Last time in The Raspberry Patch we surveyed the first two of seven useful and often insightful—but not wholly adequate—theories concerning the causes of American political dysfunction: meritocracy awry and populism. This time we will cover theories three and four: polarization and institutional decay. Next time we'll finish the chapter by covering social trust depletion, industrial folklore, and technovelty.
As with part 1 of Chapter, we go light on footnotes and literature and don’t try to exhaust each theory’s several variations and details, since otherwise we would end up with a book within a book and still not make it to what is original and most interesting about the Age of Spectacle project. Each of the seven theories summarized here is the subject of many books, many dozens of serious studies, and many hundreds of journalism-level essays and articles. I’ve tried to make this survey chapter as painless as possible for readers who care about the subject and understand the need for a reasonably comprehensive contextual underlayer, but who are not expert in or sufficiently enthralled by the ways and wiles of political science—more specifically in this case, political sociology—to demand more than a survey dotted with a few examples.
I hope the compromise well serves its intended purpose, but I’ll not apologize further: The unavoidable truth is that genuine learning about difficult subjects usually requires patient investment of real effort. No reliable shortcuts exist. So stow your smartphone and focus; as with last week’s fare, this week’s won’t hurt, much.
. . . .
3. Polarization: Many observers point to the polarization of U.S. politics as the main source of our inability to solve major policy problems. That is not wrong, but polarization a grab-bag category that sometimes posits it as cause and sometimes as consequence—and sometimes as both, to wit in general terms: We can’t get things done because we’re polarized, and we’re polarized because we can’t get things done since we can’t agree on what needs to be done….so what divides us persists through its successful evasion of compromise.
That may even be true, but as analytical templates go it is not very helpful in that form. Nor is the common conflation of manner and substance; incivility can and does exist despite the absence in some cases of core policy disagreements, and core policy disagreement can exist, sometimes at least, without the presence of incivility. Example: President Biden personally and persistently, but quietly, lobbied House Speaker Mike Johnson during this spring of 2024 to find a way to renew U.S. arms aid to Ukraine; because Biden did not shame Johnson before his Republican colleagues and did not raise his voice into incivility over an issue he knew Johnson did not feel strongly about, he got the result he wanted and needed.
That said, beyond actual disagreements and incivility of tone, polarization has been abetted by structural factors, and so runs up the back of theory number four just below—institutional decay or aging. As to the Legislative Branch, some point to the impact of gerrymandering and closed party primaries as stoking polarization. Why? Because making most congressional districts uncompetitive refocuses energies on primary battles in which true-believer activists can easily out-leverage the apathy of the typical voter in a classical textbook example of the logic of collective action.
Of course, gerrymandering is preventable; if the State of California can do it, any state can do it if the political will and sufficient leadership are available to turn the trick. Parties selecting candidates did not always reply on primaries and, despite the common image, certain virtues accompanied the machinations of senior leaders in those old proverbial smoke-filled rooms. In future, primaries that tilt results toward extremists can be adjusted or even abolished. The point here is that structural features can contribute to polarization, but they don’t have to do so, suggesting in turn that the underlying causes of polarization are not structural but only may take structural forms if the institutional set-up is fungible enough to allow it.
It is also fairly obvious that persistently close presidential elections, the fact that the margin of majority in the Senate and the House has been atypically narrow in recent years, and the historically unusual fact that no major party has managed to string together more than three consecutive administrations in a long time, raises the stakes perceived to be involved in state and national elections.[1] That makes every vote seem more important because it actually is, and it tends to cause the importation of vast amounts of money to win crucial swing districts in state and national elections. The money of course brings other problems along with it; for one, it tends to nationalize local elections, depersonalizing them. Social trust tends to be more abundant in local face-to-face relationships, so nationalizing congressional district contests tends to polarize them in line with national narratives and erodes the moderating efficacy of organic local relationships.
The main takeaway here is that the less able the two major parties are to win comfortable majorities, usually the more insistent and pandaemonic the contending rhetorical joustings of the sides. A lot of that jousting falls under the general rubric of negative campaigning, which has been known to involve outright calumny, slander, and lying. That stokes polarization.
