Commentary on the Presidential Elections

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Democrats consider President Trump as the person who is causing chaos, dividing the nation and leading to major dangerous disruptions. Republicans see the Democrats as a major threat to what made America great, that it will lead to socialism and change this country for the worse. Each party sees the other as the villain.

I see the situation differently.

Every system has a life cycle. People do. They are born grow age and die. So do trees and animals. The same applies to a company and to a country.

In the growing stages, a country, or a company, or a person as a toddler, suffers from lack of law and order. It is the Wild West. On a country level, the economy is not regulated with ruinous repercussions, the Great Depression.

When law and order is introduced, the system goes through a major transformation which increases the role of government. One manifestation of it was the New Deal and Keynes economics theory legitimized government intervention in the economy.  This transformation brought America to the Prime of its lifecycle in the ninety fifties, after the Second World War.   From there on the “aging” started.

In Aging, a system starts to disintegrate. At the beginning, it is not easily noted because it is the twilight zone of aging; The middle-aged person still looks young and behaves like a young person but there are signs that the aging has started. Small hints.  Small signs of disintegration. By the time a person reaches older age, the disintegration is easily noted, the different organs do not work in unison as they used to.

In America, I suggest, the first sign of aging was the assassination of President Kennedy.  Then came Nixon and Watergate followed by other numerous “gates.”  A big “hint” that disintegration was happening is when the vote between Gore and Bush had been so unclear that the Supreme Court had to decide.

President Obama, although by his style and personality tried to integrate, was accused of running the show with executive orders, bypassing the legislature even more than his predecessors. The media was reporting that crossing the isle in Congress was becoming a rare event, not like in the past.
And now here we are. America is in the full-blown stages of aging.  Disintegrating.

When a country or a company grows, the leader impacts its culture with his leadership style and values. Washington and Roosevelt led. And the country followed.

In the aging parts, the system elects the leaders that accelerate its disintegration, like a sick organism, to speed up its demise, will reject treatments.

Trump is not the cause of our disintegration. He is the accelerator of the disintegration caused by the location of the country on the life cycle. And Biden, although promises to bring the nation together, I believe, will not be able to.  The disintegration will continue.

To stop the disintegration, we need to analyze what is causing the aging? Replacing Trump with Biden or vice versa is not the solution because the problem is not who is the president but what is wrong with the system, why it is aging.

A system ages when it does not adapt to a changing reality.

The democratic system designed over two hundred years ago in America, based on theories developed over hundreds of years longer in Europe and on a philosophy from a small town in Greece thousands of years ago, DOES NOT FIT the reality of today with the complexities of modern life.  It is simply outdated.

Our democratic system is sick. Old. Obsolete and no small changes and amendments will do it justice.

We need to review the system wholesale. Holistically.

The solution is not a free market capitalist society. It was right for the GoGo stages of the life cycle when the nation was young and highly flexible. It is not socialism that paralyses growth and innovation or as Churchill said it:” Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth. Communism (socialism?) the equal distribution of poverty”

We need a third system.  Some call it conscious capitalism. I call it self management, a highly decentralized system managed mostly by a system of values rather than bureaucratic regulations.

To be a realist, I don’t believe we are ready for the changes we need to have. It needs to get worse before it can get better and it is going to get worse whoever the President is.

Ichak Adizes was a tenured member of the UCLA Graduate School of Management faculty. Holds 21 honorary doctorates and is the Founder of the Adizes Institute for the Study and Management of Change, in Santa Barbara, California

1. Ichak Adizes: Managing Corporate Life Cycles (Santa Barbara,Cal: Adizes Institute Publications)
2. Ichak Adizes and Elizabeth Mann’Borgese : Self Management :New Dimensions to Democracy
3. Ichak Adizes:Management/Mismanagement Styles

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Dr. Ichak Adizes