american experiment failed

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The Beginning of the End of the American Experiment

In 2020, impeachment and a bitterly contested election tested the nation’s legal system. The checks and balances designed by the Founders frayed in the face of extreme partisanship, exposing the limits of Americans’ commitment to the rule of law.

Editor’s Note: How will 2020 go down in history? In the Hindsight 20/20 project from The Colorado Magazine , twenty of today's most insightful historians and thought leaders imagine themselves in 2120, looking back on 2020 and sharing their visions of how that year will stand the test of time.

A hundred years ago was the beginning of the end of the American Experiment.

How did multiple and inequitable pandemics—Covid-19, systemic racial violence, climate change—lead to a nation’s sudden decline? Seemingly lost in assessments of that year, but fundamental to an understanding of that age, was the infection inflicted upon the rule of law.

The first symptoms of this legal pandemic came on December 18, 2019. For only the third time in US history, a sitting president was impeached when the House of Representatives invoked its powers under Article II, section 4, of the Constitution against President Donald J. Trump. Congress specifically brought Articles of Impeachment against the president for abusing his power for political gain in his dealings with Ukraine and for obstructing Congress in its subsequent investigation. After an abbreviated Senate “trial” in which a majority of the senators refused to hear testimony from key actors involved in the allegations, the Senate chose not to convict the president on either count in February 2020.

Up until 2020, Congress had used its impeachment power sparingly. Although the constitutional framers understood the gravity of a president’s dereliction of duties, they knew well that impeachment could expose deep, sometimes irreconcilable divisions in civic life. With that check in mind, only one impeachment of a sitting president occurred between 1787 and 1997. The impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1997 set in motion the process the framers had feared and when Congress first attempted to bring Trump to account, it hastened deep divisions. After that, like any pandemic, the number of outbreaks exponentially grew and impacted almost all areas of life.

The Colorado Supreme Court courtroom, located in the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver.

To be sure, 2020 represented a microcosm of what was to come in an America dealing with endemic racial violence, deep-rooted economic insecurity, the contested role of science in dealing with its most intractable problems, the continued aggrandizement of wealth and power, and the corruption of those who most benefited by the perpetuation of the status quo. In the face of all this, legal institutions at every level buckled under accusations of illegitimacy, irrelevance, and inequity. State and federal courts handcuffed public health professionals’ ability to respond effectively to the Covid-19 spread. Politicians quietly dismantled regulations to protect ecosystems. Police brazenly disregarded the lives of Black men, women, and children. Redress could not be found in stacked courts.

It came as almost a surprise when the Supreme Court in December 2020 rejected what many called an “audacious legal bid” to disenfranchise millions of voters in key battleground states in the presidential election. Part of more than sixty lawsuits (only one successful) orchestrated by the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, legal attacks against public officials and civil servants only served to feed a political frenzy never before seen in America. This pandemic crested on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of insurrectionists, inspired by Trump and scores of elected politicians, stormed the US Capitol, coming within seconds of physically assaulting the elected representatives and senators assembled to confirm a peaceful and orderly transition of presidential power.

Authority of Law by James Earle Fraser sits beneath the West Pediment of the US Supreme Court Building in Washington DC.

On January 13, 2021, Trump was impeached a second time. The resulting trial only confirmed the rapid acceleration of the contagion that infected a body politic in 2020. A lack of accountability for brazen individual and institutional failures symbolized a venomous assault on fellow Americans under the guise of law. Without a shared understanding of how the scales of justice should tip, the year exposed an American legal tradition barely clinging to life.

More from the Hindsight 20/20 project in The Colorado Magazine

The Good Old Days   Coloradans of 2020 seemed unaware of just how good they really had it. A time of relative peace and plenty, it’s a year that we look back on with a sense of longing and nostalgia given the War of Disunion and the myriad other woes that we’ve endured in the century since .

American Studies 102: Survey of 21st Century US “Race” Relations   A twenty-second-century American Studies professor looks back at the antiquated notion of “race” that prevailed in 2020, when high-profile incidents of anti-Blackness sparked the War of Reckoning and, ultimately, the Great Reconciliation.

Our Strength is Our Union   We've learned a lot (that we didn't want to know) about life during a global pandemic. Mark Earnest examines how a society enshrined one generation's learning so that it became durable for future generations to draw upon. A century later we consider: How long does a society retain the lessons we learn?

The American Experiment

Exploring the revolutionary form of government created in 1787 and its evolution over time . These are stories and essays about the American Experiment through the generations – from the beginning of the experiment in the American Revolution and the creation of the U.S. Constitution – through the 19th century of relatively minor adjustments in the experiment – and down through the 20th century of more significant changes in the American Experiment. This journey might even encompass some exploration into the 21st century and our current generation. Because the experiment was started by the Founding Fathers, we will begin our story with a panoramic view of their legacy in The Legacy Papers .

Table of Contents

August 31, 2024 — the experiment papers, no. 4 – the crisis of totalitarianism and world war (1933-1945), november 15, 2022 — the experiment papers, no. 3 – the era of reunification and progressivism (1865-1932), september 30, 2022 — the summer of hamilton – hamilton: an american musical and the american experiment, april 4, 2022 — the experiment papers, no. 2 – the crisis of slavery and civil war (1854-1865), january 1, 2022 — the experiment papers, no. 1 – the era of securing the american revolution (1801-1854).

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Author Interviews

Can american democracy survive the pressure it's under a historian has an answer.

NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to historian Allen Guelzo about his book, Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment .

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America's Failing Experiment

How we the people have become the problem, kirby goidel, also available.

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Snap Out of It, America!

A new series from Times Opinion exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment.

Credit... O.O.P.S.

Supported by

By Ezekiel Kweku

Mr. Kweku is the Opinion politics editor.

• July 2, 2021

This article originally appeared in the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

America used to be a young country. And in its youth, it changed as it grew, the idea of what was American as malleable as the idea of what was America. The country expanded its borders, abolished slavery, broadened the franchise; waves of immigrants reshaped and revised America’s character; the government added and dropped functions, amending the Constitution to fit the times. It was a restless experiment.

That restless spirit was reflected in the country’s pomp and pageantry, too. For more than 150 years, the United States had no official national anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” shuffled among “Hail, Columbia” and “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee)”; the design of the flag shifted with the states and with fashion.

But America is not young anymore. Whereas it was once spry and excitable, it is now creaky and soft. The country that passed Prohibition and created Social Security now spends decades dithering over how large a role the government should play in health care. The country that went to the moon shrinks at the challenges presented by climate change. Its bold and expansive political imagination has atrophied.

There are, of course, reasons for this settling. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr argues in a guest essay, hard partisanship makes it difficult to create coalitions for sweeping changes. Wars, which once smashed through gridlock, no longer lead to collective action.

Not all of the big changes were completely — or even ambiguously — good. The economic boom of the industrial age was fueled by the blood and sweat of exploited workers; the country’s westward expansion came at the expense of Native Americans. But America in its youth was a country confident and unafraid to confront the future. What if it could recover that spirit of invention and restlessness, the risk-taking that formed this country? What would it change? What could it be?

This is the idea behind Snap Out of It, America!, a new series from Times Opinion. It will present not a single, cohesive vision but an array of ambitious ideas from across the ideological spectrum to revitalize and renew the American experiment.

The series opens with two pieces, alongside Mr. Immerwahr’s diagnosis of the stagnant American spirit. The writer and activist Astra Taylor outlines the case for total debt forgiveness — a debt jubilee inspired by the Bible and Reconstruction — and the historian Jonathan Holloway envisions a bold way to bind together our jostling, multicultural society: a year of compulsory national service as a civic rite of passage.

Snap Out of It, America! will run on Wednesdays throughout the summer. I hope you’ll find food for thought and fuel for your own political imaginations.

Ezekiel Kweku is the Opinion politics editor. He joined the Times in 2020 from New York magazine.

Snap Out of It, America! A series exploring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment

It’s Time to Dream Again

by Ezekiel Kweku

The Strange, Sad Death of America’s Political Imagination

by Daniel Immerwahr

To Unite a Divided America, Make People Work for It

By Jonathan Holloway

Make Americans’ Crushing Debt Disappear

by Astra Taylor

America Needs To Break Up Its Biggest States

by Noah Millman

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America's Failing Experiment: How We the People Have Become the Problem Hardcover – December 12, 2013

• Print length 232 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date December 12, 2013
• Dimensions 5.81 x 0.88 x 8.74 inches
• ISBN-10 1442226501
• ISBN-13 978-1442226500
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Illustrated edition (December 12, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 232 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1442226501
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1442226500
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About the author

Robert k. goidel.

Kirby Goidel is a professor in the Department of Communication and the Public Policy Research Institute at Texas A&M University. Previously, he was the Scripps Howard Professor of Mass Communication and a Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He is a co-editor of the journal Survey Practice, sponsored by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR); the co-author of two books, Money Matters: Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform in U.S. House Elections (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999) and The States of the Campaign Finance Reform (Ohio State University Press, 2003); and the editor of Political Polling in a Digital Age (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), a collection of essays exploring the future of public opinion research in light of technological changes and increasingly difficult to reach populations. He has published over 30 articles in a wide range of political science and mass communication journals, including Public Opinion Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Social Science Quarterly, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

He received his PhD from the University of Kentucky in 1993 and has taught previously at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and Indiana State University, where he also served as department chair. At Indiana State University, he wrote an editorial column for the Terre Haute Tribune Star, including a Hoosier State Press Award winning column written in the aftermath of 9/11. At LSU, he has contributed as a blogger for Patchwork Nation (currently sponsored by the Jefferson Institute and formerly sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor), served as a guest host and contributing partner on the statewide public affairs program Louisiana Public Square, is a regular guest on local talk radio programs, and is a widely quoted source for news stories on politics.

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The end of American history begins in America

America’s aggressions around the globe have now come full circle and boomeranged into its domestic affairs.

Therefore, good Brutus, be prepared to hear.

And since you know you cannot see yourself

So well as by reflection, I, your glass,  

Will modestly discover to yourself  

That of yourself which you yet know not of.    

