America as Rome (in decline)

James Fallows of The Atlantic has written a great article ("How America Can Rise Again") about the state of America's malaise: Are we in decline? Are we Rome? He's just returned from living in China for three years, and that experience along with his many years of interernational travel lead him to believe that American society is as vibrant and adaptive as ever. Anxiety about America's decline has been with us since the birth of the republic, he writes, even though measuring ourselves against other powers (which these days means China) has really only been an issue since World War II.

Our true worry, he believes, is whether our government has become too fixed in its way to continue to adapt along with the private sector:

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. If Henry Adams were whooshed from his Washington of a century ago to our Washington of today, he would find it shockingly changed, except for the institutions of government. Same two political parties, same number of members of the House (since 1913, despite more than a threefold increase in population), essentially same rules of debate in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.

Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

Unfortunately, Fallows isn't particularly hopeful. He notes that most of the world's democracies are parliamentarian and wonders if our founders may have made some mistakes in designing our own legislature (e.g. the Senate, where more than half of the U.S. population is represented by only 20 of the 100 total votes and which frequently require a 60% supermajority to pass any legislation).

Fallows' assessment of our options as a nation match my own worries about the prospect of getting older:

Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But [historian Kevin] Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional—but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time—and our children’s, and their grandchildren’s—rather than succumb.

Fallows' article includes this quote from John Adams:

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Which returns me to thoughts of "Ozymandias" and the impermanence of all that happens on this pale blue dot. And to the enigmatic words of Candide, that "we must cultivate our garden."