A.Rafay
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A few days after the election of 2012 the very talented Michael Ramirez published a political cartoon that perhaps conveyed a more profound meaning than he anticipated. He depicted a pair of hands extending from star-studded sleeves (presumably from a mendicant Uncle Sam), which were held in supplication, as though waiting for a handout or petitioning voters to relinquish more of their earnings to the federal government.
Theres another way of interpreting this image, however; the hands appeared not only pathetic and a bit contemptible, but also aged and withered, as though belonging to an old man. In which case, this representation captured perfectly the situation of the United States as it enters the second decade of the 21st century: America is getting older and is entering a state of decline.
No one understood the dynamics of aging societies approaching decrepitude better than Mancur Olson, an economist who taught at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. Olsons crowning achievement was a book published in 1982 titled, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Olson argued that the proliferation of interest groups (collusions or distributional coalitions, in his terms) eventually spells doom for the societies they inhabit.
And proliferate they have, from 6,000 in 1959 to 22,000 at the beginning of the 21st century, according to the Encyclopedia of Associations. Like it or not, every man, woman, and child in the country is represented by an interest group.
But when we say interest group, what exactly do we mean? Americas master political thinker, James Madison, said it best with his definition of faction in Federalist 10, as comprising a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
So much for our contemporary, naïve notions about how factions (interest groups) proclaim to represent some greater good.
It gets worse, especially considering three additional developments. First, Americas mammoth federal government constitutes an interest group itself, which means it does all the things other public and private groups do to protect itself.
Second, about half of the population receives some form of aid from the federal government, according to the Heritage Foundations 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, and these recipients constitute perhaps the most behemoth group of them all.
Third, close to one-half of the entire population does not pay federal-income taxes, a figure that climbed from 12 percent in 1969 to 34.1 percent at the beginning of the Bush administration to its current figure as President Obama starts his second term. The question is: What does all this mean for the destiny of America?
Prepare yourself for some very bad news. As societies age, they tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time, which in normal speak means that societies become infested with interest groups just like arteries become more rigid and clogged with body gunk as you get older a phenomenon Jonathan Rauch referred to as Demosclerosis. Further, groups reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive. Example: anyone read the healthcare bill lately? And the thousands of regulations in existence and forthcoming? And consider its huge increased costs?
The keystone of this argument is a passage that is terrifying in its implications and is worth quoting in full: The typical organization for collective action [interest group] within a society will have little or no incentive to make any significant sacrifices in the interest of the society and there is ... no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on the society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself (italics in original).
This means nothing less than it says: a group will kill its host, the American republic in this case, before relinquishing even a modicum of benefits for itself.
Nations die this way, empires collapse, societies atrophy, and countries implode (like the old USSR) or are conquered from without. In the United States, this phenomenon cannot be blamed exclusively on Democrats or Republicans; both parties represent coalitions of groups that all want something from the government. Indeed, if there is any difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard it is that President Obama has accelerated this process over the last four years. But institutionalized selfishness was a going concern before he came along.
All of which is suicidal, right? Yes, it is. Can anything be done to arrest or reverse this process? Absent some kind of revolutionary demolishing of governmental interventions, no, there probably is not. What, then, might happen to America?
Considering the current economic situation, some kind of collapse is of course possible. Most likely the United States will change into something else, into a soft totalitarian society envisioned by Alexis de Tocqueville, where its citizens are cared for but weighted down by mountains of rules and bereft of any dynamism, creativity, or imagination subservient, socialist, and senile.
The Decline and Fall of America - phillyburbs.com: Oped: america, federal government, united states, james madison, politics
Is America Dying?
Glen Browder
These are anxious times for American democracy.
The United States clearly remains the standard, by most accounts, of progressive democracy and "the good life" at this point in world history. But -- as I will argue in this unconventional analysis -- telltale signs of democratic distemper belie our contemporary stature.
Just as importantly, along with these telltale signs of civic distemper, fundamental patterns of American history appear to have erupted into contradictory, confounding turmoil. Two centuries of irresistible democratic nationalization now clash head-on with the equally powerful dynamics of centrifugal democracy.
Little wonder, then, that political scientists and historians are speculating about Election 2012, President Barack Obama, and the "Great Experiment" of American democracy.
Competing Visions for An Uncertain Future.
In many ways, the four presidential elections of the 21st century have reflected the turbulence of American democracy. Elections 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 all revealed an American nation bifurcating into two distinct philosophical personalities and cultural societies -- simultaneously competitive, commingled, and interdependent -- each with legitimate but starkly different visions of our national destiny.
On one hand is "Traditional America" -- a historically dominant white society, rooted in rural, small town, middle regions, which subscribes to religious convictions, community values, and relatively conservative government. On the other hand is "Emerging America" -- a growing, eclectic society of relatively liberal and historically disadvantaged citizens in urban and coastal areas who are inclined toward social diversity, moral tolerance, and activist government.
