James Fallows has been writing for more than a year about how the bright prospects of the US are threatened by our crippled political institutions:
America will no doubt muddle through, as it has done so often before. There is so much going on in this country other than public affairs -- so many of the daily details of people's lives that are promising, tender, inventive, rewarding, all for reasons that have nothing to do with national politics. It's a principle similar to the one I observed so often in China: in Beijing there might be tensions over this or that new crackdown, but in Shenzhen on Linyi or Changsha or Kunming people were having fun and dreaming big dreams.
Still, the major steering decisions in national policy make a difference in the long term. It made a difference, for the good, that the United States adopted the GI Bill, and set up the Land-Grant Universities. It made a difference, for the bad, that California passed Proposition 13. In the short run, the "bargain" just agreed to offers worse than no hope for addressing the really urgent problem of the moment, harmfully high unemployment. And in the long run, this has been as sobering a case study of a great nation misusing its resources, distracting itself from real problems, and discrediting its political system in the world's eyes as... as I can remember. No "foreign threat" has been involved here. Not a "rising power," like China. Not a "non-state menace," like some terrorist. We did this all ourselves.
The collapse of the US is not the result of individual bad decisions, summed up, It is a systemic product, the result of the capture by corporate interests of our political institutions, courts, and regulatory bodies. Each of these institutions primarily responds to the corporate interests that increasingly fund, educate, and staff them. Individuals, whether elected officials, their staffers, judges, regulators, or voters, respond to the incentives presented to them. Elected officials and their staffs follow the money trail to campaign donors; judges, particularly in states in which they are elected, have similar incentives. Lobbyists need six or seven figure paychecks to keep their kids in private schools. Regulators are answerable to their political masters and are rewarded with lucrative industry jobs when they toe the corporate line. Voters respond to their increasingly bleak financial lives by trying to keep as much of their shrinking paychecks safe from taxes.
Suppose in some other country, call it Corruptia, the drug cartels had paid off its office holders, police and judges. Elections would be funded by cartel money channelled to favored candidates. We would expect that policy in Corruptia would be congruent with cartel interests.
The Corruptia thought experiment is too simplistic, however, since it supposes a single cartel with a single set of interests. In the real world, in what we might as well call the United States of Corporatia, corporate interests are diverse and sometimes in conflict. This results in a jumble of incoherent and conflicting laws, regulations and court rulings. When we drill down however we can find that each of these policies represents the interests of the the largest paymaster.
Fallows is right; people muddle through even as oligarchs make their lives meaner and more dismal. But he is still starry eyed in thinking that the interests of the US are defined by what is good for the people.The people have been defined away. The US exists now as a vehicle for corporations and in the new United States of Corporatia, public policies which serve corporate masters are not bugs, they are features.
(cross posted at Possible Experience)