The End of Power

by Naim, Moises

  It is hard to disagree with any of this, and in Chapter 5 we examined the many forces that conspire against the permanent dominance of any single nation-state. But keeping our lens focused on the nation-state—even when arguing that none of them will dominate world affairs—can blur our view of the other forces reshaping international affairs: the decay of power in domestic politics, business, and the rest.

  Whether the United States is a hegemon, an indispensable power, or an empire at sunset, and whether China or some other rival stands to take its place, may be a debate that consumes international relations. But its terms are not adapted to a world where power is decaying—where unprecedented forms of fracturing are under way within each of these countries and across systems of trade, investment, migration, and culture. Identifying who is up and who is down is less important than understanding what is going on inside those nations, political movements, corporations, and religions that are on the elevator. Who is up and who is down will matter ever less in a world in which those who get to the top don’t stay there for long and are able to do less and less with the power they have while there.

  MAKE LIFE HARDER FOR THE “TERRIBLE SIMPLIFIERS”

  A second important implication of this analysis is our heightened vulnerability to bad ideas and bad leaders. In short, once we have gotten off the elevator, we need to get skeptical, especially toward the latter-day version of Burckhardt’s “terrible simplifiers.”

  The decay of power creates fertile soil for demagogic challengers who exploit disappointments with incumbents, promise change, and take advantage of the bewildering noise created by the proliferation of actors, voices, and proposals. The confusion created by changes that come too fast, that are too disruptive and undercut old certainties and ways of doing things—all by-products of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions—offer great opportunities for leaders with bad ideas. Top bankers who championed toxic financial instruments as creative solutions, US politicians who promise to eliminate the fiscal deficit without raising taxes, and, at the other extreme, the French president François Hollande’s decision to levy an extraordinary 75 percent tax on the income of the rich are only a few examples. Information technology evangelists, those who believe that technological “fixes” alone will solve hitherto intractable human problems, also tend to overstate their claims and end up being “terrible simplifiers.”

  These dangerous demagogues can be found in all of the areas discussed in these pages: the entrepreneurs and thinkers who argued that Internet companies with minimal assets and meager or no revenues deserved higher valuations than “old economy” companies with steady cash flows and vast assets, the strategists who promised that invading Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and the invaders would be welcomed as liberators or that the war would “pay for itself” thanks to Iraq’s oil revenues. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other murderous movements also depend on the terrible simplifications that they successfully manage to popularize. The promises and assumptions of the “Bolivarian Revolution” inspired by Hugo Chavez or, at the opposite extreme, those of the US Tea Party are also rooted in terrible simplifications immune to the lessons of experience and, for that matter, to data and scientific evidence.

  Of course, demagogues, charlatans, and snake-oil peddlers are nothing new; history is replete with the stories of those who have gained power and whose stay at the top had terrible consequences. What is new is an environment where it has become far easier for newcomers—including those with toxic ideas—to acquire power.

  Being on the lookout for the terrible simplifiers and denying them the influence they seek has always been necessary. And strengthening our ability—individual and collective, intellectual and political—to detect them in our midst is even more of a priority in a world undergoing rapid, bewildering change. That starts with embracing the reality of the decay of power and, again, changing our conversation to reflect it. Not just in the corridors of presidential palaces, corporate headquarters, and university boardrooms but even more so in encounters around watercoolers in offices, in casual conversations among friends, and at the dinner table at home.

  These conversations are the indispensable ingredients of a political climate that is less welcoming to the terrible simplifiers. For as Francis Fukuyama correctly argues, to eradicate the vetocracy that is paralyzing the system, “political reform must first and foremost be driven by popular, grassroots mobilization.”5 This, in turn, requires focusing the conversation on how to contain the negative aspects of the decay of power and move us to the positive sloping side of the inverted U-curve. For this to happen, we need something that is very difficult: an increased disposition in democratic societies to give more power to those who govern us. And that is impossible unless we trust them more. Which is of course even more difficult. But also indispensable.

  BRING TRUST BACK

  Although the decay of power affects all realms of organized human activity, the consequences in some are more ominous than in others. The lessened ability of business executives to impose their will or retain power is less problematic than when that happens to elected leaders who are paralyzed by the vetocracy.

  And at the international level the level of paralysis is even more ominous. Global problems are multiplying while the capacity of the international community to contain them is stagnant or dwindling. In other words, the inability of some business executives to make things happen threatens us all less than when national and international leaders are, like Gulliver, immobilized by thousands of small “micropowers” that tie them down.

