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

by Thomas L. Friedman

  That was, of course, a deliberate exaggeration. The American political system does not need blowing up, but it does need shaking up. For patients with certain kinds of mental illnesses, psychiatrists once routinely prescribed the application of an electrical stimulus, which was known as “shock therapy.” The same term, as we said, was used to describe sharp and blunt changes of economic policy, usually designed to stop rampant inflation in emerging markets or postcommunist states. This is what America now needs—but not in the economic realm. It needs political shock therapy.

  Your investment decisions about the United States should depend on whether you believe it will get the political shock therapy it requires. You are entitled to know my opinion on this question. On balance, I am bullish on America. I am cautiously optimistic that the country will rally, as it has so often in the past, to meet the challenges it confronts. But I confess that I am not sure of this. What I do know, and this is my concluding point, is that the future of America itself and, I believe, the future of the world as well rest on the answer to that question.

  Respectfully submitted,

  A. de Tocqueville

  Why Shock Therapy?

  What kind of shock therapy to the American political system is needed, and from where might it come? Tocqueville lived in an age of revolution. He was born a few years after the greatest of all of them, the French Revolution of 1789, and lived through two others, in 1830 and 1848. Nothing of that sort is in store for the United States. Nor does the country need fundamental changes to its system of government, a system that has served it well for more than two centuries and has proven equal to the task of coping with a series of major challenges. The problem for modern America is not that it has the wrong political system but rather that the eminently serviceable political system it does have is not functioning properly. And to get it to function properly is going to require a shock—like giving smelling salts to revive a person who has fainted or jump-starting a car with a dead battery. Such a shock could come from a number of places: from outside the country by some external foe, from a devastating global economic crisis, from Mother Nature, from a grassroots movement within the country, or from the top of the political system itself.

  We hope that it will come from within—from a combination of grassroots and high politics. We mean by this a serious independent presidential candidate. We agree with Senator Voinovich: We think it is time, figuratively speaking, to blow the place up.

  Our political system is stuck. It is under the sway of powerful special interests that work for policies that are at best irrelevant to and at worst counterproductive for the urgent present and future needs of the United States. The two parties are so sharply polarized that they are incapable of arriving at the deep, ideologically painful compromises that major initiatives, of the kind required to meet the major challenges America faces, will require.

  Moreover, as we have tried to demonstrate, these pathologies of our political system have deep roots. They are the products of broad historical and social trends in American society. The net effect of these powerful forces has been to create a set of perverse political incentives for avoiding rather than addressing our major challenges.

  Democrats are right that the government must make investments in—that is, spend money on—education and infrastructure if the United States is to succeed in a globalized economy in which sophisticated information technology is spreading ever more rapidly. Republicans are right that the engine of national economic advance will have to be the private sector and that the government must tailor its policies to encourage and enable private innovation and entrepreneurship. But both parties are wrong to assure Americans that taxes will never rise, as Republicans do, and that the benefits they have been promised will never be cut, as Democrats do.

  In other words, to adapt to the new world and the major new challenges it has thrown at us, it is not enough to find a sliver of common ground between left and right. The country must move, in political terms, “to higher ground,” as Don Baer, the former communications director in the Clinton administration, put it—higher ground on which it can make the changes that will sustain the American dream and American global leadership into the next decade and the next generation.

  As the former Republican congressman from South Carolina Bob Inglis told us, what we need today is “a hybrid politics” that would replace grudging compromise between two hostile ideologies with a creative synthesis. “We need to take the strengths of both parties and use them to the benefit of the country,” said Inglis. “Democrats tend to concentrate on fairness. Republicans excel at building meritocracies. The truth is, Americans want and need both. We want and need the wealth that meritocracies can create, but we also want and need fairness so that the little guy doesn’t get squashed by the big guy. Hybrid politicians—aware of the external threats that we face together—would welcome the improvements that their counterparts could offer.”

  To put it another way, the United States needs a politics of the “radical center.” This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. The policies necessary to meet America’s challenges are centrist in that they fall, on the left-right political spectrum, somewhere in the considerable space between what have become mainstream Democratic and mainstream Republican positions. People in the middle—centrists—are often called “moderates,” implying that they are lukewarm about everything. But they need not be weak-willed people who wish to befriend everybody, offend nobody, and change nothing. The policies we need are also radical because they involve far more substantial changes in the current ways of doing things than Democrats or Republicans are on course to propose. Especially on the federal budget, the two major parties act as tenacious guardians of the status quo, but the status quo does not give the country the tools necessary to make the present century, like the previous two, an era of American prosperity.

