ANYTHING TO GIVE FOR EVERYONE

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

We Don't Live In Neverland

The return to an older American concept of government as the guarantor of the national commons, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, is to my mind one of the crucial steps that might just succeed in making a viable future for the post-imperial United States. A viable future, mind you, does not mean one in which any signficant number of Americans retain any significant fraction of the material abundance we currently get from the “wealth pump” of our global empire. The delusion that we can still live like citizens of an imperial power when the empire has gone away will be enormously popular, not least among those who currently insist they want nothing to do with the imperial system that guarantees their prosperity, but it’s still a delusion.

The end of American empire, it deserves repeating, means the end of a system in which the five per cent of humanity that live in the United States get to dispose of a quarter of the planet’s energy and a third of its raw materials and industrial product. Even if the fossil fuels that undergird the industrial product weren’t depleting out of existence—and of course they are—the rebalancing of global wealth driven by the decline of one empire and the rise of another will involve massive and often traumatic impacts, especially for those who have been living high on the hog under the current system and will have to get used to a much smaller portion of the world’s wealth in the years immediately ahead. Yes, dear reader, if you live in the United States or its inner circle of allies—Canada, Britain, Australia, Japan, and a few others—this means you.

I want to stress this point, because habits of thought already discussed in this sequence of posts make it remarkably difficult for most Americans to think about a future that isn’t either all warm fuzzy or all cold prickly. If an imagined future is supposed to be better than the one we’ve got, according to these habits of thought, it has to be better in every imaginable way, and if it’s worse, it has to be worse just as uniformly. Suggest that the United States might go hurtling down the far side of its imperial trajectory and come out of the process as a Third World nation, as I’ve done here, and you can count on blank incomprension or self-righteous anger if you go on to suggest that the nation that comes out the other side of this project might still be able to provide a range of basic social goods to its citizens, and might even recover some of the values it lost a century ago in the course of its headlong rush to empire.

Now in fact I’m going to suggest this, and indeed I’ve already sketched out some of the steps that individual Americans might choose to take to lay the foundations for that project. Still, it’s also worth noting that the same illogic shapes the other end of the spectrum of possible futures. These days, if you pick up a book offering a vision of a better future or a strategy to get there, it’s usually a safe bet that you can read the thing from cover to cover no reference whatsoever to any downsides, drawbacks, or tradeoffs that might be involved in pursuing the vision or enacting the strategy. Since every action in the real world has downsides, drawbacks, and tradeoffs, this is not exactly a minor omission, nor does the blithe insistence on ignoring such little details offer any reason to feel confident that the visions and strategies will actually work as advertised.

One example in particular comes to mind here, because it has immediate relevance to the project of this series of posts. Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil scene for any length of time will have encountered any number of enthusiastic discussions of relocalization: the process, that is, of disconnecting from the vast and extravagant global networks of production, consumption, and control that define so much of industrial society, in order to restore or reinvent local systems that will be more resilient in the face of energy shortages and other disruptions, and provide more security and more autonomy to those who embrace them.

A very good case can be made for this strategy. On the one hand, the extreme centralization of the global economy has become a source of massive vulnerabilities straight across the spectrum from the most abstract realms of high finance right down to the sprawling corporate structures that put food on your table. Shortfalls of every kind, from grain and fuel to financial capital, are becoming a daily reality for many people around the world as soaring energy costs put a galaxy of direct and indirect pressures on brittle and overextended systems. That’s only going to become worse as petroleum reserves and other vital resources continue to deplete. As this process continues, ways of getting access to necessities that are deliberately disconnected from the global economic system, and thus less subject to its vulnerabilities, are going to be well worth having in place.

At the same time, participation in the global economy brings with it vulnerabilities of another kind. For anyone who has to depend for their daily survival on the functioning of a vast industrial structure which is not answerable to the average citizen, talk about personal autonomy is little more than a bad joke, and the ability of communities to make their own choices and seek their own futures in such a context is simply another form of wishful thinking. Many people involved in efforts to relocalize have grasped this, and believe that deliberately standing aside from systems controlled by national governments and multinational corporations offers one of the few options for regaining personal and community autonomy in the face of an increasingly troubled future.

