There was a time when the Soviet Union was a leading beacon of progress for the world. In 1919, Lincoln Steffens, an American journalist visited the new revolutionary state and proclaimed “I have seen the future and it works!” By the 1930s, with the “liberal” West in the convulsions and dreariness of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was again held out as a model for the world. Since it had been economically isolated in retaliation for the Bolshevik revolution, the USSR had little choice but to go it alone. It was also a pioneer in state-directed economic management driving the most rapid modern industrialization program in history. As a result its relative economic success in the 1930s (the foundation for its strength against the Nazis in the 1940s), made it a formidable role model across the world in the 1950s and ‘60s.

We know now that this leap forward was to collapse a few decades later. We have known for some time (although not then) the brutal costs paid by the peoples of the USSR for this over-centralization of power.

My topic today, however, is not the Soviet system’s successes or failures. Rather, I want to highlight the precariousness of the current American image in the world.

While the US was eventually dominant in the global cultural cold war of the 20C, the competition between the US and China in the 21C could well come out differently. The smugness of the ‘90s about the triumphalism of the modern/liberal/Western/capitalist approach to the world was severely punctured on 9/11. Still, the absence, until recently, of any viable competitor has made it easy for Americans to pretend that our exceptionalism was unique/inevitable/eternal and to dismiss the Chinese as parvenus, whose dictatorial tendencies and inscrutable language made them—at most—problematic.

The expectation that China will overtake the US in terms of GDP in the next decade and the emergence of China as an active wielder of the world’s second most powerful military will affect our broad understanding of the two countries’ relationship. But these phenomena will not be tangible to most folks whether Chinese, American, or otherwise.

Instead, the two biggest developments of the last 12 months have the potential to shift the global perceptions of these two giants. China has successfully managed the outbreak of the Coronavirus and the US has been incompetent. Both in terms of culture and governmental power, China has got the pandemic under control and those who challenge its success on the ground of the surrender or suppression of individual liberty must get past a tall list of deaths, disabilities, disease, and economic pain at both the macro and micro levels as an “acceptable” cost for political “freedom” and cultural individualism.

The insurrectionist spasm at the Capitol on January 6 could profoundly undercut the US as a role model for the rest of the world. As one Columbian newspaper asked: “Who’s the banana republic now?” There are many reasons (economic inequality, racial treatment, hyper-active military) why the US’ global image has plausibly suffered of late, but Confederate flags in the halls of Congress make it difficult for us to claim to be the “shining city on a hill” of our national mythology. Even if Trump is an aberration as a person, the endorsement of over a quarter of Congress undermines our desperate claims that “this is not who we are.” To the extent we have been successful in promoting democracy on a global basis, there are many countries who manage better-run (and more-widely accepted) electoral systems than we operate. [What would it mean for Rudy Giuliani to be as passionate about real voter suppression as he has been about his fantasies?]

China recognizes and is taking advantage of this, as they have generally, as Trumpian withdrawal of American presence and influence across the world has created opportunities for the opportunistic and ambitious Chinese. They are often clumsy and prone to repeat the arrogance of American power in countries around the world, but they are also sufficiently savvy to repress freedoms in Hong Kong and across China itself just when the US is hobbled from its usual finger-pointing about the global preservation of democracy.

Beyond the fact that the “leader of the free world” is MIA when it comes to freedom, our sorry performance in pandemic management undermines our claim to technocratic and moral leadership. While our science has performed miracles, our social fabric has unraveled. At a global level, this is evident in our refusal to join the world-wide vaccine alliance.

Global public opinion is no longer limited to gentlemen who can decipher the discreet implications of the Times (of London). The social and traditional media of the 21C ensure that ordinary people around the world will see these pictures and words and have some sense of our fumbling pandemic management. What happens in the US is still far more likely to show up on the news everywhere just because we are the center of the media universe. The pictures and numbers of the impact of the pandemic are all the more startling to those who expected that, if we were going to hoard our resources in order to take care of our own, we would at least do a better job of it.

