That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can, Page 2

  We read the doubts in letters to the editor, such as this impassioned post by Eric R. on The New York Times comments page under a column Tom wrote about China (December 1, 2010):

  We are nearly complete in our evolution from Lewis and Clark into Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. We used to embrace challenges, endure privation, throttle our fear and strike out into the (unknown) wilderness. In this mode we rallied to span the continent with railroads, construct a national highway system, defeated monstrous dictators, cured polio and landed men on the moon. Now we text and put on makeup as we drive, spend more on video games than books, forswear exercise, demonize hunting, and are rapidly succumbing to obesity and diabetes. So much for the pioneering spirit that made us (once) the greatest nation on earth, one that others looked up to and called “exceptional.”

  Sometimes the doubts hit us where we least expect them. A few weeks after returning from China, Tom went to the White House to conduct an interview. He passed through the Secret Service checkpoint on Pennsylvania Avenue, and after putting his bags through the X-ray machine and collecting them, he grabbed the metal door handle to enter the White House driveway. The handle came off in his hand. “Oh, it does that sometimes,” the Secret Service agent at the door said nonchalantly, as Tom tried to fit the wobbly handle back into the socket.

  And often now we hear those doubts from visitors here—as when a neighbor in Bethesda mentions that over the years he has hired several young women from Germany to help with his child care, and they always remark on two things: how many squirrels there are in Washington, and how rutted the streets are. They just can’t believe that America’s capital would have such potholed streets.

  Frustrated Optimists

  So, do we buy the idea, increasingly popular in some circles, that Britain owned the nineteenth century, America dominated the twentieth century, and China will inevitably reign supreme in the twenty-first century—and that all you have to do is fly from Tianjin or Shanghai to Washington, D.C., and take the subway to know that?

  No, we do not. And we have written this book to explain why no American, young or old, should resign himself or herself to that view either. The two of us are not pessimists when it comes to America and its future. We are optimists, but we are also frustrated. We are frustrated optimists. In our view, the two attitudes go together. We are optimists because American society, with its freewheeling spirit, its diversity of opinions and talents, its flexible economy, its work ethic and penchant for innovation, is in fact ideally suited to thrive in the tremendously challenging world we are living in. We are optimists because the American political and economic systems, when functioning properly, can harness the nation’s talents and energy to meet the challenges the country faces. We are optimists because Americans have plenty of experience in doing big, hard things together. And we are optimists because our track record of national achievement gives ample grounds for believing we can overcome our present difficulties.

  But that’s also why we’re frustrated. Optimism or pessimism about America’s future cannot simply be a function of our capacity to do great things or our history of having done great things. It also has to be a function of our will actually to do those things again. So many Americans are doing great things today, but on a small scale. Philanthropy, volunteerism, individual initiative: they’re all impressive, but what the country needs most is collective action on a large scale.

  We cannot be pessimists about America when we know that it is home to so many creative, talented, hardworking people, but we cannot help but be frustrated when we discover how many of those people feel that our country is not educating the workforce they need, or admitting the energetic immigrants they seek, or investing in the infrastructure they require, or funding the research they envision, or putting in place the intelligent tax laws and incentives that our competitors have installed.

  Hence the title of this opening chapter: “If you see something, say something.” That is the mantra that the Department of Homeland Security plays over and over on loudspeakers in airports and railroad stations around the country. Well, we have seen and heard something, and millions of Americans have, too. What we’ve seen is not a suspicious package left under a stairwell. What we’ve seen is hiding in plain sight. We’ve seen something that poses a greater threat to our national security and well-being than al-Qaeda does. We’ve seen a country with enormous potential falling into disrepair, political disarray, and palpable discomfort about its present condition and future prospects.

  This book is our way of saying something—about what is wrong, why things have gone wrong, and what we can and must do to make them right.

  Why say it now, though, and why the urgency?

  “Why now?” is easy to answer: because our country is in a slow decline, just slow enough for us to be able to pretend—or believe—that a decline is not taking place. As the ever-optimistic Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, son of Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver, and nephew of President John F. Kennedy, responded when we told him about our book: “It’s as though we just slip a little each year and shrug it off to circumstances beyond our control—an economic downturn here, a social problem there, the political mess this year. We’re losing a step a day and no one’s saying, Stop!” No doubt, Shriver added, most Americans “would still love to be the country of great ideals and achievements, but no one seems willing to pay the price.” Or, as Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, put it to us: “What we lack in the U.S. today is the confidence that is generated by solving one big, hard problem—together.” It has been a long time now since we did something big and hard together.

