Political Order and Political Decay (74 page)

There are numerous ways that the U.S. bureaucracy has moved away from the Weberian ideal of an energetic and efficient organization staffed by people chosen for their ability and technical knowledge. The system as a whole has changed from being merit based. Following two Middle Eastern wars, half of all new entrants to the federal workforce have been veterans, and of that group, a large portion is disabled. While the Congressional mandate leading to this outcome is perhaps understandable, this is not the way most corporations would voluntarily choose to staff themselves. Surveys of the federal workforce paint a depressing picture. According to Light, “Federal employees appear to be more motivated by compensation than mission, ensnared in careers that cannot compete with business and nonprofits, troubled by the lack of resources to do their jobs, dissatisfied with the rewards for a job well done and the lack of consequences for a job poorly done, and unwilling to trust their own organizations.”
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According to the 2003 National Commission on the Public Service, “Those who enter the civil service often find themselves trapped in a maze of rules and regulations that thwart their personal development and stifle their creativity. The best are underpaid, the worst, overpaid.”
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Government work has always been driven, of course, more by a service ethic than by monetary rewards alone, but these same surveys indicate that young people hoping to serve the public interest are much more likely to go into a nonprofit than the government. When one survey asked how well their organizations were at disciplining poor performance, only 9 percent answered “very good,” while 67 percent responded “not too good” or “not good at all.” These trends have all accelerated in the early decades of the 2000s.
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HOW INSTITUTIONS DECAY

The travails of the Forest Service are but one small example of a broader phenomenon of political decay. Political institutions develop over time, but they are also universally subject to political decay. This problem is not solved once a society becomes rich and democratic. Indeed, democracy itself can be the source of decay.

Much of the best-known writing about decline, by Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Kennedy, and Jared Diamond, has focused on the systemic decline of entire societies or civilizations.
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It is possible that there are general processes of civilizational decay at work, though I seriously doubt that one could extract anything close to a universal law of social behavior from the available cases. The kind of decay I am interested in here is related to the workings of specific institutions and may or may not be related to broader systemic or civilizational processes. A single institution may decay while others around it remain healthy.

Samuel Huntington used the term “political decay” to explain political instability in many newly independent countries after World War II. Traditional political orders undergoing rapid change had collapsed into disorder all around the globe. Huntington argued that socioeconomic modernization led to the mobilization of new social groups over time, whose participation could not be accommodated by existing political institutions. The source of political decay was thus the inability of institutions to adapt to changing circumstances—specifically, the rise of new social groups and their political demands.
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Political decay is therefore in many ways a condition of political development: the old has to break down in order to make way for the new. But the transitions can be extremely chaotic and violent; there is no guarantee that political institutions will continuously, peacefully, and adequately adapt to new conditions.

We can use this model as the starting point for a broader understanding of political decay. Institutions, according to Huntington, are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior” whose most important function is to facilitate human collective action. Without clear and stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. The substantive content of these rules varies, both across different societies and over time. But the faculty for rule making as such is genetically hardwired into the human brain, having evolved over centuries of social life.

Individuals may come to accept the constraints of institutions out of a calculation of their own self-interest. But human nature has provided us with a suite of emotions that encourage rule or norm following that is independent of the norm's rationality. Sometimes rule following is reinforced by religious belief; in other cases we follow rules simply because they are old and traditional. We are instinctively conformist and look around at our fellows for guidelines to our own behavior. The tremendous stability of normative behavior is what creates enduring institutions and has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
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The very stability of institutions is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances. However, the original environment in which institutions are created is subject to change. The kind of social mobilization described by Huntington is only one form of change in the conditions surrounding the institution that may lead to dysfunction. Environmental change is another: anthropologists have speculated that shifts in climate are what led to the decline of Maya civilization and the Indian cultures of the American Southwest.
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Institutions fail to adapt to changing circumstances for a number of reasons. The first is cognitive. Human beings follow institutional rules for reasons that are not entirely rational. Sociologists and anthropologists have speculated, for example, that various religious rules have rational roots in different functional needs—for example, the need to regulate sexuality and reproduction, the requirements for conveying property, organization for warfare, etc. But fervent religious believers will not abandon their beliefs simply in the face of evidence that they are wrong or lead to bad outcomes. This kind of cognitive rigidity extends well beyond religion, of course. Everyone creates and uses shared mental models of how the world works, and sticks to them in the face of contradictory evidence. This was just as true of Marxism—an avowedly secular and “scientific” doctrine—as of contemporary neoclassical economics. We saw a vivid case of this in the U.S. Forest Service's belief that it possessed “scientific” knowledge about forest management, which led it to persist in its fire suppression policy in the face of accumulating evidence that this was undermining its goal of forest sustainability.

