One Nation
Under One Party
DEMOCRACY was not actually “on the ballot” in 2024. That was just a metaphor by people who write for news anchors and TV panelists. The main media have lunch together in NewYork and pass around plates of platitudes. Democracy has already been so corrupted by billions of campaign dollars that it is not recognizable as America’s child. A national majority of voters did, however, enable a “one-party democracy,” as the CIA ‘s World Fact Book used to call strongman regimes.
These voters turned government over to a party that hates government. As Ronald Reagan said in the beginning of the new Republican era: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Reagan’s 1986 mockery prevails, reinforced by Party Leader Donald Trump immediately upon winning re-election. He nominated cabinet members as if he were a director casting a show for television and little else. He appointed a pair of self-described “small-government revolutionaries” to cut or eliminate agency budgets. He proposed tariffs up to “100 percent” against nations he does not like.
Libertarians endorse “limited government,” but those of the Koch lineage do not like Donald Trump. His arbitrary tariffs violate the Libertarian first principle: free trade and open markets. Tariffs are “a sales tax on imports,” as a writer for The Economist put it. So far the publication has not explored the legality of Trump tariffs and neither have the Liberal Democrats. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate foreign trade and impose federal taxes, but Congress has delegated that authority to the President. In one-party democracy, the Party controls all three branches of federal government including the Supreme Court. The majority justices are leaning toward a general principal that delegation of legislative power is unconstitutional, but they also seem to like sovereign immunity.
Now, U. S. America — considering its 750 foreign military bases, its trillion-dollar defense budget, its world’s largest consumer market, and its immigrants coveting citizenship — is an empire. And empires do decline and fall. It’s a story often told with various morals or causal conclusions but no general theory. The strange exception is The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter, published in 1988 as part of an archeology series by Cambridge University and reprinted an amazing 30 times in paperback. He began the story this way: “The image of lost civilizations is compelling: cities buried by drifting sands or tangled jungle, ruin and desolation where once there were people in abundance. Surely few persons can read such descriptions and not sense awe and mystery.”
The Chaco Example
I was drawn to this 250-page text book because of Tainter’s focus on Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico and the Roman and Mayan empires. Patricia (my wife) and I have seen ruins of all three, with some awe despite the disruptive arch of postmodern tourism. We have elbowed through the mobs at the Roman Coliseum built to hold 73,000 bread-and-circus fans. (They’re back!). I have climbed the hundred stone steps in the sun at the Mayan Chichén Itzá in Yucatán to a domed observatory where hundreds of tourists had discarded empty plastic water bottles. We have wandered high and alone at the Mayan Caracole jungle ruin in Belize, our wary guide watching below for Guatemalan gangs just across the border. (They are awed by tourist purses).
And we have frequented Chaco Culture National Park, which embraces Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi) constructions probably inspired by Mesoamerican architecture but with their own cosmic obsessions. Sighting from the south doorway through the north doorway of Casa Rincon, a 63-foot-diameter gathering place called a “great house,” you can see the dressed-stone architecture of Pueblo Bonito, a solar-oriented “D” embracing 37 sand-filled kivas and 700 small rooms with narrow T-shaped doors.
Raising your gaze to the mesa top you can see Pueblo Alto and on the far horizon the white summits of La Plata range near Durango, Colo. An ancient curbed road has been detected going true north straight as a light beam from Pueblo Bonito through Pueblo Alto to the San Juan river, and perhaps farther. It was one of several roads connecting outlier villages with the empirical center. Many of these small ruins are within sight of 10,000-foot Sleeping Ute Mountain, 80 miles north of Chaco near Cortez, Colo. The very last work in a 300-year Anasazi construction project at Chaco was in 1132 CE, at Pueblo Alto. The Chaco culture still flourished then, according to National Park Service literature. Then it collapsed. The marvelous former center was completely empty by 1300. What happened?
In his search, Tainter surveyed 18 dead societies. He sorted through proposed causal explanations, discarding the ones that “never existed” or by themselves “could not bring down an empire.” He found that social conflict may be the most popular causal explanation of collapse, writing: “In a civil society, discord fanned by demagoguery leads to the abandonment of civic responsibilities.” He rejected it as inadequate, particularly in its Marxist form because “peasant revolts” rarely happen and are “generally initiated by a fusion of disaffected intellectuals or military leaders.” The second most popular set of explanations he described as “mystical,” such as the frequent attributions of Rome’s troubles to “the judgements of God” for moral depravity. So he set aside the most famous mystics, identified as Augustine, Toynbee, and Spengler. He considered the presumption of invasion, particularly by “Barbarians,” but concluded this is more a consequence of collapse than a cause. (At Chaco, there was no evidence of invasion.)
