Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient
Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies—and in
particular the United States—tend to follow across time. The pattern that
Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so
far in the course of its history, begins with most of the nation’s political
power concentrated in a single person, and follows the diffusion of power to
the point that the entire political system settles into a gridlock only a
massive crisis can break. Just now,
according to that model, we are in the stage of gridlock, and thus of maximum
diffusion of power.
Now of course this interpretation flies in the face of the
standard narrative that surrounds power in America today. Both sides of the
political spectrum these days like to insist that too much power is in the
hands of the other side, at least when the other side is in the White House or
has a majority in Congress. The further from the mainstream you go, the more
strident the voices you’ll hear insisting that some small group or other has
seized absolute power over the US political system and is running things for
their own advantage. The identity of the small group in question varies wildly—it’s
hard to think of anyone who hasn’t been accused, at some point in the last half
century or so, of being the secret elite that runs everything—but the theory
that some small group or other has all the power that everybody else seems to
lack is accepted nearly everywhere. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street talking
about the nefarious 1%, or the Tea Party talking about the equally nefarious
liberal elite, the conviction that power has been concentrated in the wrong
hands is ubiquitous in today’s America.
It’s an appealing notion, especially if you want to find
somebody to blame for the current state of affairs in this country, and of
course hunting for scapegoats is a popular sport whenever times are hard.
Still, I’d like to suggest that an alternative understanding explains much more
about the current state of the American political system. The alternative I
have in mind is that the political system is lurching forward like a driverless
car along a trajectory set by the outdated policies of an earlier time, and
that just now, nobody is in charge at all. Unpopular though this way of
thinking about power in America is, I suggest that it makes more sense of our
predicament than the more popular notion of elite control.
It’s important to understand what my proposal means and,
more importantly, what it doesn’t mean. A great many of those who insist that
power in America is in the hands of a small elite offer, as evidence for the
claim, the fact that a relatively small number of people get an obscenely large
share of national income and wealth, and they’re quite correct. The last three
decades or so have seen America turn into something close to a Third World
kleptocracy, the sort of failed state in which a handful of politically
well-connected people plunder the economy for their own benefit. When bank
executives vote themselves and their cronies million-dollar bonuses out of
government funds while their banks are losing billions of dollars a year, just
to name an obvious example, it’s impossible to discuss the situation honestly
without using words like “looting.”
Still, the ability to plunder one corner of a complex system
is not the same thing as the ability to control the whole system, and the
freedom with which so many people pillage the institutions they’re supposed to
be managing could as well be understood as a sign that there’s no center of
power willing or able to defend the core interests of the US empire against
death by financial hemorrhage. The only
power the executives of, say, Goldman Sachs need is the power to block any
effort to stop them from stripping their bank to the bare walls for their
personal enrichment, or to cut them off from the access to tax dollars that’s
made that process so lucrative. That much
power they certainly have—but it’s a kind and a degree of power shared by many
other influential groups in America just now.
Consider the defense industries that are busy profiting off
the F-35 fighter, an impressively corrupt corporate welfare program currently
chewing gargantuan holes in the defense budgets of the US and several other
nations. Years behind schedule and
trillions of dollars over budget, the F-35 is by all independent accounts a dog
of a plane, clumsier and more vulnerable than the decades-old fighters it is
supposed to replace. The consortium of interests that profit from its
manufacture have the power to keep the process chugging along, even as the
delays stretch to decades and the cost overruns head toward lunar orbit, and
again, that’s all the power they need. It’s all the more telling that they’re
able to do so when the F-35 project is directly opposed to crucial US
interests: having the US and its allies equipped with a substandard fighter, at
a time when China and Russia are both busily testing much better planes, risks
humiliating defeat in future wars—and yet the program moves steadily forward.
Examples of the same sort of thing can be multiplied
endlessly, and they aren’t limited to corporations. Cities and counties all
over the United States, for example, are being driven into bankruptcy by the
cost of public-sector salaries and benefits that politically influential unions
have extracted from vulnerable or compliant local politicians. Equally, other
countries—China and Israel come to mind—have learned to make use of the
diffusion of American power for their own interests. It doesn’t matter how blatantly the Chinese
manipulate their currency or thumb their noses at intellectual property rights,
for instance; so long as they keep their lobby in Washington well funded and
well staffed, they’re secure from any meaningful response on the part of the US
government. I’ve come to suspect that the only reason the US government is down
on Iran is that religious scruples keep the Iranian government from buying
immunity the way the Chinese do; they’ve got the petroleum and therefore the
money, and could doubtless have their own influential lobby capable of blocking
hostile legislation in Congress, if only they didn’t let their ideals get in
the way.
