Is 5GW Necessary For a Functioning Republic?
America’s system of government follows an evolutionary pattern called punctuated equilibrium, an idea popularized by paleontologist Steven Jay Gould. In punctuated equilibrium, species are biologically static over long periods of time. Periodically, however, events trigger a burst of evolution and species morph through a wild variety of forms before settling down into another period of crisis.
Similarly, America has a crisis driven form of government. The institutional and socio-cultural framework of the American republic guarantees that under normal circumstances constitutional and legal change will happen at a snail’s pace. Agendas will pile up in the forgotten cupboards of congressional staffers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, public intellectuals, journalists, and think tanks. Then a large crisis will occur, agendas will emerge from the darkness, and sweeping enactments will make them law. 9/11 and the GFC are two recent examples of such punctuated equilibria.
5GW, to use purpleslog’s definition is:
5GW is the secret deliberative manipulation of actors, networks, institutions, states or any 0GW/1GW/2GW/3GW/4GW forces to achieve a goal or set of goals across a combination of socio, economic, and political domains while attempting to avoid or minimize the retaliatory offensive or defensive actions/reactions of 0GW/1GW/2GW/3GW/4GW powered actors, networks, institutions, and/or states.
Given the crises necessary to drive our system of government forward, I wonder if it isn’t prone to 5GW-style manipulations. Furthermore, I wonder if the system doesn’t require 5GW-style manipulations in order to function, change, and evolve. If your system requires a steady stream of catastrophe inputs in order to adapt to emerging trends, a far-sighted statesmen may have to manufacture crises in order to move the Leviathan forward. Our leaders past and present tell us that an educated citizenry is supposed to deliberate of the great issues of the day and move the nation forward through the enlightened wisdom of the crowds. That’s poppycock.
Consider one (possibly) 5GWish operation: the creation of the US Constitution. The Federalists were a group of proto-nationalists who wanted to build a local superpower. Note Alexander Hamilton’s ambitions expressed in Federalist No. 11:
By a steady adherence to the Union we may hope ere long to become the Arbiter of Europe in America; and to be able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interest may dictate…I shall briefly observe, that our situation invites, and our interests prompt us, to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs. The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America have successively felt her domination. The superiority, she has long maintained, has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority; and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed a while in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the European. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all trans-Atlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!
The key to creating a more powerful United States was acquiring the four corners of the square of power as outlined in Niall Ferguson’s The Cash Nexus:
- Tax bureaucracy.
- Parliament
- Central Bank
- National Debt
Each of these were necessary to get the financial and military muscle to create a muscular Empire of Liberty, financed at non-junk rates. However, what was needed was a crisis, real if possible but manufactured if necessary. Daniel Shays helpfully provided the crisis. The Federalist’s were able to get themselves appointed to a convention to help revise the Articles of Confederation but used the occasion to launch a slow motion coup d’etat against the states. This is a classic example of the frog boiling slowly.
A possibly even better example of 5GW at work in American history is the triggering of the American Revolution itself. Samuel Adams was the Lenin of the American Revolution. At some point in the early 1760’s he developed the explosive idea that America should be independent from Great Britain. Adams carefully built up agitprop machinery around the notion that America just wanted to return to the status quo before the onset of the Seven Years’ War. However, behind this agenda was the desire to breakup the British Empire. In his case the British ministry was more than up to the challenge of providing crises but after the repeal of the Townshend Acts Adams was left without a major issue for his conspiracy to exploit. He had to manufacture his own firebrand. Seizing on the only duty not repealed with the other acts, the duty on tea, he organized an assault on an East India Company ship and dumped tea into the harbor. This set off a series of events that Adams exploited, with a little luck, to create an independent United States and throw off the deadening hand of perfidious Albion.
The history of the United States may be more of a sequence of orchestrated Boston Tea Parties than we realize. Whether these constitute 5GW since, to paraphrase Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire, 5GW is neither a fifth nor a generation nor warfare, is an open question. However, it seems that at minimum the American system is driven by crisis. George Marshall offered this great insight on the essence of the American system while reflecting on FDR’s decision to go ahead with Operation Torch, an operation that was opposed by Marshall and other senior US military commanders who thought it was militarily unnecessary:
The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. (This may seem like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.) The people demanded action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into sideshows and if we had gone as far as he did we would have never gotten out. But I could see that the president had to have something.
If 5GW, assuming it exists, can be boiled down to anything, it’s providing the American people with entertaining diversions. Paradoxically, it’s easier to get an agenda after you’ve gotten the American people to stampede rather than when they are peacefully chewing their cud.