There are more points that can be made in favor of relocalization schemes, and you can find them rehashed endlessly on pro-relocalization websites all over the internet. For our present purposes, though, this fast tour of the upside will do, because each of these arguments comes with its own downside, which by and large you won’t find mentioned anywhere on those same websites.

The downside to the first argument? When you step out of the global economy, you cut yourself off from the imperial wealth pump that provides people in America with the kind of abundance they take for granted, and the lifestyles that are available in the absence of that wealth pump are far more restricted, and far more impoverished, than most would-be relocalizers like to think. Peasant cultures around the world are by and large cultures of poverty, and there’s a good reason for that: by the time you, your family, and the other people of your village have provided food on the table, thatch on the roof, a few necessary possessions, and enough of the local equivalent of cash to cover payments to the powers that be, whether those happen to be feudal magnates or the local property tax collector, you’ve just accounted for every minute of labor you can squeeze out of a day.

That’s the rock on which the back-to-the-land movement of the Sixties broke; the life of a full-time peasant farmer scratching a living out of the soil is viable, and it may even be rewarding, but it’s not the kind of life that the pampered youth of the Baby Boom era was willing to put up with for more than a fairly brief interval. It may well be that economic relocalization is still the best available option for dealing with the ongoing unraveling of the industrial economy—in fact, I’d agree that this is the case—but I wonder how many of its proponents have grappled with the fact that what they’re proposing may amount to no more than a way to starve with dignity while many others are starving without it.

The downside to the second argument is subtler, but in some ways even more revealing. The best way to grasp it is to imagine two relocalization projects, one in Massachusetts and the other in South Carolina. The people in both groups are enthusiastic about the prospect of regaining their personal autonomy from the faceless institutions of a centralized society, and just as eager to to bring back home to their own communities the power to make choices and pursue a better future. Now ask yourself this: what will these two groups do if they get that power? And what will the people in Massachusetts think about what the people in South Carolina will do once they get that power?

I’ve conducted a modest experiment of sorts along these lines, by reminding relocalization fans in blue states what people in red states are likely to do with the renewed local autonomy the people in the blue states want for themselves, and vice versa. Every so often, to be sure, I run across someone—more often on the red side of the line than on the blue one—whose response amounts to “let ‘em do what they want, so long as they let us do what we want.” Far more often, though, people on either side are horrified to realize that their opposite numbers on the other side of America’s widening cultural divide would use relocalization to enact their own ideals in their own communities.

More than once, in fact, the response has amounted to a flurry of proposals to hedge relocalization about with restrictions so that it can only be used to support the speaker’s own political and social agendas, with federal bureaucracies hovering over every relocalizing community, ready to pounce on any sign that a community might try to do something that would offend sensibilities in Boston or San Francisco, on the one hand, or the Bible Belt on the other. You might think, dear reader, that it would be obvious that this would be relocalization in name only; you might also think that it would be just as obvious that those same bureaucracies would fall promptly into the hands of the same economic and political interests that have made the current system as much of a mess as it is. Permit me to assure you that in my experience, among a certain segment of the people who like to talk about relocalization, these things are apparently not obvious at all.

By this point in the discussion, I suspect most of my readers have come to believe that I’m opposed to relocalization schemes. Quite the contrary, I think they’re among the best options we have, and the fact that they have significant downsides, drawbacks, and tradeoffs does not nullify that. Every possible strategy, again, has downsides, drawbacks, and tradeoffs; whatever we choose to do to face the onset of the Long Descent, as individuals, as communities, or as a nation, problems are going to ensue and people are going to get hurt. Trying to find an option that has no downsides simply guarantees that we will do nothing at all; and in that case, equally, problems are going to ensue and people are going to get hurt. That’s how things work in the real world—and it may be worth reminding my readers that we don’t live in Neverland.

