Why is america crumbling

Although our languishing transportation and public works system certainly require repair and modernization -- and racial equity must be a centerpiece of that -- it would be a huge mistake to ignore the perilous state of our democracy. The array of federal investments under consideration will not have the grand impact intended on our economy and our social structures if too many of our citizens are still excluded from participating in decision-making on these and other vital issues of the day.

Read More. We urge the White House and Congress to reconstruct our deteriorating voting infrastructure and counter the almost daily assaults on our democracy which we are witnessing around the country.

Empowering partisan poll watchers, restricting mail-in ballots, and reducing early voting impose additional barriers on citizens who are already severely hampered in exercising their right to vote. Unfortunately, for too much of the country, the trend keeps moving in the wrong direction.

Let's be clear. Restricting access to voting is an existential threat to our democracy. Biden recently called today's voter suppression efforts a "21st century Jim Crow assault" that is "real. It's relenting. Beto O'Rourke: Texas offers Americans a stark history lesson. These moments share certain features.

People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt for established power is intense.

A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion. In , Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now.

And, of course, he was correct. Our moment of moral convulsion began somewhere around the mids, with the rise of a range of outsider groups: the white nationalists who helped bring Donald Trump to power; the young socialists who upended the neoliberal consensus and brought us Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; activist students on campus; the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose to prominence after the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. Systems lost legitimacy.

The earthquake had begun. The events of —the coronavirus pandemic; the killing of George Floyd; militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest—were like hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake.

They did not cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. They flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and exposed every flaw.

Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud.

Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation.

Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated. This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment. Its central focus is social trust. Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society—of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good.

When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses. This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society. It is an account of how, under the stresses of , American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still. We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust.

We did not. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop. Read: Trust is collapsing in America. When moral convulsions recede, the national consciousness is transformed. New norms and beliefs, new values for what is admired and disdained, arise.

Power within institutions gets renegotiated. Shifts in the collective consciousness are no merry ride; they come amid fury and chaos, when the social order turns liquid and nobody has any idea where things will end. Afterward, people sit blinking, battered, and shocked: What kind of nation have we become? We can already glimpse pieces of the world after the current cataclysm. The most important changes are moral and cultural.

The emerging generations today enjoy none of that sense of security. They grew up in a world in which institutions failed, financial systems collapsed, and families were fragile. Children can now expect to have a lower quality of life than their parents, the pandemic rages, climate change looms, and social media is vicious. Their worldview is predicated on threat, not safety. Thus the values of the Millennial and Gen Z generations that will dominate in the years ahead are the opposite of Boomer values: not liberation, but security; not freedom, but equality; not individualism, but the safety of the collective; not sink-or-swim meritocracy, but promotion on the basis of social justice.

Once a generation forms its general viewpoint during its young adulthood, it generally tends to carry that mentality with it to the grave 60 years later. A new culture is dawning. The Age of Precarity is here. One question has haunted me while researching this essay: Are we living through a pivot or a decline?

During past moral convulsions, Americans rose to the challenge. They built new cultures and institutions, initiated new reforms—and a renewed nation went on to its next stage of greatness.

The cancer of distrust has spread to every vital organ. Renewal is hard to imagine. Destruction is everywhere, and construction difficult to see. The problem goes beyond Donald Trump. The stench of national decline is in the air. A political, social, and moral order is dissolving. America will only remain whole if we can build a new order in its place.

In a last desperate bid to preserve their regime, a group of hard-liners attempted a coup against the president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. As Soviet troops and tanks rolled into Moscow, democratic activists gathered outside the Russian parliament building to oppose them. Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, mounted a tank and stood the coup down.

In that square, I met a year-old woman who was passing out sandwiches to support the democratic protesters. Her name was Valentina Kosieva. She came to embody for me the 20th century, and all the suffering and savagery we were leaving behind as we marched—giddily, in those days—into the Information Age. She was born in in Samara. In , she said, the Cossacks launched pogroms in her town and shot her uncle and her cousin.

She was nearly killed after the Russian Revolution of In , the Soviet secret police raided her apartment based on false suspicions, arrested her husband, and told her family they had 20 minutes to vacate.

Her husband was sent to Siberia, where he died from either disease or execution—she never found out which. During World War II, she became a refugee, exchanging all her possessions for food. Her son was captured by the Nazis and beaten to death at the age of After the Germans retreated, the Soviets ripped her people, the Kalmyks, from their homes and sent them into internal exile. For decades, she led a hidden life, trying to cover the fact that she was the widow of a supposed Enemy of the People.

Every trauma of Soviet history had happened to this woman. Amid the tumult of what we thought was the birth of a new, democratic Russia, she told me her story without bitterness or rancor. Those were the days of triumphant globalization. Communism was falling. Apartheid was ending. The Arab-Israeli dispute was calming down. Europe was unifying. China was prospering. The American economy grew nicely. The racial wealth gap narrowed. All the great systems of society seemed to be working: capitalism, democracy, pluralism, diversity, globalization.

