After two centuries and 41 presidents, it is perhaps understandable that we take for granted today what remains the greatest political miracle of all time: the United States of America. The miracle consists not only in the remarkable circumstances of the country’s birth, but in the fact that this most heterogeneous and diverse population, having no common origin and no obvious basis for unity, has nonetheless endured as a unified nation through over two centuries of massive change, including a civil war, two world wars, several economic depressions, and the strains of industrialization, immigration, and sweeping territorial expansion. What is more, the astonishing vitality of the American republic unfolded within the framework of a constitution of fewer than 7,000 words, drafted by a committee of patrician landowners in only four months, and rarely amended since. If the United States is not a miracle, then nothing of a political nature can possibly merit the term.
Longevity, of course, promotes presumptions of permanence. Despite having witnessed the collapse of one superpower widely believed to be infrangible, we devote hardly a thought to the prospects for stability and survival of the other. Few would deny that the United States has serious problems, but since those problems are still dealt with through a process of consent and compromise that has worked—with only one systemic breakdown—for over 200 years, we are inclined to assume that the United States will continue to endure.
The immediate, though by no means only, cause for questioning that assumption is the end of the cold war, which places the United States in the same position it faced after the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, and World War I. Suddenly, the country has no serious enemies and faces no military threat from abroad. In similar situations in the past, American unity has waned. Will the same thing now happen again? Will the end of a half-century of superpower rivalry and proxy wars abroad mark the beginning of a new turbulence within America itself?
One sign that the end of the cold war may have profound repercussions at home can be seen in the political problems of our cold-war allies. In Italy, the postwar political system has been discredited by massive scandal. Elsewhere in Western Europe, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, and John Major have sunk to record lows in opinion polls. In Japan, the monopoly of the Liberal Democratic party on power has been broken for the first time since World War II. Across the entire band of countries who jointly fought the cold war, political incumbents are being challenged as never before; the status quo is increasingly under siege. And indeed, with the West no longer mobilized on the front lines of a grand ideological crusade, it is only logical that nations would turn inward to bicker over their domestic problems, many of which were neglected in the pursuit of international victory.
The United States will not escape this process. A diverse and continent-spanning society that is suddenly no longer faced by foreign threats will likely find that its own internal cleavages are greater than anyone suspected. This is all the more to be expected because the United States is the one great power, besides the former Soviet Union, whose internal cohesion has been based on adherence to a common political ideology rather than on ethnic or national homogeneity.
Most probably the end of the cold war would not, by itself, generate a sufficient tidal force to threaten the survival of American democracy. But it will greatly increase the strains on our political system just as other centrifugal forces, long building, are tearing at the fabric of American society.
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The first of these centrifugal forces is a crisis of American identity, caused by the vigorous assertion of subnational loyalties above a common, unifying bond.
In the past, the peculiar genius of American democracy was its success in divorcing national identity and political rights from personal pedigree. American nationality and the national feeling associated with it were from the beginning linked not to national origin, religion, or even language, but to abstract ideals of liberty, human rights, representative government, and the equality of all human beings. Nationality in the new republic was based on documents, not on ancestry. Hence, for most of American history, anyone arriving on American shores could become an American; and once this happened, his “Americanness” took precedence over his national origins. This was the essence of the American miracle and an absolute key to the preservation and vitality of the United States.
Admittedly, immigrants often faced discrimination, and, of course, the melting pot failed miserably for black Americans—most of whom did not arrive here of their own free will and who even after the abolition of slavery were not permitted to assimilate into American society or enjoy the full rights of citizenship. Though Reconstruction officially ended in 1876, the tragic fact is that well before then, the population of the Northern states had lost interest in defending the rights of former slaves in the South. The liberators abandoned the liberated to a century of oppression, prejudice, and second-class citizenship. The roots of the mounting crisis of American identity that now faces us can be traced to this enormous moral failing, which short-circuited the process of national integration at its most critical moment.
The civil-rights movement of the 1960’s finally brought home to millions of white Americans the magnitude of the injustices that had been perpetrated on black Americans for over a century, notwithstanding the abolition of slavery. The response was an understandable rush to overcome the effects of this lost century through governmental action, including preferential programs intended to compensate for past injustices. While the civil-rights movement itself had been both integrationist and inclusive in thrust, many of these later programs deliberately emphasized racial awareness, ethnic identity, and group preference. Eventually they came to encompass not only black Americans, but other ethnic—and gender—categories as well.
