America’s Future
William Cooper is the author of How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t.
America’s Future
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
America’s dysfunctions, failures, and threats raise fundamental questions about the future and whether America will start working again. Is America’s twenty-first-century backslide merely another dip in a long arc of nonlinear, yet upward, progress? Or is it, rather, the first phase of a steep and irreversible decline?
The answer, again, lies with the American people. Like all nations, America is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And as this book details, things are getting worse, not better. Tribalism is intensifying. Social-media platforms are getting smarter at manipulating human cognition. The US political system’s defects are hardening and calcifying. And America’s public-policy failures are deepening.
The remedies are easy to prescribe. Americans must improve civic education in schools; raise awareness about cognitive biases throughout society; spend more time with people from other political tribes; reduce and regulate the use of social media; rework the political structure to foster more political parties and equal representation; double down on free speech; shun politically motivated prosecutions; feverishly guard election integrity; and support a new Republican champion other than Donald Trump.
Yet in practice these goals have been impossible to achieve.
And two broad and overlapping global trends will only make reversing the free-fall harder as the twenty-first century marches on. First, technology is getting more sophisticated — at a dizzying pace. The positives are huge. The internet democratizes education. Streaming innovations like Netflix enrich entertainment. Pioneering products like self-driving cars revolutionize transportation. Highly sophisticated research dramatically improves medicine. High technologies substantially broaden the distribution of necessities like food and clothing.
But the negatives are unnerving. Online innovations like deep fakes compound the internet’s harms. Poor cybersecurity undermines the safety of personal data and the control of computerized systems. Popular applications like Chinese-owned TikTok give rival governments control over Americans’ private information. Artificial intelligence jeopardizes humanity in ways neither clear nor limited. Industrial innovations like fracking plunder the environment. Battlefield inventions like drones swarms threaten to change the face of warfare.
Second, international affairs are getting more complicated. It took America a full two centuries to achieve global hegemony — and merely two decades to lose it. As former United States CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a 2023 Foreign Affairs essay The Dysfunctional Superpower, America’s geopolitical threats are expanding: “The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them.” According to Gates: “The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time — Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran — whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia. And no one alive can remember a time when an adversary had as much economic, scientific, technological, and military power as China does today.”
But it’s not just America’s biggest rivals that matter. Within a few decades it’s likely that even small countries will have military capacities that in key respects exceed those of the superpowers today. Given the dominance and cohesion of America’s military, another civil war is highly unlikely. The worst-case scenario arising from America’s dysfunction isn’t domestic mismanagement; it’s foreign policy miscalculation.
These dynamics establish a striking truism that looms over humanity: The world’s preeminent democracy and most powerful nation is backsliding precisely when world’s challenges and need for rational leadership are increasing.
The American experiment has seen better days. But it’s also seen worse. Today’s struggles pale in comparison to the republic’s early days when slavery and conquest predominated. No one would choose either the Civil War era or Reconstruction over contemporary America. And the wars of the twentieth century (both world wars, Korea, Vietnam) were far more devastating than twenty-first-century America’s worst conflagrations.
Somewhere beneath the thickening surface of tribal bedlam and political fervor, moreover, is still a core national impulse to confront and overcome big challenges. The question is how strong that impulse remains.
The French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832. A close observer of human activity, de Tocqueville traveled across the country taking copious notes of what he saw. His book Democracy in America is a classic text in American political science. And he’s been revered as capturing the true essence of America like few others have, before or since. Perhaps de Tocqueville’s most profound insight was that the “greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Twenty-first-century America is putting this thesis through a searing test. And the world will find out, soon enough, whether or not it’s still true.
