I’ll keep this little essay short and sweet.

Don’t destroy your own institutions. Your institutions — whether they are great ones, like the BBC, NHS, and CBC, or small ones — are your crown jewels. For an almost invisible reason. They do not just serve a soft function, like providing a sense of national identity. They do something far, far more vital. They provide the high quality public goods that define whether or not a society is truly rich — healthcare, education, media, and so on. And that is the first step in a beautiful and noble virtuous cycle, which I’ll discuss shortly. First, America.

America spent decades deliberately destroying its own institutions — its educational, legal, healthcare, and financial systems (“drowning them in the bathtub”). What is the end result? Now, it is easy prey for adversaries, like Russia, to begin preying on, toying with, using and abusing. I really want you to see that clearly: how can a society that destroys its own institutions be anything but a broken, easily manipulated puppet, a weakened shell? Institutions are the muscles of the body social and politic, and a society that destroys its own institutions is like a drug abuser who is trading a quick fix for long term health.

Give people the highest quality public goods you can. What does it really mean to have strong institutions? Public goods are vital in the truest sense; vita, life. They and they alone make up the fundament of a truly prosperous life. Extreme capitalism can provide gadgets and reality TV shows. But a sane person values health, relationships, and education more — not just a little more, but to a higher degree of value for which there is no substitute. Why? Without them, our lives are empty, hollow, stunted. Our capacity for happiness and meaning is quickly drained. Let’s do a pop quiz: you get free iPhones for life, but I kill everyone you love. Deal? I didn’t think so. We fail to be civilized without public goods.

Inoculate people against demagoguery. It is for this reason that public goods play a hidden but crucial role in the history of modernity. They inoculate against demagogues. When people are happy, fulfilled, comfortable, secure, they are not angry, afraid, enraged. They are thus not easy pickings for demagogues.

It is precisely all this, which I would call the virtuous cycle of modernity, that America has failed at: public goods that elevate people’s quality of life to the point that they will not, do not, cannot turn to dictators and demagogues, for they feel safe, happy, and secure.

America’s story is exactly the opposite: without providing high quality public goods — by denying people public goods, in fact— demagogues arose in the ruins of a broken state, able to easily feed like Dementors on people’s fear and rage.

Don’t give extremists any oxygen. Any. Demagoguery is like fire. In the presence of oxygen, it will grow, until it consumes a society whole. America’s great mistake was to begin to give extremists oxygen. Room in media, the public sphere, official life. From there, extremism became a way of life, normalized and accepted. Think of the many hateful bigots that publish bestsellers. They corrode the body social and politic. And yet, Americans appear to have no defense against them — not legal (hate speech laws) or formal (norms against casual bigotry). Thus, extremism is given oxygen — and now the fire has consumed society whole, with the election of a demagogue who is legitimizing bigotry institutionally.

In all this is the story of American collapse. Yes, collapse. That is precisely what we are witnessing. Not a mere malaise, but the collapse of a society. Collapse doesn’t mean that everything turns into Mad Max suddenly. Life is not a dystopian fantasy. It is more prosaic. Collapse simply means that because a nation stops being a res publica, a public affair, the law of the jungle takes hold. It’s every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. When that sentiment comes to rule a people, then a society is collapsing. And yet that is precisely where America is. Collapsing: from democracy into kleptocracy, from constitutional liberalism into autocracy, from global leader to failed state.

And that is the greatest and last lesson of all. Keep the spirit of a society alive.

When a society stops believing that it is one, when citizen comes to hate and despise citizen, there is little hope for it to recover. Something more fundamental has been lost: the bonds that shape the incentives for people to act collectively at all. In other words, a people’s spirit.

Umair

January 2017