The Future

by Al Gore

  U.S. HEGEMONY IN the world thus reached its peak, and the ideology of democratic capitalism spread so widely that one political philosopher speculated that we were seeing “the end of history”—implying that no further challenge to either democracy or capitalism was likely to emerge.

  This ideological and political victory secured for the United States universal recognition as the dominant power in what appeared to be, at least for a brief period, a unipolar world. But once again, the superficial label concealed complex changes that accompanied the shift in the power equilibrium.

  Well before the beginning of World War II, Soviet communism had run afoul of a basic truth about power that was clearly understood by the founders of the United States: when too much power is concentrated in the hands of one or a small group of people, it corrupts their judgment and their humanity.

  American democracy, by contrast, was based on a sophisticated understanding of human nature, the superior quality of decision making to be found in what is now sometimes called the wisdom of crowds, and lessons learned from the history of the Roman Republic about the dangers posed to liberty by centralized power. Unhealthy concentrations of power were recognized to be detrimental to the survival of freedom. So power was separated into competing domains designed to check and balance one another in order to maintain a safe equipoise within which individuals could maintain their freedom to speak, worship, and assemble freely.

  The ability of any nation to persuade others to follow its leadership is often greatly influenced by its moral authority. In the case of the United States, it is undeniably true that since the ratification of its Constitution and Bill of Rights in 1790–91, its founding principles have resonated in the hearts and minds of people throughout the world, no matter the country in which they live.

  Since the end of the eighteenth century, there have been three waves of democracy that spread throughout the world. The first, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, produced twenty-nine democracies. When the Great Liberator, Simón Bolívar, led democratic revolutions in South America in the two decades after America’s founding, he carried a picture of George Washington in his breast pocket.

  This was followed by a period of decline that shrank the number to twelve by the beginning of World War II. After 1945, the second wave of democratization swelled the number of democracies to thirty-six, but once again this expansion was followed by a decline to thirty from 1962 until the mid-1970s. The third wave began in the mid-1970s and then accelerated with the collapse of communism in 1989.

  The struggle within the United States over policies that promote the higher values reflected in the U.S. Constitution—individual rights, for example—has often been lost to the interests of business and calculations of realpolitik. When Western European countries began to grant independence to their overseas colonies and pull back from the spheres of influence they had established during their imperial periods, the United States partially filled the resulting power vacuums by extending aid and forming economic, political, and military relationships with many of the newly independent nations. When the United States feared that the withdrawal of France from its colonial role in Vietnam might lead to the expansion of what some mistakenly viewed as a quasi-monolithic communist sphere, this misunderstanding of Ho Chi Minh’s fundamentally nationalist motivation contributed to the tragic miscalculation that resulted in the Vietnam War.

  Nevertheless, in spite of its strategic mistake in Vietnam (following the earlier long and costly stalemate in the Korean War), heavy-handed military interventions in Latin America, and other difficult challenges, the U.S. consolidated its position of leadership in the world. The unprecedented growth of U.S. prosperity in the decades following World War II—along with its continued advocacy of freedom—made it an aspirational model for other countries. It is difficult to imagine that human rights and self-determination could have made as much progress throughout the world in the post–World War II era without the U.S. being in a dominant position.

  More recently, the spread of democracy has slowed. Since the market crisis of 2007–08, there has been a decline in the number of democratic nations in the world and a degradation in the quality and extent of democracy in several others—including the United States. But even though the world is still in a “democratic recession,” some believe that the Arab Spring and other Internet-empowered democratic movements may signal the beginning of a fourth wave of democratization, though the results are still ambiguous at best.

  In any case, it is premature to predict an absolute decline in U.S power. Among positive signs that the United States may yet slow its relative decline, the U.S. university system is still far and away the best in the world. Its venture investment culture continues to make the U.S. the greatest source of innovation and creativity. Although the U.S. military budget is lower as a percentage of GDP than it has been for most of the post–World War II era, it has increased in absolute terms to the highest level since 1945. The U.S. military is still by far the most powerful, best trained (by the best officer corps), best equipped, and most lavishly financed armed force the world has ever seen. Its annual budget is equal to the combined military budgets of the next fifty militaries in the world and almost equal to the military spending of the entire rest of the world put together.

  AS SOMEONE WHO was frequently described as a pro-defense Democrat during my service in the Congress and in the White House, I have seen how valuable it has been for the United States and for the cause of freedom to maintain unquestioned military superiority. However, after more than a decade of fighting two seemingly endless wars, while simultaneously maintaining large deployments in Europe and Asia, U.S. military resources are strained to the point of breaking. And the relative decline of America’s economic power and wealth is beginning to force the reconsideration of such large military budgets.

