That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Members of Congress certainly understand this, but they—especially Democrats—have shied away from supporting serious measures to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits because of the political power of America’s senior citizens. That power stems from two hard realities: there are many people sixty-five and older—more than forty million, comprising 13 percent of the population, in 2009, with the percentage expected to rise to 20 percent by 2050—and proportionally more of them vote than do people in other age groups. The AARP is a potent lobby, but what gives it its power is something bigger than money or expertise in the labyrinthine statutes and regulations of the federal government. It is numbers, numbers that can be mobilized for the battles that matter most to politicians—elections.

  In the 1930s, when Social Security was established, old-age pensions of any kind were rare, and senior citizens were the poorest age cohort in America. Now, by some measures, seniors are overall the richest, while the poorest rung on the American ladder of wealth is occupied by children. But our entitlement programs transfer resources from the working population to the old at the expense of the young. Children are, as the cliché has it, our future, which means that our entitlement programs represent an investment in the past at the expense of the future. The national interest depends on everyone, including seniors, making some sacrifice so that the country can make the investments it needs in America’s future.

  Persuading seniors to do so will be hard; not all of them are well-to-do “greedy geezers.” The baby boom generation as a whole has a dismally low savings rate, which means that its members are counting on Social Security payments as a much-needed source of income for their retirement years. Serious cuts to Medicare spending would likely affect the quality of care, probably shortening the lives of some of the older Americans who will depend on it. Yet some restraints on the otherwise soaring costs of these two programs are necessary, as the AARP itself has recognized in the case of Social Security, if America is to renew its formula for greatness and tackle its major challenges.

  While reducing Social Security and Medicare may be unfair to older Americans, under-investing in education is harmful to everyone. In this sense, entitlements serve a special interest, while education serves the national interest. Virtually all studies of the subject show that the earlier in an individual’s life an investment in his or her education is made, the greater will be the payoff in productivity and income earned in the course of that person’s life. A dollar wisely invested in early education can do far more to meet the challenges of the world we are living in than a dollar spent on a senior citizen, no matter how deserving he or she may be.

  Show Me the Money

  The novelist William Faulkner, the recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, once said that “to live anywhere in the world of AD 1955 and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” So is being against money in politics. Money has always been a part of politics—at least of democratic politics—and always will be. Like partisanship and special interests, however, money has taken on a markedly more pronounced political role in recent years, to the detriment of the policies America desperately needs to enact.

  Much of the money goes to pay for the ever more elaborate technology of contemporary political campaigns: polling, direct-mail solicitation, robo-calling, and television advertising. In 1974, the money spent on the congressional election—the combined spending by all the candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate—was $75 million. During the next several election cycles this sum escalated sharply, reaching $343 million in 1982. The amount of money spent on campaigns has continued to climb upward ever since. Altogether, the candidates for the 2010 congressional election spent $879 million.

  Where do candidates get all that money? Some of it comes from organizations dedicated to promoting particular causes or issues that tend to fall at either end of the ideological spectrum: gay rights and the environment for Democrats, abortion and gun rights for conservatives. Committed partisans give more money than people in the middle, which aggravates the polarization of American politics.

  But candidates’ money also comes in large quantities from special interests. Politicians spend an enormous amount of time raising the money they get and spend. The constant need to raise money not only empowers the special interests, which have the money to give; it also disempowers the politicians, by forcing them to spend almost as much time raising money as they do governing. The politicians we spoke to estimated that it routinely takes up a quarter of their working days, and sometimes more. Senator Evan Bayh, the Indiana Democrat who retired in 2011 after two terms, told us that when his father served in the Senate, from 1963 to 1981, “the saying was that you legislate for four years and campaign for two.” Now, by contrast, campaigning—especially in the form of fund-raising—goes on all the time. “There are people,” Bayh said, referring to his Senate colleagues, “who go from their swearing-in to a fund-raiser that night for their reelection that’s six years away. That has happened and is happening! So it never stops.

  “If fund-raising and all things political are constantly in the forefront of your mind, it makes it harder to legislate absent those kinds of considerations,” added Bayh. “Yeah, it’s all politics all the time … Political calculus is more prominent in people’s thinking when they’re forced to think about campaigning and politics 24/7 for six years. Money is a big part of it. And why? Because there are going to be sleazy ads running against you, attacking your character—you’ve got to be able to set the record straight. And this comes back to the media again, just the cost of television. The atomization—again, even ten years ago, twelve years ago, the number of commercials you had to run to communicate effectively with the electorate was much less than today because they didn’t have all these cable channels. The audience is so fragmented. You have to run three or four more times the number of commercials to get the same exposure. And obviously, that’s big money. And the cost keeps going up per commercial. So when you combine those two factors, it’s just exploded.”

