As someone who's mused at length over whether the United States retains its
capacity for self-correction, I lapped up James Fallows' panoramic and even-handed
exploration of "How American Can Rise Again" (or not). Fallows' broad points:
- Worries about American decline are a constant in our culture and a sign of societal health.
- Current problems, e.g., the structural deficits and infrastructure decay, are serious but manageable.
- More endemic and threatening than the problems that require policy solutions is our current political paralysis -- bequeathed to us by a Constitution that has not proved sufficiently amenable to amendment and that has stuck us with steadily less representative government:
Fallows sees no clear path to fixing the paralysis caused by the nonrepresentative nature of the Senate (where Wyoming has the same clout as California with 1/69 the population), the fiercely Gerrymandered Congressional districts, the multiple layers and local government, etc. His conclusion is really a non-conclusion: our only hope for bringing about sufficient constructive change is to "muddle through." That is, we need leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower who "worked within [the system's] flaws and limits...that is the bravest and best choice for us now."
That conclusion is a bit circular, since Fallows' core question is whether the United States retains the
capacity to muddle through, given the dysfunctions of the political system. Perhaps the missing link is a discussion of whether the U.S. can "muddle through" to incremental systemic change, i.e., change in the political system.
