Where is america headed

Donald Trump and the battle of the two percent. The return of machismo geopolitics. When human rights could determine an election. Vibeke Schou Tjalve. Sine Plambech. Louise Riis Andersen On leave. Cecilie Felicia Stokholm Banke. Yang Jiang. Luke Patey. Jean-Francois Drolet. Lars Erslev Andersen. Mikkel Runge Olesen. Rens van Munster. Will highly-educated Americans really be willing to settle for physical security and financial success beyond anything now imaginable, in return for abandoning the American Republic for an enlightened dictatorship?

When the crisis came, it was the optimates i. The republican structures they defended—elections, limited and dispersed powers, rule of law—in turn supported the rest of their existing order: an increasingly globalized economy exacerbating distributional divides but benefiting their own class. The optimates were tone deaf to the needs of those struggling to make a living, while the insurrectionists played to the working class in order to destroy what passed for democracy and impose their personal rule.

Rich, out-of-touch, socially liberal democrats versus rich, demagogic authoritarians masquerading as the party of the working class—not far off from today. As in Rome, life is good for those who live on the hills and could save the Republic.

But the communities of the hinterlands, stretching off to the seemingly-faraway Rubicon, are increasingly devastated. Virtually all economic growth in the past decade has occurred in three coastal metros. Inequality has intensified. The opioid crisis has decimated countless communities of the interior. Meanwhile, time grows short. This one went into the comparison between the Roman Senate, in the era of Cicero and the Catiline conspiracy, and the current one in Washington. Now, some reader reactions.

First, from a reader with extensive experience in national government:. Thank you for conveying the very thoughtful observations of Eric Schnurer comparing our situation to that of late republican Rome. Republicans are working to deprive the majority of its ability to control the agenda or to change the leadership.

For all their failures which have become ever more obvious , the Founders did not have this outlook. Our misfortune is that, partly because of the deficiencies of that design owing largely to several forced compromises and partly because of later developments such as the emergence of parties and of the filibuster , we face the reverse of one of their fears: a dictatorship not of the mob but of an entrenched minority.

And we don't seem to be coping with that danger any better than did Ciceronian Rome. He did not quite despair, nor evidently does Schnurer. O Mores! Their focus on ends by any means would make Machiavelli blush. It is a race against time in my view. Will they succeed in subverting American democracy before people wake up to the con trick.

I suspect they will. He reached a similar conclusion to Eric Schnurer at the end of the book. This article is very well-taken. Reading Gibbon even 20 years ago felt like reading the news … now we can even go back to ancient Greek experience of demagogues. I wonder if you would ask conservative Republicans you know, not whether they agree with those of us who fear a reprise of Germany, but if they could say at what point in German political history it would NOT have been wildly premature and hyperbolically alarmist to raise a cry that would bring developments to a halt.

Were that possible. In these last four years of our own personal Catiline, I did read up on ancient Rome, and read Gibbon.

I also wondered about the validity of democracy in this country, and now, with this article, the validity of democracy in Rome before Caesar. It would seem to me that if there is a decline and fall of an American Empire, I agree that it would happen more quickly than the centuries it took Rome to splinter and disappear.

But I think the outside forces that will eliminate us will be natural in origin, and not a sleepy Chuck Grassley, Visigoths or Sandinistas pouring across the border at Brownsville.

Argument by analogy may be the only tool historians have to predict the future, but it is still invalid. Yet our lives are increasingly dependent on them.

So, just soothsayer-wise, I would predict that industry will be chewing holes in the Congo in search of the latest element needed for the most advanced iPhone in , when the world population will hit 10 billion and the oil will run out. Those natural phenomena are actually predictable and I think, regardless of what surprises democracy has in store for us, will be the end of us. Because we still solve problems like the Romans did, after all is said and done. By killing them. Yet we are far more destructive, given our machines, than they ever were.

Rome never had the ability to kill the biosphere. Everyone in America, and indeed, on planet Earth, is participating in that execution right now. The U. Fifty-four senators including six Republicans voted to approve the investigative commission. Only 35 opposed it. The 35 who opposed represented fewer than million. How do I know this? The Senate was, of course, not designed to operate on a pure head-count basis.

But this is a contemporary, permanent imbalance beyond what the practical-minded drafters of the Constitution would have countenanced.

Because the filibuster was not part of the constitutional balance-of-power scheme. But it could have been presented as a breaking-news analysis of the event. Then we come to his argument. Like many good headlines, the one for this story intentionally overstated its argument. Many people wrote in to agree and, naturally, to disagree.

One long response I quoted was from my friend Eric Schnurer. I had met him in the late s when he was a college intern in the Carter-era White House speechwriting office, where I worked. Since then he has written extensively including for The Atlantic and consulted on governmental and political affairs. Now he is back, with a third and more cautionary extension of his argument.

