Quote:Jordan’s elevation would reflect that for many years now, Republicans have elevated those who disdain government and whose goal is to stop it from working.
That seems to me precisely the key element.
A courtroom settlement over withheld Covid-19 data that critics say cost thousands of lives has deflated Ron DeSantis’s campaign trail persona as a courageous freedom warrior who kept his state open during a deadly peak of the pandemic.
It comes at a pivotal time for the Florida governor, whose teetering run for the Republican presidential nomination is mired in financial difficulties and collapsing poll numbers in early primary states.
Among the efforts DeSantis has made to try to arrest his slide among Republican hardliners include positioning himself as a champion for “medical freedom”, and defying federal health guidance to advise Floridians against taking new Covid-19 booster shots.
The settlement ends a two-year legal battle between the DeSantis administration and a coalition of Democrats, open government advocates and media outlets that began in June 2021 when the Florida health department ended daily updates of Covid cases, deaths and vaccinations on its online dashboard.
The department will pay the plaintiffs’ $152,000 legal bill and resume regular posting of the data that DeSantis’s communications team insisted at the time was no longer necessary because cases had “significantly decreased” and that Florida was “returning to normal”.
In reality, as DeSantis dismissed reporting on the pandemic as “media hysteria”, the Delta variant of the virus was just taking hold, and cases and fatalities spiked, to a record 385 a day in Florida by September 2021. Simultaneously, Florida led the nation in pediatric Covid hospitalizations.
Critics dubbed DeSantis “the Pied Piper of Covid, leading everybody off a cliff”, as he forged ahead with an executive order banning mask mandates in schools, having already signed legislation awarding himself veto power over coronavirus mandates set by municipalities.
“Twenty-three thousand Floridians died during the Delta surge, and not only did the DeSantis administration restrict information on Covid during that time, they repeatedly downplayed the severity of the outbreak to fit their political narrative and help DeSantis run for president. That decision cost lives,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic former state congressman who filed the lawsuit against the Florida health department, later joined by the Florida Center for Government Accountability.
“Our school leaders were struggling to make informed decisions about how to mitigate the spread of Covid, whether it be masking or social distancing policies, or other strategies. They needed data, they needed information, but the state made it unavailable, then said it didn’t exist.
“All Floridians have a constitutional right to public records and receive them in a timely manner. And what’s interesting about the governor’s arguments about Covid is he repeatedly talks about giving people the choice over masks and vaccinations, but without critical public health data how are they able to make informed choices?”
Smith said the settlement became inevitable when an appeals court ordered the health department earlier this year to produce documents containing Covid data it claimed did not exist.
“The DeSantis administration was caught red handed lying about the existence of these public records in court, repeatedly claiming that the records we were requesting didn’t exist, then saying even if they did exist, they would not share them because they were somehow exempt,” he said.
In a statement to the Guardian, the Florida department of health noted that the settlement did not include any admission of wrongdoing or violation of any law, and that the state had always reported data to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“It is unfortunate that we have continued to waste government resources arguing over the formatting of data with armchair epidemiologists who have zero training or expertise,” department spokesperson Jae Williams said, in a swipe at Smith.
Williams said it was inaccurate to say DeSantis had “lost” a court fight. “Governor DeSantis isn’t a party in the settlement agreement,” he said.
Public health analysts, meanwhile, welcomed the resumption of publication of Covid data, and lamented the “politicization” of both the process and the virus.
“There’s no valid excuse for withholding information from the public except in the rare circumstance where there’s a bona fide concern that if you release certain data you’ll cause panic, and that the panic itself would cause more damage than the withholding of the data. I don’t think there was any case for that to be made here,” said Jay Wolfson, distinguished professor of public health, medicine and pharmacy at the University of South Florida.
“It was unfortunate because it didn’t only politicize whatever we were doing about the disease, it politicized medicine and science. It reduced the public’s reliance and belief there was a source of good science behind the medicine they could rely on, and gave them less basis for trust.”
Wolfson added that public confusion was understandable when federal health agencies such as the CDC were recommending vaccination boosters, while DeSantis’s hand-picked state surgeon general warned against them.
“There’s an old term called the sacred trust of medicine. It suggests there’s a special relationship people have with their medical provider, a trust that if you have any questions you consult your physician,” he said.
“The politicization didn’t help because even physicians weren’t sure what to do. In Florida, there was a concern, ‘Do I require my patients to get vaccinated? Do I suggest it, or do I run the risk, certainly recently, of being sanctioned by the state if I do?’”