We think of the s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world.

Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

For his book, Moral Freedom , the political scientist Alan Wolfe interviewed a wide array of Americans. The moral culture he described was no longer based on mainline Protestantism, as it had been for generations. The United States finds itself as impregnable and mighty as the former Roman Empire; the most powerful military, the most compelling diplomats, unrivaled soft power , that is to say, influence through language, culture, and ideology, as well as the largest network of dependent allies places the United States on a unique pedestal in world history.

The Romans controlled the Mediterranean. The Mongols controlled Eurasia. The British controlled the seas. Americans control the world. No polity throughout world history wielded as much power, both soft and hard , as the modern United States. With such unprecedented power, the United States, a hermit of diplomacy slightly more than a century ago, crafted the largest network of modern alliances reinforced by the necessity of dependence, resources, military presence and cultural ties. NATO stands as the pinnacle of democratic defense against rising authoritarian states, most notably China.

Bulwarks of democracy and capitalism such as Israel in the Middle East and Japan in East Asia see cooperation as their only route to survival against increasingly threatening extremist groups, civil war, and foreign pressure. Democracy and liberty around the world ultimately lie in the hands of the United States.

The federal deficit is soaring. The health system is deteriorating. The cities are unsafe. The schools are failing. The gap between rich and poor is widening. So pervasive is this preoccupation with decline that it has given birth to its own school of thought. Why all this concern about decline? One straightforward possibility is that it is an accurate reflection of economic reality. But there is another explanation, more complicated but ultimately more accurate.

Declinism may be less the product of actual decline than a response to rapid economic and social change. Change is always disturbing and often perceived negatively, for the simple reason that losers tend to be more vocal than winners. But the changing terms of global competition also represent a particular crisis for the institutions of American society—companies, government, educational institutions, and the like.

The books and reports collected here all shed light on the debate about decline. Some are classic declinist texts that catalogue the supposed weaknesses of the U.

Others dispute the very idea of U. However, none of them fully grasps the real challenges facing U. Taken together, these texts suggest that while the popularity of declinist writings says something important about contemporary America, it is not exactly what most declinist authors think. These authors fail to grasp the true significance of the debate about decline. Government Printing Office, October America: What Went Wrong?

Donald L. Barlett and James B. During the postwar era and, indeed, for much of this century , U. However advantageous to Americans, eventually that situation was bound to end. Concerns about decline are a symptom of the growing equality among industrialized nations rather than a reflection of any fundamental problem with the U.

Another important characteristic of the postwar U. This fortuitous combination of easy economic growth and widespread social equality seemed tailor-made to fulfill the promise of the American dream.

But the very economic changes that have led to increased equality among industrial nations have also served to increase social inequality within American society. Much of the concern about U. The real challenge facing American society is not reversing economic decline; it is addressing the social implications of the new economy.

The end of U. Ironically, too great a preoccupation with decline may keep American society from getting on with the job. First, declinists compare U. Second, they urge the United States to become more like its competitors—primarily by copying Japanese and European mechanisms for business-government collaboration.

For some typical examples of this kind of analysis, consider two recent reports coming out of the Washington public-policy community: Competing Economies: America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim, a report from the Office of Technology Assessment, and Building a Competitive America, the first annual report of the Competitiveness Policy Council. Its share of world manufacturing exports has declined in recent decades, while its share of imports has risen.

It fails the living standards test because the real wages of manufacturing production workers have fallen since the late s. And while Japanese trade barriers contribute to the U. The OTA concedes that some decline in the U. But it puts too little emphasis on this fundamental fact of history.

Europe and Japan were bound to catch up, in the process undermining U. Indeed, the United States spent much of the past 30 years making sure that exactly this process took place. Now that the policies have succeeded, declinists wish to use an entirely different measuring stick to declare them failures. The OTA analysis is flawed in other ways. It overlooks the fact that the United States has been quietly recapturing market share from its leading industrial competitors in the past five years.

The wages of manufacturing workers, meanwhile, are hardly a robust measure of national living standards. Like many declinists, the OTA confuses growing inequality with declining prosperity: real per capita GDP has risen substantially since the late s. Building a Competitive America presents a more sophisticated version of the same declinist thesis.

Not only must the U. The definition is so broad that the Competitiveness Policy Council has little trouble concluding that U. Given the fluctuating fortunes of different sectors, the amount of growth required to raise the incomes of all Americans, for example, could prove very large indeed. Both reports, however, serve a useful function in pulling together many different strands of the declinist case. It is dangerous to make projections with a ruler.

The fact that budget deficits, for example, were such a problem in the s is a good prima facie reason for expecting remedial action in the s. Politicians, like everybody else, must be presumed to have a learning curve.