The Disunited States – What Happened?
Chris Bronk, University of Houston
Moshe Y. Vardi, Rice University
“American malaise is not just a dip in our national mood; it's a reflection of our collective
longing for change, for progress that benefits all and an awakening of the spirit that
makes us truly united.” This is no quote by a famous orator, but rather a computer-generated
one from the ChatGPT artificial-intelligence application in answering the question, “What is
American malaise?” AI seems to understand what the trouble is, but most of the rest of us
are wondering how to reconcile the good with the bad. The United States boasts the world’s
largest economy, strongest military, and largest number of elite universities. Shamefully, it
also holds the largest number of gun deaths, lethal drug overdoses, and reported COVID-19
ffatalities among developed nations. We are a nation of contradictions, and a deeply divided
one. Our society is polarized, with common beliefs growing increasingly uncommon. We
need to understand how three drivers – economics, politics, and technology – have gotten
us to where we are so that we may begin to design remedies for our state of deeply
imperfect union.
Let us start with technology. Both of us have held membership in the Association for
Computing Machinery, or ACM, the flagship professional and scholarly organization for
computing. Over the past decade, ACM celebrated three major milestones. In 2012, ACM
feted the Turing Centenary, in honor of Alan M. Turing, one of the founding figures of
computer science. In 2017, ACM celebrated 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award, the
“Nobel Prize” in computing. Finally, on June 10, 2022 ACM marked its 75th Anniversary.
But browsing the agendas of the three events reveals a stark difference. The 2012 and 2017
events celebrated the achievements of computing and its remarkable development into an
ascendant technology, though the 2017 event did end up with a panel on “Challenges in
Ethics and Computing.” In the space of five years, however, these challenges grew to
become the major focus of the 2022 event. One of the participants commented on social
media that he found “the whole thing a little ... depressing.”
It would appear that computing has taken the tone of a nation increasingly in trouble. The
day before the ACM anniversary, a US House of Representatives Select Committee opened
its public, televised hearings detailing its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the
U.S. Capitol, laying out its evidence of an attack on democracy orchestrated at the highest
levels of the United States government. In the background of the hearings, was the May 24,
2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students
and two teachers as well as wounding 17 other people, while dozens of police officers
stood idly by. Despite this horror, a decade after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Connecticut, nothing seemed to change. “Even as America’s firearm massacres
provoke profound shock”, wrote Brian Bennett in Time Magazine, “change seems out of
reach.” The horrific attack was a suggestion of societal paralysis going far beyond what we
would consider mere malaise.
The January 6, 2021 attack and the unending series of mass shootings are hardly the
behaviors to which Samuel Huntington referred when he wrote on American exceptionalism
a half century ago. These tragic and profoundly disturbing events point to an increasingly
dysfunctional US society, but also one in the throes of deep polarization, which not only
leads to political paralysis, but also threatens the foundations of democracy. “The United
States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War,”
wrote Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, raising the specter of mass violence. How did
we get here? What went wrong? We have no doubt that historians will spend the next 50
years trying to answer these questions. But the crisis is upon us, so it is important, we
believe, to come up with some answers now!
If polarization produces paralysis, we need to get to the bottom of why we have such
polarization. A standard explanation is that our political polarization is driven by our
primary election system, which is a voting process where voters indicate their preference
for their party's candidate. The US has been running primary elections to select nominees
for general elections at the local, state and federal level for more than a century. They are
viewed as more democratic than the old system, where party machine bosses at each level
simply named the candidates they wanted. The argument is that primary voting has come
to be dominated by ideological partisans who please the more agenda-driven voters in
either party, and these are the most likely to participate in primaries. There is little incentive,
therefore, to reach out to voters who might fall somewhere in the middle, between the two
parties, a place where moderation and compromise exist. The outcome is political
polarization
But political scientists found little evidence that the introduction of primary elections, the
level of primary election turnout, or the threat of primary competition are associated with
partisan polarization in congressional roll call voting.
If pure political factors are not the main cause of polarization, then what? Let us look at
other developments over the past 40-plus years. Those years have launched a tsunami of
information and computing technology on the world. The IBM Personal Computer Model
5150 or IBM PC, was released on August 12, 1981. It was a smashing success. On its
January 3, 1983 issue. Time Magazine decided to replace its customary person-of-the-year
cover with a graphical depiction of the IBM PC, with the caption of “Machine of the Year.”
A computer on every desk became a reality for knowledge workers within a few years, and
these knowledge workers soon expected to also have a computer at home. (Interestingly,
the number 5150 has a societal slang meaning derived from Section 5150 of California State
legal code. It refers to an adult in a mental health crisis in need of involuntary
hospitalization.)
After the World-Wide Web was introduced in 1989, many, many millions of computers
gained access to the Internet in short order. The commercialization of the Internet in 1995,
and the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, led to billions of devices accessing it. It is
important, however, to observe also the socioeconomic context of the information-technology
tsunami.
As personal computing developed, a series of seismic political changes occurred. Margaret
Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 led to a global
resurgence of neoliberalism, a form of free-market capitalism that is generally associated
with economic policies including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade,
monetarism, and reductions in government spending designed to increase the role of the
private sector in the economy and society. Upon his inauguration in 1981, Ronald Reagan
applied these lessons as did Deng Xiaoping in his ascension to General Secretary of the
Communist Party of China. Neoliberalist economic drivers exerted significant pressure on
the economies of the developed world, forcing the manufacturing sector to automate in
order to stay competitive. Computers drove lean supply chains, offshore work, and other
hallmarks of economic globalization. Economies grew but societal well-being appeared
to disconnect from the fruits of that growth.
A 2014 paper by MIT economist David Autor provided evidence that information
technology was destroying wide swaths of routine office and manufacturing jobs, while
creating new high-skill jobs. The result of this labor polarization is a shrinking middle
class. Autor's data showed that this pattern of shrinkage in the middle and growth at the
high and low end of the labor-skill spectrum occurred in the US as well as in 16 European
Union countries. The immediate outcome of this economic polarization is growing income
and wealth disparities, as has been well documented by Thomas Piketty. Michael Sandel has described the growing economic and
cultural gap between American with and without four-year college degrees.
On top of this, information technology is flooding Internet users with more information
than they can digest, so tech companies engage in mass personalization, and now we mostly
read information that confirms our preconceived opinions, deepening political polarization
further. Furthermore, information technology, by providing low-friction means of
inter-personal communication, has reduced the amount of in-person contact between
people, contributing to political polarization.
The US is not the only country where growing economic inequality and cognitive
polarization has resulted in political polarization. The UK suffers also from growing
political polarization, which ultimately led to Brexit, the departure of the UK from the
European Union. But another contributing factor, we believe, is uniquely American – the
Southern Strategy. This strategy was a Republican Party electoral approach to increase
political support among White voters in the South by appealing to racist beliefs. In the
1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon saw the cracks in the Democratic-solid South as
an opportunity to tap into a group of voters who had historically been beyond the reach of
the Republican Party. The strategy was highly effective. Following the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, Southern states became more
reliably Republican in presidential politics, while Northeastern states became more reliably
Democratic. In Texas, for example, Ann Richards was the last Democrat to serve as
governor of Texas since 1995. But the strategy tied the Republican party deeply to its White
working-class base. By his political calculation to capitalize on the racial and cultural division
s ofhis time, Nixon opened the gate to the political polarization of the United States of today.
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