  When was the last time you heard that a large number of countries agreed to a major international accord on a pressing issue? Not in more than a decade and, for some important issues, that span of inaction stretches to even two or three. The inability of European nations—which ironically had already adopted shared governing arrangements—to act together in the face of a crippling economic crisis is as revealing of this paralysis as is the inability of the world to do something to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Or the inability to stop massacres like those that erupted in Syria in 2012.

  The pattern—and the emergency—is clear: Since the early 1990s, as the effects of globalization and the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions spread around the world, the need for effective multicountry collaboration has soared. But the capacity of the world to respond to these new needs has not kept pace. Critical multilateral talks have failed, deadlines have been missed, financial commitments and promises have not been honored, execution has stalled. International collective action has fallen far short of what was offered and, more importantly, needed.6 These failures represent not only the now almost chronic lack of international consensus but, indeed, another important manifestation of the decay of power.

  And what has all this to do with the need to restore trust?

  The failure of political leaders to effectively collaborate with other nations is related to their weakness at home. Governments with weak or nonexistent mandates are unable to strike international deals as these often require commitments, compromises, concessions, and even sacrifices that their publics won’t allow them to make. The implication is not that we need to give blank checks and unrestrained power to those who govern us: we know that power without controls, accountability, and countervailing forces is dangerous and unacceptable. But we also need to recognize that when our society operates on the declining side of the inverted U-curve, additional constraints to the power of those in government end up hurting us. Restoring trust is essential to relax these controls and bring them to the side of the inverted U-curve in which society benefits. The exploding number and complexity of the checks and balances that restrain the power of those who run democratic governments are direct results of the decline of trust. In some countries, this decline has become a permanent trend. Recall the observation of Carnegie’s President Jessica Mathews, who was quoted in Chapter 4 in the context of the Mentality revolution:
“[In the United States] anyone under the age of forty has lived their entire life in a country the majority of whose citizens do not trust their own national government to do what they think is right.”7

  There are, of course, many good reasons not to trust politicians and, in general, those in power: not only their mendacity and corruption but also the frequent underperformance of governments when compared with our expectations as voters. Moreover, we are all better informed, and heightened media scrutiny is prone to highlight the misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies of governments. As a result, the low levels of trust in government that are now common have become chronic.

  This needs to change. We need to restore trust in government and in our political leaders. For this to happen will require profound changes in the way political parties organize and operate and in how they screen, monitor, hold accountable, and promote—or demote—their leaders. Adapting political parties to the twenty-first century is a priority.

  STRENGTHEN POLITICAL PARTIES: THE LESSONS FROM OCCUPY WALL STREET AND AL QAEDA

  In most democracies, parties continue to be the principal political organizations and still retain substantial power. But beneath the surface, they are as fragmented, weakened, and polarized as the overall political system in which they are embedded. In fact, today, most old-line political parties are unable to muster the power they once had. An illustrative example is the hostile takeover of the Republican Party by the Tea Party and the internal divisions the latter has unleashed in what was once one of the world’s most powerful political machines. Similarly crippling factional conflicts are visible in political parties around the world.

  By any reckoning, since the 1990s political parties have had a bad stretch. In most countries, opinion surveys show that their prestige and value in the eyes of the very people they serve are declining and, in some cases, have plummeted to an all-time low.8

  The end of the Cold War and, more specifically, the collapse of communism as an inspirational idea blurred the ideological lines that gave many parties their unique identity. As electoral platforms became indistinguishable, the personalities of candidates became the main, and often the only, differentiating factor. To win elections, political parties relied less on the popular appeal of their ideals and ideas and more on marketing techniques, the media prowess of candidates, and, of course, the money they could raise. Naturally, the same scandals that tarnish individual politicians also affect the political organizations to which they belong. Again, freer media and more independent parliaments and judiciaries ensured that corrupt practices once carefully hidden or silently tolerated became painfully visible and obviously criminal, thus degrading the “brand” of the political party. The public tarnishing was also fueled by political parties that could no longer distinguish themselves ideologically from their opponents and relied on corruption accusations and scandals to define political rivals in the minds of voters. It is impossible to ascertain whether political corruption actually increased in the past decades, but it certainly has been more publicized than ever.

  Meanwhile, whereas political parties struggled, social movements and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) thrived. Even murderous terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda (which in many important ways are also NGOs) went global and had a good run in the 1990s. As the ties between political parties and their electorates weakened, those between NGOs and their supporters became tighter. As the public standing of politicians and political parties continued its secular decline, the prestige and influence of NGOs grew. Trust in NGOs grew as fast as trust in political parties dwindled. Their ability to recruit young and highly motivated activists willing to sacrifice for the organization and its cause is an organizational skill that has become more common among NGOs than among political parties.