As to the Executive Branch, some note that presidential systems themselves, ironically for liberal systems otherwise at pains to avoid stark zero-sum divisions, predispose national politics to either/or cadences. Thus Juan Linz in his classic 1990 essay on “The Perils of Presidentialism,” in the first issue of the Journal of Democracy: “Presidentialism is ineluctably problematic because it operates according to the rule of ‘winner-take-all’—an arrangement that makes democratic politics a zero-sum game, with all the potential for conflict such games portend.” In the U.S. case, the President is the only political leader who can claim to speak for all the people and who is supposedly accountable to all the people. He is therefore the nation’s paramount symbol of unity. In a polarized context a President can cynically deploy the unity card as a means of useful partisan division, portraying the opposition as unpatriotic. Indeed, populism and hyper-polarization go naturally together and both depend on a politics of division; certainly, since the onset of Civil War no one has used it with as much damaging effect as Donald Trump, although Richard Nixon tried his best.
Still others note that the failure or inability of Congress in recent years to get needful things done has had the effect of dragging both the Executive and the Judicial Branches into controversial and polarizing policy areas that they would be better off leaving alone. Certainly in the case of the courts this trend has harmed the reputational capital of the Judiciary, the Supreme Court not excepted. The Court was not designed to legislate, and its doing so invariably politicizes it; once its politicization becomes accepted as more or less normal, truly bad instances of bald politicization can follow—as we may be seeing in recent hearings before the bench over presidential immunity.
Many assert that the two major parties no longer overlap ideologically as they used to and so lack healthy internal diversity. Parties thus get homogenized within as prelude to becoming polarized without. This is a relatively new condition. Indeed, some scholars like my friend Lee Drutman note that before about fifty years ago we really had a four-party system in the United States, two within each major party that only needed to come together once every four years to nominate a presidential candidate.[2] We had liberal northern and western Democrats and Dixiecrats inside the Democratic tent; and inside the Republican tent we had Eastern moderates who tended to be big-business boosters and more libertarian Western and moral majority border-state types who were anything but pro-corporate.
There is much truth in this, since the U.S. Federal system has a prism-like effect on how voters and politicians behave depending on whether an election is state-based or even located at country/municipal levels, or national. This prism also helps explains the split-ticket voting that seems to perplex many casual observers, who usually insist that it spites the party “brand” determination of American voting patterns. Alas, these casual observers are evidently less sagacious than many typical voters, who know what they are doing more often than is supposed. And many times what they do is anti-polarizing in its consequences: Scary extremists make divided government attractive to some voters.
Some emphasize the growing intrusion of culture war issues into politics in recent decades. Since such issues tend to be less amenable to old-fashioned logrolling, the vitriol evoked by them contaminates all others, making civility and compromise on policy scarcer. This, just by the way, is certainly true.
Others cite particular third-rail policy issues beyond the culture war mainstays—the perennial abortion and gender/sexual orientation debates—as causing or deepening polarization, particularly immigration and birder security policies and gun control. Speaking of guns, polarized policy views about guns are one thing but violence is another, and nothing is likely to be more polarizing than blood spilt over political disagreements real and imagined. An October 2022 poll claimed that 80 percent of Americans now believe that “the other side” poses an existential threat to “America as it has been and as we know it.” Those kinds of numbers expressing belief in an existential threat to America itself bespeak a high level and broad-based kind of polarization the country has not experienced since the days of Bloody Kansas.
That certainly bodes ill for future civil peace in the United States, if it is really true. Other polling suggests it is not true, that a substantial majority of the electorate is more moderate, willing to compromise, and frustrated by polarization and gridlock. My view is that the expression of such extreme sentiments is accurate as recorded, but that most respondents are in performative mode and don’t necessarily mean what they say—or wouldn’t act on it id push came to shove. In an Age of Spectacle, everything gets exaggerated, oversized, histrionic, and that probably includes how people who imagine themselves as the star of their own private reality-TV show think they are supposed to answer political pollsters. If you don’t exaggerate, you seem wishy-washy, and no one likes or pays much attention to the blandly spoken and those of bleached convictions.