  We will argue that this slow-motion decline has four broad causes. First, since the end of the Cold War, we, and especially our political leaders, have stopped starting each day by asking the two questions that are crucial for determining public policy: What world are we living in, and what exactly do we need to do to thrive in this world? The U.S. Air Force has a strategic doctrine originally designed by one of its officers, John Boyd, called the OODA loop. It stands for “observe, orient, decide, act.” Boyd argued that when you are a fighter pilot, if your OODA loop is faster than the other guy’s, you will always win the dogfight. Today, America’s OODA loop is far too slow and often discombobulated. In American political discourse today, there is far too little observing, orienting, deciding, and acting and far too much shouting, asserting, dividing, and postponing. When the world gets really fast, the speed with which a country can effectively observe, orient, decide, and act matters more than ever.

  Second, over the last twenty years, we as a country have failed to address some of our biggest problems—particularly education, deficits and debt, and energy and climate change—and now they have all worsened to a point where they cannot be ignored but they also cannot be effectively addressed without collective action and collective sacrifice. Third, to make matters worse, we have stopped investing in our country’s traditional formula for greatness, a formula that goes back to the founding of the country. Fourth, as we will explain, we have not been able to fix our problems or reinvest in our strengths because our political system has become paralyzed and our system of values has suffered serious erosion. But finally, being optimists, we will offer our own strategy for overcoming these problems.

  “Why the urgency?” is also easy to answer. In part the urgency stems from the fact that as a country we do not have the resources or the time to waste that we had twenty years ago, when our budget deficit was under control and all of our biggest challenges seemed at least manageable. In the last decade especially, we have spent so much of our time and energy—and the next generation’s money—fighting terrorism and indulging ourselves with tax cuts and cheap credit that we now have no reserves. We are driving now without a bumper, without a spare tire, and with the gas gauge nearing empty. Should the market or Mother Nature make a sudden disruptive move in the wrong direction, we would not have the resources to shield ourselves from the wors
t effects, as we had in the past. Winston Churchill was fond of saying that “America will always do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options.” America simply doesn’t have time anymore for exhausting any options other than the right ones.

  Our sense of urgency also derives from the fact that our political system is not properly framing, let alone addressing, our ultimate challenge. Our goal should not be merely to solve America’s debt and deficit problems. That is far too narrow. Coping with these problems is important—indeed necessary and urgent—but it is only a means to an end. The goal is for America to remain a great country. This means that while reducing our deficits, we must also invest in education, infrastructure, and research and development, as well as open our society more widely to talented immigrants and fix the regulations that govern our economy. Immigration, education, and sensible regulation are traditional ingredients of the American formula for greatness. They are more vital than ever if we hope to realize the full potential of the American people in the coming decades, to generate the resources to sustain our prosperity, and to remain the global leader that we have been and that the world needs us to be. We, the authors of this book, don’t want simply to restore American solvency. We want to maintain American greatness. We are not green-eyeshade guys. We’re Fourth of July guys.

  China, Again

  And to maintain American greatness, the right option for us is not to become more like China. It is to become more like ourselves. Certainly, China has made extraordinary strides in lifting tens of millions of its people out of poverty and in modernizing its infrastructure—from convention centers, to highways, to airports, to housing. China’s relentless focus on economic development and its willingness to search the world for the best practices, experiment with them, and then scale those that work is truly impressive.

  But the Chinese still suffer from large and potentially debilitating problems: a lack of freedom, rampant corruption, horrible pollution, and an education system that historically has stifled creativity. China does not have better political or economic systems than the United States. In order to sustain its remarkable economic progress, we believe, China will ultimately have to adopt more features of the American system, particularly the political and economic liberty that are fundamental to our success. China cannot go on relying heavily on its ability to mobilize cheap labor and cheap capital and on copying and assembling the innovations of others.

  Still, right now, we believe that China is getting 90 percent of the potential benefits from its second-rate political system. It is getting the most out of its authoritarianism. But here is the shortcoming that Americans should be focused on: We are getting only 50 percent of the potential benefits from our first-rate system. We are getting so much less than we can, should, and must get out of our democracy.

  In short, our biggest problem is not that we’re failing to keep up with China’s best practices but that we’ve strayed so far from our own best practices. America’s future depends not on our adopting features of the Chinese system, but on our making our own democratic system work with the kind of focus, moral authority, seriousness, collective action, and stick-to-itiveness that China has managed to generate by authoritarian means for the last several decades.

  In our view, all of the comparisons between China and the United States that you hear around American watercoolers these days aren’t about China at all. They are about us. China is just a mirror. We’re really talking about ourselves and our own loss of self-confidence. We see in the Chinese some character traits that we once had—that once defined us as a nation—but that we seem to have lost.

  Orville Schell heads up the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York City. He is one of America’s most experienced China-watchers. He also attended the Tianjin conference, and one afternoon, after a particularly powerful presentation there about China’s latest economic leap forward, Tom asked Schell why he thought China’s rise has come to unnerve and obsess Americans.

