Making Our Future

In recognition of our quarter millennium anniversary I thought I’d muse a little bit into where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going as a country.

Over the last few years and, particularly, the last few days, I’ve seen a number of opinion pieces comparing us with Greece and Rome. Consider this from The Guardian by Brit Jonathan Freedland:

As Tom Holland, historian of the ancient world, puts it, the US was “founded as a simulacrum of the early Roman republic. And the lesson of Roman history is that at some point, a republic will become an autocracy.” The ink was barely dry on the 4 July declaration, says Holland, when Americans started “dreading the emergence of a Caesar”.

Uh, no we weren’t. There are several reasons. The first is that the Founding Fathers didn’t take the early Roman republic as a model but as an object lesson. They were asking a different question than Mr. Holland implied. He implied they were asking “How can we make this new country like pre-imperial Rome?” They weren’t. They were asking “How can we prevent this new country from falling victim to the same plight that pre-imperial Rome did?” They were not asking how to reproduce Rome. They were asking how to avoid becoming Rome. In his A Defence of the Constitution John Adams consider Polybius’s claim that “it is impossible to invent a more perfect system of government [than the Roman]” going on to add that he wanted the states’ constitutions “will prove themselves improvements both upon the Roman, the Spartan, and the English commonwealths”. That is definitely not founding “a simulacrum”. In Federalist #63 Madison argued that a “well-constructed” Senate was needed because it was so easy for one branch of government to swallow another. He made a similar argument for a strong executive in #70.

The second reason is that we are so drastically different from Rome. The early Roman republic was an oligarchy not a representative democracy. Rome was a city not a continent-spanning country. However moderns may think that women were downtrodden 250 years ago in America, they were treated much worse in ancient Rome. Roman women enjoyed far fewer legal rights and no political role whatsoever. Although slavery existed in eighteenth-century America, it had already become the subject of moral criticism in a way that slavery in the Roman Republic largely was not.

The third reason is this. It is not surprising that the Founding Fathers treated Rome as an object lesson. That is precisely what they knew of Rome. The Founders did not know Rome directly. They knew Rome through a textual tradition that had survived two millennia of copying, editing, and selection. Manuscripts were not preserved at random. Some works were copied because they were admired, others because they were useful in education, others because they could be reconciled with prevailing religious and political institutions. Still others were altered or simply ceased to be copied. The Rome the Founders inherited was therefore not antiquity in its entirety but antiquity as filtered through centuries of institutional judgment.

One consequence of that filtering is that the Founders encountered a Rome that repeatedly illustrated the fragility of republican government and the emergence of autocracy. Whether other perspectives were lost to history is impossible to know but it would be remarkable if centuries of selection had left the surviving corpus entirely unaffected.

These were not incidental differences. They were fundamental. The Founding Fathers were not attempting to recreate the Roman Republic. They were attempting to build a republic appropriate to eighteenth-century America while avoiding what they believed had destroyed Rome.

That is all the past. What about the present? I share Mr. Freedland’s concerns about our present:

And so, the American in rose-tinted glasses could enjoy Saturday’s barbecues and fireworks displays, insisting that this too will pass. That yes, a crude, venal braggart is in the Oval Office – one who, we learned this week, personally pocketed $2.2bn in his first year back in office; and yes, he launched a disastrous war that has made one of America’s sworn enemies, Iran, stronger and the US weaker; and yes, he has set about dismantling a post-1945 rules-based international order from which the US only ever benefited, growing stronger and richer; and yes, he and his vice-president seem determined to replace their country’s animating “creedal” conception of national identity, in which citizenship is open to whoever subscribes to America’s core ideals, with a definition that instead demands blood-and-soil ethnic heritage – but all of that will pass. In this view, an America that has survived a civil war, Jim Crow racial segregation and the McCarthyite witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, can survive Trump and Trumpism.

Add to that the phenomenal might of the US military and US economy, both set to be handed a further advantage over their rivals thanks to the US head-start on AI, and the outlook is positively sunny.

And yet, I’m not convinced.

In a recent Substack Nate Silver’s associate Eli McKown-Dawson observes:

Still, there has been a real decline in patriotism that I don’t think we should discount. Historically, American pride was somewhat exceptional when compared to other countries, so much so that the American tourist who slaps an American flag on everything is a common trope. Have smaller countries — particularly those in Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia — always topped the patriotism charts? Absolutely. In the latest WVS wave, 97 percent of Jordanians were “very proud” or “quite proud” of their nationality, while 92 percent of Venezuelans and Colombians felt the same.

But we used to hang with that crowd. In the first WVS wave, concluded in 1984, 95 percent of Americans were very or quite proud of their nationality. That figure was higher than the average share in Latin America (83 percent) and much higher than the European average of 77 percent. Throughout the late 20th century, the U.S. was a patriotic outlier compared to other large developed nations and our peers in Western Europe. Just 19 percent of Germans and 32 percent of French people were very proud of their nationality in the 1993 WVS wave, compared to 74 percent of Americans.

Fast forward to 2022, and “just” 78 percent of Americans were very proud or quite proud of their nationality; that’s a 17-point drop since the 1980s and lower than the 2022 European average of 81 percent. People in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are hovering closer to 90 percent pride, on average. While other regions’ national pride has held steady or increased, ours has fallen.

I think there’s plenty to be concerned about. I’m concerned that we may diverge into a class system. People in the United States frequently say “class” when they mean “income”. Increasing income inequality is concerning of itself but the greater reason to be concerned is that it may devolve into an actual class system. European countries still have classes. Historically, we didn’t or, at least, our classes were of greatly reduced significance. If we have a group of people who have considerably lower income than the rest and that’s likely to remain the case, we’ll have a class system, too.

I’m concerned that we’re using our military promiscuously without advancing our interests a great deal.

I’m concerned about the “cult of personality” that surrounds President Trump. Indeed, I’m concerned about that in any president including Obama.

I’m concerned that so more people are employed in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) than at any time in the past. I’m also concerned that more people are employed in healthcare. I’m concerned that so few people are employed in primary production.

The decline in patriotism that Mr. McKown-Dawson calls attention to may merely be a reflection of the increased partisanship in today’s America or it may simply be disapproval of President Trump. I’m still extremely proud of my country but it’s hard to be proud of our government.

Having thought a little about the past and the present, let’s turn to the future. I’ve mentioned some of my concerns which are themselves concerns about the future direction of the country. I want to highlight some additional thoughts about our future. We have spent a great deal of time asking whether we are becoming Rome, Europe, China, or something else. I suspect the better question is whether we are becoming something entirely new. The United States has repeatedly confounded historical analogies. Artificial intelligence, demographic change, and technological transformation are likely to make those analogies even less useful. History can illuminate our choices but it cannot make them for us. We are, in the end, on our own.

I’ll present some of my prescriptions in a future post.