William Cooper's Blog

Here are some questions for book groups and political discussions. Thanks all.

How America Works … And Why It Doesn’t

- What is the root cause of America's present day political dysfunction?

- What’s the bigger problem: (i) tribalism, (ii) social media, or (ii) the two-party political system?

- Is Donald Trump merely a symptom of the problem or the disease itself?

- How does America appear on the world stage today compared to several decades ago?

- Will there be a peaceful transfer of power if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election in a close contest?

- What are some of the questions or criticisms you have about the book?

- How would you challenge or debate the author’s claims or arguments?


William Cooper

A new Gallup poll shows that just 33 percent of Americans are satisfied with the nation’s position in the world today. This is down from 65 percent in 2000. As Donald Trump and Joe Biden—two historically old and deeply unpopular presidential candidates—square off yet again for America’s top job, it’s not hard to understand these sentiments.


This predicament raises two essential questions: Is America’s twenty-first-century downturn merely another dip in a long arc of non-linear, yet essentially upward, progress? Or is it, rather, the first phase of steep and irreversible national decline?


The answer lies with the American people. Like all nations, America is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And things are getting worse, not better. Tribalism is intensifying. Social-media platforms are getting smarter at manipulating human cognition. The political system's defects are worsening. And America’s public-policy failures are deepening.


The remedies are easy to prescribe. We must improve civic education in schools; raise awareness about cognitive biases throughout society; spend more time with people from other political tribes; reduce and regulate the use of social media; rework the political structure to foster more political parties and equal representation; double down on free speech; and feverishly guard election integrity.


Yet in practice these goals have, so far, been impossible to achieve.


Two broad and overlapping global trends will only make reversing the free-fall harder as the twenty-first century marches on. First, technology is getting more sophisticated—at a dizzying pace. The positives are huge. The internet democratizes education. Streaming innovations like Netflix enrich entertainment. New products like self-driving cars revolutionize transportation. Highly sophisticated research dramatically improves medicine. Pioneering technologies substantially broaden the distribution of necessities like food and clothing.


But the negatives are unnerving. Online innovations like deep fakes compound the internet’s harms. Poor cybersecurity undermines the safety of personal data and the control of computerized systems. Popular applications like Chinese-owned TikTok give rival governments control over Americans’ private information. Artificial intelligence jeopardizes humanity in ways neither clear nor certain. Industrial innovations like fracking plunder the environment. Battlefield inventions like drones change the face of warfare.


Second, international affairs are getting more complicated. It took America a full two centuries to achieve global hegemony—and merely two decades to lose it. As former United States CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a September 2023 Foreign Affairs essay The Dysfunctional Superpower, geopolitical threats to America are multiplying: “The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them.” According to Gates, “The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia.”


But it’s not just America’s biggest rivals that matter. Within a few decades it’s likely that even small countries will have military capacities that in key respects exceed those of the superpowers today. Given the dominance and cohesion of America’s military, another civil war is highly unlikely. The worst-case scenario arising from America’s dysfunction isn’t domestic mismanagement; it’s foreign policy miscalculation.


These dynamics establish a striking truism that looms over humanity: the world’s pre-eminent democracy and most powerful nation is in decline precisely when the challenges faced by the world are mounting and its need for rational leadership has never been more urgent.


The American experiment has indeed seen better days. But it has also seen worse. Today’s struggles pale in comparison to the republic’s early days when slavery and conquest predominated. No one would choose either the Civil War era or Reconstruction over contemporary America. And the wars of the twentieth century (both world wars, Korea and Vietnam) were far more devastating than twenty-first-century America’s worst conflagrations.


Somewhere beneath the thickening surface of tribal bedlam and political fervor, moreover, is still a core national impulse to confront and overcome big challenges. The question is how strong that impulse remains.


The French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832. A close observer of human behavior, de Tocqueville traveled across the country taking copious notes on what he saw. His book Democracy in America is a classic text in political science. And he’s been revered for capturing the true essence of America like few others have, either before or since. Perhaps de Tocqueville’s most profound insight was that the “greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”


Twenty-first-century America is putting this thesis through a searing test. And the world will find out, soon enough, whether or not de Tocqueville’s insight is still true.

A frenzy of polarization and misgovernance has
engulfed American politics. Actors and institutions—on both sides of the political divide—are silencing disfavored speech. Prosecutors around the country are criminalizing politics. The Republican party is openly sabotaging the electoral system. And a new breed of social-media celebrities in Congress is failing to address myriad public-policy failures, from a broken immigration system, to hugely expensive and dysfunctional
healthcare, to staggering economic inequality.

These problems have powerful momentum behind them—and will likely persist far into the future.

All around the world people are asking: What’s
wrong with America? Why isn’t it working?

