Here is a simple truth about politics that should never be forgotten:
we call politics “a game“ without hesitation or a fundamental understanding of what that really means.
Because it is a game, there must be winners and losers and essentially winning or losing defines what takes place in politics always and forever. And no one playing any game plays it to lose.
Friendships in politics are not easy to acquire. Politicians will gladly tell you that if you want a friend in this game – better buy a dog.
The problem with accepting politics as a game is that we think that there is very little new that we haven’t seen and dealt with before. The rules never change; situations repeat themselves endlessly; whatever happens, we know how to deal with it.
After all, the politics that have brought America into its 250th anniversary year, is fundamentally the same as spelled out in the rules of the game by our well-meaning founders in the brilliantly designed Constitution.
In our tripartite government with its three branches all carefully enunciated, we have essentially understood that they exist as a balance of power insuring that their roles provide us with the understanding that leadership of each branch will play within the rules. All real games must have rules.
Further, in games played by large numbers of people, there are teams and they exist in politics – we call them political parties.
Since 1776, there have been more than 100 ‘teams’ involved in these games. You history buffs remember the Whigs and Federalists and Know Nothings and Democratic-Republicans but the list is stunning long. Some lasted a year or two. Some existed for a year. Some were single State parties, others in multiple States.
In time the often used Democratic and Republican names separated and became national in scope and have been so for almost two centuries.
In New York, one of the very few States which permit multiple “third or minor” parties, we have seen the Liberal, Conservative, Green, Socialist and Working Families parties succeed, influence and fade as time and political circumstances take their toll.
While other methods existed to gain a ballot line in any New York election, those 50,000 votes made life easier and cheaper for third parties.
Cuomo got a committee of the State Legislature to expand that number to 130,000 not only in a Gubernatorial election but a Presidential election as well.
That number remains valid today and so does a singular truth…the influence of Third parties has significantly fallen until the parties themselves appear to have disappeared.
But something else has happened to our two national parties – not only in New York but across the nation.
TEAMS COLLAPSE
While we want to believe that everything about politics remans the same, that belief is shaken when we watch the teams playing the game disappear.
The Democratic Party no longer stands for the support and involvement of the blue collar worker that has made it dominant in national and local politics.
The Democrats seem now to represent groups of influential, highly educated monied people often from Wall St. and those outside the general flow of American life. They seem rudderless because of it.
As for the Republican Party in New York this fact is true: since the turn of the 20th Century, there have only been six Republican Mayors in New York City.
The Democratic Party found its overwhelming influence nationally following the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the success of the nation’s growth and power during and after the Second World War.
Today it is clear – as it began to be in the Presidential years of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – that the Democratic Party has drifted from that winning blue collar strategy and today seems bereft of any specific winning identity at all.
It recently lost the Mayoralty in NYC to a young man not affiliated with it – but one who found support from an organization which is not a political party: the Democratic Socialists of America.
The Republican Party is all but gone in New York. In the most recent years, their Gubernatorial and Mayoral candidates have fallen by the wayside.
Nationally, the Republican Party is run by MAGA Republicans – devoted most of the time to the agenda of the Heritage Foundation and its front man, President Donald Trump.
Legislatively, House Majority Leader, little Mikey Johnson does what he is told.
What we all see is that these changes in our political teams indicates something greater and more significant: the game has moved away from a democratic approach where all three branches of government play familiar and expected roles into an authoritarian approach where the President surrounded by a group of yes people, does exactly what he wants to do – even instigate a war.
Constitutional rules are regularly ignored. The game which we are convinced never really changes – politicians being politicians – is significantly and ominously changing right before our eyes.
WHEN FAILURE EXISTS
In the last several years we have repeatedly stated that world history shows us that the great nation-states of the World lost their powers, never to regain them, when they failed to educate their children.
We confront that reality here and now. America stopped educating its children in the early 1970’s. We have reported that our Gen Z generation cannot tell time from a clock, cannot sign their names to official documents and cannot make change in a store.
Those in government clearly do not know what they do not know and New York City will see that day after day for four years in the current administration of a young man who has absolutely no business being the Mayor of a major American city not because of any single reason other than he has absolutely no experience in managing anything.
He is Mayor only because his opponents from the Democratic and Republican parties were clearly not impressing anyone – despite one being a Governor for three and a half terms and one being a New Yorker with New Yorker smarts but no government experience.
Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa were the best our two major parties could do.
Neither one had any minor party support – a support which has won many a campaign – but was totally missing in the last Mayoral election.
He was pushed and supported by the generation of young people who made a star of Bernie Sanders and a Congresswoman out of a Queens bartender – Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. An organization – not a political party – provided the organization and enthusiastic volunteers.
Ask any college teacher – professors and those who teach in several colleges – how their classes work and you will hear some definitive answers that explain how a lack of elementary and secondary education has taken its toll.
They have reported for years that there is little or any discussion among students in their classes no matter what they do to encourage and awaken it.
The students come to class, take notes, study to do well on tests and to earn good marks for their attempt to enter a good graduate degree program.
They have little interest in discussion because they feel no confidence in getting up to talk and argue points of interest established by their teachers.
Involved in just the opposite environment at Brooklyn College in the 1950’s – classes in political science and social studies were loaded with fierce arguments and counter arguments.
In the midst of one of those political meles, our Poly Sci professor asked us what the hell we were doing at Brooklyn College when we should have been attending the London School of Economics.
But genuine teaching went on in those years and in the 1960’s and started dying off in the last third of the 1970’s.
Elementary and junior high schools no longer got the very best women in teaching because those women were in medicine, dentistry, law, business and finance…and not in schools of education.
A study in early 2010 damned those Schools of Education with failing to properly prepare teachers for the classroom.
Today America has a national shortage of teachers. Those who enter that work leave it early – a third of them before the end of five years.
Those who remain for the full thirty years before they receive pensions often walk through the role without any genuine effort.
When it was apparent that today’s young people cannot look at the clocks in their classrooms to know what time it is – schools began removing those clocks rather than teach how to tell time from them.
A new order in States around the country has been announced to begin teaching cursive writing again. We see it as a complete waste of time. Just teach young people how to actually write their names so they can sign legal documents – that will suffice.
So now we recognize the failure of our next generation to handle the elements of government. Not knowing what you don’t know is a tragic state of mind. We think it explains the hard negatives expressed by corporate America to so many of our Gen Z generation: they don’t want to work hard…they don’t want to do original thinking…they need to have everything explained to them – they don’t want the hard work of thinking…if they don’t like something they are told to do, they don’t do it.
But there are other more disappointing changes visible in our society. There are no longer any new novelists to entertain and teach us. There are no distinguished artists filling our galleries and museums. There are no new playwrights in either straight or musical theater. There is not a single American pianist or violinist to compete with the Asians and Europeans who now dominate the classical music stage.
Our culture has all but stopped producing.
So our failure to educate our young people has already impacted the life of our next Generation and all our lives as well.
We will compete with the World on many levels because of the power of American money no matter who is in the White House or how weak our national political parties have become.
Unless the Democratic Party finds a new or old way to collect supporters, while the MAGA influenced Republican Party will lead us into authoritarian directions. The Liberal Party will never recognize as valid or an example of a true democracy – no matter how off-beat that democracy can become from time to time.
A POSSIBILITY
Official Intelligence offers us a chance to change directions now when we need it most.
We focus here only on education and not on any other element in this very sophisticated economic and complicated issue that one can find when discussing AI and its implications for the future.
Some of this difficulty comes because the very largest tech companies now control its development. Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and younger AI tech leaders are spending billions to develop techniques of use and areas of placement.
All of this effort and the stunning amounts of energy necessary to make AI possible have frightened and concerned many in America.
We should never fear what man himself has developed. We should just concentrate on what is good and the best in working with AI.
Our recent focus on the Atlas Schools in Austin, Texas explained how potent AI can be in actually teaching children to learn at their own best pace – something no teacher in a classroom can ever do day after day…year after year.
We have not had an opportunity to travel to Texas to look closely at the program but we see its enormous value if it can be instituted into our public schools. It is now being used successfully in this $40,000 a year private school system – as that system proceeds to expand into other areas of Texas and into Florida and North Carolina as well.
Time will tell and the idea needs proponents in the public schools – which for political reasons may be difficult to arrange.
None the less it exists and we will get closer to it soon.
There is always hope – and no single political game-player or political organization will ever become powerful enough to defeat America as the land of hope and opportunity.
It may seem otherwise in these difficult days – but 250 years tells us differently and for those who wish otherwise we say “Lots of luck”!