The power exerted by each of these groups is by and large a
veto power. They may not be able to get
new policies through the jungle of competing interests in Washington, a task
that is increasingly hard for anyone to manage at all, but they can prevent
policies that are not in their interest from being enacted, and they can defend
any policy already in place that benefits them or furthers their ability to
loot the system. They have that veto power, in turn, because no one in
contemporary America has the power to get anything done without assembling a
temporary coalition of competing power centers, each of which has its own
agenda and each of which constantly has its hand out for the biggest possible
share of the take.
Not every potential power center in American politics
functions as a veto group, mind you. A great many groups have become captive
constituencies of one of the existing power centers, and thus lost whatever
independent influence they might have had. Compare the way that the Democratic
Party has seized control of the environmental movement to the way that the
Republicans have played the same trick on gun owners. In both cases, the party can ignore the
interests of its captive constituency until elections come around, and then
bombard the constituency with propaganda insisting that the other party will do
horrible things to the environment or the Second Amendment if they win the
election. The other party duly plays its part in this good cop-bad cop routine
by making threatening noises about gun rights or environmental issues at
intervals. It’s an efficient scam, and it keeps environmentalists voting for
Democrats and gun owners voting for Republicans even though neither party gives
more than lip service to the issues that matter to either group.
To the members of the captive constituencies, in turn, all
this simply feeds the belief that there must be somebody in the system who has
the power they lack; after all, they keep on voting for the right people, and yet none of their policies ever get
enacted! Since very few gun owners ever sit down and share a couple of beers
with environmentalists, there’s rarely an opportunity for them to compare notes
and notice that neither side is getting what it wants, and the same gimmick is
being used on both. The one place on the political continuum where this sort of
comparison does take place is out on the fringes, where the extreme left
increasingly bends around to touch the extreme right, and the paranoiac beliefs
endemic to the farther shores of American politics turn the whole thing into
yet another proof that the Freemasons or the Jews or David Ickes’ imaginary
space lizards run everything after all.
Just as the ability to plunder one part of a system does not
equal control over the whole system, though, the ability to manipulate a
handful of politically naive pressure groups does not equal the ability to
manipulate the whole system. It’s precisely because no one group has an
effective monopoly on power that political parties and other power centers have
to resort to complicated and expensive gimmickry to hammer together the
temporary coalitions that enable them to cling to whatever power they have and,
on increasingly rare occasions, force through some policy or other that favors
their interests.
As the system settles ever more deeply into gridlock, in
turn, policies put in place in previous decades become increasingly resistant
to change. Even those that turned out to have severe flaws will inevitably get
support from those who profit from them, and from employees of government bureaucracies
whose jobs would go away in the event of a policy change. Machiavelli pointed out a long time ago that
reforms always face an uphill struggle, since those who benefit from the status
quo can be counted on to fight fiercely to hold on to what they’ve got, while
those who might benefit from reform have less incentive to fight for gains they
know perfectly well they may never see; factor in the mutual support among
power centers who have a mutual interest in keeping the status quo fixed in
place, and you have a recipe for exactly the sort of stasis the United States
sees every seventy or eighty years, as the cycle discussed in last week’s post
approaches its end.
How the endgame plays out is a matter of more than academic
interest. In 1860 and 1932, a political
system frozen in gridlock and incapable of anything like a constructive
response to crisis finally hit a crisis that could not be evaded any longer,
and the system shattered. In the chaos that resulted, a long-shot candidate
with a radical following was able to pull together enough support from the
remaining power centers and the people in general to win the White House and
force through changes that redefined the political landscape for decades to
come. That’s a possibility this time around, too, but a possibility is not a
certainty, and nowhere is it written in stone that a crisis of the sort we’re
discussing has to have a happy ending.
The range and scale of the crises facing the United States
as it finishes the third lap around the track of anacyclosis, to begin with,
pose a far more substantial challenge than the ones that punctuated the cycle
in those earlier years. In 1860, as
we’ve seen, the question was which of two incompatible human ecologies would
dominate the North American continent; in 1932, it was the simpler though still
challenging matter of how to pry the dead fingers of a failed economic ideology
off the throat of the nation. This time,
the United States faces two immense and parallel difficulties, neither one of
which has the sort of straightforward solution that Lincoln and Roosevelt
respectively had to hand.
The first difficulty, as I’ve discussed at length in these
posts, is that the global empire established by the United States in the wake
of the Second World War is coming apart. The American way of empire – the
custom of leaving the administration of subject countries to puppet governments
drawn from local elites – was cheaper than the traditional approach of
subjugation and rule by an imperial viceroy, but it turned out to be more
vulnerable to change and less directly profitable to the imperial
government: American corporations
profited mightily from the wealth pump directed at Latin America, for example,
but very little of that money ended up in the coffers of the US treasury, where
it could help cover the costs of empire.
