Anyone who has spent time in criminal court knows this: One of the characteristics of lawbreakers is a poorly developed sense of cause and effect.
At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night of drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it and spend the rest of the useful years of his life in prison.
The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and, while there, calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.
This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort.
We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries.
Bomb people, and you will get a massive refugee problem.
Deny medical funding, and you will get overburdened emergency rooms.
Underfund science, and the talent will pop up somewhere else, like the universities of Europe and Asia.
Cut off immigration, and you will have deflation from population decline.
Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.
Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt, and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.
Action has consequences, just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: “A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”
Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:
Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement.
Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.
Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon.
Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.
Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers.
Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.
Cause: Undermine the elections by falsely claiming that they were rigged.
Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.
Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt.
Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.
All governments make mistakes, and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different. The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long.
Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.
Now, political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.
Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects, long and often.
If it goes, the cause will be forgotten, but the effect will endure.
Llewellyn King
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS.
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