Cassius, in Shakespeare’s Julius Cesare (Act 1 Scene 2)    

Has the American experiment failed and ended?   Are we on the cusp of a post-American world?   In the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama, a bureaucratic functionary at the US Department of State, had declared, with much pomp and ceremony, that “history” had ended and America was the triumphant trophy of liberal democracy.   Had he inadvertently played a satirical spoof to the end of American history itself?    

A mere quarter of a century later, with Donald Trump leading the United States in one calamity after another, people have begun speculating the very end of America.  

While North American and Western European observers are deeply concerned about the end of the American empire, the rest of the world oscillates between a sigh of relief at the prospect and a sense of wonder and amusement as to what exactly this “ending” means.   Will it be with a big bang or just a pathetic whimper?   And while we are at it, when, prithee do tell, did this “leadership of the free world” begin , for it now to end, except with brute military might and a constellation of military bases around the globe to exercise it? 

In a thoughtful recent essay , End of Empire, the eminent American historian Andrew Bacevich has put forward his argument as to why he believes “ the sun has set on the American empire “.   

As a cogent critic of American imperialism, Bacevich’s surgically precise and honest conclusion is now corroborated by the massive uprising against structural poverty and endemic racism setting the streets of major urban areas on fire from coast to coast.    

“The era of US dominion has now passed,”  Bacevich observes,  “ So Americans can no longer afford to indulge in the fiction of their indispensability, cherished in elite circles […] Subordinating the wellbeing of the American people to ostensible imperatives of global leadership – thereby allowing racism, inequality and other problems to fester at home – has become intolerable.”  

What Bacevich outlines in this crucial essay is a constellation of facts – of racism and poverty at home and pathetic and dysfunctional attempts at world domination – that much of the world and in fact, most Americans themselves have known, but which today, during the presidency of Donald Trump and this criminally negligent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been thrown into stark relief.    

Was this America ever a leader or just a bully? Did it ever have the moral authority to shepherd a terrorised Earth?      

Between Fukuyama’s pompous and absurd prognostication and Bacevich’s bold and brilliant insights, we may now wonder when did America begin and where is it wending.  

What happened to the American Century?    

America as an experiment is failing.   Perhaps it was destined to fail from its very beginning.   An idea that began with the genocide of Native Americans, thrived on the sustained course of African slavery, extended its genocidal and racist foregrounding to generations of immigrants who came to its shores to toil and suffer so that the white supremacist settler colonists prosper and enrich generations after generations, had to pay for its continued sins at some point.  

That America is failing is not a new idea or a recent discovery.  It is just that o ver the last three years, in the course of Trump’s presidency, this fact has become glaringly clear for the whole world to see. This particular president has exposed not merely his own personal vulgarity and criminal charlatanism, but also, far more importantly, the self-destructive forces that have shaped and defined this country long before he assumed office.  The viral racism to which Trump caters, and to which millions of Americans respond favourably, and which is the undoing of America, arrived in America from Europe like all other diseases the settler-colonialists brought with them.    

Every country and every clime has its own peculiar political disease. Egypt has given birth to el-Sisi, Russia to Putin, China to Xi, India to Modi, Brazil to Bolsonaro, Myanmar to Aung San Suu Kyi, Iran to Khamenei, Syria to Assad, ad nauseam.   But the point here is the mighty and powerful US and its particular brand of imperial corruption and hubris marking its final dissolution into nullity.    

The open discussions about the end of the American experiment, of course, predate Trump. David S Mason’s The End of the American Century (2009) is a typical example of such analysis in which we read about  the various interrelated phases of social, economic and global unravelling of the US that had begun with World War II.   In his essay, The End of the American Century (2019) George Packer considers the span of the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s life (1941-2010) as the period of the height of American empire, after which things began to fall apart.    

Meanwhile, the delusional imperialists at the political core of the US were busy thinking otherwise.   The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative scheme based in Washington, DC in the late 1990s triumphantly declaring the victory of US-led neoconservative and neoliberal projects, promoting, as they put it, “American global leadership”.   Led by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, all those PNAC characters today look positively ridiculous in their delusions.    

Most of them staunch Zionists, they had translated the pathological colonial interests of Israel into US foreign policy and called it “a new American century!”. Before they were all exposed for their pitiful banality, they had convinced George W Bush and Dick Cheney of their prophetic missions.   They destroyed an entire country, Iraq, with criminal intent, propagating their delusional myth of “American leadership”.     

Today, there are sober Americans like Martin Kaplan who in his 2017 essay  Trump and the End of the American Century   mourns the decline of US leadership, denounces Trump, and then concludes: “We all must respond to the unexpected and depressing challenge of the United States forsaking its historical democratic and human rights leadership, both internationally and within the United States.” But what leadership, the rest of the world may wonder, when, how?  

The ruling caste of the US – from its slave owner founding fathers to its current president – have been the unqualified source of misery inside and outside of the country.   The ending of the calamitous delusion of that history is not something to be mourned.        

The world after the American empire  

A mere 20 years ago the cleanshaven neoconservative gangsters thought they were about to rule the world. Three years into the Trump presidency, amid disastrous public health failures that have exposed millions of Americans to a deadly pandemic, the very economic and human foundation of their republic is going to pieces.   Massive social protest aims at an irrevocable dismantling of American racism.  S treets of Oregon, Seattle, Oakland, Chicago and New York look like scenes from a military coup in Guatemala or Chile.  Meanwhile, l ike a tinpot dictator American racism made us believe could only emerge in Asia, Africa or Latin America, the US president is  dismantling the US postal system to be able to cheat and get himself re-elected.  

America’s aggressions, brutal militarism, and disregard for people’s democratic will around the globe have now come full circle and boomeranged into its domestic affairs.  With  Trump and his Republican followers “kneecapping” the post office, as former President Obama put it, to suppress votes and guarantee the president’s re-election, the US is now en route to an election as ridiculous as the ones we have witnessed in Syria, Egypt or even Iran in the past.    

The post-American world will paradoxically liberate America from its own dangerous delusions and bring American people back to the bosom of humanity at large.   America will only be liberated when it comes to terms with its irredeemable racist history and dismantles all its racist institutions. And the coast to coast uprising we are witnessing today is aiming to do just that: to retrieve the repressed republican aspirations of the best of Americans and use them to dismantle the imperial arrogance of the worst.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.         

Is America a ‘failing state’? How a superpower has been brought to the brink

Lecturer in Politics, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

George Rennie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a sense history had ended , and that the United States represented a supreme endpoint.

Today, the US is not dominant, it is in crisis: convulsed by riots and protest, riven by a virus that has galloped away from those charged with overseeing it, and heading into a presidential election led by a man that has possibly divided the nation like no other before him.

Using the most common metrics available to political scientists, there are signs the United States is failing.

Until very recently, this idea was extraordinary, unthinkable to all but the most radical critics. But, the US is increasingly performing poorly on key predictors of state failure: ethnic and class conflict , democratic and institutional backsliding , and other socioeconomic indicators including healthcare and inequality.

Read more: When Trump attacks the press, he attacks the American people and their Constitution

Ethnic and class conflict

Comparative politics pays great attention to the role of ethnic conflict as a predictor of state failure. Those who study African countries, where most of the flare-ups are currently taking place, often observe that ethnic conflicts are closely correlated with battles to secure key resources , such as water and arable land. This closely relates the study of so-called “ grievance studies ”, which typically regards deep-seated inequalities as causing resource conflicts.

However, it would be a mistake to think this is because of different ethnic groups per se . It is more to do with how inequality and poverty exacerbate perceived racial and cultural fissures. The US reflects this problem, where the experience of many black Americans is telling: they feel “ criminalised at birth ”, and when this perception reaches a critical mass among a large enough population, states fail.

Read more: As Minneapolis burns, Trump's presidency is sinking deeper into crisis. And yet, he may still be re-elected

The global conflict zones that political scientists largely focus on are where groups are fighting for basic resources. These include water , mineral , and other basic economic rights.

So, areas that are deeply impoverished, such as Flint, Michigan , or almost any other recent area of profound socio-economic distress , are highly analogous to failed countries. They have also been some of the biggest challenges to the “united” part of the United States.

Signs of increased economic inequality

Yet, the economic indicators are not only dire for minority groups. America’s economy has grown at a good clip for decades, but the wealth has been taken up almost entirely by the wealthiest. For example, CEOs’ pay went from 20 times the average workers’ salary in 1965 to 278 times their salary in 2018 .

In real terms, only college graduates have seen their pay increase as a group since 1979 , and this occurs while 21% of American children live in poverty . Moreover, health outcomes for Americans are very poor compared to other OECD countries , despite having the highest per capita healthcare costs in the world .

Disproportionately, this is a problem affecting black Americans. This might go some way to explaining recent riots, but is far from a complete picture. All poor Americans are getting relatively poorer , which may also explain why poor white Americans seem increasingly likely to fight against the perceived injustices of other ethnic groups . They do this by pitting themselves against similarly politically and economically disenfranchised groups, rather than the power system that keeps them dispossessed.

Adding to this, a major historical study by Thomas Piketty showed the disconnect between the poorest and wealthiest Americans is getting exponentially worse, the middle class is shrinking, and the wealth of the top 1% is taking up an increasing share of the pie.

Is there a democratic deficit?

This wealth disconnect is increasingly represented as a deficit in democracy. As one study showed , America’s democracy is being seriously undermined.

In fact, “undermined” is putting it mildly: after a rigorous analysis of voting from 1982 to 2002, Gilens and Page showed the preferences of the top 10% routinely trumped those of average voters.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of these findings. As analyses of the 2016 general election showed , the US states that flipped from Democrat to Republican (supposedly part of Hillary Clinton’s “firewall”) were almost exclusively part of the so called “rust belt”. Once part of America’s all-powerful manufacturing base, they are now people who feel forgotten, and increasingly angry.

The black and white, racial narrative of America’s woes misses an important, but even more consequential point: while there is no doubt black Americans are disproportionately suffering, an increasing majority is losing out, regardless of race.

American hope

The American revolution centred on the very sensible idea there should be no taxation without representation. Yet, there is now significant evidence that a majority of citizens are not being represented.