  “Because we have recently begun to find ourselves so unable to get things done, we tend to look with a certain over-idealistic yearning when it comes to China,” Schell answered. “We see what they have done and project onto them something we miss, fearfully miss, in ourselves”—that “can-do, get-it-done, everyone-pull-together, whatever-it-takes” attitude that built our highways and dams and put a man on the moon. “These were hallmarks of our childhood culture,” said Schell. “But now we view our country turning into the opposite, even as we see China becoming animated by these same kinds of energies … China desperately wants to prove itself to the world, while at the same time America seems to be losing its hunger to demonstrate its excellence.” The Chinese are motivated, Schell continued, by a “deep yearning to restore China to greatness, and, sadly, one all too often feels that we are losing that very motor force in America.”

  The two of us do feel that, but we do not advocate policies and practices to sustain American greatness out of arrogance or a spirit of chauvinism. We do it out of a love for our country and a powerful belief in what a force for good America can be—for its own citizens and for the world—at its best. We are well aware of America’s imperfections, past and present. We know that every week in America a politician takes a bribe; someone gets convicted of a crime he or she did not commit; public money gets wasted that should have gone for a new bridge, a new school, or pathbreaking research; many young people drop out of school; young women get pregnant without committed fathers; and people unfairly lose their jobs or their houses. The cynic says, “Look at the gap between our ideals and our reality. Any talk of American greatness is a lie.” The partisan says, “Ignore the gap. We’re still ‘exceptional.’” Our view is that the gaps do matter, and this book will have a lot to say about them. But America is not defined by its gaps. Our greatness as a country—what truly defines us—is and always has been our never-ending effort to close these gaps, our constant struggle to form a more perfect union. The gaps simply show us the work we still have to do.

  To repeat: Our problem is not China, and our solution is not China. Our problem is us—what we are doing and not doing, how our political system is functioning and not functioning, which values we are and are not living by. And our solution is us—the people, the society, and the government that we used to be, and can be again. That is why this book is meant as both a wake-up call and a pep talk—unstinting in its critique of where we are and unwavering in its optimism about what we can achieve if we act together.

  TWO

  Ignoring Our Problems

  It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

  —Evolutionary theory

  We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy.

  —Georgi Arbatov, Soviet expert on the United States, speaking at the end of the Cold War

  It all seems so obvious now, but on the historic day when the Berlin Wall was cracked open—November 11, 1989—no one would have guessed that America was about to make the most dangerous mistake a country can make: We were about to misread our environment. We should have remembered Oscar Wilde’s admonition: “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” America was about to experience the second tragedy. We had achieved a long-sought goal: the end of the Cold War on Western terms. But that very achievement ushered in a new world, with unprecedented challenges to the United States. No one warned us—neither Oscar Wilde nor someone like the statesman who had done precisely that for America four decades earlier: George Kennan.

  On the evening of February 22, 1946, Kennan, then the forty-two-year-old deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, dispatched an 8,000-word cable to the State Department in Washington. The “Long Telegram,” as it was later known, became the most famous diplomatic communication in the history of the United States. A condensed vers
ion, which ran under the byline “X” in Foreign Affairs the next year, became perhaps the most influential journal article in American history.

  Kennan’s cable earned its renown because it served as the charter for American foreign policy during the Cold War. It called for the “containment” of the military power of the Soviet Union and political resistance to its communist ideology. It led to the Marshall Plan for aid to war-torn Europe; to NATO—the first peacetime military alliance in American history—and the stationing of an American army in Europe; to America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam; to the nuclear arms race; to a dangerous brush with nuclear war over Cuba; and to a political rivalry waged in every corner of the world through military assistance, espionage, public relations, and economic aid.

  The Cold War came to an end with the overthrow of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the broad message of the Long Telegram is one we need to hear today: “Wake up! Pay attention! The world you are living in has fundamentally changed. It is not the world you think it is. You need to adapt, because the health, security, and future of the country depend upon it.”

  It is hard to realize today what a shock that message was to many Americans. The world Kennan’s cable described was not the one in which most Americans believed they were living in or wanted to live in. Most of them assumed that, with the end of World War II, the United States could look forward to good relations with its wartime Soviet ally and the end of the kind of huge national exertion that winning the war had required. The message of the Long Telegram was that both of these happy assumptions were wrong. The nation’s leaders eventually accepted Kennan’s analysis and adopted his prescription. Before long the American people knew they had to be vigilant, creative, and united. They knew they had to foster economic growth, technological innovation, and social mobility in order to avoid losing the global geopolitical competition with their great rival. The Cold War had its ugly excesses and its fiascos—Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, for example—but it also set certain limits on American politics and society. We just had to look across at the Iron Curtain and the evil empire behind it—or take part in one of those nuclear bomb drills in the basements of our elementary schools—to know that we were living in a world defined by the struggle for supremacy between two nuclear-armed superpowers. That fact shaped both the content of our politics and the prevailing attitude of our leaders and citizens, which was one of constant vigilance. We didn’t always read the world correctly, but we paid close attention to every major trend beyond our borders.