: IL + FO [sort of]
BHO: IL

While I'm not arguing leaders arise from Prairie View Agricultural & Mechanical, the point is that our leaders share an institutional bias and fellowship, removing them from the experience of the average American. It leads to stereotypical thinking in our elected officials.

We have so many wars because we elect aggressive and elitist leaders, ideologies they learn in the elite Ivy League and military academies.