Finally he took up the the various environmental hypotheses — drought, irregular rain patterns, soil depletion, crop diseases, firewood scarcity — but concluded that in empires they were moderated by an “averaging” strategy. (The San Juan river basin, with Chaco at its center, had such diversity in topography and weather patterns that a crop failure in one place was compensated by fertility in another. At the height of the system, some 70 villages would send surplus harvests to the Pueblo Bonito Center in fertile years and draw from its voluminous central storage rooms at Pueblo Bonito in lean years.)
It’s Complicated
Amid long accounts of scholarship on the problem, Tainter’s book develops an abstract solution. What collapses in a complex society is complexity itself. The failure can be described in terms of the law of diminishing returns, a concept from economics. That is, when marginal returns don’t cover marginal costs the investment is irrational. If a business with 10 employees hires one more and the return does not grow 10 per cent, the new employe was not, in that context, worth the money. In modern political terms, the voters don’t see what they’re getting for increased taxes. Complexity is self-accelerating and unavoidable in a flourishing empire. An essential distinction of complexity is “specialization, Tainter explained in modern terms. “Where in one stage in the development of a political hierarchy multiple administrative functions tend to be carried out by a single individual, a common trend among human organizations is to respond to problems by developing specialized administrators, and by increasing the proportion of the population engaged in administrative tasks.” For example, he wrote, “Research and development move from generalized knowledge that is widely applicable and obtained at little cost, to specialized topics that are more narrowly useful, are more difficult to resolve, and are resolved only at great cost. Modern medicine presents a clear example of this problem.” General practitioners who used to treat everything by themselves now make referrals to specialists. Higher education is another example. The rising costs of higher education, according to some specific studies, are due mostly to more administrators, not more teachers. Science requires specialists for new research. Defense requires specialists to invent and operate new weapons. Specialists are costly. As fees inflate and taxes increase to pay more and more specialists, people wonder if they are worth the money. The law of diminishing returns kicks in.
Another feature of complexity is increasing population. When more and more people moved into the San Juan basin, creating new villages, the Chaco system failed. in Tainter’s theory. People soon stopped cooperating and moved away. Depopulation is an early sign of collapse. I think of Gary, Indiana, once a roaring steel center or Flint, Michigan., once a home of General Motors. I think of ghost towns on the Great Plains, vacant motels on secondary highways. “Whether as cause or as consequence, there is typically a marked, rapid reduction in population density. Not only do urban populations substantially decline but so also do the support populations of the countryside,” Tainter wrote. And, “No longer can the populace depend upon external defense and internal order, maintenance of public works, or delivery of food and material goods.” In a 2022 New York Times Magazine interview he emphasized that in collapsed complex societies literacy falls off, technical knowledge is lost and central government disintegrates.
I compared this gloomy picture with the prosperous late sixties and seventies, especially on the West Coast. Along the San Francisco Bay, Microsoft and Apple were on the path to become the world’s most valuable companies. Baby boomers had good jobs and single-family homes. Paul Ehrlich at Stanford was turning out alarming sequels to “The Population Bomb.” Elsewhere, Japan had the richest real estate in the world and China imposed a “one-child” policy. Now, ironically, China and some western nations including Germany are rewarding couples with baby incentives. The United States presumably does not need a higher birthrate for future employment because it is what Germans call a nation of immigrants. But the Republican war against them (immigrants) could create a population implosion. English would replace Spanish as what Anthony Bourdain called the language of restaurant kitchens, or they would close. America’s propagandized “immigration crisis” calls to mind the 1960’s novel Waiting For The Barbarians by Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. They never arrive, but a fascist general does, brutally patrolling the border. Actual barbarian invasion is, again, a historic consequence, not a cause.
Reaction
So as one side of Tainter’s collapse equation is increased complexity, the other is bureaucratic intervention and failure to adapt. The facts in Tainter’s book come from ancient history, but I found his analysis easily fits the modern story in the 2019 bestseller Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. The book’s second half, called “Death of an Empire,” is a good bedside companion for people who entertain political nightmares about the American empire. It correlates the Soviet Union’s collapse with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine. The radioactive fallout from the explosion and meltdown of a water-cooled uranium reactor at the huge six-unit power plant went around the globe. It was lethal within 30 kilometers and a biological danger in the rest of Ukraine, Russia and the Nordic countries. Nothing could be more dangerously complex than a nuclear reaction, and the communist political interference with scientific reality supports the Tainter theory of bureaucratic failure to adapt to complexity. He proposes three models of such failure: the Dinosaur that lumbers on as usual, the Runaway Train that innovates cannot reverse or change direction, and the House of Cards that is so fragile it is destined to fall. The USSR’s rush into nuclear power plant construction was a runaway train. In the perilous wake of the accident, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was admonished by a prime minister for presiding over “the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction,” according to Higginbotham. “Slowly at first and then with gathering momentum the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled — not only about the accident and its consequences but also the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the people from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world.” Gorbachev ushered in the end of the Communist Party and resigned in 1995.