  Bayh explained that “75 percent of the time a senator is ‘in cycle’ [meaning that the senator faces an election within two years] is spent raising money—not meeting with constituents, not talking to policy experts, not sitting down with colleagues trying to hammer out a principled compromise. It’s getting on the phone and asking for campaign cash or traveling to fund-raisers. You know, that’s the reality of it, unless you are überwealthy or are an Internet star or something. The final thing I’d say is … remember when Justice [Samuel] Alito had that moment when the president was saying the Citizens United case [striking down the law restricting corporate campaign contributions] was going to lead to a flood of secret cash into our campaigns, and Alito seemed to be mouthing the words ‘not true’? Come on! This is exactly what happened. You can say it’s good constitutional law, but you cannot [deny] what the obvious consequences of this are going to be. And it’s exactly what happened. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. There are going to be hundreds of millions of dollars in large increments of secret money influencing the elections of the highest offices in the land. I mean, it’s astonishing! … What’s going to happen [is this]: Senator A is running and is now aware that one of these secret groups will be attacking him with millions of dollars. [So you need] a secret group who’s going to be fighting on your behalf in $5, $10, $15 million increments. And that is the only way to level the playing field.

  “So both sides will have their secret groups. They’ll be taking megamillion-dollar [corporate] contributions. So what will happen is, [a senator] will say, ‘Who is going to defend me?’ And then [the senator] will go to [one of these deep-pocketed corporate groups] and say, ‘I need your help.’ And they’ll say, ‘We love you. You’ve been a good friend. We will definitely help you out. But you know, the bylaws of our organization will only permit us to do that for people who are with us 90 percent of the time. So here’s a list of our top te
n issues. Why don’t you go study that, fill it out, and give it back to us, because we’d love to help you out.’ And these are going to be real votes on specific pieces of legislation! And this [senator] is going to be looking at that, knowing that millions of dollars hang on how he fills out that questionnaire and the commitments he makes on real votes. It’s about as close to corruption as you can come without actually crossing the line. And to the average citizen, that would absolutely look corrupt. And you know what’s going to change that? It’s going to take another Jack Abramoff thing on steroids or another Watergate—it’s going to take a huge scandal that will be so shocking that not to change the system would be self-destructive.”

  Together, the power of special interests and the financial demands of campaigns place Congress—as its own members admit—in danger of becoming a fund-raising organization that dabbles in legislation on the side. It is increasingly beholden to the wealthiest and most politically extreme interests in America at a time when the country urgently needs it to be attentive to the national interest.

  Media Madness

  Senator Lindsey Graham leaned back in his chair in his Senate office, trying to imagine for us what would have happened if America’s current media had been around to cover the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. We’d probably still be living as separate colonies, he said.

  “Let’s go back in time,” mused Graham. It is 1787 “and we’re in Philadelphia, we’re trying to hammer out the Constitution. Tell me how the twenty-four-hour news cycle would have affected writing the Constitution. Cable networks are outside Independence Hall. Ben Franklin walks out. He gets ambushed by Fox News. ‘Is it true you’re caving on a small [state] representation? What power do you give small states?’ I’ve always thought Saturday Night Live should do this. Think of a skit in which Ben Franklin is walking down the streets and people are just eating him alive. And you have Glenn Beck right outside saying, ‘They’re selling us out.’ You’ve got Rachel Maddow throwing herself in front of the door. Okay, so now, fast-forward. The twenty-four-hour news cycle makes compromise difficult because things get leaked and the momentum to find consensus is deterred. It’s hard to maintain momentum for controversial topics in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. You saw it on the energy bill—when somebody from the White House told Fox News that Lindsey Graham is pushing the carbon tax, remember that?” That report generated so much conservative opposition in South Carolina before Graham got a chance to put it in context that he was unable to continue his support for the bill.

  All of the forces of polarization that have weakened our political system’s ability to address our biggest problems are reinforced by a hyperfragmented, hyper-energized media environment, which has turned the war between the parties into a much more intense form of entertainment and blood sport than ever before.

  “The twenty-four-hour news cycle is about defining things,” Graham continued. “You’re always in a constant cycle to make sure that your proposal is not defined in a way that would destroy your ability to get the necessary votes … What does this mean? It means that Social Security reform, Medicare reform, tax-code reform, are going to be incredibly difficult—because all it takes is one or two liberal or conservative special interest groups to be able to get traction [by the way they define the issue in the media and] then you start losing people.”

  Technology makes these problems more acute. Where once working politicians had to follow, and contend with, only newspapers and the three major television networks, now talk radio, cable television news, the Internet, and the blogosphere are inescapable aspects of their working lives. From our interviews, it appears that the time politicians spend obsessing on what is written about them in the blogosphere rivals the time they spend dialing for dollars.