For Smith, a prominent critic of DeSantis, the episode marks another failure for the governor’s sagging run for his party’s presidential nomination.
“Folks have largely moved on from Covid to more pressing issues that are impacting their lives, property insurance, rising costs and prices in Florida, access to health care, housing, there’s so much that’s on people’s minds the governor is not talking about and doesn’t have any solutions for,” he said.
“He launched his presidential campaign with a continuation of his war on woke and culture wars and gender ideology and all kinds of stuff. When Republican voters grew tired of that he shifted over to his record on Covid, which still didn’t earn him any points. He keeps changing the subject to see what sticks, but at the end of the day, whatever he’s selling people aren’t buying.”
Americans are by nature sunny and optimistic. The optimism can be little bit forced, because surviving the depredations and crushing stress of American life takes relentless positivity. That's not a judgment, it's an observation. This, in a sense, is where America is now, vis a vis Trumpism.
America didn't get Trumpism until it was too late. What do I mean by that? Let me explain. And as I do, the point isn't to relitigate recent history—but it is to discuss the problem America faces now, which it still doesn't fully grasp.
Today, American liberals are growing desperate. Panicked. Manic and frantic. They're searching for ways to stop Trump. From assuming the mantle of the Presidency again. So idea after idea's floated, and ripples through the pages of newspapers, columns, cable news, thinktanks, blogs, and so forth.
What if he goes to jail? Can we use the 14th Amendment? If he's convicted in this way, could that disqualify him? How about if we argue this particular legal point? What if we block his candidacy on these grounds, and send this case to the courts? The ideas, such as they are, roll on, with a growing sense of...
Despair. There's more than a little bit of a tinge of desperation to all this, this increasingly frantic quest for a method, a way, a mechanism...solution. The underlying assumption, or desired end, here, is that There Must Be a Way to Stop Trump Once and For All. It's not that that's necessarily wrong, but it misses the point. Or rather, it obscures the point, which Americans don't want to face, at least not on this political side.
Let's think back in history. There were Three Big Opportunities to Stop Trump. But America's establishment didn't seize them, out of hubris, denial, and sheer stubborn wishful thinking. And so now it faces not a short-run problem, but a long-term one.
What were they?
The first one was before the fateful 2016 election. Back then, what happened? None of the warnings were taken seriously. In fact, it was worse than that. Those of us who warned—and we did warn, strenuously—weren't even just ignored or dismissed, we were attacked, mocked, taunted, and blacklisted, by our own side. That's not point-scoring. We're discussing what actually happened.
So because the warnings weren't taken seriously, the First Big Chance to Stop Trump...was completely blown. Remember those days? That was when MSNBC pundits would argue that Trump wasn't such a bad guy, when the newspapers were full of columns if not praising him, then at least defending him from...the very warnings which would soon come true.
The theme of those days was, and it's a bit incredible to look back on them now: Trump's not a fascist, ha-ha, this isn't authoritarianism, look at these people warning of such things, why, they must be the really dangerous and crazy ones.
Remember what happened with any number of celebrity scandals recently? The warnings weren't taken seriously. Instead, walls of silence were created, which shielded predators and abusers, and let them continue their behaviour. This is exactly what happened with Trump—the establishment created a wall of silence that enabled his rise to power, and that was true on both sides of the political aisle. It's a Big Problem of Organizations.
That's worse, by the way, than just "not taking the warnings seriously." The very figures and institutions and systems who are now turning around in despair searching for ways to Solve the Problem of Donald Trump are the very ones that...made it happen. Or enabled and let it, anyways.
That brings us to the Second Big Chance to Stop Trump. That was during his Presidency. What happened then? A pattern of wildly escalating abuse of power was soon evident. It went from ethnic "bans" to putting kids in cages to "separating" families to hunting down hated scapegoats on the streets, a downward spiral accelerating seemingly at light speed.
Yet even at this juncture, the very same dynamic continued to be true. The really dangerous and crazy ones were the ones warning something was Seriously Wrong Here, not the President who was growing more and more open in his pursuit of authoritarianism and fascism. The late Ben Ferencz warned that Trump was committing the equivalent of crimes against humanity. Who was Ferencz? Only the last living Nuremberg Prosecutor at the time. But who listened? Nobody much, at least not those with or in power, in all its various forms, whether political power, audiences, relationship, deep pockets, or at the helm of institutions.
