n theory, the United States is based on a great idea: Gradually occupy a near-continent-sized living space. Bring together many different peoples from all over the globe and give them the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Preserve an inherent sense of dynamism in that emerging vast land by ensuring via the Constitution that the federal government cannot become too powerful — and that the states can maintain a sense of their own identity.
Best of all, use the states as a kind of national laboratory to conduct lots of experiments on how complex challenges in public policy — from health care and education to the environment and economic growth — can be best met.
Next, harvest the yield of best practices from that rich laboratory and implement on a nationwide scale the policies that have proved to be most promising and effective.
This would ensure that the United States would not succumb to the stifling powers of vested interests that marred, and eventually seemed to kill, the dynamism of old and overly tradition-bound Europe.
Instead, the United States would preserve its birth advantage of being the developed world's first built-from-scratch modern mass society — and use it to stay on the edge of modernity.
Better yet, it would manage to do so on all fronts on which human progress is usually measured: the economy, technology, the environment, living standards and levels of personal satisfaction.
They called it the American Dream — and, for a long while, it seemed to be working. Alas, this is no longer truly the case.
Rather than pinning the blame on this politician or that party, let's look at something more fundamental: Americans' willingness to work with each other and to learn from one another.
As regards American elites, the determination to cooperate and work with each other is often still there. Their dynamism continues to amaze the best and brightest in other countries who yearn to come to America’s shores.
They cannot wait to partake in that stimulating mix of networking, collaborating, innovating, getting rich and paying comparatively low taxes.
And once in the United States, they are amazed that as doors open more easily and new opportunities arise, one's level of personal satisfaction goes up.
But what is happening at the "top" of the American game, in its high-earning professions, is not what happens in the rest of society. There, a profound sense of stagnation, of treading water, has taken hold.
Now, status envy and political grudges have long befallen societies. But what is so stunning about the American example is the way in which what should have become the world's most innovative governance laboratory, the U.S. states, have become anything but.
The states, instead of acting as a dynamic laboratory, feel more like a morgue, exhausted from personal and public debt levels, eternal cutbacks and no sense of a brighter future. This has occurred at a time of immense economic pressures being put on Americans in the form of high unemployment rates and declining incomes.
In more prosperous times, the states would lend their citizens a helping hand through food stamps, medical care, unemployment benefits, job retraining programs and the like. Today, however, this safety net is fraying — and states are increasingly balancing their budget by laying off teachers, police and other state workers.
The key question is what effect these mounting political, economic and social pressures will have. Broadly speaking, they have led to growing political polarization and a widespread willingness to vilify those on the other side of the political divide.
But more directly, they have resulted in a heightened sense of separateness, of seeking solutions without regard to the nation as a whole.
"Every man for himself" is a very Hobbesian concept — and not something likely to work in modern mass societies.
But the concept of federalism — the rights of states to find their own paths within a broad framework — requires a belief that the center, i.e., Washington, can manage things in a positive fashion.
For too long, however, the glue the U.S. capital has provided was transfer payments in the form of highway funds, military contracts and the like.
At a time of frustration and disorientation, the natural inclination is to think, "We're better off just relying on ourselves." Practically, though, that's neither possible nor desirable.
The root cause of the current malaise manifesting itself at the U.S. state level is twofold: First, complexity has risen tremendously all over the world. Virtually no man, but certainly no state, is an island any longer. Everything is connected now.
Second, the need to manage rising complexity and competition is inevitable now, whether you live in Burma or the United States. In the American sphere, though, it actually requires precisely the opposite maneuver of elsewhere in the developed world: higher taxes (due both to high debt and the need for investment in infrastructure, education and the like) and more regulation.
Given that both the levels of taxes and regulation in the rest of the advanced countries have tended to be high all along, they need to lessen their burden on this front.
What the United States of 2011 faces is a challenge Europe has long overcome: the need for economic elites to pay a proper share of public funds.
Without a doubt, one can find a way to argue that the rich already pay far too much in taxes, and/or that raising their tax burden would demotivate them.
But ultimately, that doesn’t matter much — if at all. It just postpones the day of reckoning. The poorer and more destitute parts of society need investments in their education and training, lest one's nation severely limit its future earnings potential.
Europeans have traditionally paid up for such measures through taxation — while Asians, out of reverence for self-betterment though education, do so out of personal savings. Either way, the pressure is on for Americans.
Uttering warm and wooly words about American exceptionalism and scapegoating immigrants are exercises in futility. They do not make a nation more educated.
The U.S. states are where much of this social and economic frustration, as well as the lack of coordination and willingness to cooperate and contribute to the common whole, becomes apparent. They are where the social and economic rubber meets the road.
In contrast, most other large countries are doing a better job of fostering cooperation among their various factions.
The United States is on a very slippery slope — one made even more treacherous by the court system and political and economic interests dedicated to defending the status quo that has served the top 10% of Americans so well.
The veritable monster lurking in the background is none other than the fact that the United States certainly had a political revolution early on, but never a social one.
The promise, and premise, has long been that this is not necessary, since Americans will always manage to improve their lot.
For a long while, it was possible to argue, with a rudimentary kind of Calvinism, that whoever worked hard in America had it made. That concept worked until recently, as average incomes have declined in recent years despite Americans working harder than ever.
That puts undue pressure on families, communities, states and the nation. What we have under the circumstances is that the states, instead of bringing out the best in each other in the form of constructive competitions, tend to do the opposite — reinforcing their own worst habits.
Short-term fixes, phony compromises and insufficient investment for the long-term are the predictable consequences.
That typo about the “Untied” States may yet come to bear. While things aren't as bad as 150 years ago, the intransigence between two different models of life is becoming ever more pronounced.
These are somber thoughts about an America that, politically speaking, is only good at one thing — gridlock. The paralysis and venom reigning in the U.S. Congress is an apt but unfortunate metaphor for much of the rest of the country.
Where will it boil over first? Many indications are it will be at the level of the Untied States.
By: N. Peter Kramer