"Traditional America" asserts its right of national control as the historic majoritarian democratic culture. Just as vehemently, "Emerging America" boldly defines itself as the future of our nation, not only in demographic terms but also as the demonstrated political majority of the November election.
Election 2012 and Obama's America.
Interestingly, more so than any recent president, Barack Obama has articulated his mission as our transformational leader. From his dramatic burst onto the national stage at the 2004 Democratic Convention, throughout his 2008 campaign, and, expectedly in his upcoming inauguration as a two-term chief executive, his spoken words proclaim a new and different America. Contrarily, within the first week after his re-election, petitions have flourished in a majority of the states to secede from Obama's America.
The reality is, at this point in our national consciousness and public debate, neither "Traditional America" nor "Emerging America" evidences sufficient comprehension of the transformational ramifications of their differing visions and our raging philosophical civil war.
Furthermore, this cultural bifurcation -- combined with the aforementioned clash between historic democratic nationalization and contemporary centrifugal democracy -- greatly exacerbates the distemperate course of American government and democracy. An America that so proudly proclaims itself "one nation . . . indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" increasingly seems wayward, irrelevant, and ungovernable.
The Fundamental Question.
In this series, I will ask some tough questions about troubled, transforming America. For example, how do we make sense of our basic democratic distemper? Can we deal with the political realities of our changing world? Will we address the philosophical challenges of the 21st century? Or --rhetorically but most fundamentally -- "Is America dying?"
Therefore, as President Obama embarks upon a second term -- with his transformational hopes and legacy in the balance -- it is worthwhile to ask some serious questions, despite the pain of their articulation, about problematic aspects of the American system.
So I ask the rhetorical question -- "Is America dying?" -- as an heuristic exercise to encourage constructive discussion about the future of American democracy. While Socratic inquiry is a time-honored way to confront, head on, the elusive and disconcerting possibilities of our transformational experience, I anticipate that some will reject reflexively such pejorative terminology. However I hope that this provocative analysis will help focus needed attention on some of the enduring principles and contemporary challenges of American democracy.
Propositional Observations about Dying America.
In the next few posts I will explore the condition of American democracy through a series of propositional observations:
(1) The favorable systemic environment of American democracy has disappeared.
(2) We have entrapped American democracy within a philosophical civil war.
(3) American democracy no longer works the way it has in the past.
(4) America seems to be tiring of its historic Great Experiment.
My theoretical supposition (which I will examine in upcoming discussions) is that, if these four propositions are true, then, systemically, America is dying.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glen-browder/is-america-dying_b_2137681.html
Theres another way of interpreting this image, however; the hands appeared not only pathetic and a bit contemptible, but also aged and withered, as though belonging to an old man. In which case, this representation captured perfectly the situation of the United States as it enters the second decade of the 21st century: America is getting older and is entering a state of decline.
No one understood the dynamics of aging societies approaching decrepitude better than Mancur Olson, an economist who taught at the University of Maryland until his death in 1998. Olsons crowning achievement was a book published in 1982 titled, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Olson argued that the proliferation of interest groups (collusions or distributional coalitions, in his terms) eventually spells doom for the societies they inhabit.
And proliferate they have, from 6,000 in 1959 to 22,000 at the beginning of the 21st century, according to the Encyclopedia of Associations. Like it or not, every man, woman, and child in the country is represented by an interest group.
But when we say interest group, what exactly do we mean? Americas master political thinker, James Madison, said it best with his definition of faction in Federalist 10, as comprising a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
So much for our contemporary, naïve notions about how factions (interest groups) proclaim to represent some greater good.
It gets worse, especially considering three additional developments. First, Americas mammoth federal government constitutes an interest group itself, which means it does all the things other public and private groups do to protect itself.
Second, about half of the population receives some form of aid from the federal government, according to the Heritage Foundations 2012 Index of Dependence on Government, and these recipients constitute perhaps the most behemoth group of them all.
Third, close to one-half of the entire population does not pay federal-income taxes, a figure that climbed from 12 percent in 1969 to 34.1 percent at the beginning of the Bush administration to its current figure as President Obama starts his second term. The question is: What does all this mean for the destiny of America?
Prepare yourself for some very bad news. As societies age, they tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time, which in normal speak means that societies become infested with interest groups just like arteries become more rigid and clogged with body gunk as you get older a phenomenon Jonathan Rauch referred to as Demosclerosis. Further, groups reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive. Example: anyone read the healthcare bill lately? And the thousands of regulations in existence and forthcoming? And consider its huge increased costs?
The keystone of this argument is a passage that is terrifying in its implications and is worth quoting in full: The typical organization for collective action [interest group] within a society will have little or no incentive to make any significant sacrifices in the interest of the society and there is ... no constraint on the social cost such an organization will find it expedient to impose on the society in the course of obtaining a larger share of the social output for itself (italics in original).
This means nothing less than it says: a group will kill its host, the American republic in this case, before relinquishing even a modicum of benefits for itself.
