Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

  In addition to those advantages of democracies in general, the U.S. derives further advantages from its particular form of democracy, namely, federal government. In a federal system important functions of government are reserved for regional democratic units and aren’t the prerogative of a single centralized national government. The U.S. version of a federal system consists of 50 states, which in practice often means 50 competing experiments that test different solutions to the same shared problem, and that may thereby reveal which solution works best. For instance, American states variously permit (Oregon) or ban (Alabama) assisted suicide, and variously levy high (California) or low (Montana) state taxes. As another example, while I was growing up in the northeastern U.S. state of Massachusetts, the first Californian whom I met explained to me that California had become the only U.S. state to adopt a law permitting cars to make right turns on a red light at an intersection, after coming to a full stop. In the U.S. such traffic laws are the prerogative of individual American states, not of the national government. To my fellow Massachusetts citizens of the early 1960’s, and to the citizens of all other American states, that seemed an insanely dangerous idea that only those crazy freaked-out Californians would even dream of trying. But when California did try the experiment, it proved safe, other states were able to learn from California, and all states eventually adopted the same law (Plate 9.6).

  You may object that being permitted or forbidden to turn right on a red light after a full stop isn’t important enough to convince you of the advantages of our federal system. A more consequential experiment carried out recently was that Governor Brownback of the American state of Kansas maintained that cutting state taxes was more important to the well-being of Kansas citizens than was a well-funded system of public education. Hence, beginning in 2012, he reduced state tax income to the point where drastic cuts in public education became necessary in Kansas. Other U.S. states watched the outcome of this experiment with interest. By 2017, results from Kansas convinced even Kansas legislators belonging to the same political party as Governor Brownback that cutting public education was not a good idea, and so they voted to raise state taxes again. But our federal system permitted one state to test that idea by itself, and let the other 49 states learn from what happened in that one state.

  Those are some of democracy’s big advantages that the U.S. enjoys, and that China doesn’t. The lack of those advantages is in my opinion the biggest single disadvantage that will prevent China from ever catching up with the U.S. in average income per person—as long as the U.S. remains democratic and China remains non-democratic. That reminds me to reiterate: a nominally democratic country loses those advantages if its democracy is seriously infringed; more on that below. I also acknowledge that democracy isn’t necessarily the best option for all countries; it’s difficult for it to prevail in countries lacking the prerequisites of a literate electorate and a widely accepted national identity.

  I’ll briefly mention two other political advantages of the U.S. besides democratic government. The U.S. has had uninterrupted civilian control of our military throughout our entire history. That’s not true for China or for most Latin American countries, and it was disastrously untrue for Japan in the period from the 1930’s until 1945. The U.S. has relatively low overt corruption by world standards, though in that respect it lags behind Denmark, Singapore, and two dozen other countries. Corruption is bad for a country or for a business, because decisions become influenced by what’s good for corrupt politicians or business people, even though the decision may be bad for the country or the business as a whole. Corruption also harms businesses because it means that they can’t count on contracts being enforced. That’s another huge disadvantage of China, which has much overt corruption. But the U.S. does have much covert corruption, because Wall Street and other rich entities and individuals influence U.S. government policy and actions by means of lobbying and election campaign contributions. While those money outlays are legal in the U.S., they achieve results similar to those achieved illegally by corruption. That is, legislators or officials adopt policies or actions harmful to the public good, but beneficial to the donor of the money, and sometimes beneficial to the legislators or officials as well.

  The next-to-the-last U.S. advantages that I’ll mention are the most familiar ones, which most Americans would cite before thinking of the fundamental geographic and political advantages that I have been discussing so far. The U.S. has been characterized (at least until recently—more about that in Chapter 10) by high socio-economic mobility. Our ideal and reality of rags-to-riches mean (or meant) that able hard-working people who are born poor or arrive poor may achieve wealth. That’s a big incentive driving people to work hard, and means that the U.S. has made good use of much of its potential human capital.

  The U.S. is preeminent in the ease with which even young people can found successful businesses. (Think of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and innumerable less spectacular but still profitable new companies.)

  We have a long history of federal, state, and local government investment as well as private investment in education, infrastructure, human capital, research, and development. (China has only recently been catching up in investments in those areas.) As a result, the U.S. leads all the rest of the world combined in every major field of science, as measured by articles published or Nobel Prizes won. Half of what are generally considered the world’s top-10 scientific research universities and institutions are American. For almost a century-and-a-half, we have held a big competitive advantage in inventions, technology, and innovative manufacturing practices—as exemplified by Eli Whitney’s mass production of interchangeable parts for muskets; Henry Ford’s assembly-line factories; the Wright brothers’ powered airplanes; Thomas Edison’s alkaline storage battery, incandescent light bulb, motion picture equipment, and phonograph (Plate 9.7); Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone; and, more recently, the Bell Telephone Laboratories’ transistor, men on the moon, cell phones, the internet, and e-mail.

