(The author is a bona fide radical.)
NY Times, July 2, 2021
The United States used to be a country of dramatic invention and dynamic
change. Today, our politics are sclerotic,
and our dreams are small. What happened?
The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination
By Daniel Immerwahr
Mr. Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern and the author
of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”
This essay is part of a series exploring bold ideas to revitalize and
renew the American experiment. Read more about this project in a note
from Ezekiel Kweku, Opinion’s politics editor.
The world didn’t expect much from Edward Bellamy, a reclusive,
tubercular writer who lived with his parents. Yet if he lived small, he
dreamed big, and in 1888 he published a phenomenally successful utopian
novel, “Looking Backward, 2000-1887.” It told of a man who fell asleep
in 1887 and awoke in 2000 to electrified cities, music broadcasts and
“credit cards.”
Even more exciting than Bellamy’s technological forecasts were his
political ones. Unforgiving capitalism would be replaced by a welfare
state, he predicted, with universal education, guaranteed incomes and
supported retirement. His readers started Bellamy Clubs and set off a
craze for utopian novels. In the 19th-century United States, only “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin” sold more copies in its first years than “Looking Backward.”
Bellamy, and his fans across the country, felt confident a “radically
different” future was imminent. And why not? The United States was a
dynamic, almost volatile, country then. During the 1800s, the United
States grew more than four times in size, its western edge moving from
the Mississippi River to the South China Sea. In the first half of that
century, it had transformed from a patrician society run by the
propertied into a rough-and-tumble one in which nearly all white men
could vote. The second half, when Bellamy lived, saw the end of slavery,
the military defeat of great Native American powers and the explosive
growth of industrial capitalism — events that, for good or ill,
profoundly altered the country.
Bellamy saw his era as “portentous of great changes,” and he was right.
Not only did his technological predictions come true; his political
ideas caught fire. In 1892, the Populist Party presidential candidate
won five states running on a Bellamy-inspired platform that called for a
shortened workday, a graduated income tax and the direct election of
senators. The New Deal — with its income supports, economic controls and
federal jobs — seemed straight out of Bellamy.
During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency, “Looking Backward”
occupied a conspicuous spot in the White House library. Roosevelt’s own
book, published on his inauguration in 1933, was titled “Looking Forward.”
Our own era is, like Bellamy’s, “portentous of great changes.” A
Bellamy-style character falling asleep just five years ago and waking up
now would require patient orientation (“So, after the assault on the
Capitol, the right seized on calls to defund the police and Mr. Potato
Head’s gender as wedge issues, which …”). Alongside eventful episodes
like Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic are deeper
transformations: the internet’s upending of daily life and work, the
faltering of the gender binary, the rise of China, the warming of the
planet.
And yet it’s hard to imagine politics changing as a result, as Bellamy’s
readers once did. Washington seems inhospitable to utopians; it’s
deadlocked between those determined simply to hang onto power and those
seeking modest tweaks.
The current top concern of both parties is whether to raise or lower
barriers to voting. That’s an important question, but it’s ultimately a
procedural one. Meanwhile, the most substantive issue imaginable, global
warming, languishes. A majority of Republicans in Congress are deniers.
And the Democratic leadership has met calls for big changes (“the green
dream, or whatever they call it,” as Nancy Pelosi originally referred to
the Green New Deal) with notable coolness.
This hardening of our political arteries is dangerous. It’s not just
that needed legislation gets blocked; it’s that our civic culture is in
crisis. When passion can’t flow easily into policymaking, it congeals as
angry protest, growing wilder and more paranoid.
Now we’ve reached a tipping point. On both the right and left, activists
call for things that, just a few years ago, would have been unspeakable.
Yet rather than inspire voters, our politicians mostly seek to deflect
or fend them off, seeing them as perhaps a little too inspired.
What happened? How did politics become so sclerotic? It’s not hard to
think of factors. Sharp partisanship creates gridlock. Loose campaign
finance rules let wealthy donors torpedo inconvenient legislation. And
as the traditional news media gives way to social media, representatives
talk more but do less.