Nations die this way, empires collapse, societies atrophy, and countries implode (like the old USSR) or are conquered from without. In the United States, this phenomenon cannot be blamed exclusively on Democrats or Republicans; both parties represent coalitions of groups that all want something from the government. Indeed, if there is any difference between Republicans and Democrats in this regard it is that President Obama has accelerated this process over the last four years. But institutionalized selfishness was a going concern before he came along.
All of which is suicidal, right? Yes, it is. Can anything be done to arrest or reverse this process? Absent some kind of revolutionary demolishing of governmental interventions, no, there probably is not. What, then, might happen to America?
Considering the current economic situation, some kind of collapse is of course possible. Most likely the United States will change into something else, into a soft totalitarian society envisioned by Alexis de Tocqueville, where its citizens are cared for but weighted down by mountains of rules and bereft of any dynamism, creativity, or imagination subservient, socialist, and senile.
The Decline and Fall of America - phillyburbs.com: Oped: america, federal government, united states, james madison, politics
Is America Dying?
Glen Browder
These are anxious times for American democracy.
The United States clearly remains the standard, by most accounts, of progressive democracy and "the good life" at this point in world history. But -- as I will argue in this unconventional analysis -- telltale signs of democratic distemper belie our contemporary stature.
Just as importantly, along with these telltale signs of civic distemper, fundamental patterns of American history appear to have erupted into contradictory, confounding turmoil. Two centuries of irresistible democratic nationalization now clash head-on with the equally powerful dynamics of centrifugal democracy.
Little wonder, then, that political scientists and historians are speculating about Election 2012, President Barack Obama, and the "Great Experiment" of American democracy.
Competing Visions for An Uncertain Future.
In many ways, the four presidential elections of the 21st century have reflected the turbulence of American democracy. Elections 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 all revealed an American nation bifurcating into two distinct philosophical personalities and cultural societies -- simultaneously competitive, commingled, and interdependent -- each with legitimate but starkly different visions of our national destiny.
On one hand is "Traditional America" -- a historically dominant white society, rooted in rural, small town, middle regions, which subscribes to religious convictions, community values, and relatively conservative government. On the other hand is "Emerging America" -- a growing, eclectic society of relatively liberal and historically disadvantaged citizens in urban and coastal areas who are inclined toward social diversity, moral tolerance, and activist government.
"Traditional America" asserts its right of national control as the historic majoritarian democratic culture. Just as vehemently, "Emerging America" boldly defines itself as the future of our nation, not only in demographic terms but also as the demonstrated political majority of the November election.
Election 2012 and Obama's America.
Interestingly, more so than any recent president, Barack Obama has articulated his mission as our transformational leader. From his dramatic burst onto the national stage at the 2004 Democratic Convention, throughout his 2008 campaign, and, expectedly in his upcoming inauguration as a two-term chief executive, his spoken words proclaim a new and different America. Contrarily, within the first week after his re-election, petitions have flourished in a majority of the states to secede from Obama's America.
The reality is, at this point in our national consciousness and public debate, neither "Traditional America" nor "Emerging America" evidences sufficient comprehension of the transformational ramifications of their differing visions and our raging philosophical civil war.
Furthermore, this cultural bifurcation -- combined with the aforementioned clash between historic democratic nationalization and contemporary centrifugal democracy -- greatly exacerbates the distemperate course of American government and democracy. An America that so proudly proclaims itself "one nation . . . indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" increasingly seems wayward, irrelevant, and ungovernable.
The Fundamental Question.
In this series, I will ask some tough questions about troubled, transforming America. For example, how do we make sense of our basic democratic distemper? Can we deal with the political realities of our changing world? Will we address the philosophical challenges of the 21st century? Or --rhetorically but most fundamentally -- "Is America dying?"
Therefore, as President Obama embarks upon a second term -- with his transformational hopes and legacy in the balance -- it is worthwhile to ask some serious questions, despite the pain of their articulation, about problematic aspects of the American system.
So I ask the rhetorical question -- "Is America dying?" -- as an heuristic exercise to encourage constructive discussion about the future of American democracy. While Socratic inquiry is a time-honored way to confront, head on, the elusive and disconcerting possibilities of our transformational experience, I anticipate that some will reject reflexively such pejorative terminology. However I hope that this provocative analysis will help focus needed attention on some of the enduring principles and contemporary challenges of American democracy.
Propositional Observations about Dying America.
In the next few posts I will explore the condition of American democracy through a series of propositional observations:
(1) The favorable systemic environment of American democracy has disappeared.
(2) We have entrapped American democracy within a philosophical civil war.
(3) American democracy no longer works the way it has in the past.
(4) America seems to be tiring of its historic Great Experiment.
My theoretical supposition (which I will examine in upcoming discussions) is that, if these four propositions are true, then, systemically, America is dying.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glen-browder/is-america-dying_b_2137681.html
Hey weren't we supposed to collapse earlier?