The political scientists are still at the academic barricades fighting out the question of how polarized the American body politic really is, as opposed to the political elite. But if the polarizers end up being right, it’s no small matter and it has an array of policy implications. For example, with so many guns already out there, new gun control measures may not matter much in the near term—not that they are not worth having if only for calming psychological reasons. In that context, too, it would also be nice if more Americans actually read the Second Amendment—it’s only one sentence long, after all, totaling 27 words. Perhaps then fewer people would be so risibly clueless about its original meaning and intent in the historical context of the late 18th century.
Still others point more broadly, and in my view persuasively, to elite-driven changes in the political economy over time that have worsened cleavages between social classes and, often related, between urban and rural Americans—and with that observation we are, unsurprisingly, thrown back again on theory number one: a “gated” elite meritocracy run amok.
But of course it is true: The close correlation of the “red/blue” divide part harmonizing statistically with the rural/urban divide, and with the actual data on inequality as opposed to its common mis-imagination, has long been obvious. Corporate and banking elites enriching themselves at the expense of the American manufacturing sector, with foolish or suborned macroeconomists claiming falsely or cluelessly (and there is a difference, presumably) that no major differences exist between the social quality of a predominantly manufacturing and a predominantly service economy, has made a huge political-economy difference, particularly over the past 25-40 years. It is certainly responsible for a lion’s share of both populism and polarization.
This phenomenon is not limited to the United States, by the way, as the “yellow vest” protests in France and similar cleavages elsewhere have illustrated.[3] Different countries manifest the phenomenon differently, at least to some extent. In Japan, for example, the mean age of urban residents is much lower than that of rural residents, leading to a over-layering of elderly rural voting patterns that disproportionately supports the dominant LDP party. In Germany, support for AfD candidates and views is more complex: Originally, after reunification, rightwing views arose more prominently in the former East Germany (DDR), but over time rural populations in some former Bundesrepublik lander have become more AfD-friendly. No party can get to a 23 percent favorable rating in polls relying only on support in the former DDR.
It is worth dwelling a bit on the urban/rural divide as a source of American political polarization, for its causes are poorly understood and until fairly recently the academic literature has often failed to do justice to them. Two generic causes for its recent exacerbation—for it has long existed, nearly everywhere—are most important: more acutely segmented economies, and urban-based media saturation of rural communities. Let’s take a closer if brief look at each.
Segmented Economies: By segmented economies we mean the fact that globalization has created a situation in which major urban nodes in nearly all advanced economies that are linked to the global economy, lately called “world cities” by some observers. These nodes invariably have more elevated and differential demand profiles, and so generally higher price levels, than rural and village areas in the same countries, where the range of material demands is narrower and most prices are lower.[4]
This is an empirically researchable subject. If one traces economic exchanges in a given area over time, one can count how many are within the region, how many internal purchases are from outside the region, and how many internal sales come from outside the region in the form, say, of tourism and other flows. One can also calculate the value of sales as well as their number. One can categorize the exchanges sectorally into rents, foodstuffs, transportation, entertainment, and so on. These data can be expressed in scattergraphs, and looking at a time-series of scattergraphs provides a sense of the relative perforation of local economies from the outside. That, in turn, can tell you something about the extent to which globalized urban nodes are affecting the economic life of more insular populations.
This is true not only within the same countries but even within the same states in the United States. So in Franklin, Pennsylvania, for example, a small hamlet between Pittsburgh and Erie along the banks of the Allegheny River, salaries and profits are lower than they are in, say, Philadelphia or even fairly nearby Pittsburgh, but prices for locally produced goods and services are also lower. It’s when folks in Franklin desire and so buy goods and services from, or closer to, the global economy that household budgets get busted open. But with system-wide technological innovation, that is becoming ever more a percentage of that rural household budget: energy for transportation, heating and cooling, and manufacturing processing; automobiles and trucks; computers and cell phone service; higher education and continuing education tuition; healthcare and pharmaceuticals; and more—many sectors afflicted by market-distorting “cost disease” on account of massive oligarchical-bureaucratic structures.
On top of the economic stresses that segmented economies place on rural areas in a globalizing world, many rural Americans think that government at both state and Federal levels robs the countryside to pay for hordes of immigrants and freeloaders in the cities. This is not typically true; more state and Federal money flows to rural America than is siphoned from it. But with rural budgets being stretched, and with rural labor profiles being more isolated as a rule from the value-added ladder of newer “best practice” manufacturing, whatever gets taxed away can feel a lot more dear to rural folk than the same amount or percentage taxed away may feel to a fairly well-heeled urbanite.