Again, the loss of allegiance to central government usually precedes collapse. Following a pointless “World War,” European monarchies collapsed. The poet Yeats in 1919 wrote a famous line predicting a dark future: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Following the “Roaring Twenties” when marginal loans for speculation went wild, the U. S. stock market crashed and banks closed in the ensuing panic. After six months of this, Congress passed record high protective tariffs, mostly to protect the agrarian economy. (Note: the legislative branch not the executive branch imposed these taxes.) The blunder froze international trade, bringing on the Great Depression. The center did not hold. Could this happen now in the post-modern specialist-run world, and if so would it actually be a catastrophe? It’s apparent that many voters in 2024 supported what the Party and its leaders were proposing: a one-party democracy free of liberal media, where loyalty replaces experience, foreign policy withdraws to a dome of isolation, and high protectionist tariffs are imposed by the executive without the advice and consent of the legislative branch. And the Show would go on.
The Anomaly
Certainly, there are revolutionary political consultants who propose that collapsing and starting over would be a good thing. See The 2025 Presidential Transition Project. And there also must be some progressives who believe collapse of the consumerist industrial society will save the planet from what the writer Jared Diamond called “ecological suicide” as happened in the deforesting of Easter Island, leaving only monumental stone statues staring into the cosmos. Tainter himself said collapse “is not intrinsically a catastrophe. It is a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.”
On the contrary side is the big-state legacy of Hobbes, a 17th century English philosopher whose theory of the “social contract” influenced Thomas Jefferson. Hobbes asserted that in the “state of nature,” with its constant war of all against all, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To escape this we give up (alienate) certain freedoms and create states.
Tainter paints a contrasting picture. States are a recent creation. They have existed only in the recent 6,000 years of the 300,000 years of Sapien dominance. He agrees with the calculation that “98.8 percent of human history has been dominated by small autonomous communities.” We ourselves are the anomaly with our “hierarchical, organized, independent states.” The North American continent was that way when the first European colonists arrived with their faith-based Hobbesian philosophies, beginning a 400-year war of bureaucracy against traditional kinship-based Indian communities. Pekka Hamalainen, the revisionist historian of that conflict says (in his encyclopedic “Indigent Continent”) the Indians were “sophisticated, diplomatic, shrewd traders, and forceful leaders,” and “when war came the Indians won as often as not.” At first they usually won the battles, but died of small pox and other diseases they were not immune to. It was the Europeans who committed most of the atrocities, he says.
So just as there is a new interpretation of Indigenous society in North America, the theory collapsing complex societies has begun drawing public attention (NY Times) after a generation in print. Tainter wrote: “A complex society that has collapsed is suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated. Specialization decreases and there is less central control. The flow of information drops, people trade and interact less, and there is overall a lower coordination among individuals and groups. Economic activity drops to a commensurate level, while arts and literature experience such a quantitative decline that a dark age ensues.” * To campaign for election on the idea that such isolated small-town utopias would be better than living in an empire is subversive, but there are many in the Party who believe it.
So What If…
One of the collapsed societies that Tainter profiles is the Chou (Zhou) feudal dynasty. In 1122 BCE it succeeded the corrupt Shang dynasty that began mass development of canals, dams and diverted rivers in what is now China. The Zhou became masters of feudal lords until 770 when its ruler was killed, destroying political unity. The nearly five centuries of conflict that ensued earned concluded with “The Warring States” era. Yet despite the chaos, Tainter said, “The period of disintegration and conflict produced some of China’s major philosophical, literary, and scientific achievements.”* Confucius and Mo Tzu wrote principles for good government “Under The Mandate of Heaven” and the oppositional Taoists wrote poetical advice to rulers under the principle of wei wu wei, sometimes translated as “doing without doing.” In America the only classic from the Warring States Period that everybody tries to read is the Tao Te Ching. This is the Taoist bible. Among its sometimes contradictory injunctions is: “Banish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will be benefited.”
The next to last verse in the present organization of the book describes a “small kingdom, few people” that is the autochthonous alternative to what was ahead of the warring city states: the Chin dynasty which united China and created an anti-Barbarian empire in 221 BCE. In this pastoral, blissfully provincial village the people have labor-saving machines but don’t use them, boats and carriages they never ride in, military weapons they will not bear. They dwell there happily, enjoying their food, dress and customs. And they don’t travel, not even to villages so near they can hear its hens cackling and dogs barking. I suppose many Americans — tired of airport tourism, employment globalization, unintelligible foreign wars and computer complexity that compounds with every “update” — would (and did) vote for a simpler nation with a simpler democracy.