  As NGOs pursued their single issues with monomaniacal zeal, political parties chased a multitude of different, even contradictory, goals and seemed monomaniacal only in their pursuit of campaign contributions. In countries where political parties remained banned or stifled, NGOs became the only channel of political and social activism. In most other nations, NGOs grew rapidly because they were less tainted by corruption, often belonged to a larger international network, and generally had clearer ideals, a less hierarchical structure, and a closer relationship with their members. NGOs also had the advantage of having a clear mission. Whether dedicated to protecting human rights, saving the environment, lessening poverty, or controlling population growth, members rarely lost sight of what their organizations stood for. All of these factors led new cohorts of political activists, who in the past would have gravitated toward political parties, to tend instead toward NGOs.

  The growth of NGOs is, on balance, a welcome trend. What is far less welcome, and indeed ought to be reversed, is the erosion in the public standing of political parties, which in many countries—Italy, Russia, Venezuela, and so on—has led to their virtual disappearance and replacement with ad hoc electoral machines.

  The key to parties’ resurgence and increased effectiveness is to regain the ability to inspire, energize, and mobilize people—especially the young—who would otherwise disdain politics altogether, or channel whatever political energy they have through single-issue organizations or even fringe groups.

  Political parties must therefore be willing to adapt their structures and methods to a more networked world. Just as relatively flat, less hierarchical structures have enabled NGOs to be more nimble, adaptable, and more attuned to the needs and expectations of their members, so they might also help political parties reach new members, become more agile, advance their agendas, and hopefully become better at fighting the terrible simplifiers that seek power inside and outside the party.

  NGOs gain the trust of their supporters by making their members feel they are having a direct impact, that their efforts are indispensable, that their leaders are accountable, transparent, and not beholden to dark or unknown interests. Political parties need to elicit these same feelings from larger segments of society and to be capable of enlisting members beyond their narrow, traditional base of stalwart activists.

  Only then will they be able to recover the kind of power they need to govern us well.

  INCREASE POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

  Easier said than done. Who has the time? And the patience to attend all the meetings and group activities that come with the involvement in any collective undertaking—especially a political party? These and other good reasons explain why only rarely do most people get actively involved in political parties or social causes in ways that go beyond the giving of an occasional donation or attending a meeting or a rally once in a very long while. Under normal circumstances, political involvement and social activism are for minorities.

  But in recent years we have been surprised by sudden surges of interest in public affairs, the mobilization of vast numbers of usually uninterested, even apathetic citizens, and the engagement of tens of thousands in political activities that are more demanding (and in some countries more dangerous) than attending a political party’s meeting.

  In the United States, for example, Barack Obama and his presidential campaign in 2008 were able to motivate large numbers of political neophytes and young people who would not normally be interested or engaged in one of the two parties’ electoral activities. Beyond the background and race of the candidate, a lot more happened in the 2008 campaign that was also unprecedented: from the innovations in social media used to target political advertising to specific voters, to the use and recruitment of volunteers, to the novel approaches to fundraising. The surprises inherent in the sudden surge of political activism by hitherto-inert groups did not stop with the political newcomers to the Obama campaign. Energized or, rather, infuriated by the financial crises and the perception of unfairness in the distribution of the burdens of the crisis, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its thousands of equivalents in cities around the world also stunned governments and political parties that scrambled to understand its nature and functio
ning while searching for ways to tap the political energy of these largely spontaneous movements.

  The most surprising and consequential manifestation of this broader activist trend started with an upheaval in a small town in Tunisia in December 2010. It led to the toppling of the government there and ultimately to the contagious wave of protests and demonstrations throughout the Middle East that became the Arab Spring. Millions of once passive—and repressed—citizens became political actors willing to make extreme sacrifices that included not just risking their own lives but even putting their families in danger. In contrast to the “Occupy” movements, which so far have been unable to convert political energy into political power, in the Arab Spring the political awakening did lead to important power shifts.

  Thus, whereas under normal circumstances political participation is for small groups of engaged activists, in other instances, such as revolutions, political activism becomes the obsessive focus of entire societies. But revolutions are too costly, their outcome is too uncertain, and progress is not their guaranteed result. Therefore, the challenge is to avoid costly and risky revolutions while creating and channeling the political energy latent in all societies to effect desirable changes. The best way to do that is through more competitive political parties.