Watching, wide eyed, the revolutionary bonfire of institutions in the United States is a little alarming.
\nIt\u2019s alarming\u00a0because these institutions have vital functions: they control the gains to dominant players by enforcing laws and regulations. They are guarantors of the sense of fairness that holds that society together. The Republicans\u2019 clear intention is to unleash a tornado of profit making to reignite American capitalism. They are likely, of course, to simultaneously tilt inequality to nineteenth century levels and produce even deeper pits of despair to create the next Trump.*
\nThis is exactly the cycle that destroyed the Roman Republic, whose separation of powers constitution was the model that inspired the US founding fathers. I see Trump as the Crassus who inevitably falls because of his own stupidity and greed. He died, with his legions, in the Syrian desert while trying to pillage the riches of the Parthian empire. Will he be followed by a smarter and more destructive Julius Caesar, Marc Antony and Augustus, all successively trashing institutions until there are no impediments left to absolute power? Well I hope not. It all depends on whether the United States manages to resuscitate and reinvigorate its institutions. It\u2019s therefore very heartening to see the absolute alarm and horror amongst progressive Americans as Trump organises his bonfire. Only their passion will recover those pillars of stability.
\nSystems rarely, of course, totally collapse. Instead, as a threshold is passed, the whole system suddenly transforms into a new stable state that\u2019s less diverse. Usually there\u2019s no path back. That\u2019s according to Resilience Thinking \u2013 see Walker and Salt\u2019s pioneering book https:\/\/islandpress.org\/book\/resilience-thinking<\/a> on the subject,\u00a0and this superb resource from The Stockholm Resilience Centre. http:\/\/www.stockholmresilience.org\/download\/18.10119fc11455d3c557d6928\/1459560241272\/SRC+Applying+Resilience+final.pdf<\/a>
\nWalker and Salt\u2019s most famous example is the effect of rising salt in the Goulburn-Broken Basin, Victoria\u2019s most productive agricultural landscape. For decades, irrigators\u00a0pumped more and more water into the subsoil, with no discernable effect, until saline groundwaters reached the root zones, and sudden system transformation began. Those farmers can never return to highly productive orcharding again.
\nIt\u2019s eerie how similar this is the rise of poverty in America. We\u00a0pretended not to notice\u00a0for decades, then suddenly the threshold passes, and the system teeters. Will it have the resilience to recover?
\n* According to Thomas Picketty inequality in the US has already fallen to 1930s levels under the influence of neoliberalism. https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Thomas_Piketty<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching, wide eyed, the revolutionary bonfire of institutions in the United States is a little alarming. It\u2019s alarming\u00a0because these institutions have vital functions: they control the gains to dominant players by enforcing laws and regulations. They are guarantors of the sense of fairness that holds that society together. The Republicans\u2019 clear intention is to unleash […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-system-thinking-2","has-post-thumbnail","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pac6ss-s4","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.enablingchange.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}