The US has one advantage: for all of its flaws, it remains an at least semi-functional democracy . This may well mean blame for state failure can exist with individuals or parties, rather than the entire system.

However, the democratic institutions of the United States continue to break down, and successive governments have proved unable to respond and listen to their citizens. Bizarrely, by the most important indicators available to political scientists, the United States is failing.

Even among its most ardent critics, few would consider America’s failure to be anything other than a catastrophe. The domestic deterioration of the world’s biggest nuclear and military superpower would prove unprecedented and frightening beyond rational analysis — rhetoric suggesting this is merely the new “fall of Rome” is almost glib.

The challenge now is whether the world’s oldest continuous democracy can live up to its own ideals.

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Is America’s grand experiment with democracy at an end?

Q&A with MPA Director, Eric M. Patashnik and Harvard Business School Professor, Katherine M. Gehl

Q&A with MPA Director, Eric M. Patashnik and Harvard Business School Professor, Katherine M. Gehl 

Democracies are supposed to respond to all of their citizens, yet our American political system – as it exists today – is broken: Our political two-party duopoly caters to highly ideological party primary voters and special interests; erects nearly insurmountable barriers to new competition from independents or third parties; encourages extreme partisanship, rather than compromise; and fails to implement legislation to benefit society at large.   

So wrote Katherine M. Gehl, a business leader and political reformer, and the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School Michael E. Porter, in their essay, “Politics Industry Theory,” in the newly published book, Dynamics of American Democracy: Partisan Polarization, Political Competition, and Government Performance .  The book is co-edited by professors affiliated with the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, Eric Patashnik, Julis-Rabinowitz Professor of Public Policy and director of the MPA Program, and Wendy J. Schiller, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science and chair of political science; and is published by University Press of Kansas.

The Watson Institute spoke with Patashnik and Gehl to learn more about the project. The interviews were lightly edited for clarity and brevity. 

Q: What inspired the development of this book – both its content and its contributors; isn’t it fairly unusual to include the divergent perspectives of both academics and practitioners in a single book? 

Patashnik: Anyone who has watched the American political system over the last 10 or 20 years has to have a sense of deep humility. Few experts predicted that Donald Trump would be elected president in 2016. Almost no one expected the level of partisan polarization to climb this high. Few thought issues like health reform and the environment would become so contentious. Are our governing problems originating in Washington, or do they reflect something happening among the citizenry itself?  We weren’t sure. Rather than presuming the answers, we thought the best way to understand what ails American governance was to bring together leading scholars of the key trends shaping American politics today. We also recognized that scholars don’t have all the answers, and we thought we could learn a lot from the perspective of business leaders who have had experience developing products that respond to public preferences in an era of rapid technological and demographic change.

Q: Who do you hope absorbs the lessons of this book; who is your target audience? 

Patashnik: The book should interest not only scholars but also educated lay readers concerned about American democracy. It is easy to get caught up in current headlines – we hope the book helps readers place current partisan conflicts in a wider historical and conceptual perspective.

Q: Katherine, as a CEO and business leader, what led you to immerse yourself in an effort to understand American politics and advocate for political reform?

Gehl: I was deeply engaged in politics for much of my adult life—and I was increasingly frustrated. I sought improvements through better candidates, or better policy, or better political culture. None of that worked.  

Fortunately, my full-time career was in business. In 2013 I was the CEO of a $250 million high-technology food and beverage manufacturing company in Wisconsin. That’s where the breakthrough happened for me. While I was leading a classic strategy project for my company, I simultaneously uncovered that thinking about politics as an industry and using a competition lens to figure out what was really going on—and going wrong—was illuminating and uniquely helpful. 

In 2015, after selling my company I started focusing on engaging business leaders in political innovation. It didn’t work. I failed. They were missing in action. I realized, I needed to create the business case for investment. I began developing what I call “Politics Industry Theory” to understand what was wrong, identify solutions, and then show how the solutions could happen. In 2016, I invited Michael Porter to join me as my co-author for this “investment case.” Together, we wrote a Harvard Business School report that led to our book, “The Politics Industry,” which was published in 2020. 

Q: The chapter you and Porter wrote asserts that implementing what you call “Final-Five Voting” – a two-pronged election reform that combines open, nonpartisan, top-five primaries and ranked choice voting (RCV) in general elections—would promote more political competition and winners who have support from the majority of the electorate. Fewer than a dozen countries offer RCV in one or more of their elections; they range from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to Fiji, Malta, and New Guinea. Do these countries’ RCV offer a roadmap for the United States to follow? 

Gehl: We can certainly learn from the successes and tribulations of political innovations in other countries, but the institutional contexts are somewhat different. Fortunately, we will soon have a real-life look at the system in action in the U.S.  The state of Alaska just passed a measure somewhat similar to what we are proposing—Final-Four Voting—which will take effect in 2022. We look forward to studying the effects of this and other political reforms.

Q:  Has there been evidence of either less political polarization or higher percentages of eligible voters turning out to vote after countries implemented RCV? 

Gehl: There is evidence to support both of those benefits—and the theory suggests we would expect those benefits here in the U.S. as well. Having said that, it’s important to note that the outcomes we target with Final-Five Voting are results and accountability. Higher turnout and a “less divided” country per se, while laudable, would fall far short of our goal. What people really need and want from politics is better results.  That’s one of the reasons I take care to primarily refer to this work as political innovation—because it doesn’t just address symptoms or improve ideals. It really gets to the root cause and affects the likelihood that the system delivers what citizens need.

Q: In the November elections, Alaska voters approved a ballot initiative to use RCV in their elections, but Massachusetts voters rejected a similar measure. What do you make of these outcomes? 

Gehl: Change isn’t a straight line. So, it’s disappointing, but not any sign that this isn’t the right direction—though it’s definitely a sign that the message didn’t get out to enough voters in Massachusetts. 

Having said that, it is important to note that the ballot measure in Massachusetts was RCV alone, whereas the measure in Alaska was Final-Four Voting (i.e., the combination of top-four primaries and ranked choice voting general elections). That’s not a small difference. The combination of incentives in Final-Four Voting has a much more profound impact on the freedom and agency our congresspeople have to legislate in the public interest—and, if Alaska is an early indicator, of how voters feel about its addressing what they don’t like in our current system. My fervent hope is that the next time Massachusetts votes on an election reform, it will be for the combination innovation, Final-Five Voting.

Q: This book was published in the midst of election-related crises: A significant minority of the population refuses to believe that the election was fair and honest and a federal government official has willfully refused to allow official transition processes to get underway. How do these factors, plus the president’s refusal to concede the election, make your book’s messages more relevant to preserving American democracy? 

Patashnik: I think our book highlights the dangers of political tribalism, and the existential fear that exists among a portion of the electorate—especially among a segment of the Republican base—that losing an election now means not only that your side didn’t win, but that your identity and way of life is under threat. There is no doubt that the Trump presidency exacerbated political tribalism, but the forces are so strong now it is not clear that even a centrist Biden presidency will be able to tame them.

Q: Is there political will – among political leaders or voters – to reform our voting system and processes to encourage legislators to actually meet the needs of their constituents through good governmental policies? Do you see any evidence of such will at any level of government? 

Gehl: The movement for these non-partisan systems changes to our elections has grown dramatically since I started this work more than seven years ago. I do a lot of work with business leaders, and we really see buy-in there. As Michael and I wrote in a Harvard Business Review article that came out at the same time as the book, “There is no greater threat to our economic competitiveness and social progress than our passive acceptance of a failed political system. Business leaders would not tolerate such performance in any of their organizations. Rather, they would diagnose the problem, design a solution, take action, and fix it. Business leaders, right alongside other citizens, can and must do the same for our politics. Now.”

The thing is, we’ve got to be working on solutions that are both powerful and achievable. Many political reform efforts are powerful enough to affect results (e.g., non-partisan redistricting) or not achievable, in any realistic time frame (e.g., constitutional amendments for reducing corporate money in politics) or both (e.g., term limits).  Final-Five Voting is both. So, it’s worth investing agency in these initiatives. And that’s how we’ll be successful.

Additionally, Final-Five Voting can be adopted by each state individually. Our Constitution gives states the power to change election rules. In half the states, we don’t even need politicians to agree because the rules can be changed by referendum. And I am confident we’ll change it with legislation also because politicians know we can’t keep doing what we’re doing in Washington, D.C. We’ll get there.

Learn more about the book HERE . 

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The American experiment

Helle C. Dale

Former Senior Fellow, Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom

The American experiment was unique and improbable in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and the American colonies defied Britain, the most powerful nation on earth at the time. As we look around the world at how difficult it is for democracy and freedom to take hold and flourish, America seems like a political miracle.

In 1787, when the Founding Fathers had hammered out the U.S. Constitution in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin told an inquiring woman what the gathering had produced, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it." Jefferson also knew how great the American experiment's appeal would be to others. "The flames kindled on the 4th of July, 1776, have spread across too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume the engines and all who work them." The self-evident truth that "all men are created equal; endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" remains the powerful philosophical and moral foundation of a successful foreign policy no less than it is the foundation of the American republic itself. Yet, as we are seeing today, the advance of freedom and democracy is not a straight path, but one that also sustains setbacks.

Americans have kept their republic and built it to be strong, but it will only remain so under constant vigilance. The bombing scare in Britain, where an ineffectual bomb was detonated in Glasgow airport and several other plots unfurled in London, helps remind us that freedom's enemies are as determined as ever. After a full decade of progress following the end of the Cold War, democracy is still under attack and retreating in other parts of the world. The Muslim Arab world presents a persistent and difficult challenge; China continues on its own path, which it hopes will prove that freedom and economic prosperity do not have to go hand in hand; Russia is taking the road toward a kind of authoritarianism of the past; in Africa, democracy's progress has been uneven to say the least; and some countries in Latin America are seeing autocratic populism resurging.

President Bush's ambitious declaration of the advance of freedom and democracy to be his banner causes has run into a tempest of radical terrorist opposition in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, calling into doubt a once promising Iraq policy. Ironically, those on the left who in the past declared themselves democracy's champions have responded with cynicism to the goal of bringing freedom to oppressed nations. Advancing the American model of governance is regarded by some both here and in Europe as naive and imperialist. This is a sad state of affairs.