The answer isn’t one of the common partisan
narratives. It isn’t the “radical progressives” who want to tear the system down. Nor is it the “deplorable conservatives” who want to punish America’s elites. It’s not a dysfunctional, gridlocked Congress. Nor is it a right-wing, reactionary Supreme Court. It’s not an aging
Joe Biden. Nor it is an ever-angrier Donald Trump (though he sure isn’t helping).

The answer, rather, is broader than any narrow
category or single person. The answer is the American people themselves. A nation is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And Americans in the twenty-first century are becoming increasingly untethered from both reality and the essential principles and traditions that have shaped their nation’s historic success. A big part of why America isn’t working is because far too many Americans neither know nor care how it’s supposed to work.

The root cause of this mania is the combination of three deeply connected things. The first is tribalism. Americans, like all humans, have deep tribal roots. This expresses itself in powerful biases in favor of one’s own political clan—and searing antipathy for the other side.

The second is social media. Sophisticated algorithms behind major online platforms exploit Americans’ cognitive vulnerabilities and intensify their tribal prejudices.

And the third is the structure of the US political system itself. The two-party system amplifies
and exacerbates polarization by pitting two juggernauts (Democrats and Republicans) against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry—and gerrymandering, closed primaries, and the Electoral College compound the problem.

This flywheel spins faster every day. And it’s
culminating in two overlapping threats to the American experiment. The first is the criminalization of politics, as prosecutors from around the country set their sights on partisan rivals. Since every political salvo must be met
with greater opposite force, this has set in motion a pernicious dynamic which is spiraling into catastrophe.

The second threat involves the central premise of American government: the sanctity of the vote. America’s election system is under attack. And not just by ineffectual zealots at the margins of power or howling mobs in the street, but by the Republican party’s undisputed leader, Donald Trump, and his loyalists throughout federal and state government.

The election in several months will reveal a lot about the current state of the nation. Given that neither candidate is fit for the job (albeit for very different reasons) it will be not only a bumpy ride till November but a tumultuous four years after that.

With Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas' impeachment secured, House Republicans can now set their sights on President Joe Biden. To this end, Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee recently grilled special counsel Robert Hur regarding his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents.


But to understand today's impeachment dynamics one must first understand the relevant history. For several decades now the opposition party in Congress has used impeachment or its threat to undermine duly elected presidents.


Republicans impeached Democrat Bill Clinton in 1998 for his indiscretions with a White House intern and his associated perjury. Clinton’s offenses were real: having sexual relations with an intern was reckless and beneath the presidency. And lying under oath was technically criminal. But the Republicans’ multi-year, $52 million impeachment spectacle was a ruthlessly disproportionate response.


Two decades later the Democrats overreached. They wanted to impech Donald Trump before he even took office. As Emily Jane Fox wrote in Vanity Fair on December 15, 2016, a month before Trump assumed the presidency, “Democrats are paving the way to impeach Donald Trump.”


Again, Trump’s offenses weren’t trivial: pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden was reckless. But Democrats undermined the process from the beginning by transparently obsessing over ousting Trump, rather than finding out what really happened. Many key questions about the underlying events remain unanswered. And a fiercely anti-Trump zealot, Adam Schiff, even ran the Democrat’s impeachment proceedings—feverishly amplifying facts that hurt Trump and minimizing those that helped him.


The Senate acquitted both Clinton and Trump. And neither attempt to remove a sitting president will look good in the eyes of history. Impeachment is a limited Constitutional mechanism that Congress should pursue only with temperance and discretion. Only clear “high crimes and misdemeanors” under the Constitution’s Impeachment Clause should trigger impeachment proceedings. If Congress was respecting the Constitution, then impeachment would be a last resort, not a first impulse. The goal of the proceedings would be to uncover the truth, not manufacture a winning case. And the duly elected president’s legitimacy would be weighed heavily, not simply cast aside.


Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings in the early 1970’s show how the system is supposed to work. Nixon was accused of ordering subordinates to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington and steal confidential information. Congress undertook a respectful, bipartisan effort to uncover the truth. They weren’t trying to destroy Nixon or reverse the results of a presidential election. They were, instead, simply trying to figure out what happened. With the evidence mounting against him, Nixon resigned from office.


Then there was Donald Trump’s second impeachment. This time Trump’s offenses were immense. His sustained effort to reverse the 2020 presidential election results was a “high crime or misdemeanor” under any definition. And significant evidence against him was already public. The only threat to the integrity of the impeachment process was not trying to remove him from office. The contrast with Trump’s first impeachment was stark.


These examples of presidential impeachments put today's campaign to impeach Biden into perspective. The evidence just isn't there. The Republicans nonetheless seem poised to add yet another blight on the Impeachment Clause's checkered history.


The three branches of American government are supposed to check and balance each other, with energy but also with discretion. The separation of powers requires Congress to pursue impeachment only if the president actually commits an impeachable offense. America doesn’t tolerate kings. But nor does it gain from a president under siege.