Governments respond to forces similar to those which affect aircraft, such as the lift, gravity, drag, control and thrust forces that the Wright brothers contended with in developing the first successful powered airplane.
Early on, the Wrights discovered that the universally-accepted lift coefficient tables of that time were just plain wrong, in spite of their use by all early aviation explorers. Undeterred, the brothers built or invented a wind tunnel and developed very precise lift tables for a large variety of airfoil shapes.
The control problem, which was solved by none of the aeronautical pioneers except the Wright brothers, yielded to use of ailerons coordinated with rudder and elevator controls. A related attribute, stability, required tinkering with weight and balance until airplanes not only flew well but were also stable enough in flight to relieve the pilot from the necessity of continuous control surface movements.
Drag was not “conquered” by the Wrights, or any of their competitors, but it was brought to tolerable levels, and aeronautical engineers’ drag reduction efforts are ongoing today.
Weight control is one of the essential steps in countering the force of gravity. An airplane must be able to lift its own structure, the fuel, the pilot(s) and passengers, and any other cargo–within the available lift. The Wrights built and tested light-weight structures, first as kites, later as gliders, and finally as a powered airplane. They even built their own light-weight gasoline engine.
Another Wright brothers “first” was the scientific design and carving of the propellers for their plane. There was just enough thrust produced when the engine’s marginal power was combined with the remarkably efficient propellers.
Now, what of governments and aerodynamics? (As you read the following, keep in mind that our founding fathers were educated, knowledgeable people who were confident that they could design a superior form of government, one that had never been tried before. In some respects their efforts and the problems they had to overcome resembled those of the Wright brothers a little more than a hundred years later).
In terms of governments, lift can be defined as a bottom-up force coming from the governed. In the United States, most citizens take the government’s dependence on consent of those being governed for granted, rarely thinking about it. But with the painfully slow evolution of the government of Iraq since 2003, we are reminded frequently by politicians and the media of the importance of the consent of the governed in Iraq.
If lift is the consent of the governed, then we can observe governments around the world with varying degrees of lift, ranging from high, through moderate, and down to essentially zero in a number of dictatorships, irrespective of what euphemism the dictator appends to the country’s name. Governments which have little lift usually have “Peoples” somewhere in the name, probably to fool outsiders into believing the people have some relationship to the government other than that of slave-to-master. The other common ruse is to include “Democracy” somewhere in the country or government title, thereby assuring the world that democracy is the one thing not likely to exist in that place.
But controllability of governments seems to be inversely proportional to lift. That is, the dictators of most low-lift governments can easily remove potentially destabilizing forces, quickly and permanently. Compare the dictator’s relatively effective ability to that of high lift governments like the United States, where just getting around to enforcing existing laws can take years and years, e.g., illegal immigration. Other types of controllability examples might include France, which is on its fifth Republic in about the same amount of time as the U. S. has been in its first, or Italy, where the governments have changed so often the rest of the world can’t keep track (if the government doesn’t work, don’t fix it–just tear it down and try something else).
Drag, the force that holds back the forward progress of an airplane, certainly exists in government. While drag is normally thought of as a totally undesirable attribute, it does play a positive role in the stability of conventional aircraft. Perhaps a certain amount of drag in government also has a positive role. While we U.S. citizens may be impatient for our government to produce a result we want, the agonizingly slow legislative process might well reduce the number of serious-repercussion errors our government might make. After all, this is still the first United States Republic.
Most of us just assume that our government can handle the weight of everything we want, need or expect from government. But the truth is there is no limit to the amount of “good” that the people want or expect from their government; no limit to the amount of innovation that the government’s executive, legislative or judicial branches are willing to attempt; and certainly no limit to the greed of unscrupulous people and organizations who view government as the Golden Goose. In aircraft, increasing loads are carried, with corresponding decreases in performance, up to the point of structural failure or catastrophic crash. History has at least a few examples of governments that collapsed of their own weight.
Thrust in the government is the combined efforts of the elected leaders and their appointed staffs. When the leadership combination works effectively there will be forward motion, overcoming the varying degrees of adverse forces. All too often we perceive governmental thrust to be like that of a glider–forward motion is at the expense of altitude, inevitably headed down.
Ultimately, it is we passengers aboard who must insist that our pilots operate the craft in a safe manner–not overloading it, not over-stressing it, and not trying to go beyond its design limits.
Tags: control forces, drag, gravity, Iraq government, lift, stability, thrust, Wright brothers