A Pew Research Center poll released last week on global views of America illustrates the problem. Public rejection of American democracy is prevalent in most countries. This may reflect opinions about the way in which the United States has implemented its pro-democracy agenda, and also about America's democratic values themselves. In 43 of 47 countries surveyed, a majority say that the United States promotes democracy mostly where it serves its interests, rather than as a matter of principle. Even more unfortunately, this cynicism also includes 63 percent in the United States itself. Only 45 percent of Americans have faith in American leadership in the world.

How to restore faith in the American political system -- and in its importance as a model for democracy to be exported and shared -- will, for the most part, be the job of the next president of the United States. Meanwhile, history will likely look more favorably on the vision of Mr. Bush than we see today. By comparison, the star of President Reagan has been ascending since he left office, and it is worth recalling that the Berlin Wall fell during the presidency of Mr. Reagan's successor, the current President Bush's father. Mr. Reagan's vision of worldwide freedom earned him scorn at the time, whereas history has vindicated him.

As Mr. Reagan stated at Yorktown in 1981, "Our Declaration of Independence has been copied by emerging nations around the globe, its themes adopted in places many of us have never heard of. Here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights. We the people declared that the government is created by the people for their own convenience." As powerful as that message is, it has to receive constant reinforcement from those who remain convinced of its promise.

Helle Dale is director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

First appeared in The Washington Times

Political Process

Understanding our political heritage is a vital part of building a stronger America for the next generation.

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Failed American Experiment

Here comes the front edge of a new era, one in which America finally falls off its horse, its global standing properly diminished.

Cornel West, lower left, with Anderson Cooper on CNN, May 29, 2020.

By Patrick Lawrence Special to Consortium News

That is Cornell West’s take on our perfect storm of calamities. “I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment,” the Harvard philosopher said in a remarkable appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper program a couple of weeks back. It says something about the gravity of what is going on around us that Cooper invited the plain-speaking West on the air and that his employer consented. Cooper and CNN profess America’s righteous success with unflagging loyalty to the orthodoxy.

Whether or not our troubled republic is failing in a way that will land us in the history books — and in my view it is — there is one feature of this spring’s back-to-back disasters that is to be affirmed. Let us now praise the precipitous decline in American power and global primacy as hastened by the Covid–19 pandemic and now the crisis playing out on American streets.

The failure of empire is a dead certainty. There is no reversing this, however long and messy the collapse will prove, and long and messy are about it. Imperial decline is to be celebrated without reservation.

This waning of American authority is now starkly evident across both oceans. The Europeans, setting aside the sycophantic British, have been restive within the American embrace for decades. At last they appear set to go their own way.

The Chinese were never going to cave to U.S. intimidation and threats. Now they openly defy Washington’s hopelessly miscalculated campaign to “contain” them.

These are excellent developments. Who would have guessed that our tragic failures at home would precipitate our worthy-of-applause failures abroad? At this point, it is to be noted, the two are inseparable.  

America’s unique brand of “free market,” profit über alles capitalism has proven abjectly unprepared to manage a mass public health crisis. The demonstrations we are either part of or watch daily on our streets go to the same point; so do the violent responses of local police departments — and now the creeping threat of de facto martial law.

Race is the immediate issue; behind it we find the failures of our radical neoliberalism — poverty, inequality, malnutrition, unlivable wages next to  vulgar accumulations of wealth, poor schools, collapsing infrastructure, mass deprivation of medical care.

Obvious Paradox

George Floyd protests in Miami on June 6. (Mike Shaheen, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The world is watching closely now. Others have not been propagandized such that they do not see what lies in plain sight. They no longer confuse might with right: It is self-evident now that our nation is powerful but at the same time weak, the paradox being merely apparent, not real.

Given the bedrock importance of our long claim to moral authority — “City on a Hill,” beacon of the world, and all the other fanciful rubbish — the stunningly swift collapse of this authority is of fundamental consequence. Does anyone think our decadent leadership is capable of reconstituting this presumption? Out of the question, given our national pose was bogus from the first. This is what makes ours a turning point.

Let us ask ourselves: Have the Danes or the Italians or the French or the South Koreans, or the Chinese , or, or, or swooned into mass unemployment while failing to deliver benefits to many millions who deserve them? Have they deprived as many of health care when it is urgently needed? Have they incurred unmanageable trillions in public debt? Have they given billions of dollars to corporations in no need of assistance? Do their corporations indulge in embarrassingly raw displays of greed? Are they about to begin a nationwide wave of evictions among those who cannot make the rent?

Do any of these nations now face nationwide protests over discrimination, official violence, or the grinding deprivations underlying our national discontent? This hardly bears asking.

The Price of All This

Building burning in Minneapolis on May 29, 2020, during George Floyd protests. (Hungryogrephotos, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

Here comes the price of all this. Here comes the front edge of a new era, one in which America finally falls off its horse, its global standing properly diminished. Let it be, let it be, given how consistently Washington has abused the privilege that fell to it after the 1945 victories.  

Europeans have for years nursed their resentment of America’s overweening assertions of power even as they have managed to contain it. Now Jack springs out of his box.

When Angela Merkel announced last week that she won’t attend this year’s Group of 7 summit in the U.S., the German chancellor’s now-overt contempt for the Trump administration can be taken to reflect the Continent’s. Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who has made a determined effort to accommodate President Donald Trump since taking office three years ago, seems to have given up.

This appears to be a river crossing from which there can be no turning back. One has waited decades for the Europeans to find their own place in global affairs, allied with the U.S. but un-beholden to its every wish. This is at last the anticipated moment, in my read. Not even a president more palatable than Trump across the Atlantic is likely to reverse these emerging facts on the ground.

Two weeks ago this column noted indications that the Chinese have determined to find their future in the non–West, having given up on constructing mutually accommodating relations with the U.S. Its indifference to American censure over planned security laws in Hong Kong was a blunt signal of this.

We now have reports, here and here , that China is newly focused (after an interim of friction ) on Brazil as an alternative source of energy and agricultural supplies — not least the soybeans the mainland has long purchased from the U.S.

‘Cheap Grace’

It is remarkable to note how unaware our leadership is of all the chickens now coming home to roost. The Trump administration’s excesses these past few weeks speak for themselves. Our corporate captains are treating us to a festival of “cheap grace” — the memorable coinage of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti–Nazi Lutheran pastor, meaning compassion without cost, with no skin in the game.

Jamie Dimon, the chief exec at JPMorgan Chase, had himself photographed the other day kneeling before a bank vault— “taking a knee” in supposed solidarity with those of us on the streets these past 10 days. You’ve now got Goldman Sachs pledging $10 million “to help address racial and economic injustice,” while Intel promises $1 million and Nike adjusts its signature slogan to suit the zeitgeist .

In a stunning display of nitwittery, The New York Times ’s Tom Friedman published a column last week nominating “America’s principled business leaders… to come together to lead a healing discussion.”

Wow. What would we do without our Tom “ suck on this” Friedman —a closet racist if ever there was one?

The best take around on this drift in the national discourse arrived over the weekend on Twitter from Hamilton Nolan, a labor reporter for In These Times and the Washington Post ’s public editor:

If all the companies saying “Black Lives Matter” would stop making it impossible for their workers to unionize it would cause a transfer of wealth to black and brown working people a thousand times greater than any charity donation and that is exactly why they won’t do it — Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) June 6, 2020

Nolan goes to the farce of it — the cheap grace, the virtue-signaling — in five lines. American corporations are jumping onboard the race question to keep the discourse from spilling into the true causes of our national illness — neoliberal economics and the attendant greed. Cynical times 10. We will see no grand donations if these matters are ever put on the table.

But we must also note in this the intellectual unseriousness rampant among American corporations. There is no true grasp of the gravity of what befalls America this spring. Combined with the Keystone Kops act unfolding daily in Washington, this holds out no meaningful remedy for our too-evident ills.

The world will continue watching as we thus compound our failures and continue or descent into decline. The only source of promise now lies where many millions of us were this weekend — in the street.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the   International Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century” (Yale). Follow him on Twitter  @thefloutist .   His web site is  Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via  his Patreon site .  

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  Consortium News.

Please Contribute   to Consortium News’ 25th Anniversary Spring Fund Drive

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39 comments for “ patrick lawrence: the failed american experiment ”.

Many will be looking forward in eager anticipation for Thomas Friedman’s and others’ reviews of the powerful new documentary “SEVEN”…

I fail to understand the “equal demagoguery” argument: if the Chinese are just as bad, then that absolves the US? Precisely the virtue-signaling trope outlined earlier. This is not a contest to see who is the baddest, or for that matter, the wickedest. I consider arguments of this nature utterly puerile, seeing as they trivialize the debasement of many human beings, and draws a sort of hierarchy vis a vis the suffering of people

This country was founded on a lie and we are still living that lie. There is no democracy here – it is pure unadulterated capitalism. There is no freedom while people are still in shackles. This country is not based on compassion, integrity, morality or understanding – it is based on greed. We don’t have a legitimate vote – we have evil shoved down our throats by two corrupt political parties with the same agenda, make the wealthy wealthier and keep the poor man down. There is no such thing as equality in the USA – it’s every man for himself and shoot first, ask questions later. We are a doomed society established on the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, wrath, envy and sloth. If you don’t believe me, open your eyes and take a good look around…

Businesses do what they do as a form of Woke Insurance. Companies publicly & financially support social liberal policy (racial justice, climate change, gay marriage) to buy allies against economic policies(healthcare, education, paid leave, unionization, etc.) which might make it harder for them to make money.

In fact, if they would stop blocking unionization, businesses would benefit workers of all races, genders, shapes, sizes colors and flavors a thousand times more than by any donation they possibly could make. Which is why they do not do so.

A cornered animal is a dzngerous one. And it is not just the financial/political that will lash out if the feel endangered; the public herd who do not even comprehend just how immoral and corrupt is the land tbey grazed upon are. And will stampede in whatever direction they are manipulated into Our past history of warmaking bas never been an act initiated by rational discussion by populace at large. And it is the co.bination between military a tions directed by financial and political llayers aided by our scientific edu ational system, all that allowed national borrowing that is real ubderpining of co sumer society. Not by ma ufacturing expertise that built. nation till 1960 but by interest who use politics to. Co trol wealth. Out of sovereign taxpayrrs tax a nd robbing of. Publics natural Nations s resources..

