THE END OF
DEMOCRACY?
(excerpt)

Win McCormack

If Liberalism does not work out, it’s not the final answer

While the authoritarian powers of China and Russia have been on the rise, the lead­ing democracy in the world, the United States, has seemed suddenly and precipi­tously headed in the opposite direction. David Boren, a former moderate-con­servative Democratic U.S. Senator who is now president of the University of Okla­homa, has written a book called Letter to America, in which he says: “The country we love is in trouble. In truth, we face grave danger as a nation. If we do not act quickly, that decline will become dra­matic. The signs are clear for all to see. Only those in deliberate denial could fail to notice.” Topping Boren’s list of signs is “the catastrophic drop in the way the rest of the world views us.” (Boren was chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee when he was in office.)

Let me quote from an investment report that recently came across my desk. The report emanates from a group of cold­blooded financial analysts whose job it is to figure out how to maximize investment returns for their capitalist clients—not from, say, a liberal think tank. The quoted passage is in a section dealing with the recent run-up in commodity prices, par­ticularly the price of oil:

What effect might this precipitous ero­sion of U.S. prestige and power be having on the state of democracy in the world? In a recent New York Times column, “The Democratic Recession,” Thomas Fried­man reported: “The term ‘democratic recession’ was coined by Larry Diamond, a Stanford University political scientist, in his new book The Spirit of Democracy. And the numbers tell the story. At the end of last year, Freedom House, which tracks democratic trends and elections around the globe, noted that 2007 was by far the worst year for freedom in the world since the end of the cold war. Almost four times as many states—thirty-eight—declined in their freedom scores as improved—ten.” Friedman blames this trend partly on the fact that states whose economies depend largely on oil and gas revenues tend not to be democratic, but adds: “The decline of U.S. influence and moral authority has also taken a toll,” and, quoting Diamond, “There has been an enormous squandering of American soft power, and hard power, in recent years.”

Also prominent on Boren’s list of signs of a U.S. decline is the equally appalling state of the nation’s domestic infrastruc­ture. This dire situation was detailed by Sarah Williams Goldhagen in an April 27, 2007, article in the New Republic titled “American Collapse.” The article was writ­ten soon after two notorious recent calam­ities in urban America—in Minneapolis, the tumbling of a forty-year-old bridge into the Mississippi River that killed at least five people and injured approximately one hundred more, and in mid-town Man­hattan, the explosion of an eighty-three-year-old asbestos-wrapped steam pipe that killed one person and injured a dozen more (the pipe’s owner, the Con Edison company, had inspected and certified it as being in good order that morning)

“America’s metropolitan regions,” Goldha­gen wrote, “are in serious trouble. Bridges, utilities, and flood-prevention systems, whether publicly or privately owned, are grossly neglected. Suburbs are sprawling like unchecked chickweed. Cars are stuck in ever-mounting hours of traffic. Cit­ies are bleeding people. School buildings are overpopulated and crumbling. Waters are polluted. Shipping ports are decrepit.” Goldhagen contrasts this situation in the United States with the state of things in other parts of the world:

According to Goldhagen, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has estimated that the United States would need to spend $1.6 trillion to bring the country’s infrastructure up to only mini­mal standards. The ASCEhas apparently given no estimate of what it would take to bring our infrastructure up to the higher standards prevailing in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Canada, and we can probably only begin to imagine.

How did we reach, almost unawares, this crisis of infrastructure in our country? Goldhagen attributed this to two factors. The first is sheer cost. Large infrastruc­ture projects, such as a new mass transit line or waterway system, even a new park or a bridge, cost “an extraordinary amount of money,” something that strikes fear in the hearts of local politicians. “When a proposed tax or budget item can be spe­cifically linked to the officials whom voters elect to their own state or local offices, the political disincentives to address a metro­politan region’s infrastructural needs are enormous.” Since Reagan’s first budget, federal funding of local infrastructure con­struction has been steadily declining. The federal government, which used to pro­vide the bulk of these monies, has drasti­cally reduced its role, while state and local governments have been unable or unwill­ing to step up to the plate. (Tom Frank, in this issue, discusses how devolving costly federal programs and responsibilities to the state and local level has been part of “conservative” governing strategy since Reagan.)