  Our last advantage to be mentioned is one that, nowadays, many Americans don’t consider an advantage at all: immigration (Plate 9.8). Of course it creates problems, which now weigh on our minds. But the reality is that every single American today is either an immigrant or else descended from immigrants. The vast majority immigrated within the last four centuries (my own grandparents, in 1890 and 1904). Even Native Americans are descended from immigrants who arrived beginning at least by 13,000 years ago.

  To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population of any country into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everybody else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment. Hence it comes as no surprise that more than one-third of American Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born, and over half are either immigrants themselves or else the children of immigrants. That’s because Nobel Prize–winning research demands those same qualities of boldness, risk tolerance, hard work, ambition, and innovativeness. Immigrants and their offspring also contribute disproportionately to American art, music, cuisine, and sports.

  Everything that I have described so far in this chapter can be boiled down to saying: the U.S. enjoys enormous advantages. But countries can squander their advantages, as has Argentina. There are warning signs that the U.S. may be squandering its advantages today. High among those warning signs are four interlinked features that are contributing to the breakdown of American democracy, one of our historical strengths. I’ll devote the remainder of this chapter to the first, and most serious, of those four sets of problems. The following chapter (Chapter 10) will discuss the “other” three sets of problems, which are serious. They rate as “other” only because they are ec
lipsed by our biggest problem.

  The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise. As I previously explained, political compromise is one of the basic advantages of democracies as compared to dictatorships, because it reduces or prevents both tyranny by a majority and its converse of paralysis by a frustrated minority. The U.S. Constitution sought to create pressure for compromise by devising systems of checks and balances. For instance, our president leads government policy, but Congress controls the government’s budget, and the Speaker of the House (Congress’s lower chamber) sets the House’s agenda for acting on presidential proposals. If, as regularly happens, our representatives in Congress disagree among themselves, and if backers of one view cannot muster sufficient votes to impose their will, a compromise must be reached before the government can do anything.

  Naturally, fierce political struggles have been frequent, and majority tyranny or minority paralysis occasional, in American history. But, with the conspicuous exception of the breakdown of compromise that led to our 1861–1865 Civil War, compromises have usually been reached. A modern example is the relationship between Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas (Tip) O’Neill between 1981 and 1986 (Plate 9.9). Both men were skilled politicians, strong personalities, and opposite to each other in their political philosophies and in many or most questions of policy. They disagreed and fought politically on major issues. Nevertheless, they treated each other with respect, acknowledged each other’s constitutional authority, and played by the rules. While O’Neill disliked Reagan’s economic agenda, he recognized the president’s constitutional right to propose an agenda, scheduled House votes on it, and stuck to that scheduled agenda. Under Reagan and O’Neill, the federal government functioned: it met its deadlines, budgets were approved, government shutdowns were non-existent, and threats of filibusters were rare. Major pieces of legislation on which Reagan and O’Neill and their followers disagreed, but on which they nevertheless succeeded in reaching compromises, included lowering taxes, reforming the federal tax code, immigration policy, social security reform, reduction of non-military spending, and increases of military spending. While Reagan’s nominees for federal judgeships were usually not to Democrats’ tastes, and Democrats blocked some of those nominees, Reagan nevertheless was able to appoint more than half of federal judges, including three of the nine Supreme Court judges.

  But political compromise in the U.S. has been deteriorating from the mid-1990’s onwards, and especially from around 2005. Compromise has been breaking down not only between our two major political parties, but also between the less moderate and more moderate wings of each party. That’s especially true within the Republican Party, whose more extreme Tea Party wing has mounted primary election challenges against moderate Republican candidates for re-election who had compromised with Democrats. As a result, the 2014–2016 Congress passed the fewest laws of any Congress in recent American history, was behind schedule in adopting budgets, and risked or actually precipitated government shutdown.

  As an example of our breakdown of compromise, consider filibusters and blocked nominations of presidential nominees. A filibuster is a tactic admissible in the U.S. Senate under Senate rules (not specified in the Constitution), whereby a minority of senators (or even just one senator) opposed to a motion talks non-stop (or threatens to do so in a so-called phantom filibuster) in order to force a compromise or else withdrawal of that motion. (The record was set in 1967 by a non-stop speech lasting more than 24 hours: Plate 9.10.) Senate rules permit a filibuster to be ended by a “cloture” vote not of a simple majority of senators but of a supermajority (60 out of 100 senators). In effect, a filibuster permits a determined minority that would otherwise be outvoted to force a compromise, while cloture permits a determined supermajority to refuse to compromise.