So a Chinese empire is the solution to the worlds problems.I’m sure that all of those imprisoned and oppressed ethnic groups in China(just like the USA) are happy with their oppression.My sociopathic empire is better than your sociopathic empire is not a defendable position.The American Republic with all its sins to atone for is still worth defending.The American Empire(the Deep State)has used 100 years of hardcore propaganda to ensure its dominance.Because the USA did not suffer massive destruction from World War II it saw from 1946 to 1973 unprecedented prosperity.The Neoliberal project began in earnest in 1973(there were always parts of it that existed in our socioeconomic system) and here we are.Hatred of the American Empire is to be welcomed.Hatred of the American Republic(the American People) is destructive.This is our home why do you want to burn it down?

So a Chinese empire is the solution to the worlds problems.I’m sure that all of those imprisoned and oppressed ethnic groups in China(just like the USA) are happy with their oppression.

We’d like to see evidence of that. Thanks.

David, I agree but think Mr. Lawrence advocates taking to the streets, rather than anything to cause the potential “historic denouement.” He just asks “Is it our fate to join the sad list of failed or failing states?” If we lose some police stations harboring rogues it would be a small price to chasten corrupt politicians. Jefferson knew rebellion as a messy process, but costs fewer lives and less than interest on a year’s war debt.

My apologies because I did’t make myself clear.I was not talking about the protesters against police violence(whom I mostly agree with)when I said “why do you want to burn it down”.I was talking about misanthropic,knee-jerk anti-American discourse.And for China?How about the imprisonment and oppression of the Uyghurs and the Tibetan people.

The 18th century experiment has failed. It was a capitalist oligarchy masquerading as a democratic republic. It was failing even before the corona virus, which has exposed the emperor to be completely butt naked. Aristotelian class system is the academic way of describing it. The people I know describe it in much more colorful language.

The question now is can such a class system remodel itself into a democratic republic. I think so. The protests are the most positive sign I’ve seen. The fat lady won’t sing for awhile.

The real failure that so many Americans can’t acknowledge is the UNION. Once it is broken up, the people there will be able to restore their pride and self esteem just like Russians did. We might view various other “unions” similarly.

As we watch and or participate in protests for racist attitudes ,of which I agree by the way ,all across the world due to the exposure of police brutality ,I find myself disgusted by the fact that not a word ,not a sentence , said or in print ,about the most obvious racism in the world that is happening 24/7/365 ,in Palestine .

“Imperial decline is to be celebrated without reservation.. ” My nagging fear is that the MICIMAC Derp State will precipitate WW3 to try and restore Washington as top Dog even if it risks human extinction via nuclear war.

I believe the subject of this article is the failing of democracy in the USA, partly due to the racism there.

Great, righteously angry article as usual Patrick but I urge you to reconsider this very dangerous Framing: “Have they incurred unmanageable trillions in public debt?” I urge you to read Stephanie Kelton’s “The Deficit Myth” that funnily enough was just published today. We desperately need the policy space to solve the long emergency we’re in and the “household fallacy” will bar the door.

I read that article, listing all the things she used to believe but now doesn’t . Didn’t impart confidence.

American corporations are not so much “jumping onboard the race question” as using acts of “cheap grace” to deflect from getting too near the ugly truth that American capitalism is inherently and irredeemably racist—was founded on racism.

Neoliberalism is nothing other than a permutation of colonialism—a racist colonial economics—that by design exploits the labor and other resources of people of color here at home in the Americas and in developing countries everywhere. If we understand this clearly our moment becomes all the more potent. Neoliberal economics is a lethal knee to the neck. And I wonder if an argument can be made that Derek Chauvin was actually doing his job when he murdered George Floyd—upholding the neoliberal order. And maybe that is what we aren’t supposed to notice.

Bingo. Until we can speak these simple truths about the inherent racism in our current colonialism, nothing will change. And I keep asking the question: wasn’t Chauvin, in reality, doing the job he was hired and trained to do? Haven’t the police been doing the same during these protests? To me it’s plain. These are not bad actors in an otherwise nobly-defined profession, these are actors playing the parts they were hired to play. These were orders given. And yet we can’t quite say it out loud. Even now, after two weeks of a glorious, righteous expression of centuries-old rage. Come out of denial over this systemic racism, US. It is quite necessary if we are to move on to healing.

Americans have long struck the pavement hoping for change. The miners struck for change 100 years ago and got superficial change after violent, often deadly cries for help. Asbestos workers sued their corporate masters to a fake funeral and a worse replacement. There were violent demonstrations throughout the Sixties and no one heard us. There were fatal demonstrations to end the war in Vietnam and Nixon ended it when we were abjectly defeated militarily (but we did learn to dance alone to ever-wilder music.)

This is such a brilliant, clear-eyed article that it’s hard to understand why Patrick Lawrence threw the poor dog a bone in the final sentence. If we’re lucky, Trump will not be re-elected and he MAY actually accept his defeat, but then we get a brief prolongation of the floundering empire.

We will not get better until we have hit the bottom and we are not there yet.

Great piece Mr. Lawrence.

The elites in the United States have a serious problem: contemporary American capitalism has no use for a good chunk of the population, they’re a superfluous population that’s unnecessary for capital accumulation. Therefore a massive police-state has been created to quarter and corral these folks who would otherwise be in a good position to foment a populist rebellion.

Christian Parenti’s book “Lockdown America” is an absolute must-read.

But the elites do have use for the pool of superfluous population, to drive down wages and create competitive and scarce conditions that prevent labor from organizing.

In the hundreds if not thousands of experiments in complex societies that have been run on this planet, not one has been successful in perpetuity. They all fail, eventually. The bigger question for those of us experiencing the decline that accompanies such failure is whether the ‘collapse’ will be quick, like the few decades for Easter Island, or prolonged, like the few centuries for the Roman Empire. An even bigger concern may be what chaos will befall us when the switch on the wall stops functioning…

Patrick Lawrence nails it. I wish it weren’t so. Like alcoholics, this place must hit rock bottom before any turnaround can begin where oligarchy, the ruling elite, is destroyed. It may be too late in any case, but there’s a smidgen of hope if the rest of the world, as Lawrence notes Germany and China are doing, gives up on trying to reckon with the US on anything whatsoever. A shunning. How fitting if this core-rotten place were simply ignored and its tentacles severed. So far, when good people have gained a foothold (Mossadegh, Allende, Zaylaya, Aristide, Whitlam, and others plus possibles such as Corbyn, Stein, Gabbard, Yang, Sanders, to say nothing of censored reporters), they are thoroughly shut out by this same rotten core, the almost out of sight puppeteers. The only hope is the sheer mass of people deciding there’s no place to go or do except fight. Of course, climate or nuclear destruction may solve all our problems.

“When Angela Merkel announced last week that she won’t attend this year’s Group of 7 summit in the U.S., the German chancellor’s now-overt contempt for the Trump administration can be taken to reflect the Continent’s.” Yes, that’s good news, but everybody knows Merkel was spied on under Obama. That’s not contemptuous because Trump is now the personification of evil. Let’s hope we move toward taking power and not losing to totalitarianism.

An excellent article about the state of this union. I’m not the most educated, well spoken person to reply to this but as an African Descendant of Slavery, it is apparent now that White folk put us in this mess and they are the only ones who can fix it. We need reparations we were promised and never given if this race issue is ever to be fixed. Thank you for this article.

Cornell West: “I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment.” I remember Howard Zinn viewed correctly that the U.S. was set up from the beginning to be a state which protects the interests of the rich and powerful: a view a bit different which I share.

“Even French President Emmanuel Macron, who has made a determined effort to accommodate President Donald Trump since taking office three years ago, seems to have given up.” I am not sure that Macron sees the situation differently from Trump in any important way. Macron considers protests (yellow vests, trade union marches, justice for George Floyd …) as illegitimate, and the most recent ones have been declared illegal by the government. And furthermore 12 people died in police custody during the shutdown period, see

see: rebellyon.info/Meurtres-et-mensonges-d-Etat-la-police-22286

Globally this article is useful, Patrick Lawrence is a valued voice, so is Cornell West.

While our 18th-century experimental Constitution would fail unassisted, the founders knew that it must be updated. Franklin described the new government as “A democracy if you can keep it.” Jefferson outlined the maintenance schedule: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” and “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.”

This is long overdue, and will not be pretty. Democracy must be restored at any cost, or all is lost. We must find the ways to destroy oligarchy and its economic power over the tools of democracy: elections, mass media, and judiciary. We succeed only when we have secured amendments and laws to protect these tools of democracy from oligarchy.

America’s only enemy is internal corruption, by the Tyrant who as Aristotle warned must create outside enemies to pose as a protector. The tyrant in business, politics, and mass media exploits the power of amorality. His belief system is power=money=virtue no matter how he gets it. He will say anything, but he hears only the language of force.

The enabler of the tyrant’s corruption is unregulated economic concentrations, which have seized power because the Constitutional Convention did not protect democratic institutions from economic powers that did not then exist, and the emerging middle class were too preoccupied with their escape from poverty.

We have tried progressive parties that represent supporters, but they are powerless against oligarchy tyrants. Reform requires either overreach of a dark-horse president, to eject Congress and the judiciary for corruption and demand Amendments to isolate government and mass media from economic power, or we must hope to see action cells form to destroy mass media facilities and raid gated communities, and ensure that police refuse to suppress riots.

Benjamin Franklin’s statement was “A Republic if you can keep it.”

I agree completely.Read my comment and you will see how I feel about these subjects.Infantile anti-American hatred(except hatred of the American Empire) will not win this battle, solidarity and fellowship will.

I’m sure America really was that beacon on the hill in the two decades after WWII…if we leave Korea, Vietnam, Iran’s democracy overthrown and being the real driver of the Cold War aside. The problem is America took that beacon to set the world on fire.