Instead, while Trump pushed America off the edge, and into the abyss, while his pattern of abuse of power escalated...the same dynamic as before the election went on. In those days, the columns were full of "takes" like no, this isn't fascism, ha-ha, you can't say that, we'll get very Angry At You, Trump Isn't Mussolini, No, These Aren't High Crimes, and so forth. Let me say that again, because it matters a great deal, if you want to understand how societies collapse. While Trump was escalating...American institutions and power went on building a wall of silence around him, defending him from the warnings that weren't by now just soon to come true, but coming true.
Let me emphasize that while, sure, there was reporting on all this, and that was necessary and well and good, the attitude of the analysis and thinking, the social current, the "takes," wasn't that this was an Existential Crisis for America and Democracy. It was...No Big Deal.
That brings me to the Third Chance to Stop Trump. Who could have checked his abuses of power? Given not just a free pass by the establishment, and I don't just mean politically, but in all its forms, all that was left was...the GOP. But by now, having escalated the abuse of power right down into the abyss, Trump had consolidated his hold on power. He'd wowed his flock with his shock-and-awe tactics, forged a bond with them stronger than steel, through scapegoating, hate, conspiratorialism, and demonization, all of which had become official government policy by now. With his flock marching in step behind him, the GOP had no choice but to fall into lockstep, too.
Three Big Chances to Stop Trump. None of them were taken. What's my point? That you should shed tears about history? To make you feel guilty and ashamed? Not at all. It's so that you look at things in a mature, adult, sophisticated way, which doesn't happen too often in America.
One of American thinking's great assumptions is that there's no such thing as a mistake you can't recover from. Nothing is irredeemable, irreversible, unchangeable. No situation is insurmountable. Everything is solvable. Think of how deep that goes in American life and culture and ideology—in its celebration of failure as something to treasure, for example. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again.
This is also how America's thinking about Trumpism now.
Only it isn't true. Some mistakes? You don't recover from them. Some situations really do do permanent harm. Some problems can't be solved. Some crashes are fatal. There really is such a thing as an irredeemable plight. Especially in the sense of "the long run."
You see, when America searches desperately for a Way to Stop Trump Once and For All, it's imagining, fervently, that somehow, Trump and Trumpism can be a short-term problem. A blip, an anomaly, and soon enough, hey presto, we'll revert to the mean. That's emphatically the wrong way to understand what did happen, and what is.
Trump and Trumpism could have been short term issues, perhaps. But not anymore. Precisely because they weren't even acknowledged as that much at the time, when there were still chances to reduce or maintain them to such a degree. And so today they've grown into...bigger ones. Far more powerful and enduring ones, with deeper roots, now planted firmly into the soil. So now?
Trump and Trumpism are long term problems. Or at least changes. Because it should be said that Trump, despite his odious attitudes, has a point, as all demagogic movements do, which is why he continues to connect with masses—institutions and systems are badly broken, and American life is in ruins, maybe not for the K Street class, but for the average person struggling to pay their bills, certainly.
Trump and Trumpism are an example of mistakes that can't be corrected in the short term. Not anymore, and not by a long shot. They're textbook examples of long term issues now, of the classic "social collapse by way of political meltdown" variety. Sure, there might be some abstruse mechanism to block Trump from assuming the Presidency. Great. So what? He'll still be pulling the strings behind the scenes. Trumpism will continue believing in what it does. The masses aren't exactly likely to turn their backs on what's a salvational ideology for them now. As Hillary Clinton said, recently, desperate, they'd have to be "deprogrammed"—but of course, you can hardly do that on a social scale.
So this issue isn't going away. It's here to stay. For a very, very long time. America still fails to grasp that. Liberals look desperately for an immediate, short-term way out of the Trump Problem, as if to almost deliberately overlook the facts. They had their chances, they blew those chances, and so now, American authoritarianism is a long-run issue.
What does that mean? It means that America will now go through a period of destabilization. It's already in one, of course, but underlying how we're told to think about it is the unconscious message that it'll all suddenly end. Soon. Probably not. Rather, this Age of Destabilization that America's in now will last for quite some time to come. Decades, probably. In the same way that the evolution from Reagan Gingrich to Trump took decades. America's in a new political age now. Key word, period. Fascism and authoritarianism in America are here to stay, hardly likely to simply disappear. (And yes, that's not new, it should be pointed out that those critics who warned that America always contained these tendencies have been proven right, too, like a James Baldwin.)
