FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

THE POLITICAL MAUSOLEUM

 

Referring to the “frenetic schedule,” a report by the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future summarizes the situation vividly: “Increasing complexity and speed-of-light crises, such as votes in one week on gas deregulation, Rhodesia, the Panama Canal, a new Department of Education, food stamps, AMTRAK authorization, solid waste disposal, and endangered species, are turning Congress, once a center for careful and thoughtful debate . . . into the laughing stock of the nation.”

Obviously, political processes vary from one industrial country to the next, but similar forces are at work on all of them. “The United States is not the only country that seems confused and stagnant,” declares U.S. News & World Report. “Take a look at the Soviet Union… Noresponse to U.S. nuclear-arms-control proposals. Long delays in negotiating trade agreements with both socialist and capitalist nations. Confused treatment of French President Giscard d’Estaing during a state visit. Indecision over the Mideast policy. Contradictory calls for West Europe’s Communists to confront and cooperate with home governments. . . Even in a one-party system it is almost impossible toproject firm policies—or re-ipond quickly on complex issues.”

In London a member of Parliament tells us that central government is “grossly overloaded,” and Sir Richard Marsh, a former Cabinet minister, now head of the British Newspaper Publishers Association, declares that “the Parliamentary Iructure has remained relatively unchanged over the past 250 years and it’s just not geared to the sortof managerial decision-making necessary today… The whole thing isto-lully ineffectual,” he says, and the “Cabinet is not much I bptter.”

What about Sweden, with its shaky coalition government hnrely able to resolve the nuclear issue that has torn the country apart for nearly a decade? Or Italy, with its terrorism Km I recurrent political crises— unable even to form a govern-
-iii for six months?

What we confront is a new and menacing truth. The po-||lllcal shudders and crises we face cannot be solved by lead-|r» —strong or weak—so long as those leaders are compelled operate through inappropriate, broken down, overloaded iNlifutions.

 

 

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