Thus, by the 1980’s, perhaps a majority of the American population in one way or another fell under the rubric of “disadvantaged minority,” and great political and economic benefits could be achieved by emphasizing one’s identification with a specific group so designated. Political rights came to be seen as group benefits, rather than as universal rights to which all Americans were equally entitled. Whether or not affirmative action and the related programs which grew out of it advanced the fortunes of minority Americans (or at least of minority elites), they certainly stimulated a powerful reassertion of subnational loyalties. These now threaten to be exalted over any common sense of American nationality or identity. And without a common sense of “Americanness,” the threads holding together this most diverse of republics will become thin indeed.
The end of the cold war will exacerbate this crisis of national identity in a number of ways. For one thing, after every major war of this century, racial tensions have worsened. Is there any reason to suppose that the cold war will be any different, particularly given the acute sense of separate identities that is emerging? It may be that the Los Angeles riot of 1991—which followed shortly after the national celebration of victory in the Persian Gulf—was a harbinger of things to come.
Second, the scaling down of the U.S. Army and other of the armed services means a contraction of the very institution which, for over 40 years now, has been most successful in integrating and elevating blacks and other minorities. In the Persian Gulf war, the nation’s senior military officer was a black American, and 33 percent of all enlisted personnel and officers were minorities. Nor are we talking only about front-line troops; as a proportion of persons assigned to various occupational specialties in the military, there is a higher ratio of blacks in medical, administration, communications, and service-support functions than in combat specialties. This has been achieved in a highly meritocratic institution in which advancement is based on performance, not group preference. The downsizing of the armed forces will thus curtail one of the largest and best channels for minorities to climb from inner-city poverty to self-reliant independence. It is one of the more unfortunate consequences of our reduced international position.
Finally, since Pearl Harbor, Americans have tended to set aside their partisan differences at the ocean’s edge; to a lesser extent, the same can be said of separate group identities. But just as partisanship is waxing stronger in the aftermath of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, our common American identity will also lose the unifying focus that flowed from the foreign-policy challenges of the past five decades. New and serious challenges face us abroad, but they may not be sharply defined enough to elicit a similar unifying response. Ironically, then, our failure to exert leadership in the Balkans may only hasten our own Balkanization.
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A second incipient crisis of American democracy is that of declining governability—the incapacity of our political institutions to resolve or even mitigate the complex economic and social problems that face us. In particular, the failure of Congress or the executive branch to deal effectively with the deficit problem fuels public perceptions of paralysis. At some point, if these perceptions continue or increase, they will almost inevitably translate into demands for radical—and not necessarily thoughtful—constitutional reform.
The failure to reduce the deficit, despite numerous highly publicized efforts beginning with the Gramm-Rudman amendment of 1986, does not stem entirely from a lack of political leadership in both parties. It also arises out of deeply-rooted structural problems that make traditional political solutions unworkable.
The first of these structural obstacles might be called the “scissors dilemma” of the welfare state. It derives from the fact that recessions simultaneously reduce revenue and increase welfare outlays (hence the analogy of closing scissors). This forces the federal government either to borrow heavily or to raise taxes to maintain its welfare commitments. But since increased debt is always eventually repaid by taxation, the long-term effect is to increase the government’s share of gross domestic product (GDP).
Over the long run and beyond a certain threshold, an increasing government share of GDP acts as a drag on national productivity and contributes to declining growth rates, thereby further exacerbating the scissors dilemma. It will be aggravated still more by the changing demographic profile of the country—an aging population with a higher ratio of pensioners to workforce will drive up welfare costs while shrinking the national revenue base.
Another structural problem is what might be termed the “benefits-ratchet effect.” Redistributive benefits, once given, are politically almost impossible to revoke, even when their costs spiral far beyond original projections. Neither the Gramm-Rudman amendment, nor the Bush deficit-reduction proposals, nor the Clinton budget package recently passed by Congress has addressed the problem of skyrocketing growth in entitlement programs—money which the federal government is required by law to dispense according to rigid formulas that are defended to the hilt by the groups that benefit from them. Only a few of these entitlements are aimed solely at the indigent—most stretch their largesse high up into the middle class and beyond—which is precisely why they have proved impossible to cut. The constituency of beneficiaries has become too large for most political leaders to risk offending.
From which flows still another structural problem—the “electability dilemma.” As public anger with Washington rises, the risks of incumbency increase, making legislators more, not less, cautious about doing anything to alienate voters essential to victory at the polls.