  Despite the obvious potential for abuse—i.e., for filibusters to introduce paralysis, and for cloture to introduce tyranny—this system has worked throughout most of our history. Minorities as well as supermajorities have recognized the potential for abuse, and resorted only rarely to filibusters and even more rarely to cloture. Under our first 43 presidents and our first 220 years of constitutional government, our Senate opposed a total of only 68 presidential nominees for government positions by filibusters. But when Democratic President Obama was elected in 2008, Republican leaders declared their intent to block anything that he proposed. That included blocking 79 Obama nominees by filibusters in just four years, more than in the entire previous 220 years. Democrats responded by abolishing the supermajority requirement for approving presidential nominees other than Supreme Court justices, thereby making it possible to fill government jobs but also reducing the safety valve available to a dissatisfied minority.

  A filibuster is merely the most extreme and least frequent method to prevent confirmation of presidential nominees. In President Obama’s second term of office from 2012 to 2016, the Republican-controlled Senate confirmed the lowest number of presidentially nominated judges since the early 1950’s, and the lowest number of appeals court judges (the court level immediately below the Supreme Court) since the 1800’s. The most frequent tactic used to block nominations was to refuse to schedule a Senate committee meeting to consider the nomination; next most frequent was to refuse to schedule a full Senate vote on a nomination approved by the relevant Senate committee. For instance, one nominee for an ambassadorship never got to serve because he died while waiting more than two years for a confirmation vote that still hadn’t happened. Even the filling of jobs much less controversial or powerful than a position as judge or ambassador has been blocked. One friend of mine, nominated to a second-level position in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdrew his candidacy when he still hadn’t been confirmed after a year of waiting.

  Why has this breakdown of political compromise accelerated within the last two decades? In addition to the other harm that it causes, it’s self-reinforcing, because it makes people other than uncompromising ideologues reluctant to seek government service as an elected representative. Two friends of mine who had been widely respected long-serving U.S. senators, and who seemed likely to succeed once again if they ran for re-election, decided instead to retire because they were so frustrated with the political atmosphere in Congress. When I have asked elected representatives, and people experienced in Congress’s workings, about the causes of the trend, the explanations that they suggest include the three following ones.

  One suggested explanation is the astronomical rise in costs of election campaigns, which has made donors more important than in the past. While some candidates for high office succeed in funding their campaigns by scraping together many small donations, many or most other candidates are forced to rely on a small number of large donations. Of course those large donors give because they feel strongly about specific goals, and they give to candidates who support those goals. They don’t give to middle-of-the-road candidates who compromise. As one disillusioned friend wrote me after retiring from a long career in politics, “Of all the issues that we face, I think that the skew of money in our political system and our personal lives has been by far the most damaging. Politicians and political outcomes have been purchased on a grander scale than ever before… the scramble for political money saps time and money and enthusiasm… political schedules bend to money, political discourse worsens, and politicians do not know each other as they fly back and forth to their districts.”

  That last point raised by my friend is a second suggested explanation: the growth of domestic air travel, which now offers frequent quick connections between Washington and every American state. Formerly, our representatives served in Congress in Washington during the week; then they had to remain in Washington for the weekend because they couldn’t return to their home state and back within the span of a weekend. Their families lived in Washington, and
their children went to school in Washington. On weekends the representatives and their spouses and children socialized with one another, the representatives got to know one another’s spouses and children, and the representatives spent time with one another as friends and not just as political adversaries or allies. Today, though, the high cost of election campaigns puts pressure on representatives to visit their home state often for the purpose of fund-raising, and the growth of domestic air travel makes that feasible. Many representatives keep their families in their home state, where their children go to school. The children don’t play with the children of other congressional representatives, the representatives don’t get to know one another’s spouses and children, and they see one another only as politicians. At present, about 80 out of the 535 members of Congress don’t even maintain an apartment or house in Washington, but instead sleep on a bed in their office during the week, then fly back to their home state for the weekend.

  Still a third explanation that I hear to account for the breakdown of compromise involves the practice termed “gerrymandering.” That means redrawing the geographic outlines of a state’s congressional districts so as to favor one party, by assuring that party a proportion of elected representatives higher than the whole state’s proportion of voters choosing that party. This is not a new practice in American politics. In fact, it derives its name from Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, whose administration already in 1812 redrew the state’s districts for the sole purpose of increasing the number of elected representatives belonging to Gerry’s party. The resulting districts had geographically weird shapes, one of them resembling a salamander and thereby giving rise to the term “gerrymander” (Plate 9.11).