  The same global trends that have dispersed productive activity throughout Earth Inc. and connected people throughout the world to the Global Mind are also dispersing technologies relevant to warfare, which used to be monopolized by nation-states. The ability to launch destructive cyberattacks, for example, is now being widely spread on the Internet.

  Some of the means of waging violent warfare are being robosourced and outsourced. The use of drones and other semiautonomous robotic weapons proliferated dramatically during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force now trains more pilots for unmanned vehicles than it trains pilots of manned fighter jets. (Interestingly, the drone pilots suffer post-traumatic stress disorder at the same rate as fighter pilots even though they see their targets over a television screen thousands of miles away.)

  On several occasions, drones have been hacked by the forces they are targeting. In 2010, intelligence analysts found that Islamic militants in Iraq used commercially available software selling for $26 to hack into the unencrypted video signals coming from U.S. drones and watch the same video in real time that was being sent to the U.S. controllers back in the United States. In Afghanistan, insurgent forces were able to do the same thing, and at the end of 2011, Iran hacked into the control system of a U.S. stealth drone and commanded it to land on an airstrip in Kashmar, Iran.

  A new generation of robotic weapons in the air, on the land, and in the sea is being rapidly developed. More than fifty countries are now experimenting with semiautonomous military robots of their own. (A new legal doctrine of “robot rights” has been developed by U.S. military lawyers to give unmanned drones and robots the legal right to unleash deadly fire when threatened, just as a fighter pilot has the right to fire at a potential attacker as soon as he is alerted to the fact that a targeting radar has “lit up” his plane.)

  At the same time, some dangerous combat missions are being outsourced. During the war in Iraq, the United States shifted significant operations in the war zone to private contractors.* After the unpopular Vietnam War, the United States abandoned the draft and has since relied on a professional volunteer army—which many claim emotio
nally insulates the American people from some of the impact wars used to have on the general population.

  THE CHINA ISSUE

  Meanwhile, China’s military budgets—while still only a fraction of U.S. defense spending—are increasing. Yet there are questions about the sustainability of China’s present economic buildup. Many feel that it is premature to predict a future in which China becomes the dominant global power, or even occupies the center of a new power equilibrium alongside the United States, because they doubt that the social, political, and economic foundations in China are durable. In spite of the economic progress in China, experts warn that the lack of free speech, the concentrated autocratic power in Beijing, and the high levels of corruption throughout China’s political and economic system raise questions about the sustainability of its recent growth rates.

  For example, at the end of 2010, there were an estimated 64 million empty apartments in China. The building bubble there has been attributed to a number of causes, but for several years visitors have remarked upon the large number of subsidized high-rise apartment buildings that spring up quickly and remain unoccupied for very long periods of time. According to research by Morgan Stanley, almost 30 percent of the windmills constructed by China are not connected to the electrical grid; many have been placed in remote locations with strong winds but no economical way to extend the grid to them. China’s success in building its capacity to construct renewable energy systems of low cost has been of benefit to China and to the global market, but as with the many empty apartment buildings, the idle windmills serve as a warning that some trends in the Chinese economic miracle may not continue at the same pace. China’s banking system suffers from the same distortions of state manipulation. Some state-owned banks are recycling their allocations of credit into black market lending at usurious and unsustainable interest rates.

  There are also questions about China’s social and political cohesion during what has already been a disruptive economic transition, accompanied by the largest internal migration in history and horrendous levels of pollution. Although precise statistics are hard to verify, a professor at Tsinghua University, Sun Liping, estimated that in 2010 there were “180,000 protests, riots and other mass incidents.” That number reflects a fourfold increase from 2000. Numerous other reports confirm that social unrest appears to be building in response to economic inequality, intolerable environmental conditions, and opposition to property seizures and other abuses by autocratic local and regional leaders. Partly as a result of dissatisfaction and unrest—particularly among internal migrant workers—wages have been increasing significantly in the last two years.

  Some scholars have cautioned against a Western bias in prematurely predicting instability in countries whose governments do not gain democratic legitimacy. In China, according to some experts, legitimacy can be and is derived from other sources besides the participatory nature of their system. Since Confucian times, legitimacy has been gained in the eyes of the governed when the policies implemented are successful and when the persons placed in positions of power are seen to have earned their power in a form of meritocracy and demonstrate sufficient wisdom to seem well chosen.

  IT IS PRECISELY these sources of legitimacy that are now most at risk in the United States. The sharp decline of public trust in government at all levels—and public trust in most all large institutions—is based in large measure on the perception that they are all failing to produce successful policies and outcomes. The previous prominence of reason-based decision making in the U.S. democratic system was its greatest source of strength. The ability of the United States, with only 5 percent of the world’s people, to lead the world for as long as it has is due in no small measure to the creativity, boldness, and effectiveness of its decision making in the past.