PR matters. Soft power matters. Geopolitics is not just about the range and sophistication of drones  and the number of “feet-on-the-ground.” Regardless of bragging rights, there is something in the argument that it is in the American national interest to have friends overseas (lots of them!). There is something in the argument that we have something important to offer to others to see our example (positive and negative).

Our self-inflicted wounds will require considerable attention if we are to heal for our own benefit. They will require more and attention if we are to resume the effort to show other countries “how its done.”

It might be that China’s pandemic-management success is an echo of the Soviet’s industrialization and growth of the 1920s and ‘30s and that the underlying hollowness of an unconstrained bureaucratic system will, in due time, become clear. Or, it might be that we will look back on the US of 2020 and say: “I have seen the past, and it didn’t work.”

(“Who will watch the watchmen?”)

The answer we have been living under for 230+ years was famously laid out by Montesquieu and realized in the doctrine of separation of powers in the Constitution. Under this model, each of the “three branches of government”: legislative, executive, and judicial is supposed to be limited in its natural tendency to accumulate power by the countervailing authorities of the other two. Despite the wide range of the ordinary jousting between and carping about each branch from advocates of the other two, the only fundamental shift among the three since the early 19C has been the accumulation of discretion by the executive branch, which has been driven particularly by the increasing breadth of governmental action and responsibility, as well as military technologies which have altered the nature of the nominally limited Presidential war powers.

Another change, however, calls out for remediation: the embedded nature of the political class as a whole which has manifested in members of Congress serving for multiple decades with little competition, hideous gerrymandering, an ossified duopoly of political parties, and election mechanisms corrupted long before Citizens United (2010). We have created a political oligarchy whose differences from the “democratic centralism” practiced by the Chinese Communist Party are far fewer than we would like to think. And, as is the nature of oligarchies, they prefer to “police” themselves, with the result that, once in office, Congressional “Ethics” Committees are a joke (Congress writes its own special health insurance and pension rules and exempts itself from standard rules preventing discrimination and abuse) and impeachment has descended into political theater.

Addressing these concerns will require a set of Constitutional changes that go beyond the simple tinkering of imposing term limits and reserving political speech rights to actual persons (i.e., excluding corporations). Efforts in the post-Watergate era which led to the creation of the Federal Election Commission (another model of bureaucratic toothlessness) were well intended but ran headlong into the power of incumbency and First Amendment sanctimoniousness.  When ordinary political processes have been corrupted, expecting them to produce useful and meaningful controls is naïve.

In The Republic, Plato proposed that a council of Guardians, made up of a small group of the wisest, best educated men, would be the best form of government. Such an approach doesn’t sit well in a democratic age with risks of corruption and difficulties of selection looming large. Nor does the closest current example: the Iranian Republic, bode well for a plenary, omnicompetent group dictatorship.

Perhaps a blending of Socrates and Montesquieu might be an improvement. A council of the wise whose scope of authority was limited to electoral and governmental integrity. They would be charged with administering electoral laws and constitutional provisions, including limitations on expenditures and methods, processes of selecting candidates, demarking electoral districts, and hearing allegations of corruption and other improper behavior on the part of elected officials.

A group of 5-7 members, eligible for a single term of 5-10 years, prohibited from further participation in politics and government (for themselves and their immediate families) could be trusted to act for the public good. Two members would be chosen by each house of Congress (using weighted voting to limit majority domination) plus three members to be chosen by the Supreme Court.

This Democracy Council would combine aspects of a standard administrative agency (including a combination of rule-making and enforcing powers), the recent upsurge in state-created citizen redistricting commissions, and Congressional “Ethics” Committees. Funding would be constitutionally guaranteed at a multiple of the budget of the Supreme Court.

A fourth arm of government might seem too radical, but this Democracy Council might be seen as at least half a branch. Judicial in stature, legislative in powers, but with a limited jurisdiction and enforcement powers, it might be an important step in restoring confidence in the democratic process. There are many examples of election commissions used in other countries, some of which have maintained integrity and independence from incumbent governments, from which we could draw lessons.

After a recent posting here, my friend Trevor Getz challenged me to respond to a recent article in The Atlantic about the views of entomologist-turned-psychohistorian Peter Turchin. The subtitle reads: “A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news.”