Think about the problem even just a little bit, and it should be clear just why. The GOP can't buck Trump because of course he's got a demagogic bond with their base. That demagogic bond can be transferred much more easily than it can be broken—if it can even be broken. Meanwhile, there's no shortage of contenders lining up eagerly to have the demagogue's dark gift bestowed on them, junior league would-be Trumps.
The problem isn't going to go away. If anything, it's going to get worse. I'll discuss that in future posts. For now, I want to make the point as clearly as I can, the way it should be made.
America didn't get Trumpism until it was too late. It blew it's Three Big Chances to Stop Trump. So now, Trump and Trumpism are long-term problems. Or changes. There's no magic wand that can dispel them. The underlying thinking is wishful, almost infantile: if we just do this, maybe it'll all go away. Alas, ignoring the problem then? Only made it a much bigger one now. Hardened it, let it plunge roots into the soil, ripen, reach fruition, and even plant new seeds. The time Trump and Trumpism could have been "stopped" in such a simplistic way was back then, and it's long gone by now.
America has a Long-Term Problem, one of...many. That's what happens when you...build walls of silence...that seal the mouths of those who come to warn...so that predators can continue their rise to power. I know that's a tough way to put it. But this is where America is. Some mistakes linger, some follies are permanent, and some crashes are fatal. They're there to stay with you, such errors, costly flaws of judgment, that exert steep costs over the long-run. The beginning, as ever, is to understand this all, instead of cling to wishful thinking.
What are you even talking about?
I believe he was alluding to the alternative fact- world truism that the grave deadliness of the Covid virus is fake.
This morning, the Justice Department announced that the United States has reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in the case of Ms. L. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a class action lawsuit filed in 2018 over the Trump administration's policy of separating parents and children at the southwest border to deter migrants. That policy, implemented in 2017 and 2018, resulted in more than 5,500 children being separated from their parents.
In 2018 a judge ordered the families reunited, but it turned out the Trump administration had not kept records of the family members. As soon as he took office, President Joe Biden appointed a task force to accomplish the reunifications, but 85 children are still separated from their families. The task force also found that 290 of the children removed from their parents were U.S. citizens.
The lawsuit charged that the policy broke a number of U.S. laws—seeking asylum is legal, and taking children away from their parents without cause is not—and the settlement seeks both to heal the victims of the policy and to make sure it never happens again. The affected families will have a different process for applying for asylum than other migrants and will have access to benefits such as work authorization, possible housing assistance, immigration lawyers, and mental health care to address the trauma of the separations, and the government will agree not to turn back to such a policy in the future.
“The separation of families at our southern border was a betrayal of our nation’s values,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “By providing services to these families and implementing policies to prevent future separations, today’s agreement addresses the impacts of those separations and helps ensure that nothing like this happens again.”
The judge will need to approve the settlement.
MAGA Republicans seem unconcerned with what the law says. Indeed, they have been working hard to discredit the law in order to protect former president Trump, attacking the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After Trump has publicly attacked prosecutors and witnesses in the case over his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Judge Tanya Chutkan today prohibited him from such attacks on the court’s staff, witnesses, testimony, and prosecutors.
Last week, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) called for shutting down the government in November unless Democrats agree to cutting all spending for processing or releasing into the country any new migrants. He says the demand is “non-negotiable.” But U.S. and international law require the U.S. to process asylum requests, even if a migrant arrives in between legal points of entry.
Former senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer Tom Jawetz told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post that Jordan’s plan “would be both illegal and a practical impossibility.” Administration officials “are legally obligated to process people for asylum on request,” he said. “It’s not a choice.”
But therein lies the heart of today’s Republican Party: its extremist leaders no longer believe that rules apply to them. Jordan, a staunch ally of Trump, was key to the former president’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election. He is now gathering votes for a bid to become the speaker of the House of Representatives after the MAGA extremists threw former House speaker Kevin McCarthy out.
In 2017, former Republican House speaker John Boehner told journalist Tim Alberta: “Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate…. A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.” In 2021, he clarified: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart—never building anything, never putting anything together.”
After a secret ballot showed that 55 of his colleagues would not support him in a floor vote, Jordan has insisted on a public vote, putting his colleagues under pressure to support him and thus to support Trump. They are caving, one at a time.
But Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) called out the MAGA group that revolted repeatedly against the Republican conference and now is demanding Republican unity for the unpopular Jordan, forcing the party to fully embrace Trump. “I can’t abide by the fact a small group violated the rules to get what they wanted [and] now I’m supposed to play by the rules,” Bacon said. “I think we’ve got to have consequences, and you’ve got to stand up for this. That’s what Americans do.”
We used to be able to assume that Americans did, in fact, play by the rules, accepting the principle of the rule of law. That principle is now openly challenged here in the U.S.
That principle is also at stake around the world. In a piece in The Atlantic on October 9, foreign policy journalist Anne Applebaum noted the fragility of the rules-based international order, a system of norms and values established after World War II in an attempt to create a system for resolving international disputes, preventing territorial wars, and ending no-holds-barred slaughter.
A series of agreements, including the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war established those rules, and while they have often been flouted, they offered grounds for challenging those nations and military personnel who broke them.
Applebaum pointed out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians “are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all.” They feel justified in ignoring the rules-based international order and sowing terror and chaos among civilians.
Their “goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online.” Applebaum suggests “we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone.”
Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made no secret of their determination to strengthen the rules-based international order, and tonight the White House announced that Biden will travel on Wednesday to the Middle East, where he will visit Israel before traveling to Jordan, where he will meet with the country’s leader King Abdullah II, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
We might miss the idea of the rule of law here at home if we continue to empower MAGA Republicans. Voters in Poland missed it, and yesterday 73% of them turned out to oust from power the nationalist-conservative party that, Anne Applebaum notes in a different Atlantic article, “turned state television into a propaganda tube, used state companies to fund its political campaigns,… politicized state administration[,]… altered electoral laws and even leaked top-secret military documents, manipulating their contents for electoral gain.”
Opponents of the ruling party, which took power in 2015, came together in a coalition that rejected angry nationalism in favor of civic patriotism, met in demonstrations around the country, featured women prominently in their campaigns, promised to end Poland’s strong abortion restrictions, and offered closer cooperation with Europe.
Rebuilding democracy will be neither fast nor easy, Applebaum notes, but “Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable.”
The figures never lie.
During the study period, there were a total of 313,171 recorded COVID-19-related deaths and 54,792 recorded influenza-related deaths. Decedents were stratified by demographics and the presence of comorbidities (Table (Table1).1). Decedents with COVID-19, when compared to influenza, were more likely to be male (OR 1.37) and between ages 65 and 84 years (OR 1.45–1.51). Decedents with COVID-19 were more likely to be Black (OR 2.24) and Hispanic (OR 2.74) compared to those who had influenza and less likely to be White (OR 0.36). Compared to decedents with influenza, decedents with COVID-19 were more likely to have diabetes, obesity, and hypertension; but less likely to have malignancy, chronic lung disease, renal failure, and heart failure. There was a higher percentage of deaths in nursing homes and a lower percentage of deaths at home and hospice in decedents with COVID-19.
The deaths attributed to C19 in most nations never topped the usual numbers attributed to influenza, which somehow vanished during the orchestrated pandemic.
The numbers for all deaths in the US of A were attributed to C19, because there was a cash incentive for doing so.
Currents of destabilization race around the world. Conflict erupts. Things seem to be falling apart, wherever you look. The international order, breaking down. Threats intensifying. Tensions rising. Crises proliferating, blending, multiplying. Why? What’s going on here? Today, we’re going to talk about the fraying of the Pax Americana, aka, the American Century, America as world power, American hegemony.
Paul Krugman just wrote about it—here’s how he put it.
“Even serious students of international affairs are noting that the world seems to be becoming more dangerous, with many local cold wars turning hot, and suggesting that we may be witnessing the end of the Pax Americana.
But why is the Pax Americana in decline?”
Krugman’s answer, basically, is “The Republicans.” I’m going to explain it slightly differently. I think the problem goes deeper. And as I do, please note: I’m not blaming anyone, this isn’t about finger pointing, and its certainly about not about left vs right. Atrocities are horrific things and they should always be condemned. Don’t over-interpret it or take it personally—we’re going to try to speak a little objectively. This isn’t really about Israel and Gaza, as an explanation—that’s a sadly special case. I’m going to try and paint a picture for you about why the world order is breaking, in hard terms of political economy. And please note, “Pax Americana” isn’t my term, nor is the idea that it’s in decline mine, it’s something political scientists talk about, and think is breaking and fraying themselves, so the question is: why?
