July 13, 2012
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
Voltaire
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
C. J. Jung
Dear Friends,
During a colloquium hosted last month by the Carnegie Endowment on an insightful new book entitled, “The Dictator’s Learning Curve” (William Dobson, Doubleday) I began thinking about TMR’s buckling bookshelves, which are weighted down with works assessing America’s role in the changing global order of the 21st century.
The connection was triggered by an exchange between Carnegie’s host scholar, Karim Sadjadpour (who knows a thing or two about dictators and dictatorships,) and the author, Will Dobson, in which the term “Dictatorship 2.0” emerged as a way of distinguishing between “the good old days” when the likes of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, or the Samozas of Nicaragua held sway with the usual tools of force and torture, and today’s crop that must navigate in a universe where Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and you-name-it have made the profession far more demanding.
“It’s hard to be a dictator these days,” Dobson observed, and that led to some thoughts about how difficult it is to be a democrat these days, as well.
Political leadership, whether of the Dictatorship 1.0 or Democracy 1.0 doctrine, has fallen on hard times. Strong leaders need strong followers, and both brands have lost an ‘iron grip’ on their followers, which may be the most salient political fact of these times – accounting for the sense of possibility and potential in states where dictatorships have ruled for so long, and for the sense of angst and agita in those where democracy has been in place for decades or centuries.
And while the reasons for these changing circumstances vary from country to country, it is the same array of digital communications tools, software, and apps that are fueling the transformations.
It has become difficult to hide, to keep secrets, and to keep the ‘outside world’ out – a fact that North Korea’s newest Kim may learn a thing or two about in the years ahead.
Back to that bookshelf, to questions about America’s posture in the emerging global order, and to a fresh look at American Exceptionalism.
First, an anecdotal observation.
There’s less talk these days about America being “the only global superpower,“ and even the voices trumpeting “American Exceptionalism” have been muted.
Why might that be?
Well, let’s consider some data on education, health care, and economic mobility, and some other factors, as well.
According to an OECD study, the U. S. spending per K-12 student is higher than all other countries, except Switzerland; and yet American students rank 14th in reading literacy, 25th in mathematics, and 17th in science.
High school graduation rates are lower than the rates of the UK, Switzerland, Norway, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Finland and Denmark. And the number of who earn college degrees places America 16th, while the number who earn graduate degrees puts us in 12th place.
Add to this that while the U.S. has roughly 36% of the world's college graduates in the 55-to-64 age bracket, it has just 20% percent in the 25-to-34 age range.
Something’s going on here.
According to a World Health Organization report, the U. S. ranks 37th in terms of “overall effectiveness” of its health care system, 38th in life expectancy, 29th in infant mortality, 20th out of 92 countries in childhood obesity, and 1st among 28 OECD countries for adult obesity.
In a 2010 study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, America ranked last when compared to the six other nations, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand; as the report found, “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system.”
Another of the “wither factors” is the ‘hollowing out’ of America’s middle class, which the Financial Times’ Ed Luce writes about in his new book, “Time To Start Thinking:”
“For the first time in modern history the majority of American households were poorer at the end of a business cycle than at the beginning (2002 to 2007). Since then things have gotten worse.
“In the last full American business cycle, between 2002 and 2007, the top one in one hundred Americans captured almost two-thirds of the all growth while the top one in one thousand Americans (0.1 percent) captured more than a third of the economy’s growth.”
And yet in the most recent OECD study of household income, we are solidly in first place – more than $32,000, leading Canada, Switzerland, UK, Norway, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, and Sweden.
So, we’re the richest,
We rank first on defense spending in real dollars ($711 billion) and as a percentage of GDP (4.3 %; only Saudi Arabia exceeds that). All told, we account for 41% of military-related spending.
We rank first in per capita incarceration rates (730 per 100,000) versus the UK (90th), China (121st), Canada (130th), Germany (132nd), and France (161st.)
And we rank first in ‘billionaires,’ 425 out of the universe of 1200, followed by Russia (96) and China (95,) data points your grandfather would find inconceivable.
So, where does this leave us in our consideration of whether American exceptionalism is withering, treading water, or just having a “bad hair” decade or two?
As the distinguished historian Robert Kagan writes in his magisterial volume, “Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century:”
“The first American exceptionalism was really an English exceptionalism, the first American mission an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, imperial mission.”
And in what would undoubtedly shock today’s most bombastic “American exceptionalists,” Kagan offered this thought:
“What has been said of Russia, that it found its security only in the insecurity of others, could be said of the colonial Anglo-Americans, too. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they purchased their security at the price of the insecurity, and often the ruin, of Pequot, Iroquois, and Narragansett, of French and Spaniards, and by the time of the Revolution, of the British, too.”
Thus, it began with the Creator’s gift of geography, was animated by the arrival of religious utopians, followed by a generation or two of their native born sons and daughters, students of the Enlightenment, political pioneers who gave us the founding contours, principles, and even an operating system for the American republic.
Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, and back to Kagan in his newest book, “The World America Made:”
“Perhaps democracy has spread to over a hundred nations since 1950 not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy. Perhaps the stunning global economic growth of the past six decades reflects an economic order shaped by the world’s leading free-market economy. Perhaps the era of peace we have known has something to do with the enormous power wielded by one nation.”
Virtually all serious scholars who have examined the ‘whither’ or ‘wither’ question in this century have reached two conclusions: first, that the preservation and expansion of the liberal democratic order in the post-great war period of the 20th century owes most to American leadership; and second, that while it is unclear whether America will be primus inter pares, a “frugal superpower,” as Michael Mandelbaum has predicted, or the “largest minority shareholder in the global order LLC," as Brookings’ Bruce Jones has described, no other nation or group of nations is preparing to assume the lead position.
And thus, we are left with uncertainty, which Voltaire reminds us is vastly preferable to certitude.
Jung’s observation suggests that in order to successfully navigate the transition from Democracy 1.0 to Democracy 2.0, we must disenthrall ourselves from the dream and deal with the reality – as individual citizens, who bear much of the responsibility for the condition of the republic; and as a polity, where our political institutions must find ways of delivering results instead of dividing us further.
But how? Indeed, how?
Not easily or evenly. And probably not without a “transforming transaction,” the prospect of which seems more elusive than finding the Higgs Boson particle, aka, “The God Particle.”
And on that point, it turns out that the term “God particle,” derives not from theological inspiration, but from a 1993 book on Higgs' particle by physicist, Leon Lederman, whose title was “The Goddamn Particle,” until a politically correct publisher intervened and shortened it to a term whose meaning is lost today.
American Exceptionalism needs its ‘goddamn particle,’ and the sooner the better.
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