Now, whenever a historian offers predictions, check your wallet, and whenever someone talks about the “laws” of history, find another conversation—quick!

I have to say that I share Turchin’s medium-term pessimism about US society and global economic and ecological outlooks. However, having read some of his other work, I don’t share his methodology or certainty.

In fact, when I first looked at this article about Turchin and predictions, I immediately thought of Gavrilo Principe, the Serbian assassin of Archduke Ferdinand, whose pistol provided the spark that set off World War I. It is not too much to say that if the ‘barista’ at the Sarajevo Starbucks (avant le lettre) had taken an extra couple of minutes preparing Principe’s macchiato, then Principe would not have been in a position to shoot the Archduke when the latter’s car stopped to back up after making a wrong turn, right on the corner where Principe was sipping his brew. Then: no July Crisis, no mobilizations, no war (at least not the one we got and any other would have sent the world in quite another direction). It was, in short, a fluke. No “laws” of history, psychohistory, or cliometrics (statistical analysis of history) could have predicted it.

Similarly, if you had asked a hundred political scholars and pundits in late 2014 who would be elected President two years later, a certain orange-coiffed individual would have never been mentioned. Nor, to take our immediate situation, were any of the prognostications about 2020 made just a year ago worth the electrons they are printed on. In fact, (as was much noted at the time) a shift of only 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have swung the 2016 election. And, as an echo (though much less covered in the media), a shift of about 42,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have re-elected the President. That is not to say that Clinton’s election in 2016 would have disrupted Turchin’s diagnosis, nor that the Biden victor will do so; merely to note that a swing of 3% of 1% of the vote certainly qualifies as a contingency, which sends the universe barreling down a different course.

Is it possible to extrapolate trends and find some patterns as bases of prediction? Sure. But, as I have said in other contexts, “The only thing we know about a strategic plan is that it’s one thing that won’t come to pass.” Can bright people, working at a sufficiently large scale, find some useful insights about the nature of human development? Absolutely. However, to project these into the future is another matter. There’s a big gap between plausibility and likelihood; a few seers are ever audited.

All these predictions depend on the (often unspoken) principle of “ceteris paribus,” a delightful Latin phrase which we know “all else being equal.” Great for economists and other simplifiers; but, history is replete with contingencies, personalities, and other surprises that have laid around every corner. And, if a contingency doesn’t show up, then the predictor is more likely to be right, at least directionally. I can think of a dozen plausible contingencies—some good, some bad—that would toss every prediction of the next twenty years into the garbage. So can you.

Moreover, projecting cycles of history (as Turchin does) is a practice as old as the Mayans and Tibetans. It doesn’t take much to look backward and see a rich list of “the rise and fall of ____.” Paul Kennedy did much the same as Turchin with historical grounding and considerable insight in his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in 1987. (It’s all just an analogy from Newton: gravity, inertia, and all that.) Rejecting rigid cycles as a historical model is not to embrace the Enlightenment-driven contrary view that we are on an inexorable path to the “sun-lit uplands” of human civilization (to steal Churchill’s phrase). Perhaps, as Steven Pinker has argued in a couple of recent books, things have been getting better (civilizationally) for the past several hundred years. Will it continue? No one knows.

I was glad to see that Turchin acknowledged his intellectual debt to Isaac Asimov, whose sci-fi Foundation series (1950-52) included a character named Hari Selden. Selden, too, claimed to have discovered the laws of human behavior on a universal scale which enabled him to predict the course of developments far into the future. This science of “psychohistory” worked for a while, but then got knocked off course in a big-and-dramatic way by a mutant fluke, until some new heroes came to save the day. Perhaps Asimov was trying to re-establish Enlightenment optimism after European civilization had been knocked off course by Gavrilo Principe and Adolf Hitler.

Turchin may be right about his theory that our society will crash under the weight of too many in the “elite” class, or Piketty may be right that the cause will be that group having too much money. But we don’t need history to teach us the morality of inequality or social distension. We should fix them on our own, even if they won’t drive us over the cliff. Ditto on climate.
History, as I have argued several times in this blog, is great for many purposes (and it’s fun, too). But the future,… it’s a mystery.