It’s not that America is, as Krugman seems to suggest, now a superpower without teeth. America has teeth aplenty. My interpretation is that America was and is a superpower, in fact, the world’s dominant power by a very long way—only that power hasn’t been used in wise and lasting ways. America’s Paradigm of Peace and Prosperity hasn’t even worked for itself…it ended up, today, a nation in profound crisis…so how could it also work for something as big as…the world? To build a stable, secure, optimistic, cooperative, and future-facing world (versus one desperately, angrily, now, regressing, racing back to pre-modernity)?
When I put it that way, perhaps you see a glimmer of what I mean.
Why is the world destabilizing? Why is democracy in steep, sharp, shocking decline, yes really—to the tune of, right about now, 5-10% a decade? Why do currents of conflict race around the globe, and why are authoritarianism and fascism resurging?
Let’s take a hard look at the world—not opinion, not speculation, an empirical, factual look. Hold on while I put on my economist slash World’s Top 50 Thinkers hat.
The world today is an eerie echo of America. What’s America’s investment rate? About 20% or so. What’s the world’s investment rate? About 20% or so. Now, that might not sound like a Big Deal to you, in fact, I know I sound like your Neighborhood Financial Advisor, but let me assure you, it’s the Number That Explains Everything. Why?
What does an investment rate of 20%…give…America? Americans? Not much. They don’t enjoy the sophisticated, robust, cutting edge social contracts that place like Canada and Western Europe enjoy. Made of advanced forms of public goods, like healthcare, retirement, higher education, media, and so on, right down to, for example, high speed rail, as universals. And so American life has fallen apart—now, there’s widespread poverty, two thirds of Americans living at the edge, paycheck to paycheck, over a third without enough every month to just pay the bills.
An investment rate of 20% isn’t enough. For what? To have modernity itself. Because an investment rate that low can’t provide the systems, institutions, and goods that we think of as modern. Those are public goods, based on shared investment, like Europe and Canada enjoy. Yet without them, what happens? Again, we just have to look. Empirically. At America itself. Democracy begins to implode, as people turn on it, feeling abandoned, betrayed, in rage, despair, old hatreds surging. It’s me or you. People or turn on one another, in a desperate battle for survival and existence. Peace implodes, and conflict rises in its place. So let me say it again. An investment rate of 20% is too low to have modernity itself.
Now let’s come to the world. What do you see?
The world lacks what are called global public goods. Just like America lacks public goods at its level. Precisely because in both cases, too-low investment levels are…eerily similar.
Let’s go back to Stiglitz’s foundational definition of global public goods to remind ourselves what they are. "In Stiglitz (1995) I identify five such global public goods: international economic stability, international security (political stability), international assistance, and knowledge." That's just a beginning—to it, we could everything from development itself to healthcare, education, and finance—but you get his basic, and big, idea.
So: America. A critical lack of national public goods. The world: a critical lack of global public goods. America, critical, as in: a threshold at which democracy itself begins to shatter. The world? Right there, too.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a relationship.
The world lacks these Keys to Modernity, global public goods, for the same reason that America lacks public goods, its own keys, at a national level, too. Because, of course, American thinking, and I mean that in a formal way, opposes them. You’ll almost never hear, for an example, an American economist argue that everyone should have healthcare or retirement or so forth—just wouldn’t be “competitive.” Pure crackpottery, because of course….places like Europe do…and they have now vastly higher living standards.
That’s the Pax Americana. The real one. It’s not just about military might or deterrence. It’s about a paradigm. A broken one. The Paradigm that the World Should Develop Like or Into America, more or less, if you want to think about it that way. Another way to put that is what’s sometimes called the “Washington Consensus,” that is, neoliberalism, and I’ll come to that in a moment. Think about this way, if you like: keeping the peace, or producing peace? What’s the difference? And if America itself melted down into conflict and rage and paralysis by way of deprivation, inequality, and stagnation, wouldn’t a world oriented by it towards its model of growth and prosperity, do just that…too?
The world is a mirror image of America precisely because America is its dominant hyperpower, by a very long way. Hegemons create worlds that reflect their values, priorities, societies. It can scarcely happen any other way. And the real problem today, when it comes to “international order,” is that just as America’s Paradigm of Development failed for itself, it’s also failing for the world, too.
Let me make that more concrete for you with a counterfactual, and that just means, “a thing that could have happened but didn’t.” Imagine that the world was instead developed along the European or Canadian model.