“The failure of empire is a dead certainty. There is no reversing this…” Historically, empire has replaced empire – violently. But can the American empire be replaced by something better without the real danger of nuclear war, and if so, how? See: ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

A strong column for Patrick Lawrence.

The summary about empire is very accurate.

Unfortunately, America is stuck with a money-rotted political system which is incapable of offering sound leadership in either party.

It’s likely to be a rough ride ahead.

Honest and correctly designed experiments never “fail”, since the idea is to discover whatever results, whether it confirms or dis-confirms a hypothesis. The phrase “American Experiment” is a rhetorical ploy to suggest moral legitimacy, and is essentially a deceptive and dishonest usage. Real scientific language is parrhesiastic, plain language, and is therefor honest.

The failure of the ruling class to conserve their control does not stem from the Entfremdung of the working class, but from the moral destitution attendant to the rulers circumstance and decadent perception – they have abandoned the People and the State. What we see to-day is the result of the ruling class leaving the Country to itself and the contradictions of hundreds of years of Imperial plunder.

Without a moral ruling class there naturally is an explosive growth in a struggle for Power. Since it’s clear that the bourgeoisie has in significant measure agreed with the masses, this satisfies Trotsky’s description of a revolutionary phase.

I would prefer 1960…

”Now Jack springs out of his box.”

More like now Pandora opens here Box.

Always love reading me some Patrick Lawrence. It’s not that the empire has no clothes, it is the fact that it has no memory. We’ve now become too stupid to remember that “the past is prologue.” An ugly summer awaits us. Let’s hope the autumn has an ample reckoning with reality.

As the police dog is to the policeman so is the policeman to the corporate state. The dog is trained to bite, the cop is trained to kill and the plutocracy requires that they do so in service to the state. George Floyd’s searing cry for help reverberates through America’s bantustans and echoes through the canyons of her cities : “I can’t breathe”. Thousands march peacefully only to be attacked by militarized police wearing the hand me down armor from America’s endless wars. While there are life threatening shortages of nose swabs, face masks, medical supplies and PPE for medical personnel during the pandemic there is no shortage of tear gas, batons, flash grenades, rubber bullets and cops eager to employ them on their fellow citizens. But Trump, not satisfied with the brutal police response, has threatened to use the U.S. military to quell the protests over Floyd’s murder while under the knee of Derek Chauvin. America’s wars have never been fought only against peoples in far away lands. Just ask native Americans, just ask black Americans; just ask people of color in general; just ask striking workers if you can find any; just ask the poor; just ask the beleaguered middle class; just ask young who are facing a bleak future; just ask yourself; just ask. As Malcom X said of this violent, racist country on the news of JFK’s assassination, “the chickens have come home to roost”. Black America knew what he meant then and we all should know by now.

Thank you for this post.

The saying ‘Never Let a Good Crisis go to Waste’ has led to a sort of ‘Crisis Inc.’ We vote in rhetoric devoted to bring change only for those politicians who we voted for to be absorbed by a select business community who by crisis create huge windfalls off these sad events whereas these corrupt leaders continue too profit time and time again. This cruel system is a crooked system where the word looter doesn’t apply to this country’s elite who are beyond the power of the law because they own the law and, all that’s wrong for us right for them is the hidden code of their despicable dark honor. I surely hope that after the profits are spent by this greedy elite that the real people are still out their marching and they continue petitioning for change long after the lucrative commercial trend for change is over… & if the protesters still protest then there in lies hope for a new and maybe better America!

Well said Joe Tedesky. Thank you Jane Christ

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number 60 • Summer 2024

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The Public Interest

Introduction - the american experiment, daniel p. moynihan.

WHAT have we learned? It is two centuries now since the American people commenced what even they appear to have understood as an experiment in liberty. In his essay in this volume, Martin Diamond, following the lead of Leo Strauss , observes that the men of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution were pursuing, were implementing what Hamilton called the “new science of politics.” There had been a crucial turn in political thought away from the earlier Greek assumption that the virtue of its citizens was the foundation of the state, and that society accordingly ought to focus on the inculcation of such virtue, and, of course, its further elucidation. Civic philosophy would be the basic science of such a society, with its teachings a kind of applied science. Such was the view that persisted thereafter for two thousand years, with generally indifferent results. Then came Locke and Montesquieu and others with a quite different view. They saw the object of society as the attainment of liberty for the individual, and judged that society accordingly ought to focus on the practicable arrangements that would establish and preserve that liberty. Diamond describes the Declaration as expressing the “political science of liberty” of that age, a science subsequently, and for the first time, fully elaborated in the Constitution.

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University of Virginia School of Law

The American Experiment Launched by Jefferson Goes On, Says Justice Breyer

Dean Risa Goluboff quizzed Justice Stephen Breyer about his past experiences in government and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Photos by Julia Davis

Americans are still taking part in the democratic experiment Thomas Jefferson launched with the Declaration of Independence, said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer in remarks Tuesday at the University of Virginia School of Law.

“We’re in it now, aren’t we? Same experiment,” Breyer said. “Can we make it work?”

Breyer spoke to a full audience in the school’s Caplin Auditorium while accepting this year’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law .

He soon answered his own question.

“We will do it,” he said. “Who's going to decide whether or not that experiment in trying to achieve those ideals will work? And the answer is simple for me. The answer is simply: you. And I say this to the high school students. I say this to the college students. I will say it to the law students. I will say, ‘My friends. It is you who will decide. It is you who will figure out how to do it.’”

UVA President Jim Ryan ’92 presented the medal to Breyer, who announced Jan. 27 that he will retire this summer after 28 years on the Supreme Court bench.

“Many of the ideals that Jefferson espoused remain central to the American experiment and remain at the heart of UVA, including the idea of citizen leadership and public service,” Ryan said. “Today, we honor Justice Breyer, a lifelong leader and a public servant whose devotion to upholding the values set forth in our Constitution has touched the lives of every American.”

Following the medal presentation, Dean Risa Goluboff , who clerked for Breyer before joining the faculty, quizzed her former boss in a wide-ranging interview, with members of the audience also asking questions.

Throughout, Breyer made his case that people can make a difference in shaping democracy one improvement at a time, by listening to each other and by finding common ground.

He pointed to Brown v. Board of Education , the 1954 Supreme Court case that deemed segregated schools unconstitutional. It was clear by the time the case came to the court that equal protection under the law was not being followed, Breyer said, and that segregated schools were “separate but not equal.”

Several historical events were driving toward a conclusion on segregation – from African Americans serving in World War II to the nascent civil rights movement after Brown , so the impact of the decision itself was unclear. Breyer said he once asked Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton and a lawyer who was “a hero of that movement,” whether Brown mattered.

“And he said, ‘Of course the Supreme Court mattered. Just don’t think they did it by themselves,’” Breyer said. Breyer noted that the decision, while obvious in retrospect, still took courage.

“Life is not perfect at the moment, but as I say, it’s continuous progress there, a continuous effort, which required far more than judges, and which required far more than lawyers,” he said.

Breyer said he thought that though people disagree on how to get there, the end goal in a country of 330 million citizens is to have “each of those people respect the other person as a person.”

Asked what has changed at the Supreme Court over his 28 years there, Breyer noted that the court changes very slowly.

“There is a political aspect because of changes in who is appointed,” he said. “I think the question to think about, for those interested, is not so much politics. If they’re interested in law, think about: Is the court changing? And how much? And where? And should it?

“And the answers to that are going to be sometimes more technical than you might think.”

Breyer said time is the court’s greatest ally.

“Why? Because when you’re first appointed to that court, it takes three to five years before you can settle down. I mean, first thing, you don’t say to anybody, but [you think], ‘My God, can I do this job?’ And whatever you say and however confident you may appear, you’re thinking, ‘I hope so.’”

Breyer’s seat will go to another former clerk, Ketanji Brown Jackson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was confirmed by the Senate last week.

“I feel very good about that,” Breyer said.

Recalling his time working with Sen. Edward Kennedy ’59 as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Breyer said he learned lessons in compromise.

“He said, ‘Take people who really disagree with you, and if you need their vote … get them to talk,’” Breyer recalled. “The more they talk, the better, and pretty soon, you'll discover that they’ll say something you agree with. And when they say that something you agree with, you say, ‘That’s pretty good. Let's work with that. I bet we can.’ And lo and behold, some of the time you would achieve something, not unthinkable. Maybe 30%, but he said, ‘Take the 30%, rather than take 100% of what you didn't get and be a hero to the group that you’re working with that supports you.’ … And then when the time comes to give the credit, that's the person you give the credit to.”

Breyer said it was all too easy to think you’re right and the other side is wrong. But listening is important.

“I’ll tell you who public enemy No. 1 is, and I’ll tell you how to find him,” he said. “It’s called the mirror.”

Breyer pulled out a copy of the Constitution from his coat pocket, noting that some countries are held together by shared memories, and some by a document.

“I believe this is the document. That’s it,” he said.

Breyer has been an associate justice on the court since 1994, after being nominated by President Bill Clinton. Prior to that, Breyer was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, was a professor at Harvard Law School, and served in federal government in various roles.

Breyer’s “belief in deliberation and the importance of relationships have made him the ‘glue’ among his colleagues,” Goluboff said in her introduction. “And his commitment to the court’s unique role in the American constitutional scheme has made him its greatest institutional champion.”

She added, “Justice Breyer will be remembered as a statesman of the highest order, whose gifts and service have redounded to the extraordinary benefit of the Supreme Court and this nation.”

Sponsored jointly by the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit organization that owns and operates Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals are awarded each year to recognize the achievements of those who embrace endeavors in which Jefferson — author of the Declaration of Independence, third U.S. president and founder of the University — excelled and held in high regard. The law medal, and its counterparts in architecture, citizen leadership and global innovation, are UVA’s highest external honors.

The medals are given annually as part of Founder’s Day activities at the University and Monticello, timed to coincide with Jefferson’s birthday on April 13.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation President Leslie Greene Bowman also delivered remarks at the event, recalling Jefferson’s words to a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, Edward Rutledge, encouraging him to seek national office.

“There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him,” Jefferson wrote.