  To get to that higher ground, to be able both to articulate a program of the radical center and then to generate a mandate for it, we need to overcome or change the perverse political incentives that now keep such ideas and candidates promoting them on the fringe. How can we do that?

  In theory, either party could nominate a presidential candidate who, once elected, would embrace a program of the radical center. In practice, though, such a “Trojan horse” candidacy is highly unlikely. Once elected, a president does not become a free agent. He or she enters office with obligations to those whose support put him or her in the White House and therefore cannot simply jettison the promises that attracted that support in the first place. The most loyal supporters tend to be the most ideologically polarized members of the candidate’s own party, who are the most zealous guardians of its doctrinal orthodoxies. Nor can a president rely on personal popularity to enact an agenda of the radical center. To do this, charisma is not enough, as two recent examples demonstrate. Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the governor’s mansion in California under unusual circumstances, having won a special election and with widespread goodwill and the advantage of a powerful and widely known public image. He tried to adopt policies to stop his state’s downward economic spiral, but largely failed. He made his share of political mistakes, but in the end it was the entrenched power of the two major parties that thwarted him.

  Similarly, Barack Obama won the presidency promising a new era of cooperation in American public life, but his first two years reproduced the partisan rancor of his predecessor’s time in office. He did inherit an economic disaster that demanded immediate attention, and the attention his administration paid to shoring up the economy used up much of the political capital he brought to office. But he devoted his remaining capital to expanding health-care coverage. That was certainly a worthy goal and one that had an almost religious significance to his own political party but, as enacted, it is unclear how much it will do to equip the United States to meet the challenges we face.

  “Change We Can Believe In” proved to be an effective campaign slogan but not a useful guide
line for governing. Obama did not seek a mandate for the radical centrist agenda that would enable Americans to thrive in the world in which they were living, and so, when he began his presidency, he did not have one.

  The only way around all these ideological and structural obstacles is a third-party or independent candidate, who can not only articulate a hybrid politics that addresses our major challenges and restores our formula for success but—and it is a huge but—does this in a way that enough Americans find so compelling that they are willing to leave their respective Democratic and Republican camps and join hands in the radical center. Only that could change a political system that rewards our politicians for postponing hard decisions and blaming the other party rather than making those decisions.

  In business and politics, people respond to incentives, and when the incentives are perverse, people behave perversely. Move the cheese, move the mouse; keep the cheese where it is and the mouse doesn’t move. We need to change those incentives before the market or Mother Nature does it for us. We need to move the cheese, and only a compelling third-party candidate, with a compelling hybrid politics, can do that.

  A Third Way to a New Way

  A third-party or independent presidential candidacy might seem, at first glance, an odd way to administer the needed shock to the American political system. After all, in the history of the American republic no third-party candidate has ever been elected president. In fact, third-party candidates have rarely been elected to any office. Since the Republicans replaced the Whigs in 1854 and joined the Democrats as one of the country’s two major political parties, the two of them have had a stranglehold on American politics. They have managed to maintain it for more than a century and a half for several powerful reasons.

  To compete with them, a third party must get on the ballot, and that is not easy. Each state has its own election laws, and the Democrats and Republicans in the state legislatures who write these laws have deliberately made access to the ballot difficult almost everywhere. California is once again the extreme example: to get on the presidential ballot a candidate who is not a Democrat or a Republican must gather 1.1 million valid signatures, which usually requires at least 1.6 million total signatures. Collecting them one at a time outside a supermarket or in a mall, which is how it is usually done, is not easy.

  Moreover, victory in an election for virtually every American office, including the presidency, goes to the candidate with the most votes. This means that candidates are often elected with less than 50 percent of the votes and candidates and parties that finish second or lower get nothing. This single-member, plurality, district system differs from electoral systems based on proportional representation, in which parties earn the number of places in the legislature that is proportional to their share of the overall vote. A third party can reasonably aspire to a share of political power in a system of proportional representation, but not in the United States.

  American voters often develop an allegiance to one or the other of the two major parties—they come to identify with the Republicans or the Democrats—which makes it emotionally trying for them to cast a ballot for any other party. New York Mets fans don’t become New York Yankees fans just because the Mets have one or two bad seasons. The same is true in politics. Party loyalty reinforces the Republican and Democratic duopoly, as does the fact that they have dominated the American political system for so long. Also, the nation’s political history has been, on the whole, and with the notable exception of the Civil War, a successful one, so Americans have acquired a respect for the idea of a two-party system. Although political parties are not mentioned in the Constitution, the belief that there should be two and only two of them has achieved quasi-constitutional status—that is, an arrangement with which it is unwise to tamper—in the eyes of many voters.