It’d be very, very different. We’d have built a world…with…global public goods. Or at least more of them. We’d have focused on giving people around the world everything from healthcare to education to retirement, right down to bodily autonomy and safety, which would imply self-governance and self-determination. Grand institutions would have been constructed to bring those rights to life, whether at regional or international levels.
None of that happened. And of course as none of that happened, a lack of development is now catching up with the world. The UN warns that many of its goals—the most significant indicators of human progress we have—are way off track, stuck, going into reverse. That’s not a coincidence—these are the real world outcomes of the Pax Americana. The American paradigm hasn’t worked at a civilizational level, as a world.
As a consequence, destabilization is spreading. Conflict’s erupting. Democracy’s in increasingly dire shape, as people around the world turn to demagogues, seeking scapegoats for their resentments, frustrations, and woes. Think about what’s happening in America, politically: a point of paralysis has been reached. This is where we’re approaching in terms of global governance, too: as a world, we’re paralyzed.
How did all that come to be? Think about the way that global growth and development work. In an almost unstated away. Just in terms of norms and values. Institutions and organizations—whether international ones, banks, corporations, "multilateral" ones like, say the IMF and World Bank, aid agencies, whomever—don’t go out there and press for the world to have the equivalent of a European social contract. They press, if they do, for it to have something much more like an American social contract.
So people are to have basic American-style rights: freedoms of speech, expression, religion, perhaps, the right to vote, etcetera. That’s not a bad thing, but the rest is more or less to be left up to markets, who are supposed to fill the gap. A very real vacuum of public goods is left. This paradigm doesn’t press—not often, and not systemically, anyways—for a European style social contract, made of healthcare, retirement, higher education, transport, media, income, shelter, dignity, etcetera for all, affordably, universally, as the critical infrastructure of a society. There are exceptions, here and there, but as a system, our model of global development and growth, our paradigm of prosperity is broken in this way. China, for example, now has a generation of young people in crisis, just like in America.
Just as America denied itself modernity, the endgame of this model is much the same. The world is denied modernity, too. And as modernity fails to emerge, all that’s left is a vacuum, in which people’s living standards begin to stagnate and fall, despair and frustration set in, while inequality rises—and eventually, demagogues come along to take a wrecking ball to what’s left. And those demagogues take many, many forms. We’re left with old hatreds and ancient prejudices rising, and setting people against one another, often brutally, as threats proliferate, norms break down, and aggression and hostility surge. Chaos and disorder begin to reign.
That’s emphatically not a childish way of saying “America bad!” That isn’t the point. This is a set of observations about how the world came to approach this point of breakdown. There are indeed truly bad actors in the world, we all know who they are. No, I'm not saying they're the good guys. They're not. The point is paradigmatic, to understand how peace and prosperity are built, in enduring ways, what power is, what it should be used for, and how—and why, today, the global order is at risk of collapse. “The world no longer trusts U.S. promises.”—not my words, Krugman’s.
So this is about different paradigms of peace and prosperity. Do they come from markets, financialization, and a very, very minimal set of rights, by way of “small government,” backed up by military might, neoliberal slash Washington Consensus style? Or do they come from expansive social contracts, advanced rights, and sustained investment in institutions which provide universal public goods for all? That all used to be a theoretical question, but right about now, we’re beginning to see an answer emerging before us, by way of Big H History.
That's the point—an answer emerging before our eyes, as a rejoinder to this Grand Theory. History is teaching us that the old paradigm is broken.
The Pax Americana’s failure is becoming more and more apparent, and it’s very real. It’s evident in all the above—stalled levels of global development, a stagnant global economy, growing conflict, the resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism. Just as America itself was denied a future, and plunged into destabilization, the same outcome is spreading around the world. The world is a mirror of America, in these hard terms of political economy—the global political economy reflects America’s values, priorities, norms, goals, right down to being an eerie reflection of its basic economics, not because it wants to, particularly, but because that’s what power is.
So where does the world go from here? We don’t know. That’s why this decade is turning out so badly. The old paradigm’s failing spectacularly, before our eyes. And yet the new one has yet to be born. We’re in the in-between times. Our challenge this decade is that big, too: rethinking an age of mega-failure, hegemony, power, development, growth, what it means to be a world, and a civilization. We’re taking the first few steps, in places, at times—but not nearly fast or decisively enough. The demagogues are outrunning us. We have to change that—or else things only get worse from here.
