Opportunity for the G6

La Malbaie: scene of the G7 meeting. Photo credit: Elaine Martin

Will the G7 collapse in Quebec?  Then what, in a world has had it with an American President who is out of control—personally and politically—as well as with a Congress that lacks the decency to stop him. Shall we all just wait, heads in sand, for this to pass, so that noble America can once again replace nasty America?

We would do better to face the reality. A great many Americans not only voted for Donald Trump, but continue to support him. When he goes, how can trust in America be restored when we know full well that next time, or the time after, back could come the likes of him, or worse?

This tells us that the problem goes deeper than Donald Trump, far deeper: American society is dangerously out of balance, ironically in much the same way that the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were out of balance, just on the other side of the political spectrum. The public sector dominated those regimes; the private sector dominates America.

This problem has been festering since Thomas Jefferson expressed the “hope [that] we…shall crush in it’s birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength...”(sic). Unfortunately, the founding fathers addressed another problem, the one that provoked their revolution: excessive power in government. Hence, they imposed checks and balances on the public sector, with no comparable checks that might have limited the power of any other sector in society.

Half a century later, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized corporations as “persons” in the eyes of the law, and took that over the edge with a decision in 2010 that extended the rights of these and real persons to fund political campaigns to their hearts’ content. In effect, the Supreme Court of America legalized bribery in the United States, and the country has not been the same since.

Who is to blame? Hillary Clinton blamed the “deplorables” who supported Donald Trump. Were they more deplorable than the established people who drove so many of them to support him: not only Hillary Clinton and the people of Goldman Sacks, but everyone else who benefits from tax advantages, union busting, meagre wages for workers, and the rest. If I want to see this kind of deplorable, even here in Canada, I look in the mirror.

Into this swamp came Donald Trump, ostensibly to drain it. Instead, he has been wallowing in it, providing the U.S. with more of the same business as usual, not least his own. Thank you Donald Trump for putting the handwriting on the wall.

A healthy society balances the collective power of governments in the public sector with the commercial interests of businesses in the private sector and the communal concerns of citizens in the plural sector (or “civil society,” if you prefer). In such a society, the three sectors hold each other in check while cooperating for constructive change. Canada maintains a better balance than does the U.S., as does Germany, France, and Japan, all members of the G7, as well as the Scandinavia countries, New Zealand, Uruguay, Costa Rica, perhaps South Korea, and maybe Brazil when it gets its act together again. The G8 lost Russia; this G7 will likely lose America, in one way or another. That’s not crisis; it’s opportunity.

Imagine a city with weak government and no police force. Gangs would roam the streets and battle with each other, or else carve up the place for their own convenience. This is our “global village”, dominated by three superpowers. A G6 has the opportunity to begin countering this, perhaps joined later by other democratic nations that have no aspirations for superpower status or recent histories of belligerence. Is this impossible? Hardly: we see the budding of it in the Trans-Pacific [Trade] Partnership that proceeds without the United States. We need solutions that seem impossible until they become obvious.

© Henry Mintzberg 2018. See Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center.