  Ironically, the economic growth in China since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, launched in 1978, were brought about not only by his embrace of a Chinese form of capitalism but also by his intellectual victory within the Chinese Central Committee in advocating reason-based analysis as the justification for abandoning stale communist economic dogma—and his political skill in portraying this dramatic shift as simply a reaffirmation of Maoist doctrine. In a speech to the All-Army Conference in the year his reforms were begun, Deng said, “Isn’t it true that seeking truth from facts, proceeding from reality and integrating theory with practice form the fundamental principle of Mao Zedong Thought?”

  One reason for the rise of the United States over its first two centuries to the preeminent position among nations was that American democracy demonstrated a genius for “seeking truth from facts.” Over time, it produced better decisions and policies to promote its national interests than the government of any other nation. The robust debate that takes place when democratic institutions are healthy and functioning well results in more creative and visionary initiatives than any other system of government has proven capable of producing.

  Unfortunately, however, the U.S. no longer has a well-functioning self-government. To use a phrase common in the computer software industry, American democracy has been hacked. The United States Congress, the avatar of the democratically elected national legislatures in the modern world, is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.

  THE LONG REACH OF CORPORATIONS

  It is now common for lawyers representing corporate lobbies to sit in the actual drafting sessions where legislation is written, and to provide the precise language for new laws intended to remove obstacles to their corporate business plans—usually by weakening provisions of existing laws and regulations intended to protect the public interest against documented excesses and abuses. Many U.S. state legislatures often now routinely rubber-stamp laws that have been written in their entirety by corporate lobbies.

  Having served as an elected official in the federal government for the last quarter of the twentieth century, and having observed it closely before that period and since, I have felt a sense of shock and dismay at how quickly the integrity and efficacy of American democracy has nearly collapsed. There have been other periods in American history when wealth and corporate power have dominated the operations of government, but there are reasons for concern that this may be more than a cyclical phenomenon—particularly recent court decisions that institutionalize the dominance and control of wealth and corporate power.

  This crippling of democracy comes at a time of sweeping and tumultuous change in the world system, when the need for U.S. advocacy of democratic principles and human values has never been greater. The crucial decisions facing the world are unlikely to be made well, or at all, without bold and creative U.S. leadership. It is therefore especially important to restore the integrity of U.S. democracy. But in order to do so, it is necessary to accurately diagnose how it went so badly off track. The shift of power from democracy to markets and corporations has a long history.

  In general, political freedom and economic freedom have reinforced one another. The new paradigm born in the era of the printing press was based on the principle that individuals had dignity, and when armed with the free flow of information could best chart their own destinies in both the political and economic realms by aggregating their collective wisdom through regular elections of representatives, and through the “invisible hand” of supply and demand.

  Throughout history, capitalism has been more conducive to higher levels of political and religious freedom than any other way of organizing economic activity. But internal tensions in the compound ideology of democratic capitalism have always been present and frequently difficult to reconcile. Just as America’s founders feared concentrated political power, many of them also worried about the impact on democracy of too much concentrated economic power—particularly in the form of corporations.

  The longest running corporation was created in Sweden in 1347, though the legal form did not become common until the seventeenth century, when the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom allowed a proliferation of corporate charters, especially for the exploitation of trade to and from their new overseas colonies. After a series of spectacular frauds and other abuses, including the South Sea Company scandal (which gave birth to the economic concept of a “bubble”), England banned corporations in 1720. (The prohibition was not lifted until 1825 when the Industrial Revolution required the capitalization of railway companies and other new firms to exploit emerging technologies.)

  The American revolutionaries were keenly aware of this history and originally chartered corporations mostly for civic and charitable purposes, and only for limited periods of time. Business corporations came later, in response to the need to raise capital for industrialization.

  Referring to the English experience, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to U.S. Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania in 1816, “I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

  Between 1781 and 1790 the number of corporations expanded by an order of magnitude, from 33 to 328. Then in 1811, New York State enacted the first of many statutes that allowed the proliferation of corporations without specific and narrow limitations imposed by government.

  So long as the vast majority of Americans lived and worked on farms, corporations remained relatively small and their impact on the conditions of labor and the quality of life was relatively limited. But during the Civil War, corporate power increased considerably with the mobilization of Northern industry, huge government procurement contracts, and the building of the railroads. In the years following the war, the corporate role in American life grew quickly, and the efforts by corporations to take control of the decisions in Congress and state legislatures grew as well.