But I turn the floor over to him. He starts with a precis of his case of two years ago:. Of course, the successive murders of two progressive brothers at the top rung of national power would seem to suggest the Kennedys more than, say, Bernie Sanders and Elisabeth Warren, to whom I compared them.

Yet, historical events can be instructive, predictive—even prescriptive—when not fully de- scriptive of current times and customs. In the s, such developments were in the future, although perhaps apparent then to the prescient …. If we could peg late summer to the Gracchi era—roughly up to B.

A year later I wrote about the developments of that seemed to move us closer to midnight. But as U. I read them in the original in my high school Latin class, at a time when my major focus was on school politics and, as the immediate past student body president, I was leading a similar in my mind effort to beat back a coup attempt by the would-be conspirator who had been defeated electorally by my chosen successor.

But to read them in the original is to recognize them as deservedly so. Latin is an extremely complicated but flexible language. Its elaborate system of agreements between nouns, adjectives and verbs allows for words to be ordered in sometimes almost-random-seeming patterns requiring extensive detective skills to puzzle out the actual meaning of a sentence.

At the peak of my Latin studies, for example, I could probably translate an average sentence in the great Latin epic, The Aeneid , at the rate of about one per hour. Reading Cicero in Latin, however, is like spreading warm butter over a piping-hot piece of bread: It simply flows.

Cicero could reach unequaled heights of high dudgeon with the simplest of sentences. He reached for his greatest in the opening lines of his first Catalinarian Oration to the Roman Senate. But he nonetheless was headed to a loss in the consular election of 63 B. Upon uncovering the conspiracy, Cicero called an emergency meeting of the Senate to denounce this attempt to short-circuit the election and end republican government through violence. How long is that madness of yours still to mock us?

When is there to be an end of that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now? He lives? Indeed, he even comes into the Senate, he takes part in public debate, he notes and marks out with his eyes each one of us for slaughter! Some sympathized with his political program; others were implicated in the plot; still others were basically in the same boat as Catiline, having committed similar crimes and sexual debaucheries that limited their political futures; and still others were perfectly fine with ending the trappings of republicanism if it meant they retained their power and Senate seats.

Catiline, a demagogue but in the end not the best of politicians or insurrectionists, was killed. But it turned out to be a brief reprieve. The rot had already set in. What mattered most in the long-term was not the immediate threat of the insurrectionists, but rather the complacency, if not sympathy, of the other ostensibly-republican leaders.

Another 10 months in America, another 15 years forward on the Roman sundial. Millions of them should. He was a gifted editor, mentor, leader, and friend, who within the publishing world was renowned. His untimely death of cancer yesterday, at age 67, is a terrible loss especially for his family and colleagues, but also to a vast community of writers and to the reading public.

Minute by minute, and page by page, writers gripe about editors. Year by year, and book by book, we become aware of how profoundly we rely on them. For now, I want to say how much Dan Frank meant to public discourse in our times, and how much he will be missed. Dan started working in publishing in his 20s, after college and graduate school. While in his 30s he became editorial director at Viking Books.

Among the celebrated books he edited and published there was Chaos: Making a New Science , by James Gleick, which was a runaway bestseller and a critical success. It also represented the sort of literary nonfiction and fiction that Dan would aspire to: well-informed, elegantly written, presenting complex subjects accessibly, helping readers enter and understand realms they had not known about before.

As it happened, Gleick worked with Dan on all of his subsequent books, including his biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton , as well as Faster and The Information.

During his tenure, Dan established Pantheon as an industry-leading publisher of narrative science, world literature, contemporary fiction, and graphic novels. For decades, Dan has been the public face of Pantheon, setting the tone for the house and overseeing the list. He had an insatiable curiosity about life and, indeed, that curiosity informed many of his acquisitions. As important as the books he published and the authors he edited, Dan served as a mentor to younger colleagues, endlessly generous with his time and expertise.

There are surprisingly few photos of Dan available online. I take that as an indication of his modesty; of the contrast between his high profile within the publishing world and his intentionally low profile outside it; and of his focus on the quiet, interior work of sitting down with manuscripts or talking with authors.

Dan is seated at the right, with his trademark round glasses. The clip will give an idea of his demeanor, his gentle but probing curiosity, his intelligence and encouragement, his readiness to smile and give a supportive laugh.

Watching him talk with Mallon reminds me of his bearing when we would talk in his office at Pantheon or at a nearby restaurant. Everything that is frenzied and distracted in modern culture, Dan Frank was the opposite of. The surest way to get him to raise a skeptical eyebrow, when hearing a proposal for a new book, was to suggest some subject that was momentarily white-hot on the talk shows and breaking-news alerts. I know this firsthand. The book ideas he steered me away from, and kept me from wasting time on, represented guidance as crucial as what he offered on the four books I wrote for him, and the most recent one where he worked with me and my wife, Deb.