The Clinton budget has not dented these structural barriers to change; in fact, it does precisely what was done in past deficit-reduction packages: postpone all serious cuts to a later date (many of which will be reversed in the end); leave entitlements (the growth of which continues unabated) virtually unscathed; and base all projections on optimistic assumptions of growth and revenue, including the assumption that potential revenue sources will not flee to available tax shelters.
The result of all this is a deficit that is intractable and certain to remain high, a deficit whose causes are completely bipartisan and have nothing to do with which party has occupied the White House or has had a majority in Congress since 1980 or before. Nor could it come at a less propitious time, given the strains on national unity already outlined above. Either the rising factionalism of the post-cold-war era will prevent a solution, or the solution will be so painful as further to aggravate our social divisions.
Reasonable persons may differ over the economic implications of the deficit; many have argued that a $6-trillion economy ought to be able to sustain a $200- to $300-billion deficit indefinitely. But the real implications of the problem are political, not economic. The deficit affects all facets of American government, curtailing the policy options available to national leaders. On the one hand, it has already swallowed up the “peace dividend” that proponents of social spending had hoped to tap. On the other hand, it will force continued cuts in defense spending and thereby make it difficult to sustain American military power: we will withdraw from the world as much for want of money as for want of will.
Rising public resentment over the failure of Washington to address the deficit has already spawned both the anti-incumbent movement and the Ross Perot phenomenon. Other challenges to the status quo no doubt lie ahead—new political ideologies, other charismatic leaders, third-party movements, voter-mobilization drives, term-limitation efforts, recalls and referenda at the state and local level, and campaigns for constitutional reform, including attempts to call a constitutional convention under Article V of the Constitution. None of this will necessarily be destabilizing—some of it may even be healthy and necessary—but it does suggest that a volatile political decade or more lies ahead of us.
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Lastly there is the crisis of American values. Every society, however pluralistic it may be, however much it may tolerate and respect divergent viewpoints and styles, must nevertheless have some common set of values to anchor its institutions. Tocqueville acknowledged this in the first volume of Democracy in America:
I will never admit that men constitute a social body simply because they obey the same head and the same laws. Society can exist only when a great number of men consider a great number of things under the same aspect, when they hold the same opinions upon many subjects, and when the same occurrences suggest the same thoughts and impressions to their minds.
This does not mean that social stability requires unanimity or that everyone in a society should be expected to hold to the same views and values or lead a common life. It means only that in any society capable of functioning as a society, there will always be some values that the vast majority will accept and defend, regardless of their other differences.
Yet the past three or four decades have witnessed a shift in influential sectors of American society away from a commitment to such values and toward an overarching moral relativism that simply refuses to admit that any point of view can possibly have greater validity than any other. In our universities—and even in many of our churches—basic American political values are regularly, even stridently, dismissed as instruments of repression by the reigning power structure, having no intrinsic moral worth or legitimacy. And in our schools the failure to defend and teach basic standards of civil behavior is resulting in a generation incapable of drawing moral distinctions—a generation devoid of any sense of what is right or wrong, or that there may even be a right or a wrong. A 1,740-percent increase in the number of children and teenagers treated for knife and gunshot wounds since 1986 cannot possibly be attributed to poverty or rising racism alone. It suggests, rather, that a society which treats almost every form of behavior as no better or worse than any other will be unable to make a strong enough case even against violence.
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We are, then, entering a season of sharpening internal strains, during which the United States may be as badly divided along partisan, class, ethnic, gender, and ideological lines as it was along sectional lines in the 1850’s. In a polity that has no purely national basis to fall back on, such cleavages may portend serious and even violent upheaval. If the above trends were to continue unabated, they would eventually lead to the destabilization of our political system and its replacement either by unrelieved anarchy or a more authoritarian form of rule.
But even assuming that large-scale political upheaval is averted, we are bound to witness a difficult period of growing public alienation from the political process, rising racial tensions and unrest in the inner cities, partisan and ideological acrimony, deepening social divisions, escalating violence among the young, political radicalism on our campuses, one-term presidents, and breathtaking political turmoil.
We may also see a variety of attempts to solve all these problems through foreign diversion: finding or inventing enemies (Japan is a likely candidate) against which united efforts can be directed. But unless we are forced to resolve our differences by the rise of a genuine military adversary—an eventuality no sane person could possibly hope for—there can be little doubt that a turbulent domestic storm lies ahead. When it breaks, it may take miracles of leadership as great as any we have witnessed in the past to keep the miracle of this venerable democracy alive.