  The new media have turned news into something that is distributed through many channels, that is updated constantly, and that is available everywhere. Because of blogs and Twitter, anyone can be a reporter or a columnist. Because of websites, the news is reported twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—in the back of a taxi to the airport, in the waiting room at the airport, and on the plane itself. Because of satellites, digital cameras, and cell phones, anything that happens anywhere that is of interest to anyone can and will be broadcast, instantaneously, around the world. These developments have broadened the range of news sources and opinions, which we believe is healthy for our democracy. But they have also created an appetite, and platforms, for more opinions from more people all the time, which can have unanticipated and unwelcome consequences.

  “In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the political moment seems to trump any sense of history,” added Graham. “I guess what we’re losing in the Senate is a sense of history and perspective. The intense pressures of the twenty-four-hour news cycle don’t allow one to reflect very well about who we are and what we’re doing … [As a result], you’re no longer the most deliberative body in the world. You’re just an extension of the political moment.”

  This new-media environment reinforces hyper-partisanship in Washington, because the new media generally aim at smaller audiences than the old. Talk radio and cable television are not trying to attract people from different points on the political spectrum, as the three networks and the major newspapers did when they had a virtual monopoly on news dissemination. Instead, they target one end or the other of that spectrum by offering programming that reinforces the opinions that viewers or listeners already hold. This so-called “narrowcasting” is the secret of Rush Limbaugh’s success, and of the success of Fox News and MSNBC as well. Conservative programs on talk radio and cable television have bigger audiences than liberal ones—perhaps because, as surveys show, there are more self-identified conservatives than liberals, perhaps because, unlike liberals, conservatives feel that the mainstream media does not serve them properly. Limbaugh surely entertains his listeners, but that contributes to the problem.

  The new media seek to capture audiences by presenting news as entertainment and politics as sports—a kind of “PSPN” alongside ESPN. The USA Network has a slogan that refers to the offbeat stars of its comedies and dramas: “Characters welcome.” That could be the slogan of cable news and talk radio as well. They offer the public outsize, quirky, passionate, controversial personalities. Not for them the dry, on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other style of discourse. Unfortunately for the country, such a measured, dispassionate, sometimes even boring approach is the appropriate one for the complicated issues of public policy that will determine the American future. Aiming as they do to entertain, the new media thrive on conflict. Indeed, the programs they present often bear more than a passing resemblance to professional wrestling, with stock heroes and villains, exaggerated feuds, and, since the programs are explicitly either liberal or conservative, a predetermined outcome. At times, all that’s missing are the Tarzan outfits and fake body slams.

  This is not a useful model for public debate on the serious issues the country now faces. As Jon Stewart put it in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC (November 11, 2010): “The problem with the twenty-four-hour news cycle is it’s built for a particular thing—9/11. Other than that, there really isn’t twenty-four hours of stuff to talk about in the same way. The problem is, how do you keep people watching it? O.J.’s not going to kill someone every day. So that’s gone. So what do you have to do? You have to elevate the passion of everything else that happens that might even be somewhat mundane—and elevate it to the extent that this is breaking news … You begin to lose any meaning of what breaking news means.”

  Cable news does not exist in order to bridge the partisan divide but rather to thrive on it, feed it, and inflame it. Those who watch cable news shows and listen to talk radio learn that the people on the other side of that divide are foolish, hypocritical, and sometimes wicked—not that the problems the country faces are complicated, difficult, and urgent.

  The new-media outlets have relatively small audiences. In 2010, prime-time programs on Fox
averaged about two million viewers (although some programs had as many as three million), and the numbers for MSNBC and CNN were even smaller: 764,000 and 591,000, respectively. Most blogs and websites attract a trickle of visitors at best. Yet they help to shape our public life because they matter a great deal to our public officials.

  In sports, when a player is frustrated, distracted, and confused by an opponent to the point that he performs badly, the opponent is said to be “in his head.” Similarly, the new media are “in the heads” of American politicians. All the elected officials with whom we spoke for this book—without exception, Republican and Democrat alike—said that talk radio, cable television, and the Internet exercised substantial influence on how they did their jobs. It prompted them either to say things in more pointed ways to get attention or to spend time and energy reacting to things said about them. “Did you see what that blogger said about me?” is how a lot of sentences begin in Washington these days. Again, in some cases the greater scrutiny on politicians, on how they spend their time and money and on what they say in one place as compared with what they say in another, is an asset for democracy. This makes elected officials, and everyone else, more accountable.

  Sometimes, though, it can be a distraction, or worse. On balance, we think the impact of the new media is positive, but its downside is not negligible.

  It can instantly purvey both misinformation and corrections to the misinformation. Put up a lie or a mistaken fact and the Internet will both spread it and correct it at lightning speed. The problem, though, is that the falsehood often draws much more attention than the correction, and the sites that spread falsehoods are different from the sites that correct them, so the corrections often don’t reach the right people.