WHAT IF EVERYONE USED PRES. TRUMP’S “POSSIBILITY THINKING”?
Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D. 2-25
Pres. Trump has approached his second term as President with fervor and many ideas. His thinking has been in the nature of brainstorming, unconstrained by strict adherence to what is probable and what is “realistic,” as illustrated by his push to buy Greenland, incorporate Canada, and take over Gaza. It is also somewhat akin to approaching a negotiation by asking for the outrageous, knowing that you would actually accept quite a bit less. This approach has the merit of startling people into thinking more outside the box, but what if everyone adopted this style of thinking/planning? We could let go of our comforting assumption that “it could never happen here” and let ‘er rip!
School boards could “secede” from their state’s public education system, as long as they were willing to pay their own way entirely. Perhaps states could secede from the U.S. (Who knows? The circumstances and attitudes are different now than they were in 1860.) Texas could send its militia or National Guard to seize a northern part of Mexico, counting on the U.S. to back it up if Mexico fought back. California could buy Baja Mexico with its many tourist destinations. Employees could take over a company, with guns and barbed wire, and not let management back in. Why not? It might not work out in the long run, but the employees would certainly get great press coverage for their grievances. Particularly bold children could go on permanent strike, refusing to do any chores from that day forward. If they could withstand all entreaties and “guilting” from parents, what could parents really do long-term? Send them to juvenile hall? Perhaps more importantly, in families with two breadwinners, wives could limit their housework and home support activities to doing only as much as their husbands do (if they could stomach the results for the first months of that change).
More seriously, what would stop the western states (California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington) from forming a regional compact, agreeing to vote in Congress as a bloc, thereby wielding considerable power? To have a compact like that, they would have to have an agreement that would satisfy some of the specific desires of each state, of course, but if that could be done, why not take more power? Similar blocs could form in response—the Old South (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas); the Northeast (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England states); etc.).
This could lead in the direction of what may be a trend for Trump and MAGA—to move power from the Federal government to the states, such as doing away with the Federal Education Department. The President talks as if it’s good that abortion management has moved to the states (although that is not what the Supreme Court did). We could also move transportation to the states, as well as the FDA and CDC. States could all manage the next pandemic differently and could approve or not approve various medicines to be used in their states.
History is often forgotten by leaders. The education department came about (as I remember it) when some states were not graduating enough high school students with background to pursue work in science and engineering, and Congress thought that the country needed more people in those fields. Local control was not preparing people for the new science and engineering jobs. To have local control appeals to people who want to control culture change in their areas, but this will no doubt conflict at times with our needs as a nation, and local control, since it would reject much information from the outside world (e.g., book bans) would reinforce in children the idea that other people in other states are different and therefore not acceptable.
To aid Pres. Trump for a moment, the size of the Federal government could be shrunk a great deal if our taxes were “reconfigured.” We could do away with all Federal taxes, have the states collect all taxes (and pay for everything that the Federal government pays for now in their states), and have the states contribute a certain amount to the Federal government every year (like the old tribute system). These tributes could be adjusted to take into account the income or wealth of each state’s citizens as well as the number of citizens.
I’m afraid Pres. Trump would not go along with my tax proposal, though, because the Federal government uses the money it “gives” to the states (welfare, Medicaid, highways, education, etc.) as its method of controlling those states and keeping everybody in line with the national interest (as the Federal government understands it).
Most people are more comfortable with less change, so few are likely to act like the President in their daily lives, but some could, and the President inspires them to feel powerful. Why not aspire to poison thousands of people through the water supply instead of just a hundred using your gun? Why not a large bomb to take out your whole school instead of just a few people with your AR-15?
There is value that could come from unconstrained, “out-of-the-box” thinking. We might do much better in trying to solve our national problems if we seriously discussed and debated issues such the relation of the states to the Feds and the value of saving more lives from an epidemic vs. giving citizens more freedom during the epidemic. We might come up with adaptive ways to educate voters better by establishing an institute with both conservative and liberal scholars and writers who could publish (on TV, too) “the facts” that both sides agree on and clarify the differences between conservative and liberal approaches to solving societal problems, given those facts. This kind of serious discussion is missing from our public forum. We see reports (the news) of things that happen which highlight problems, but we never see the serious discussion that could move us toward solutions. Is this because we don’t like change, don’t like conflict, or have forgotten how to think? (Our two-party political system is not helping us with this, because (I think) both parties focus more on getting voters to vote for them than they do on actually trying to solve problems.)
Essays\trumppossibilitythinking