In the past, such hurdles have been overcome by wars. A painful fact
about U.S. history is that it often takes a military conflict to
transcend the habitual holding pattern of checks-and-balances
government. The Civil War prompted the land distribution of the
Homestead Act, established federal funding for dozens of colleges,
introduced a federal income tax and abolished slavery.
World War II sent a generation of men to college. The Cold War spawned
the Interstate System of highways and pressed the federal government to
accept civil rights. Even the New Deal, enacted in the shadow of a
looming war, started when Roosevelt explained in his Inaugural Address
that he needed “broad executive power to wage a war against the
emergency” as “if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
The United States has fought wars recently, but they haven’t prompted
collective action. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11,
President George W. Bush called on his compatriots not to do anything
differently but to “get down to Disney World.” The many military
interventions that have followed have entailed smaller sacrifices at
home than previous wars have. No one gets drafted, fewer come home in
body bags, and increasingly the fighting is handled by airstrikes and
drones.
The growing invisibility of combat reflects a larger shift in our public
affairs, away from open debate and toward backstage management. Since
1945, when the United States assumed a position of armed primacy over
the planet, its government has grown more centralized, more opaque and
less democratic: The National Security Council, an unelected group on
which no lawmaker serves, oversees international affairs. The most
controversial parts of foreign policy — arguably the ones most requiring
public debate — are covertly handled by the C.I.A.
The federal government doesn’t just run the United States; it seeks to
run the world. And it’s hard to do that while remaining open to domestic
democracy. The centralization is contagious. A government operating
unaccountably abroad starts doing the same at home. You send Humvees to
Falluja, and soon they’re patrolling Ferguson.
Voters in Bellamy’s day argued about where and when to fight wars. Now
that’s handled by the experts; when four U.S. soldiers were killed in
Niger in 2017, it came out that key senators hadn’t even known troops
were stationed there. Similarly, Bellamy lived through elections in
which farmers fiercely debated monetary policy with bankers. Yet today,
the dollar — a global currency as well as a domestic one — is managed
quietly by the unelected governors of the Federal Reserve.
An opaque government favors insiders who know how to work its levers.
The Beltway is packed with long-term residents — advisers,
functionaries, think tank experts and lobbyists. Even elected
representatives tend to be long-haulers, as can be seen in their ages.
Though the baby boom lasted only 18 years, we’ve just finished a 28-year
streak of boomer presidents. It was broken, finally, by Joe Biden, a
pre-boomer president.
The aging of politicians tracks with the aging of the population in
general. But it’s meant that younger people — the ones most given to
“noble aspirations and high dreams,” as Bellamy wrote — are blocked from
power.
In the Democratic caucus, the six members of the insurgent, left-wing
“squad” are all in their 30s and 40s (the most famous, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, is 31). So are most of the congressional boat rockers on
the right, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Lauren
Boebert, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik and Matt Gaetz. The average
senator’s age, by contrast, is 63 and rising.
In “Looking Forward,” Roosevelt noted the brewing extremism of his day.
But the real trouble wasn’t wild ideas, he believed. It was rather the
“hand of discouragement” signaling that “things are in a rut, fixed,
settled.” Instead of quashing radicalism, he wrote, leaders should greet
it as “a challenge, a provocation” and an occasion to offer “a workable
program of reconstruction.”
That would be a good idea today. Such a program might try to reverse the
damage that seeking global primacy has done to our country. We could
take the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan as an occasion to ask
whether the United States truly needs to police the planet — or is any
good at it. Perhaps it’s time to exchange armed supremacy for earnest
diplomacy, and the rule of experts for the rights of citizens. Clawing
power back from unaccountable decision makers could let us start
debating the things that our leaders rarely even mention, like taxing
carbon emissions, legalizing drugs, overhauling the prison system and
shuttering overseas bases.
Going big might seem unthinkable. But such fatalism is precisely the
problem Roosevelt sought to address. We own the house; we’re allowed to
remodel it. Doing so would not only prepare us for new challenges, but
it would also establish an important point: The future is open.
Daniel Immerwahr is a professor of history at Northwestern and the
author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”
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