The second important reason that institutions fail to adapt is the role of elites or incumbent political actors within a political system. Political institutions develop as new social groups emerge and challenge the existing equilibrium. If successful institutional development occurs, the rules of the system change and the former outsiders become insiders. But then the insiders acquire a stake in the new system and henceforth act to defend the new status quo. Because they are insiders, they can use their superior access to information and resources to manipulate the rules in their favor. We saw how the new classified (merit-based) civil servants created by the Pendleton Act immediately began to unionize in the first decade of the twentieth century in order to protect their own jobs and privileges. This became a bulwark of protection not just against corrupt politicians but also against superiors demanding better performance and accountability.

Modern state institutions, which are supposed to be impersonal even if not necessarily democratic, are particularly vulnerable to insider capture in a process that I labeled “repatrimonialization.” As we have seen, natural human sociability is built around the twin principles of kin selection and reciprocal altruism—the favoring of family or of friends with whom one has exchanged favors. Modern institutions require people to work contrary to their natural instincts. In the absence of strong institutional incentives, the groups with access to a political system will use their positions to favor friends and family, and thereby erode the impersonality of the state. The more powerful the groups, the more opportunities they will have to do this. This process of elite or insider capture is a disease that afflicts all modern institutions. (Premodern or patrimonial institutions don't have this problem only because they are captured from the start as personal property of the insiders.)

In the first volume of this book I offered numerous examples of repatrimonialization. China, which created the first modern state in the third century
B.C.
, saw the state recaptured by elite family networks at the end of the Later Han Dynasty, a domination that continued well after the reconstitution of a centralized state in the Sui and Tang Dynasties of the seventh and eighth centuries. The degree of impersonality that existed during the Han Dynasty wasn't restored until the time of the Northern Song in the eleventh century. Similarly, the Mamluk slave-soldiers who legitimated themselves by defending Egypt and Syria against the Mongols and Crusaders themselves became an entrenched elite. Indeed, by the end of the dynasty, the older Mamluks found themselves presiding over elite patronage networks designed to block the upward mobility of their younger peers. This, coupled with their disdain for new technologies like firearms, led to their conquest by the Ottomans and the collapse of the Mamluk state. And finally, the French state under the Old Regime progressively sold itself off to wealthy elites from the late sixteenth century on. The power of entrenched venal officeholders made it impossible to modernize the state; reform could occur only when the revolution violently dispossessed these individuals.

Democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, should theoretically mitigate the problem of elite capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction that can use its political power to tyrannize the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country. Rather than trying to regulate these factions (or, as we would say today, interest groups), Madison argued that their numbers and diversity would protect the liberty of individuals. If any one group obtained undue influence in a democracy and abused its position, the other groups threatened by it could organize to counterbalance it.

But while democracy does provide an important check on elite power, it frequently fails to perform as advertised. Elite insiders typically have superior access to resources and information, which they use to protect themselves. Ordinary voters will not get angry at them for stealing their money if they don't know that this is happening in the first place. Cognitive rigidities may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own self-interest. In the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealthy, despite the fact that this hurts their own economic situations. They do so in the belief that such policies will spur economic growth that will eventually trickle down to them, or else make government deficits self-financing. The theory has proved remarkably tenacious in the face of considerable evidence that it is not true.

Furthermore, different groups have different abilities to organize to defend their interests. Sugar producers or corn growers are geographically concentrated and focused on the prices of their products, unlike ordinary consumers or taxpayers who are dispersed and for whom the prices of these commodities are only a small part of their budgets. This, combined with institutional rules that often favor such interests (like the fact that Florida and Iowa where sugar and corn are grown are electoral swing states in presidential elections), gives those groups an outsized influence over agricultural policy. To take another example, middle-class groups are usually much more willing and able to defend their interests, like preservation of the home mortgage deduction, than are the poor. This makes universal entitlements to social security or health insurance much easier to defend politically than programs targeting the poor only.

Finally, liberal democracy is almost universally associated with a market economy, which tends to produce winners and losers and amplifies what James Madison termed the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth, and when it occurs under conditions of equal access to the economic system. It becomes highly problematic politically, however, when economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do this on a transactional basis by, for example, bribing a legislator or bureaucrat, or more damagingly by changing the institutional rules to favor themselves—by, say, closing off competition in markets they already dominate. Countries from Japan to Brazil to the United States have used environmental or safety concerns to in effect protect domestic producers. The level playing field becomes progressively tilted in their direction.

The decay of American political institutions is not the same thing as the phenomenon of societal or civilization decline, which has become a highly politicized topic in the discourse about America.
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America's greatest strengths have never been the quality of its government; the private sector has from the start always been more innovative and vital. Even as government quality deteriorates, new opportunities open up in sectors like shale gas or biotechnology that lay the basis for future economic growth. Political decay in this instance simply means that many specific American political institutions have become dysfunctional, and that a combination of intellectual rigidity and the power of entrenched political actors, growing over time, is preventing the country from reforming them. Institutional reform is an extremely difficult thing to bring about, and there is no guarantee that it will be accomplished without a major disruption of the political order.