LOOKING AHEAD: THE WAYS CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POLITICIANS IMAGINE THE FUTURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIRMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE December 2011 By David J. Brier Dissertation Committee: Jim Dator, Chairperson Kathy Ferguson Phyllis Turnbull Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua Alex Golub Keywords: images of the future, long-term politics, future generations, intergenerational justice, futures studies, forecasting ©2011 by David J. Brier ii DEDICATION To my children Jade and Rory iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to all the members of my committee who have inspired and helped me. Kathy Ferguson’s and Phyllis Turnbull’s work and comments helped sharpen my eye for the practices of political power within images of the future. Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua’s work inside and outside of the classroom helped me imagine new worlds and enriched my ideas in this project. Alex Golub’s entry into the project made an arduous process easier and more bearable. I am especially thankful to James Dator, my chair and mentor, who guided me through this process. Over the years, he has invested much time, energy, and attention teaching and coaching me. His work inspired me and speaks from these pages. I am grateful to my dad, the late Robert J. Brier, who never failed to offer me his analytic energies reading and unraveling politics. My dad’s interest in politics (and daily critiques on political corruption and inefficiencies) rubbed off on me and inspired my interest in studying government. My mother, Maria Brier, offered regular encouragement that I would finish this project. Thanks go to my children. My daughter, Jade, politely sat through numerous out loud readings of paragraphs of this dissertation (and then ran when it looked like I would read more). Jade has not yet known a time when her dad was not “working on his dissertation.” The completion of this project will open a new chapter in her life with me. My now two year old son, Rory, acted as my unofficial editor. He sat on my lap as I typed portions of the dissertation offering creative commentary (an odd mix of babble and interesting linkages among chocolate milk, cookies, cheese, and the future) and encouragement. Above all, I am grateful to my wife, Vickery, who remains an invaluable support. She took the children out of the house on countless weekend mornings so I could write. She gave me pep talks when I needed it and provided a sounding board when trying to form and sharpen my arguments. Without her intellectual and emotional support, I would have been unable to complete this dissertation. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the ways in which contemporary American politicians imagine the future. Analysis of the futures-related content of political speeches and congressional testimony reveals that, contrary to conventional wisdom, politicians do think beyond the next election and, at times, consider the plight of future generations. Chapter 2 analyzes images of the future and futures-related discourse found in State of the City and State of the State addresses delivered between 2000 and 2010. The dissertation provides a new methodology to classify images of the future to improve the ability of analysts to identify long-term politics. Typically, categorization schemes such as Dator’s generic images of the future encourage the analyst to conceptualize the future as a noun, the thing it becomes. This dissertation offers a new classification scheme that invites scholars to conceptualize the future as a verb, a political process and contest. By exploring the ways politicians speak about the extent of human agency in shaping the future, this dissertation develops a technique to help scholars escape the short-term economic development versus long-term environmental preservation frame that dominates our thinking about long-term politics and intergenerational justice. Chapter 3 investigates the use of future generations-related language and themes in these speeches. Chapter 4 studies the struggle to control the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The ANWR debate shows that the future is a process (a contest) as much as it a thing (what emerges). The ANWR debate also suggests that one cannot speak about the plight of future generations in any universal or common way because future generations do not share a unified identity. Drawing on an array of sources including James Dator’s generic images of the future and Michel Foucault’s ideas on power/knowledge, I study v how these generic images of the future and power shape the way politicians do (and do not) speak and think about the future and the implications for creating just futures. This dissertation complicates an overly simplistic view of long-term politics and contributes to a discussion about the possibilities of more future-oriented government in the current political structure. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv ABSTRACT v LIST OF FIGURES x CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 Politicians Don’t Take the Future Seriously 1 Short-Term Assumptions and Starting Points 3 Individuals and Groups have Exclusively Short-Term Interests 4 Events Contain One Time Horizon 10 Future Generations are a Single Entity 11 Long-Term Thinking is Altruistic 11 Long-Term Action Will be Punished by the Electorate 12 Short-Term Action is Required by the Structure of Democratic Institution 13 Politicians Have No Long-Term Interests of their Own 14 Future-Oriented Behavior is Counted by Winning Acts of Legislation 15 Long-Term Thinking is Primarily a Struggle between Short-Term Development Needs and Long-Term Environmental Issues 16 A More Complicated Story 30 Agency without Autonomy 31 The Remaining Chapters 32 The Justification for This Dissertation 33 CHAPTER 2. IMAGINING THE AMERICAN FUTURE: VISIONS OF WHAT IS TO COME IN POLITICAL SPEECHES 36 Why Rhetoric and Discourse? 36 State of the State and State of the City Speeches 43 Images of the Future 44 Economic Growth Image 51 vii Technology Driven Future 53 Economic Growth versus Environmental Protection Equals Green Jobs 59 Feasibility 63 Education – Preparing Today’s Labor Force for Tomorrow’s Jobs 75 Using the Future – The Future as a Strategic Asset 79 Hauntingly Familiar 82 Education in 2100 85 Social Continuity 86 Phoenix in 2034 87 The Emergence of the Creative Class 89 Social Justice & the Uncreative Class 95 Technological Fixes 97 The Future Hawaiian Style 106 There Can Only be One 107 Using the Long-Term 108 Smart Growth 110 Shrinkage (Smart Decline) 116 Who to Shrink? 118 Image Complexity (Images within Images) 121 The Many Challenges to Futures Thinking 123 Agency Images 142 Conclusion 152 CHAPTER 3. IMAGINING FUTURE GENERATIONS 155 Generativity 158 Who Benefits? 162 Open Space 167 Time Horizon 170 Scope of Interest 172 The Gendered Nature of the Future 173 Conclusion 178 viii CHAPTER 4. ANWR: A CASE STUDY IN POLITICAL FUTURES 179 Why ANWR? 180 Background 181 Structural Prohibiters or Enablers 184 Whose Long-Term? 186 Cost Benefit Analysis 188 Growth Future 191 Thinking About Future Generations 194 National Environmentalism versus Global Environmentalism 204 National Security 210 Indigenous Futures 217 Alaska Land Claims Settlement Act 228 Introducing the Gwich’in 231 Who Decides? The Genuine Native 233 The Timeless Indian 241 Conclusion 247 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 249 REFERENCES 272 APPENDIX. FUTURE EXCERPTS 295 Dean, Howard. 2000. Vermont State of the State Address 295 Gordon, Phil. 2004 Phoenix State of the City Address 298 Hoeven, John. 2005 North Dakota State of the State Address. 308 Lingle, Linda. 2009 Hawaii State of the State Address 314 Nickels, Greg. 2007 Seattle State of the City Address 324 Shaheen, Jeanne. 2001 New Hampshire State of the State Address 326 ix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: ANWR Map 182 Figure 2: ANWR Land Use 182 x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Politicians Don’t Take the Future Seriously A popular belief in futures research, political science, and public administration is that elected members of government do not think long-term (20 years or more into the future) or beyond the next election cycle when preparing or considering legislation and providing plans and visions to their constituencies. For example, public administration scholars Keiner, Rejeski and Wobig described it this way: Ask high level public officials how much time they are able to spend thinking about long-term issues, and the answers often range from “none” to “a few moments in the shower this morning.” The future is simply too distant to command much attention given the day-to-day imperatives of government. (Keiner, Rejeski, & Wobig 2002, 26) This assumption that government focuses on the present and does not think long-term is shared by numerous futurists. In the words of political scientist and futurist James Dator: “it is impossible for a legislator to be future-oriented” (Griffith 2005, 8) and “… the future can and MUST be ignored by elected officials (Dator 1998). This is echoed by futurist Alvin Toffler when blaming government policy makers for failing to anticipate the future: “Our political decision makers swing widely back and forth between doing nothing about a problem until it explodes into crisis, and alternatively, racing in with ill- equipped, poorly assessed crash programs” (Toffler 1978, xvii). And reechoed by futurist Richard Slaughter when writing “governments around the world still maintain their short- term time horizons up to the next election, with little or no thought for the longer-term” (Slaughter 1996). This conventional assumption is not limited to political scientists, public administration scholars, or futurists. To illustrate, an editorial appearing in Australian newspaper represented the belief this way: Government must begin thinking ahead with the unacceptable rate of unemployment in this country, one would expect the Federal Government to be doing everything possible to remedy defects in our education and training system.