As the American empire falters, in turn, rival powers expand
their own military capacities and apply pressure wherever they can get away
with it, short of being drawn into a premature war; the US military reacts with
the same sort of stereotyped response that characterized the latter years of
the British empire, preparing to fight bygone wars with ever more ornate and
overpriced technology, while its most likely opponents show every sign of
asking the hard questions about basics that lead to sudden revolutions in
military practice. When this has happened in the past, the results have almost
never been good for the established imperial power, and there’s no reason to
think that things will be noticeably different this time around.
Meanwhile America’s “empire of time,” its once-immense
energy resource base, has been drawn down at breakneck rates for more than a
century and a half. Recent handwaving around shale gas reserves has served
mostly to pump up the price of drilling company stocks, and enabled a certain
number of rich men in influential positions to get away with another round of
looting; we’ve all heard the strident claims that the United States will become
an energy exporter sometime very soon, but the numbers don’t even begin to add
up, and it’s a safe bet that a few years down the road shale gas will have gone
the way of ethanol and all the other energy sources that were allegedly going
to replace petroleum and keep the industrial age running smoothly ahead. The American economy is utterly dependent on
very large quantities of petroleum; so is the American military; drastic
changes, going far beyond the baby steps involved in manufacturing a few
electric cars or running a naval vessel or two on biodiesel, would have to get
started well in advance to cushion the end of either dependency, and those
changes are not taking place.
The consequences of the end of these two empires can’t be
dealt with on the battlefield, as the long debate over the shape of America’s
human ecology was, and it can’t be dealt with by jerry-rigging a set of
temporary expedients to overcome the mismatch between real wealth and a
dysfunctional financial system, as the crisis of the Great Depression was. It will require massive changes in every
aspect of American life, starting with a steep decline in standards of living
and the forced abandonment of privileges most Americans think of as theirs by
right. That would be an immense crisis at the best of times, and these are not
the best of times; our political system has spent the last thirty years trying
to evade exactly these issues, while sinking further and further into stasis,
and it’s our luck that the crisis seems to be arriving just as American
politics freeze up completely.
That might result in the kind of systemic shock that brings
another long-shot candidate with a radical following into the White House, and
catalyzes immense natonal changes. It might also result in the more extreme
form of systemic shock that shatters a nation into fragments. In the weeks to
come we’ll be discussing both those possibilities, and others.
****************
End of the World of the Week #21
It’s necessary to turn to history books to get the details
on most of the apocalyptic prophecies discussed here and in Apocalypse
Not, but there’s at least one important exception – and no, I’m not
talking about Harold Camping. Nearly all of my readers will remember those giddy
months toward the end of 1999 when a great many people expected industrial
civilization to grind to a halt because an older generation of computer
software used two digits, rather than four, to keep track of the year, and
risked freezing up when “99” turned to “00” amd a variety of internal functions
geared to incremental changes in date went haywire. That was the Y2K crisis—or, more precisely,
noncrisis—and it has a lesson that not everyone who lived through the
nonarrival of that noncrisis may have grasped.
I had a certain
advantage in grasping it, as I lived in the high-tech hotbed of Seattle and
knew a lot of people in the computer industry. Some of them knew as much about
the Y2K problem as anybody alive, but you’d just about have to schedule an
appointment with them to hear what they had to say about it, because they were
working as much overtime as they wanted, and raking in money at a dizzying
pace. Those who still remembered enough from their college classes in COBOL and
other obsolete computer languages were rewriting code for banks, bureaucracies,
and big corporations; those who didn’t were generally installing brand new
Y2K-compliant PC systems and networks for smaller firms that had decided to
scrap their existing hardware altogether.
Quite a lot of
people spent those last months of 1999 cowering in fear or gloating over the
imminent demise of everybody else. For
computer geeks, though, the Y2K noncrisis was an extraordinarily profitable
time, and every round of dire warnings in the media was followed by panicked
phone calls to computer firms from more businesses eager to save their
companies from the “Millennium bug.” I
can’t say for sure that those dire warnings were part of a deliberate marketing
strategy, but they certainly functioned that way, and they drove the single
largest boom the US computer industry had ever seen.
Mind you, I used
an old and noncompliant PC for writing, and didn’t have anything like the money
I would have needed to buy an up-to-date machine. Instead, a few weeks before
the new year, I went into the software and reset the internal calendar to the
equivalent date in December 1949, and then went through the rollover to January
1, 1950 without any trouble at all.