And this is why, to repeat an observation from an earlier post [toward the conclusion of “Why Trump, Why Biden, Why Are U.S. Politics So Screwed Up?” from March 1], shiny macroeconomic data touted by the Federal government quarter by quarter can be true as stated but false as experienced by many less well off and particularly less well off rural Americans. And so we come to factor two, the role of the media.
Perforated Moral Communities: Over the years a sharper values divide has arisen between urban professionals, typically the kinds of educated people who usually run national and state governments, and rural residents who but rarely do, oftentimes even in more local county seats. It’s the former who have moved further away from what was the typical American values “mean” over the past half-century and more.
Here is an experiment that urban-based sociologists and political scientists might consider running on themselves: Have a group of them walk down the streets of Franklin, Pennsylvania—it’s not that big a place at its center, so it can be walked well in less than hour or so—and ask them what they see that might be of interest in explaining the values divide that stands at the apex of urban/rural polarization, and that tends to define Franklin’s basic political orientation.
Now, Franklin, Pennsylvania, like many small towns in north-central Pennsylvania, was founded by German-speaking immigrants who were on the whole traditionally religious people following the pilgrim dissenter road to the New World—some Lutherans but also Mennonites, even Amish came into that area to set roots and build community. The environment was conducive to new residents building churches and forming faith communities of their own. Franklin is dense in churches of many sorts, mostly Protestant but also some Catholic ones. Secular-inclined city folk tend to look right past all these churches as though they were some sort of inert street furniture. They tend to think that the embodiment of a social function that is unimportant to most of them could not possibly be very important to many others. When Orwell wrote in 1946 that, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” this is part of the set of cases he may have had in mind--or should have had in mind if he didn’t.
So what has happened is that people in rural areas still express traditional Christian religious faith, and for many if not most the mediating institution between individual and society that is by far the most important is the church. Private belief is not the point here. The point is that the church is the focal point of social exchange among resident families and, for that matter, the schools and businesses that extend from those families. In far more ethnically heterogeneous cities, many decades of social pluralization has had over time the effect of muting or segregating off parochial identities into private provinces, and countercultural memes among more educated people has driven sharply down the status of traditional religious practice and belief.
This evolving difference did not matter much a century ago when the divide was milder, and it was milder partly because rural people were not so keenly aware of what urban secularists thought—or if they were aware dismissed them as an effete fringe of American life, which they pretty much were judging by numbers and then-extant social attitudes. Media technology in the digital age has changed all that.
Rural people are today bombarded with urban-generated, secularist storylines in nearly all the mass electronic entertainment they watch, and many watch plenty. In those storylines values are communicated, sometimes directly but usually through indirection, that often lie athwart what has been inherited and what is still ratified by family elders and by the church. For an obvious example, virtually no big-budget sitcom in recent years has been without a sympathetically presented homosexual character, but traditional Protestant attitudes toward homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, remain ambivalent if not simply negative. This is not to judge either those trying to push the Overton Window down the street or those who incline to push back; it is just stating a sociologically relevant fact.
Rural clergy have often been vocal in opposing this values invasion or inversion, which has led to more homeschooling, private schooling, and informal, usually church-centric bans on certain kinds of entertainment programming. Also important, as media business models have changed in the cybernetic era, local newspapers have gone belly-up in alarming numbers and into the void rightwing ideological entrepreneurs—including those with national media reach like Fox News and One America News—have been exaggerating and sometimes just plain lying about what “liberals,” rarely if ever fairly defined, are up to. It has proven a short distance from malarkey about “Communist” Democrats to QAnon fantasy paranoia for some people.
