American Footprints

I admit to indulging in occasionally grandiose swings between the poles of optimism and pessimism regarding the future of the United States.  At times, I am convinced that our sclerotic, dysfunctional political system isn’t up to the task of addressing major problems like environmental degradation, that our focus and resource allocation is too skewed by narrow interests that don’t spread benefits around sufficiently and that, in general, we are in the midst of a slow but steady decline.  Reading accounts such as these from Carnegie Council Vice Chairman Dr. Charles Kegley on the similarity between current trends in the United States and those of past fading powers doesn’t inspire confidence:

Among the traits the U.S. exhibits in common with its declining hegemon predecessors, Kegley identified the following:

- Exorbitant military spending.The United States’ massive military budget, which accounts for roughly 40 percent of global military spending, has left the country heavily fortified. Should Washington continue to spend at this pace, Kegley argued, the U.S. will remained fortified, but with little left to protect.

- Gap between resources and commitments. With two ongoing wars and more than 750 U.S. military stations in more than 100 countries worldwide, the United States continues to stretch its resources globally. As a result, it increasingly relies on allies to help fulfill large commitments (i.e., NATO forces in Afghanistan), forfeiting power in the process.

- Preoccupation with non-threatening rival. China looms in the background of most of the United States’ strategic decisions today, though Beijing has not yet been formally defined as a rival. The preoccupation with China’s rise, which is unavoidable, represents energy better spent elsewhere.

- Neglect of internal development.The world’s lone superpower now ranks 38th in the world in terms of life expectancy, just one of many ways that an excessively outward-looking posture creates a weaker state.

However, at other times, I chide myself for giving in to such decadent thoughts, reminded of the fact that every generation of Americans has its doomsayers, its prophets of apocalypse and its composers of jeremiads. As James Fallows argues quite persuasively, this recurring Cassandra refrain is practically an American institution.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  According to Fallows, a little fire and brimstone can provide the impetus needed to break through the inertia of inaction.

Fallows’ article is another masterpiece, a stark look at the enormity of the problems facing us, and some useful suggestions for charting a course out.  It is worth the read in full – more than once.  I will focus on only a couple aspects of the overall story.  First, our crumbling infrastructure, made all the more tragic by the fact that we are shoveling trillions of dollars into wars/nation building projects in multiple locations outside of the United States – endeavors that will leave behind no lasting monument or significant improvement in the lives of Americans, despite the exorbitant amount of wealth squandered:

Just as the material bounty of America is more dramatic on return to the country, so are areas of backwardness or erosion you do not notice unless you’ve been somewhere else. Cell-phone coverage, for instance. In other developed countries, and for that matter most developing countries I’ve visited, you simply don’t have the dead spots and dropped calls that are endemic in America. There are reasons for the difference: China, in which I never lost a signal when on subways, in elevators, or even in a coal mine, has limited competition among phone companies that coordinate to blanket the country with transmitters. Still, this is one of several modern-tech areas in which the U.S. is now notably, even embarrassingly, behind. I went several times to a private medical clinic in Beijing and once to a public hospital in Shanghai (the Skin Disease and Sexually Transmitted Disease Hospital—it’s a long story). In each, the nurses entered my information at a computer, rather than having me fill out the paper forms, on a clipboard, on which I have entered the same redundant information a thousand times in American medical offices. Again, there’s a reason for the difference; but we’re not keeping up.

When I was a schoolboy in California in the 1950s and ’60s, the freeways were new and big and smooth—like the new roads being built all across China. Today’s California freeways are cracked and crowded and old. A Chinese student I knew in Shanghai who has recently entered graduate school at UC Berkeley sent me a note saying that the famous San Francisco Bay Area seemed “beautiful, but run down.” I remember a similar reaction on arriving at graduate school in England in the 1970s and seeing the sad physical remnants—dimly lit museums, once-stately homes, public buildings overdue for repair—from a time when the society had bigger dreams and more resources than it could muster in the here and now. A Chinese friend who flew for the first time from Beijing to New York phoned soon after landing to complain about the potholed, traffic-jammed taxi ride from JFK to Manhattan. “When I was growing up, these bridges and roads and dams were a source of real national pride and achievement,” Stephen Flynn, the president of the Center for National Policy in Washington, who was born in 1960, told me. “My daughter was 6 when the World Trade Center towers went down, 8 when lights went off on the East Coast, 10 when a major U.S. city drowned—I saw things built, and she’s seen them fall apart.” America is supposed to be the permanent country of the New, but a lot of it just looks old.

Since everyone knows that America’s passenger-rail system is a world laggard, there is no surprise value in saying so. But it’s still true. Stephen Flynn points out that the physical infrastructure of big East Coast cities was mainly built by the 1880s; of the industrial Midwest by World War I; and of the West Coast by 1960. “It was advertised to last 50 years, and overengineered so it might last 100,” he said. “Now it’s running down. When a pothole swallows an SUV, it’s treated as freak news, but it shows a water system that’s literally collapsing beneath us.” (Surface cave-ins often reflect a sewer or water line that has leaked or collapsed below.) [...]

The American Society of Civil Engineers prepares a “report card” on the state of America’s infrastructure—roads, bridges, dams, etc. In the latest version, the overall “GPA” for the United States was D, and the cost of bringing all systems up to adequacy was estimated at $2.2 trillion over the next five years, or twice as much as is now budgeted by all levels of government. In 1988, the comparable study gave an overall grade of C, with many items getting B’s. Now, the very highest grade was for solid-waste systems, at C+, or “mediocre.” Roads, dams, hazardous-waste systems, school buildings, and public drinking water all received a D or D–. The average dam in the United States is 50 years old. “More than 26%, or one in four, of the nation’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete,” according to the latest report. Improving existing bridges would cost about $17 billion per year, or about twice as much as currently budgeted. Worn-out water systems leak away 20 gallons of fresh water per day for every American; replacing systems that are nearing the end of their useful life would cost $11 billion more annually than all levels of government now plan to spend. “Engineers don’t usually put things dramatically, but the alarm about infrastructure is real,” Stephen Flynn, of the Center for National Policy, told me. “Our forebears invested billions in these systems when they were relatively much poorer than we are. We won’t even pay to maintain them for our own use, let alone have anything to pass to our grandchildren.”

Next, Fallows takes on our political system – noteworthy for its lack of imitators and for the anacrhonistic and undemocratic Senate:

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” [...]

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. [...]

When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.” [...]

“I don’t think that America’s political system is equal to the tasks before us,” Dick Lamm, a former three-term governor of Colorado, told me in Denver. “It is interesting that in 1900 there were very few democracies and now there are a lot, but they’re nearly all parliamentary democracies. I’m not sure we picked the right form. Ours is great for distributing benefits but has become weak at facing problems. I know the power of American rejuvenation, but if I had to bet, it would be 60–40 that we’re in a cycle of decline.”

One gets the impression from Fallows’ article that there is reason to have faith in America’s ability to muddle through and renew its spirit despite these daunting challenges.  I am not without hope.  After all, gnashing our teeth about insurmountable obstacles, and somehow pulling out a fix, is a national pastime. 

However, what gives cause for concern is the seeming lack of urgency in the body politic – or at least, the lack of focus of the atmospheric anxiety.  Political movements and the media that covers them, seem preoccupied with the trivial, creating more obfuscation than explanation.  As if the dire problems are actually less important than the next horse race, the next puff piece and the next sex scandal.  As Rick Perlstein notes in a conversation with Fallows, “In the long rhythms of American jeremiad, he said, [the proliferation of doom and gloom tracts] was a sign of political health…By contrast, the public mood now is “perilously blithe.” 

Indeed.

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