  The failure of challengers to the Democrats and Republicans has become self-fulfilling: Because third parties do not win elections, voters expect them not to win and thus do not vote for them so as not to waste their votes. This calculation, a major reason for the weakness of third parties (and thus the strength of the Republicans and Democrats), can, however, be seriously mistaken. A vote for a third-party presidential candidate can be an effective way to change the direction of American national policy—and that is the strategy we are advocating.

  A third party succeeds not by winning elections but by affecting the agenda of the party that does win. A third party—or what became far more common in the twentieth century, an independent candidate leading a party that does not outlast the candidacy—can affect the agenda of the two major parties by drawing an appreciable number of votes. By doing so, it demonstrates the existence of a bloc of voters uncommitted to either major party. Since the core business of both Democrats and Republicans is the winning of elections, each has a fundamental interest in attracting as many voters as possible. That means that one or the other will move to co-opt the supporters of any independent candidate by embracing whatever the candidate stood for that earned their support—provided that support is substantial. Historically, the two major parties have been like large retail stores that seek as many customers as possible by offering a wide variety of items—in the case of the parties a wide variety of policies. Like such stores, Republicans and Democrats have been willing and, within limits, able to add to their offerings whatever their customers—that is, voters—have wanted. Once the large stores begin to carry the products customers want, the smaller establishments close their doors.

  So it is with third parties. The historian Richard Hofstadter compared third parties to bees: After they sting, they die. While third parties and the proprietors of the small businesses suffer from this process, voters and customers do not. To the contrary, they get what they want.

  We would like to see the emergence of a very big bee that can sting both parties in a way they can neither ignore nor shrug off. When an independent presidential candidate makes a strong showing, the dynamics of the two-party system impel the major parties to capture his or her voters, if at all possible. In this way those voters can exert greater influence over the policies of the victorious candidate than do the voters who actually supported the candidate in the election. This has happened three times in the twentieth century.

  In 1968, the former Alabama governor George Wallace won five Deep South states and captured just over 13.5 percent of the popular vote, mainly but not exclusively from Southern states, where he won 34.3 percent, in a presidential election in which the Republican Richard Nixon narrowly defeated the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, gaining 43.4 percent of all ballots to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent. Wallace ran as an opponent of the civil rights laws passed between 1963 and 1965. During those years the United States experienced a revolution in race relations. Wallace offered himself to the public as a counterrevolutionary.

  He also placed on the national agenda other issues that, although having racial overtones, were not exclusively racial in character and persisted as national concerns for the next two decades. One was support for “law and order,” a reaction to the civil disturbances in a number of American cities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, between 1965 and 1968. Another was populist hostility to the federal government and what he and others came to see as America’s liberal establishment. Wallace advertised his scorn for such people, whom he called “pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t park a bicycle straight.” In different ways, both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan took up his anti-Washington theme, and it helped both of them get elected president, in 1976 and 1980, respectively.

  The Wallace campaign also had a more immediate impact—on public policy rather than on the style of presidential campaigning. During and after the campaign, Nixon made a concerted effort to win the favor of Wallace voters, an effort that became known as his “Southern strategy.” He appointed an official, lodged in the White House, with special responsibility for protecting that region’s interests. He made a point of his opposition to the compulsory busing of schoolchildren to achieve
racial balance within school districts, which federal courts had ordered in a number of states, not all of them in the South. The Nixon administration might not have pursued all the policies that many Wallace voters wanted—it did not seriously attempt to repeal the major civil rights laws—but those voters could see that the administration for which they had not voted had adopted at least some of the policies, and attitudes, of the candidate whom they had supported.

  Almost a quarter century later another independent candidate, H. Ross Perot, who had made a fortune in the data-processing business, did even better in a presidential election. In 1992, he won 18.9 percent of the popular vote in a three-way contest with the Republican incumbent, George H. W. Bush, who polled 37.5 percent, and the Democratic challenger, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who won with 43 percent.

  Perot’s principal campaign issue was the danger posed by the federal budget deficits the country was running, which were, in fact, more modest than today’s. Like Nixon, once in office Clinton moved to try to capture Perot voters by addressing the issue that had motivated them to support an independent candidate. His first major policy proposal was a program designed to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over five years through tax increases and spending cuts. By the end of his second term as president, the United States had a budget surplus for the first time in several decades. The Democratic senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1992, told us that for the deficit reduction that followed “the impetus came from Perot.” A vote for Perot, far from being wasted, helped to achieve what his voters most wanted.