Now, too, social media has enabled younger rural people to network to express their discomfort if not outrage at urban-elitist politically correct “values” concerning sexuality especially, but also many other cultural themes: coarseness and vulgarity in speech; immodesty in fashion; flamboyant tattooing and body piercings; banning prayer and Christian symbols from public spaces; allowing so many foreign, non-English-speaking people to come into and live in the country without legal residency rights and even be protected from Federal agents by urban “sanctuary jurisdictions”—and some city governments, like that of Washington, DC, deciding to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. One can of course add to the list. The ideological entrepreneurs of the Right seize on this rural social media buzz and burnish it, run it up the electronic flagpole so to speak, whether to make money, gain influence, or carve out partisan political advantage. It usually works, too, since there is little backtalk to balance rightwing activism. Rather too many liberals think actually going and talking to rural folk is a waste of time—just a bunch of rubes and deplorables…..why bother?
It was only a matter of time before the urban/rural divide amid the current media environment got politicized on the rural side, and now it has been. Near Clarion, Pennsylvania, amid the mass of Trump signs nearly everywhere on the very eve of the 2022 midterms—including on church lawns where by rights they must not be to qualify for their tax-exempt status—one special banner over the road stood out. It read “God, Guns, and Country. Trump 2024.”
It will probably also only be a matter of time before some incensed right-wingnut with artistic talent creates an image of a bearded and berobed Jesus totting an AR-15. Most folks around Franklin will probably think of this, as they seem to think of the banner in nearby Clarion, as perfectly natural and internally consistent. How “God” (read Jesus for most of them) can be consistent with “Guns” will surely raise questions among some people, but if they know what’s good for themselves they won’t express their querulousness too loudly in public, especially near any house or storefront sporting a profusion of “FXXK Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon” signs. They were, and they remain, fairly plentiful.
Of all the manifestations of political polarization in the United States today, the urban-rural aspect is the sharpest, clearest and, given the way American federalism works, the most consequential politically. But there is a sense in which the particular sources and expressions of polarization matter less than the stark reality that the extreme edges of our ideological divide affect the concentric circles headed toward the center. If the underlying thinking of those extremes is displacing older stabilizing attitudes it matters a lot, for it takes far more time to build, or re-build, stable orders than it does to tear them down.
Finally on polarization, perhaps the deepest most fundamental reason that it is happening concerns the degradation of analytical thinking into ideological thinking, on the part of elites as well as ordinary citizens. Part of that has to do with the erosion of deep literacy, of which more below. Part of it has to do with arrested cognitive and intellectual development, of which also more below. But to keep it simple and short for now, ideological thinking is long on emotion and simplicity, and it tends to divide the world into saints and devils. Ideological simplifications of reality invariably conflate; analytical thinking seeks distinctions. Ideological thinking thus tends to the two-valued orientation and to zero-sum premises about human relationships. That is another way of describing what polarization is. Thus, at base, polarization, real as it is at the political level, is far more a consequence of deeper currents in the culture than it is an independent variable. That said, polarization does then double back and seem to validate the zero-predicates in the culture. A kind of dialectic from hell, one might call it.
4. Institutional decay: For a variety of reasons, not all of them having to do with meritocracy, populism, or polarization, most American political institutions have stopped working well. Even the simplest and most obvious logical solutions to problems cannot be instituted because the rules for running things are so balled up by over-lawyering and other means as that they no longer suit direct logical redress. Institutional decay is real, ubiquitous historically, and in most cases rather subtle.[5] It is not as though someone throws a switch and a correspondence of evolved rules to achieve a given public function and attitudes toward those rules (that is what an institution is) suddenly goes haywire. It is usually a gradual and complex progression of that correspondence coming too loose to properly handle new business. It is as much a problem of aging as decay from some theoretically ever-perfect standard, although the two terms can end up meaning pretty much the same thing in practice.
Arguments here concerning the United States tend to focus on the decay of the Civil Service and the sclerosis of the administrative/bureaucratic state; the overbearing role of the Federal center at the expense of state and municipal/county government, and with it further excessive concentration of power in the Executive Branch; the strangeness of certain key Supreme Court decisions in recent years having to do with standing, political voice for corporations, and hence the role of lobbying and money in electoral politics; the weakness of Congress as an institution as power has passed increasingly to party leaderships; the distortions of gerrymandering and the Electoral College that now enable about 45 percent of the electorate to determine 53 percent of the U.S. Senate, with all that implies for judiciary appointments and balances; the outsized role of activiste-dominated primaries that hollow out the political center; ballot-access deficiencies, many deliberate, some just stupid; the warping role of the Federal Election Commission in artificially limiting third-party ballot access; and several other discrete erosions of norms and institutional performance.
