Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 81. Sunrise is 6:39 and sunset is 6:57, for 12 hours, 18 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1796, George Washington’s Farewell Address is printed across America as an open letter to the public.
Consider a small town (you might have Whitewater in mind) that was once a predominantly status-based culture (with social ties mattering more than talent, perimeter-fencing and gate-keeping by a few local figures, resistance to change, grandiose — indeed, ludicrous — claims of talent from these few, and mutual back-patting among them).
A few like that would have been those that a libertarian blogger might have satirized (ridiculed, truly) as town squires, town notables, etc. Needless to say, no person not in the grip of intoxication or mental malady would believe that such few were unsurpassingly talented except in unsurpassed self-praise. Their ideology was boosterism, and their idols were those they saw in their mirrors each morning.
That culture is on the wane in many places now, with Whitewater, happily, being among those places. What’s left of it looks old, odd, and obtuse.
A status-based culture, with a small special-interest faction, would prefer politics over policymaking. Of politics, it is enough to win control of a council, board, or commission. No one needs talent to fund a catspaw’s campaign or put up yard signs. No catspaw needs talent to vote the way he was told to vote once he is in office. (It’s enough to know: vote yea or nay on the issues that matter to a special-interest faction. Afterward, one can pretend to be reasonable, and perhaps even to speak reasonably, on topics generally. In this way, a clever catspaw becomes, to add another metaphor in the mix, a Judas goat.)
Policymaking, where one has to craft thoughtful plans in writing (memoranda of economics, development, or law), is not to the liking of a special-interest group. They want a result, a favorable decision, a conclusion that advances their self-interest. Details need to be few for that ilk, mere appliqués to create the impression of reasonable.
And so, and so — when along comes true policymaking, genuine nuts-and-bolts considerations, the special interests of a status-based culture have fits. They grew up in a culture that did not require them to craft something; they grew up in a culture allowing them to demand something.
And look, and look, about Whitewater — for the first two decades of this century, Whitewater’s special-interest men produced not a single serious policy document of their own. The city had good consultants (Ehlers and Strand) and poor ones (Trane), but these special-interest men, themselves, crafted nothing beyond their own insistence. They didn’t need to write as long as they could talk, and they only needed to talk long enough to command others while praising themselves.
When, in communities like Whitewater today, meritocracy comes along, it’s a shock to the remaining few aged and average men of yesteryear. They’d rather get rid of what they don’t like rather than negotiate. They’d prefer a politics of control over policymaking through discussion.
What shocks them is simply the Shock of the Normal: a normal place of policymaking, of meritocracy, of the openness to talent that has made communities across America the envy of the world.