Bowman added, “Justice Breyer, you have paid that debt of service, many times over so much so that the debt now owed is one of gratitude to you by our country, and we, your fellow citizens.”

Breyer is the ninth Supreme Court justice to receive the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law since its inception in 1977.

Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.

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About the National Archives

Welcome Remarks for the American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream

Greetings from the National Archives’ flagship building in Washington, DC, which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I’m David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today’s conversation with David M. Rubenstein about his new book, The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream.

The American Experiment is the third work in a trilogy that includes How to Lead and The American Story. It is based on conversations with some of our nation’s greatest minds—Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, diplomats, music legends, sports giants—and looks into the inspiring story of America as a grand experiment in democracy, culture, innovation, and ideas.

Before we begin, I’d like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel.

On Friday, September 17, at 1 p.m., John Kowal and Wilfred Codrington III, authors of The People’s Constitution , will discuss how generations have reshaped our founding document—the U.S. Constitution—amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life.

And on Tuesday, September 21, at 3 p.m., we will commemorate the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with a program presented in partnership with Arlington National Cemetery. “Here Rests in Honored Glory” is a two-part look at National Archives records related to Arlington National Cemetery and the tomb. Part one will feature motion picture, cartographic, and photographic records.

David Rubenstein is a true friend of the National Archives. He knows the importance of making the documents of government available to the public so that all Americans know their rights, responsibilities, and shared history. His personal copy of the Magna Carta is the anchor of our Records of Rights exhibit housed in the David M. Rubenstein Gallery. In 2011, he received the National Archives Foundation's Records of Achievement award for giving countless Americans the opportunity to learn about our country through documents. His generosity has inspired many others to support the work of the Archives, and for that, we are grateful.

David Rubenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of How to Lead and The American Story. He is co-founder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, and Chairman of the Boards of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an original signer of The Giving Pledge and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award. He is also the host of The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS.

Joining David in conversation today is author and historian Michael Beschloss, an award-winning historian, bestselling author, and Emmy winner. He is on the Board of Directors of the National Archives Foundation, a trustee of the White House Historical Association, and former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Now let’s hear from David Rubenstein and Michael Beschloss. Thank you for joining us today.

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The american experiment in liberty has failed.

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Liberty Bell depiction of hairline crack, early 20th century. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is, perhaps, a fact provocative of sour mirth that the Bill of Rights was designed trustfully to prohibit forever two of the favorite crimes of all known governments: the seizure of private property without adequate compensation and the invasion of the citizen's liberty without justifiable cause...It is a fact provocative of mirth yet more sour that the execution of these prohibitions was put into the hands of courts, which is to say, into the hands of lawyers, which is to say, into the hands of men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts.

______ H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, pp. 180-82

The American experiment in liberty has failed.  It is only a matter of time before people realize it. Official dogma exulting over the U.S. Constitution, which for so long was propagated through public schools, churches and government mouthpieces, will not forever withstand the exposure of the truth about American democracy now readily available on the Internet .

The greatest fear of America’s Founding Fathers has been realized: The U.S. Constitution has been unable to thwart the corrosive dynamics of majority-rule democracy, which in turn has mangled the Constitution beyond recognition. The real conclusion of the American Experiment is that democracy ultimately undermines liberty and leads to tyranny and oppression by elected leaders and judges, their cronies and unelected bureaucrats.  All of this is done in the name of “the people” and the “general welfare,” of course.  But in fact, democracy oppresses the very  demos in whose name it operates, benefiting string-pullers within the Establishment and rewarding the political constituencies they manage by paying off special interests with everyone else’s money forcibly extracted through taxation.

The Founding Fathers (especially Washington , Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison , and James Monroe ), as well as outside observers of the American Experiment such as Alexis de Tocqueville all feared democracy and dreaded this outcome.  But, they let hope and faith in their ingenious constitutional engineering overcome their fear of the democratic state, only to discover they had replaced one tyranny with another. As one contemporary libertarian has put it :

“It is hard to think of other examples in history where so many checks and balances were placed upon centralized political power – and it is also impossible to think of a more dangerous and powerful government than the modern American leviathan. The abysmal failure of such a noble experiment should give all moralists pause. If the smallest possible government has grown into the largest conceivable government – within a few hundred years – it is hard to imagine what kind of theoretical system could conceivably control state growth in the future.”

Perversely, at the same time the U.S. Constitution was slowly unraveling and being brazenly rewritten by lawyers and judges over the course of two centuries, the founding document and the drivel spewed forth by judges and lawyers called “constitutional jurisprudence” took on an almost sacred aura, deluding most citizens into believing it was all succeeding marvelously.

A few people recognized the slow-motion failure of the Constitution right along, especially after the New Deal memorialized the dramatic alterations that had occurred since the War Between the States.  For example, in a 1947 exchange of letters with Ludwig von Mises, journalist, war correspondent, and novelist Rose Wilder Lane wrote :

“As an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism. It is precisely democracy which is destroying the American political structure, American law, and the American economy, as [James] Madison said it would, and as [Thomas] Macauley prophesied that it would do in fact in the 20th century.”

Some of us observed other frailties of the U.S. Constitution years later , but deluded ourselves into believing it was all just a consequence of inadequate constitutional design, which could be overcome and rectified with appropriate constitutional changes. Alas, it is impossible any longer to labor under the delusion that democracy can be fixed by tinkering with constitutions, appointing the right judges to the bench or electing the right politicians to office.  As Frank Karsten and Karen Beckman have written in  Beyond Democracy , democracy cannot be fixed because it is inherently broken:

“The problems of democracy are inherent. It’s like having dinner with a million people and deciding up front the bill will be split evenly. Everyone has a strong incentive to order more than he would individually, resulting in a huge bill that everyone deplores but no individual could do anything about. Democracy therefore has a very limited self-cleansing capability. Our politicians have a natural short-term outlook since they are only temporarily in office. They will overspend, overtax and over borrow knowing their successors will have to deal with the negative consequences. Besides that, they spend other people’s money anyhow.”

But now we come to the hard part: What is to be done?  If not democracy, what? If the ballot box won’t work to reverse the arrow of democratic politics, if better constitutional design can’t overcome democratic entropy, are we left with rebellion and revolution?  History demonstrates that violence begets violence and the violent overthrow of tyrants begets new tyrannies, frequently worse than those they replace.  Is peaceful rebellion feasible? Will non-violent, civil disobedience work to reorder our dysfunctional politics, and if so, what kind of “new order” is to replace the old order?

The fact is, we don’t know how to structure society, and any effort trying to do so by constitutional/political/social engineering—no matter how well intentioned, no matter how smart the designers—inevitably leads to disastrous outcomes.  The key, therefore, is not to think about replacing what we have with something else but rather to replace it with nothing, i.e., freedom from government, not enslavement to a new form of government.

The only way human societies can possibly develop successfully to satisfy the needs and desires of the individuals that make them up is through a process of gradual evolution, not juridical, legislative and bureaucratic incrementalism, but rather a social, political and economic evolution that occurs free of all three; a trial-and-error, evolutionary process where millions of free individuals work it out on a case-by-case, day-to-day basis at the individual level of bilateral trade, voluntary contract and discourse with each other.  Coercive collective action in the name of the greater good not only is immoral—who decides who has the gun?—it also is destructive of human happiness and ruinous of human potential.

Therefore, the only “structural” device that holds forth true hope of facilitating and nurturing a market-like process of social, political and economic evolution is to constrain government and other coercive institutions in a way that allows individuals the freedom to escape, without prejudice, the clutches of any authority that would impose non-consensual, involuntary rules upon them.

That is why a true federalism—properly defined as the presence of alternative polities to which individuals can escape—is the greatest, indeed the only effective protection of human liberty. That is why contrary to James Madison’s rationalizations for an extended republic , a geographically large, powerful central government will always become the most tyrannical.  That is why I wrote a while back that the greatest hope to revive freedom and prosperity in America is for the states to rise up against the oppressive federal government, exert their sovereign powers and put Washington back in its rightful place—not a revolution but a restoration of the Old Federalist Republic. Not a call to take up arms but a call for states to just deny and defy federal authority.

Make no mistake though, such a call for a restoration of the Old Federalist Republic is not premised on any fallacious notion that the government closest to the people is the best government. To the contrary, Hunter’s Postulate holds that the closer one gets to the individual, the more oppressive government becomes—try working in academia, existing under the thumb of a homeowners’ association or living in an oppressive little backwater like Warrenton, Virginia if you don’t believe it.

No, the virtue of a true federalism has nothing to do with the virtue, competence, or trustworthiness of local officials and the parasites they nurture but everything to do with the ability of people to escape their grimy little reach.  Restrict the sphere of the monopoly to initiate violence (which is the true definition of government), and you increase the possibility of escape. Farmers in human cattle, which is all governments are, cannot survive if the livestock all walks off the plantation.

In the long run, then, exit—voting with one’s feet—is the only guarantee against tyranny, which is the only reason to recommend the states rise up and overthrow the federal tyranny that characterizes the United States in the early days of the 21 st century.  Is it a panacea? No, but it probably offers the last exit before the cliff that our current system is headed toward.

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November 27, 1860

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The American Experiment

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/ The American Experiment

The material on this page is provided for use as a primary source through which to understand the period and the historical context in which it was produced. Historians recognize the importance of maintaining documents that might no longer align with the ideas and values of an individual or organization reproducing those documents.

The social, and especially the political institutions of the United States, have, for the whole of the current century, been the subject in Europe, not merely of curious speculation, but of the deepest interest. We have been regarded as engaged in trying a great experiment, involving not merely the future fate and welfare of this Western continent, but the hopes and prospects of the whole human race. Is it possible for a Government to be permanently maintained without privileged classes, without a standing army, and without either hereditary or self-appointed rulers? Is the democratic principle of equal rights, general suffrage, and government by a majority, capable of being carried into practical operation, and that, too, over a large extent of country?

The more populous and wealthy the United States have become, and the higher the position to which they have risen in the scale of national importance, with the greater confidence has it been maintained, on the one hand, that our institutions rest on a solid and permanent basis, and on the other, that they are destitute of inherent strength and cohesion, and that the time of explosion and disruption is rapidly approaching.