Dan knew that books have a long gestation time—research and reporting, thinking, writing, editing, unveiling them to the world. They required hard work from a lot of people, starting with the author and editor but extending to a much larger team.

Therefore it seemed only fair to him that anything demanding this much effort should be written as if it had a chance to last. Very few books endure; hardly any get proper notice; but Dan wanted books that deserved to be read a year after they came out, or a decade, or longer, if people were to come across them. What, exactly, does an editor like this do to win such gratitude? Or like that of a parent or teacher, helping a young person avoid foreseeable mistakes. It even has a photo of him!

Dan worked with writers who were published by both Pantheon and Knopf. Deb and I will always be grateful to have known Dan Frank, and to have worked with him.

We send our condolences to his wife, Patty, and their sons and family. The whole reading public has benefited, much more than most people know, from his life and work. The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM , about the sources of connection rather than separation in American life.

You can see their clips here. One more of these segments covers the revolution in political communication wrought by Franklin D. You can see a clip from that documentary here. Why me? For reference, here is the text version of what I said in the Burns video, about those FDR talks, as previously noted here :. Of course political leaders had used those words for centuries. But American presidents had been accustomed to formal rhetoric, from a rostrum, to a crowd, stentorian or shouted in the days before amplification.

They were addressing the public as a group—not families, or individuals, in their kitchens or living rooms: My friends. A few previous presidents had dared broadcast over the radio—Harding, Coolidge, Hoover.

But none of them had dared imagine the intimacy of this tone—of trying to create a national family or neighborhood gathering, on a Sunday evening, to grapple with a shared problem. Discussing, explaining, describing, talking—those were his goals, not blaming or declaiming or pronouncing. What I find most remarkable in the tone that followed was a president talking up to a whole national audience, confident that even obscure details of finance could be grasped if clearly explained, rather than talking down, to polarize and oversimplify.

Some of these presentations have been more effective, some less. But all are operating against the background, and toward the standard of connection, set by the 32nd president, Franklin Roosevelt, starting in The public-health and economic repercussions have been felt everywhere.

But they have been hardest on the smallest businesses, and the most vulnerable families and communities. This is an update, following a report last month , on plans to repair the damage now being done. This month the ILSR released a report on steps the federal government could take to foster business and civic renewal at the local level.

The report is available in PDF here , and a summary is here. The larger argument is designed to:. Nearly , small, independent businesses have already closed their doors permanently, with Black-owned businesses taking the biggest hit. As of early November, small business revenue was down a stunning 31 percent from January.

As small businesses close or hang on by their fingernails, meanwhile, a handful of big corporations are recording massive profits, increasing their already-dominant market share, and dramatically accelerating concentration of the economy…. People are losing their dreams and livelihoods. Neighborhoods are losing beloved local stores and gathering spots. The country is losing much of its local productive capacity.

The report covers large policy areas—a different approach to antitrust—and very tangible specifics, like the way credit-card processing fees are handled. It is certainly worth consideration by the Biden team. And, in the same vein, here is another worthwhile piece , by Maddie Oatman in Mother Jones , on the importance of economic prospects for rural America. California, which has roughly one-eighth of the whole population of the United States and produces roughly one-seventh of U.

Others are a positive model for other states and the nation as a whole—notably, a non-partisan, anti-gerrymandering approach to drawing political-district lines.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor when this reform came in, has been taking the anti-gerrymandering cause nationwide, as Edward-Isaac Dovere reported here. California has, in effect, institutionalized this kind of non-partisan inquiry. This month, the Little Hoover Commission has released its report on how badly the pandemic-era economic implosion is hurting businesses and families in California, and what might be done about it. The executive summary is here , and the full report is here.

One of its recommendations:. This may include working with regional business councils to disseminate information about the Rebuilding Fund and explain why it is vital to support small businesses, especially those in underserved communities. It may also include fully leveraging existing state investment networks..

In order to encourage investment, GO-Biz and IBank should also develop a strategy for publicly recognizing institutional investors and explore additional means for incentivizing participation. In parallel with this effort, two California-based business-and-economic authorities, Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca , have put out a paper on the urgency of a new federal stimulus program. For the record, both of them are friends of mine. They say:. It is incumbent on the federal government to provide more generous and flexible funding for state and local governments.

Governors and mayors across the country are pleading for help ahead of a challenging winter. Because most state and local governments cannot legally spend more than they receive in revenues, they need federal funds to cover their growing fiscal gaps. Without such support, they will have no choice but to raise taxes or cut essential services and employment in health, public safety, and education, as many are already doing. Either option will undermine the countercyclical effects of federal stimulus, thereby weakening the recovery.