A different line of argument stresses the increasingly poor quality of written staff work. One scholar at the University of Virginia, who also happens to know what it feels like to work inside government at high levels, has argued that a general decline in facility with written language has significantly dumbed down staff work—not only its literary quality, which has never been much to brag about, but its inherent creativity and practicality.[6] I heartily second his intuition. There is more to say about this general argument, but it need await a later chapter.
What distinguishes the institutional decay point of view from the others is that proffered redress is limited to the institutional level, to wit: If we fix these distortions and inadequacies, and innovate with, say, ranked-choice voting or term limits, everything, or most things, will be fine again. This perspective is both wrong and right. It is highly unlikely that institutional decay is bereft of deeper causal predicates, so it does not by itself account for most of the variance we are interested in understanding. On the other hand, fixing problems at this level may be the only ones that conventional political action is capable of fixing. If so, then this category of causes becomes more important than its inherent significance, because fixing anything properly for a change can constitute the elixir of hope the situation demands.
Some go even deeper as regards reasons for institutional decay, suggesting that beneath the mass of dysfunction are factors like the end of the Cold War, which removed the seriousness about politics as a vocation that perceptions of national security crises bring. Others point to the shift of generations bringing into political responsibility leaders endowed with less rigorous educations and less challenging life experiences such as military service. Chapter 5 below takes the institutional decay theme into realms of political philosophy, a domain where current academic political science literature almost never visits, postwar trends having jettisoned philosophy from the more narrowly redefined modern discipline.
But with that broadening, and prospective deepening, we will land right back in the muddle, challenging ourselves to find and connect more dots between and among the seven theories, and dots lying beyond those seven theories as well. We all know where that leads: to the final three theories of dysfunction in this chapter. Next week…..you can barely wait, right?
The Age of Spectacle
How a Mash-up of Affluence, the End of Modernity, and Entertainment Technovelty Have Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
2. Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
3. Underturtle II: The End of Modernity, or the Origin Stories We Have Misplaced
4. Underturtle III: The Regression from Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
9. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the Future of American Politics
EPILOGUE
10. What Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Index
[1] Not all the reasons for these circumstances are obvious. One not obvious but important is that a combination of structural and psychological factors having to do with how Republicans, Democrats, and independent voters differentially “bundle” issues affect decisions on whether and how to vote. Research suggests that temperamental conservatives tend to pile more weight on single issues than do Democrats and independents, so such a person may like only a minority of Republican policy positions and even tend to agree with more Democratic positions, yet will still vote Republican because of a single strongly favored position on abortion, or gun control, or immigration, or tax policy. See Lee Drutman, “The Paradoxical Reason Republicans Win Elections Despite Unpopular Policies,” Undercurrent Events, May 4, 2013.
[2] See Lee Drutman, “Democracy on Life Support,” American Purpose, February 21, 2021.
[3] This is not a particularly new insight; see Jon Emont, “The Growing Urban-Rural Divide Around the World,” The Atlantic, January 4, 2017. Emont’s is a brief essay and has nothing at all to say about the phenomenon of segmented economies, up next, which defines the essence of the divide.
[4] Perhaps not coincidentally, the vast majority of a large and growing literature is concentrated on urban-sector implications for subjects like job creation, wages, housing, transportation, health, political influence within and among nations, and so on. But some does look at both sides of the divide, in statistical rather than human terms most often. See Tom Kemeny and Michael Storper, Superstar Cities and Left Behind Places: Disruptive Innovation, Labor Demand, and Interregional Inequality, LSE International Inequalities Institute Working Paper 41 (February 2021), and the extensive bibliography therein. Also noteworthy, academic economists in the United States have not been at the forefront of this study area. The best work on segmented economics started in France in urban geography departments, and it is in similar departments in the United States and Great Britain, not economics departments, that the best work is still being done. This speaks volumes about the performance of U.S. academic economics departments, and it suggests that they may have more influence on U.S. policy than they deserve.
[5] A place to start in understanding this is Frances Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (Farrar, Giroux & Strauss, 2014).
[6] See Philip Zelikow, “To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Policy Competence,” Texas National Security Review, September 2019.