It cannot be doubted that the news of the present extraordinary position of affairs in the Southern States, consequent upon the result of the late Presidential election, will produce among the European advocates of democratic government and popular rights very serious alarms as to what is to become of us; while, among the advocates of monarchy and aristocracy, the threatened secession of the Cotton, if not of the entire body of the Slaveholding States, will be regarded as the first step toward the entire breakdown of our whole system of republican government.

It ought, however, to be borne in mind that the threatened disruption of the Union does not originate at all from the democratic element of our politics or social condition. It is the element of negro slavery, confined exclusively to a portion only, and that the smaller portion, of the States, that has given occasion to all the existing trouble. This element of negro slavery not only conflicts with the democratic idea by stripping the negro population of all rights whatsoever; at the same time it paralyzes and degrades the great mass of the white population; so that, whatever may be the letter of constitutions and laws, it creates a narrow aristocracy, which, in the local affairs of the Slaveholding States, has everything its own way. Not content to rule at home, this slaveholding aristocracy now undertakes to dictate to the other States also, not merely their laws and their Presidential candidates, but even their opinions on questions of religion and morals, so far, at least, as the question of slaveholding is concerned. It is not the development of democratic ideas or institutions that has brought on the present difficulties; it is the collision which has taken place between democracy on the one hand, and this foreign element and doubly aristocratical institution of negro slavery on the other. Suppose it should turn out that, under these circumstances, the Slaveholding States should determine to separate from the Union. That might prove the incompatibility of Slavery with the well-working of a Government based on democratic principles, but it would be very far from proving, or even indicating, the failure of our American experiment. Whatever happened to the Slaveholding States after this separation, in the broad extent of the Free Labor States the experiment of republican government on democratic principles would still go on; nor is there anything in our past history or present position to induce serious misgivings as to the result.

It has often been urged that with the increase of wealth and population our existing popular system of government would become impracticable, and that a great class would arise, of mere laborers, destitute of property, to whom the right of suffrage could not be safely entrusted. Our experience thus far does not give any countenance to this view. Take the State of Massachusetts, for instance: With a constant increase in population and wealth, her institutions and government have conformed more and more to the democratic idea; nor does there seem any danger to her existing political institutions, even if that increase should continue indefinitely.

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History Shows How Dangerous ‘America First’ Really Is

A t the Republican National Convention, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called former president Donald Trump “ the founding father ” of the America First movement. Greene’s timeline is wrong—the original movement actually dates from 1940—but it’s true that Trump’s foreign policy is a sharp U-turn from the global leadership upheld by both Republican and Democratic Presidents since 1945.

Addressing the U.N. in 2018, Trump startled delegates by declaring, “ We reject the ideology of globalism. ” As President he showed disdain not only for the U.N. but also for NATO and U.S. security guarantees for South Korea and Japan. “ Why would we defend somebody ?” Trump asked TIME’s Eric Cortellessa during an interview on foreign policy in April 2024. U.S. global commitments, Trump argues, have not benefited the American people.

If Trump’s move away from globalism breaks with recent foreign policy, it reconnects with a powerful earlier current in American history. Before 1944, a majority of Americans held views much closer to those of Trump than to the liberal internationalists who built the “ American Century ,” a term famously coined by publisher Henry Luce during World War II to mark the dawning era of U.S. global dominance.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the U.S. tried to influence world events without making commitments to other nations. That meant pushing preferred policies through private, informal, unilateral diplomacy. This policy of “noncommitment” failed spectacularly in the 1930s. Yet the very same idea is at the core of today’s America First movement.

Exactly 100 years ago—in the summer of 1924—the U.S. took a major step toward world leadership by framing a solution to the gnarliest problem left by World War I: German reparations.  

The issue had disrupted Europe’s recovery since 1918. After its loss, Germany had dragged its feet on making the payments demanded under the Versailles Treaty. France responded by sending troops into its industrial heartland along the Ruhr River. That led to passive resistance by Germans that tanked the country’s economy and helped trigger hyperinflation in 1923. The paralysis of Germany’s economy—the largest and most industrialized in Europe—upset production and trade across the continent.

Read More: Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls Trump the ‘Founding Father of the America First Movement’ at RNC

By early 1924, Europe’s economic and political debacle seemed impossible to solve. 

Enter the Americans. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes proposed that Europeans empower a new committee to devise an apolitical, “ businesslike ” remedy to reparations. In early 1924 such a committee was formed, headed by Chicago banker Charles Dawes and Owen D. Young, a whiz-kid lawyer from upstate New York and president of General Electric.    

After months of work, the Dawes committee, as it was known, went public with its plan. The proposal not only set up a workable timetable for Germany to pay reparations—it also promised to break an icy deadlock between the allies and Germany. 

The committee first determined what Germans could actually pay. Then, with the help of a huge loan, the plan called for stabilizing the mark and balancing the budget. Money for reparations would come from taxes no higher than those in Allied nations, as well as the sale of bonds backed by Germany’s railroads and industries. To avoid the problem of exchange rates, the payments would be made with German money, starting small and growing slowly over five years. If Germany prospered, payments would rise, giving the Allies a vested interest in building up the country’s economy.

The plan implied but did not order the removal of French troops from the Ruhr, and the committee did not even address the thorny issue of the total owed by Germany, leaving that to future discussion. 

Yet, while previous efforts to get Germany on track had triggered bitter political conflicts, this time, both the allies and their former enemy gave a thumbs up. Europeans saw in the plan not just a way out of the reparations trap, but also a ray of hope for reviving the entire continent. Even the world’s best-known critic of reparations, British economist John Maynard Keynes, praised the plan for rescuing Germans from “ oppression and ruin .” 

Within weeks the Dawes plan faced a test by fire as Germany and France held national elections. German officials had accepted the proposal, but it came under fierce attack from both right-wing and left-wing parties, making the early May elections a referendum.

The pragmatic American plan helped make the German far right’s call for a “war to the knife” against the Allies sound “ crazier than ever ,” and the moderates won a majority in the Reichstag. The plan had a similar impact on French elections a week later, with voters choosing a new prime minister willing to work with Germany. Meanwhile, in London, British leaders also agreed to go all in to support the Dawes settlement. 

Europe’s embrace of the Dawes plan seemed to herald a new global role for the U.S. There was just one problem. The Senate had twice voted down the Versailles Treaty, so the U.S. government played no formal role in putting Europe back on track. If American “ brains and business experience ” helped to end Europe’s paralysis, U.S. involvement remained private and unofficial. Even the $200 million loan needed to stabilize Germany and launch the plan came primarily from private New York banks, led by J.P. Morgan.

European leaders hoped that the Dawes plan would mark Washington moving from unofficial help toward a new global role. German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann boasted that after years of effort Germany had at last persuaded Americans to take part in European affairs. When Republicans chose Dawes to be Calvin Coolidge’s running mate in June 1924, some Europeans hoped that it meant Republicans were embracing internationalism, something previously identified with Democrat Woodrow Wilson. 

But Europeans misjudged the mood across the Atlantic. Most Americans agreed with Coolidge that they should “ avoid involving ourselves in the political controversies of Europe .” 

On the surface, the Dawes plan worked: Germany began to pay reparations, and France withdrew its troops from the Ruhr. Its success pleased Americans because it promised global influence without commitment, economic revival without public investment. Yet, Dawes’s victory created an ideal of global leadership without responsibility that was doomed to fail.

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Although the Dawes Plan ended as the Great Depression began, the dream of U.S. foreign policy succeeding without commitments lived on into the 1930s. Absent from the League of Nations, the U.S. had no forum in which to work toward a world response to growing global problems: the Depression and the rise of militaristic fascism. 

Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany made a second world war likely. Americans responded with the Neutrality Acts, passed between 1935 and 1939. The laws embargoed trade with any nation at war and did not distinguish between democracies and dictatorships, aggressors and victims. Rather than work with other democracies to curb the growth of fascist power, the U.S tried to continue the policies of the 1920s and go it alone. This strategy failed. The legislation did nothing to prevent the outbreak of war, nor did it insulate the U.S. from the conflict.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans lived in a nation with no formal allies and no mutual defense pacts. It was a dangerous world, and the twin catastrophes of global depression and global war convinced them to build a new world order founded on multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The disasters that gave rise to that order are today fading from memory.

Trump’s vision of America First repeats the errors of U.S. foreign policy before World War II. Trump tells an American public tired of foreign wars that the price of globalism is too high and takes aim at the sinews that bind the U.S. to its allies. As President, Trump pushed away allies, like Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel, and praised rivals—enemies even—like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s hostility to NATO embodies his commitment problem. In 2017, he famously questioned Article 5 of the treaty, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. At a campaign rally earlier this year, he went further, claiming that he told the leader of a major NATO ally that unless that country spent more on its own defense, “he would tell Russia ‘ to do whatever they hell they want .’”

Perhaps, like the businessmen who created the Dawes Plan, Trump is impatient with the nuances of diplomacy. His revival of America’s legacy of noncommitment, however, is misguided. Looking back at the 1920s should remind us that globalism is not the default position of the American people, but also warn us against stepping away from our global allies. If, in a second Trump term, America First crashes the American Century, it will likely beget a world that is, in the words of historian Hal Brands, more “vicious and chaotic .”

Cyrus Veeser, author of A World Safe for Capitalism and Great Leaps Forward , is professor of history at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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Write to Cyrus Veeser / Made by History at [email protected]

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The American Experiment Has Failed

I was once a patriotic, flag waving American who loved is country. I'm glad now that I never got the tattoo I always talked about, a cross with an American Flag in it. Now those two symbols make me want to vomit. I have watched as the world has progressed around me, and then I look at how we are literally going backwards. Year by year, day by day.

I was right by Columbine when it happened over 2 decades ago. Sandy Hook was a 10 years ago. Now the shooting yesterday.

I think to the the quote on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses..." that the American government can marginalize them, can exploit them, turn them into wage slaves paying for Oligarch's vanity trips to outer space, and rule you based on a two thousand year old book.

The American Experiment has failed. We had a good run but greed and selfishness prevail, all for the lie of "personal liberties....that we will force on you all."

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