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Why is Everyone so Angry?

So far as government is concerned, everything has just gone to hell. There does not seem to be much disagreement on this. In the United States, according to opinion polls, a large majority of people think that the country is heading in the wrong direction. They have believed this for years, and they blame it mainly on government. Government failed to prevent the financial crisis of 2008, and failed to achieve a speedy recovery afterward. It has failed to redress economic inequality and guarantee access to healthcare and other basic services. It seems incapable of controlling the inflow of people across borders. It bungles the response to major natural disasters. It entangles the country in ill-advised wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and ill-conceived military interventions (in Libya and Syria). It does nothing to control the growth of public debt or avert the cataclysm of climate change.

Government, it appears, is a sprawling, dissolute, feckless disaster. No wonder that Americans express little faith in major public institutions. According to a 2016 Gallup Poll, only 10 percent of Americans had a lot of confidence in the US Congress. People are also increasingly dissatisfied with the presidency, major political parties, courts and the police, public schools, and the medical system. Since 2009, the country has been roiled with protests such as the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. In the 2016 presidential election, the early favorite (Hillary Clinton) had an unexpectedly tough race for the Democratic nomination against an outsider, the social democrat Bernie Sanders. This was followed by defeat in the general election at the hands of another outsider, Donald Trump, a man who had no government experience at all. Trump's election turned Washington politics upside down. He had a "100-day action plan to Make America Great Again." But at the end of those hundred days, most of Trump's promises were unfulfilled. Washington appeared to be as dysfunctional and gridlocked as ever.

The gloom has spread across the Atlantic. It took almost seventy years to build the institutions that now constitute the European Union. Over the decades, political leaders have developed sophisticated methods for removing barriers to movement between nations and rationalizing laws across the continent. However, this great project of continental integration seems to be at risk of collapse. Many people believe that the policies adopted by EU leaders in the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis and the 2015-17 migrant crisis were ineffectual and even cruel. Harmony within the union has been displaced by rancor. Presidents and prime ministers snipe at one another and struggle to maintain authority at home. Left-wing populist movements have reached for power in Greece, Italy and Spain, while right-wing populists have done the same in Austria, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands.

"Things fall apart," the poet W.B. Yeats once wrote, "the center cannot hold." This is how politics felt in the United Kingdom in the years following the financial crisis. In a referendum held in June 2016, a slim majority of citizens voted for the UK to leave the European Union. Many leading politicians opposed the proposal, but this carried little weight. According to a 2016 Ipsos MORI poll, four out of five Britons do not trust politicians to tell the truth. Many want to "take their country back." But a solid majority in Scotland opposed exit from the European Union, and in March 2017 the Scottish Parliament called for another referendum on secession from the United Kingdom. Some Scots regard the British Parliament just as many English regard the European Parliament, and as many Americans regard their Congress: as alien and incompetent.

In France, anguish about the ineptitude of government in halting national decay resulted in the addition of a new word - déclinisme - to the French vocabulary. But there were déclinistes in other countries too. In the United States, the distinguished commentators Paul Krugman and Francis Fukuyama feared that their country was collapsing into a "failed state."1 The Financial Times worried about a "real sickness in British and American democracy."2 The researchers Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk warned about "democratic breakdown" throughout North America and Western Europe.3 Others think that we are witnessing the decline of Western civilization. "Some of the most fundamental pillars of the West and of the liberal international order are weakening," a German report warned in 2017. "Citizens of democracies believe less and less that their systems are able to deliver positive outcomes for them and increasingly favor national solutions and closed borders over globalism and openness."4

Can government do anything right? This brief canvas of public and expert opinion might make us wonder. The purpose of this short book is to provide a framework for answering the question more precisely. It may also put our current worries in perspective. The following chapters will remind us what the basic functions of government are, and suggest that in fundamental ways Western countries are still strong performers. It will also argue that in some ways the problems preoccupying us today are enduring ones, and not portents of imminent collapse. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the aim is to remind us that governing is extraordinarily difficult work, involving the constant adaptation of institutions and laws to suit a complex and turbulent world.

We must begin with a quick survey of some basic ideas. The fundamental unit of governance in the modern world is the state, a body recognized in international law that has jurisdiction over a defined territory and the people within it. There are 195 states in the world today. (That is an approximate number: there is debate among diplomats on whether the existence of a few should be acknowledged.) These 195 states assert authority over almost all the earth's surface. On average, each state governs 600,000 square kilometers of land and thirty million people. All states are bound together by customs and laws within a global system of states, sometimes also called the society of states. The keel of the modern state system was laid down in Europe about 400 years ago.

In every state, there are people who claim to be in charge. We used to call these people "rulers," and sometimes we still do, mainly when talking about states that are not democracies. For example, we often read about China's rulers, but rarely about the United States'. More often, we read about leaders, policymakers, or decision-makers in Western democracies. These are euphemisms. Whatever the word, we are talking about the people who exercise power within a state. These leaders have four goals, regardless of whether their states are democratic or non-democratic.

The first goal is the achievement of mastery over circumstances. Like everybody else, leaders dislike uncertainty. They want to know what is going on inside the borders of their territory, so that they can discourage behavior that threatens internal peace and order, and encourage behavior that advances the national interest. There is a similar desire for information about the plans of other states and foreigners, and an ambition to shape their behavior as well, with the aim of creating a state system that is stable and serves the national interest. But mastery over circumstances, whether internal or external, is elusive. It is constantly pursued but never fully achieved by any state.

The second goal is the attainment of legitimacy, or a general recognition of a state's right to govern its territory. This also has an internal and external aspect. A state must be respected by the people living within its borders, and by other states. There is a practical reason why legitimacy matters. Policymakers have a limited capacity to achieve compliance with their commands by force. Most of the time, people living within a state obey its laws because they think that is the right thing to do. Similarly, other countries are more likely to cooperate with a state's foreign policy, and refrain from attacking it, if they also recognize its right to exist and believe that it is behaving as a responsible member of the society of states.

The third goal is the advancement of human rights. We will define this concept later. Human rights are important as a matter of principle: we want leaders to pay attention to them even if self-interest would not push leaders in that direction. Increasingly, though, it is in the self-interest of leaders to respect human rights, or at least to appear respectful of them. It is hard to achieve legitimacy, either at home or abroad, while abusing fundamental rights. A governed population is more likely to resist commands, and other states are more likely to intervene in the internal affairs of a state, if its leaders seem to be maltreating their people.

The final goal for leaders is the promotion of economic growth. A strong and growing economy is essential for the achievement of all other objectives. Prosperity makes it easier to maintain internal order, because people are happier and less likely to fight each other if economic gains are widely distributed. Other countries also have an incentive to get along with a state if it has a thriving economy, because they will seek its largesse or access to its markets. A bigger...