At the fiat of Mitch McConnell , the U. Many states and cities are improvising in useful ways, but national crises require a national response. And while I am at it, here is another locally based initiative to create more supportive ecosystems for entrepreneurs. The negative power of judging people purely by sheepskin credentials is very familiar.

I actually did an Atlantic cover story about it 35 years ago, here. For the record, I know many of the people involved in the Opportunity and Reword initiatives. They deserve attention. When I was a kid, the sin of returning books late to the public library populated a category of dread for me next to weekly confessions to the Catholic priest what can an 8-year-old really have to confess?

Collecting fines for overdue books has been going on for over a century, originally seen as a source of revenue and as an incentive for people to behave responsibly and actually return borrowed books. Then, as early as the s, research and experiments with going fine-free began to pick up steam.

But as recently as four years ago, over 90 percent of libraries in the U. A Seinfeld episode from , called The Library Cop, seems at once timely and untimely. This is Seinfeld ; it will make you laugh. The last five years have been very busy in the world of overdue fines. Are fines consistent with a fundamental mission of libraries: to serve the public with information and knowledge?

And to address that mission equitably across the diverse population of rich and poor library users? A Colorado State Library system report showed that eliminating overdue fines removed barriers to access for children.

While some people only notice fines as an irritation, others feel the weight heavily enough to be driven away from the library. In , a Library Journal poll of libraries found that over 34 percent considered eliminating at least some fines.

In , a poll of Urban Libraries Council ULC member libraries found that the most common reason 54 percent, dwarfing all others responding libraries had gone fine-free was that eliminating fines increased access for low-income users and children. Paul , and Columbus, Ohio eliminated overdue fines. In January, , the city of San Francisco issued an extensively-researched and influential report called Long Overdue , on the impact of fines on the mission of libraries, and the costs of eliminating fines on libraries, users, and the city and county of San Francisco.

The report ultimately recommended eliminating overdue fines throughout the public library system. When the pandemic closed libraries and made it hard or impossible for people to return books, many libraries revisited their policies on overdue fines. In Washington D. Libraries have been experimenting with lots of different ways to address fines for overdue books. Some stopped fining all patrons; others only children or youth; still others exempted active military and veterans from fines.

Some forgive fines up to a certain dollar amount. Santa Barbara , California, follows one common practice—forgiving fines for a certain number of days 30 in this case days, then charging for the cost of the book, which can be forgiven upon its return. Lost or damaged books are in a different category.

The loss of a book is much more costly and cumbersome to a library than a late return, and libraries work out various ways to address that.

When libraries offer popular amnesty periods for returning overdue books, the books often pour in like gushers. An amnesty program in Chicago brought in 20, overdue items; Los Angeles nearly 65,; San Francisco just shy of , And a bonus : After the Chicago library went fine-free, thousands of users whose fees were forgiven returned to the library for new cards, and readers checked out more books overall than before.

Other libraries found substitutes for monetary fines. The Czech Republic and Slovakia went their separate ways peacefully, just within the last generation. Great Britain via Brexit seceded, in effect, from the European Union after much to-ing and fro-ing. In other words, secession might be more an intensification than a termination or alleviation of the cold civil war. I doubt we want to try it again. Which is why, under present circumstances, America seems to be approaching some kind of crisis — a crisis of the two constitutions, from which none of the possible exit ramps offers a sure escape.

The crisis could be triggered by a disputed election, a Supreme Court decision on abortion, gun rights, immigration policy, etc. Nor is simply protracting the cold civil war until the people get sick of it necessarily a better outcome. As the conflict has gone on, the disagreements, generally speaking, have gotten worse, not better. Yet the original basis of American greatness and unity is still available to us. Civility and citizenship are still possible between our factions if we could recover some of the fundamentals we used to agree on.

To appeal to the better angels of our nature, however, we must first reacquaint ourselves with that nature and with how the founders tried to encourage it. Thus, on the one hand, the consent of the governed is a basic principle upon which the American Revolution was fought and the Constitution founded.

On the other hand, the founders realized that trusted patriots elected to public office were necessary to help counsel and steer the republic. But how would such patriots be formed, and how would the republic forge citizens wise enough to elect them?

For this, a new education in self-government was needed, based on the principles of civil and religious liberty. The Americans understood these liberties in terms of the doctrine of natural rights. Our founders argued that it ran through every human being equally. They discovered the basis of political obligation in the right of each individual to consent to a just government. Thus was natural-rights and divine-right democracy born. At the same time, religious liberty for all was secured by virtue of the limited nature of the resulting social contract.

This new civil government did not seek to dictate true religion or the conditions of eternal salvation in the world to come. Freedom of the mind cannot be alienated: It is impossible to grant to government the power or right to compel the mind to believe something about which it is not persuaded by the evidence and arguments presented to it.

Especially is this true of religious questions, for faith above all cannot be forced or extorted. By virtue of these principles, people could be at the same time good members of their religious community — i.