Thus I’d like to suggest that a movement toward relocalization is another crucial ingredient of a viable post-imperial America. In point of fact, we’ve got the structures in place to do the thing already; the only thing that’s lacking is a willingness to push back, hard, against certain dubious habits in the US political system that have rendered those structures inoperative.

Back in 1787, when the US constitution was written, the cultural differences between Massachusetts and South Carolina were very nearly as sweeping as they are today. That’s one of the reasons why the constitution as written left most internal matters in the hands of the individual states, and assigned to the federal government only those functions that concerned the national commons as a whole: war, foreign policy, minting money, interstate trade, postal services, and a few other things. The list was expanded in a modest way before the rush to empire, so that public health and civil rights, for example, were brought under federal supervision over the course of the 19th century. Under the theory of government I described last week, these were reasonable extensions, since they permitted the federal government to exercise its function of securing the national commons.

Everything else remained in the hands of the states and the people. In fact, the tenth amendment to the US constitution specifically requires that any power not granted to the federal government in so many words be left to the states and the people—a principle which, perhaps not surprisingly, has been roundly ignored by everyone in Washington DC for most of a century now. Under the constitution and its first nineteen amendments, in fact, the states were very nearly separate countries who happened to have an army, navy, foreign policy, and postal system in common.

Did that system have problems? You bet. What rights you had and what benefits you could expect as a citizen depended to a huge extent on where you lived—not just which state, but very often which county and which township or city as well. Whole classes of citizens might be deprived of their rights or the protection of the laws by local politicians or the majorities that backed them, and abuses of power were pervasive. All of that sounds pretty dreadful, until you remember that the centralization of power that came with America’s pursuit of empire didn’t abolish any of those things; it simply moved them to a national level. Nowadays, serving the interests of the rich and influential at the expense of the public good is the job of the federal government, rather than the local sheriff, and the denial of civil rights and due process that used to be restricted to specific ethnic and economic subgroups within American society now gets applied much more broadly.

Furthermore, one of the things that’s rendered the US government all but incapable of taking any positive action at all in the face of a widening spiral of crises is precisely the insistence, by people in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and the other forty-eight states as well, that their local views and values ought to be the basis of national policy. The rhetoric that results, in tones variously angry and plaintive, amounts to “Why can’t everyone else be reasonable and do it my way?”—which is not a good basis for the spirit of compromise necessary to the functioning of democracy, though it makes life easy for advocacy groups who want to shake down the citizenry for another round of donations to pay for the never-ending fight.

One of the few things that might succeed in unsticking the gridlock, so that the federal government could get back to doing the job it’s supposed to do, would be to let the people in Massachusetts, South Carolina, and the other forty-eight states pursue the social policies they prefer on a state by state basis. Yes, that would mean that people in South Carolina would do things that outraged the people in Massachusetts, and people in Massachusetts would return the favor. Yes, it would also mean that abuses and injustices would take place. Of course abuses and injustices take place now, in both states and all the others as well, but the ones that would take place in the wake of a transfer of power over social issues back to the states would no doubt be at least a little different from the current ones.

Again, the point of relocalization schemes is not that they will solve every problem. They won’t, and in fact they will certainly cause new problems we don’t have yet. The point of relocalization schemes is that, all things considered, if they’re pursued intelligently, the problems that they will probably solve are arguably at least a little worse than the problems that they will probably cause. Does that sound like faint praise? It’s not; it’s as much as can be expected for any policy this side of Neverland, in the real world, where every solution brings new problems of its own.

Now in fact relocalization has at least two other benefits that tip the balance well into positive territory. One of them is an effect I haven’t discussed in this series of posts, and I haven’t seen covered anywhere else in the peak oil blogosphere yet; it will need a post of its own, and that will have to wait a week. The other, though, is a simple matter of resilience.

The more territory has to be governed from a single political center, all things considered, the more energy and resources will be absorbed in the process of governing. This is why, before the coming of the industrial age, nations on the scale of the present United States of America rarely existed, and when they did come into being, they generally didn’t last for more than a short time. In an age of declining energy availability and depleting resources, the maintenance costs of today’s sprawling, centralized United States government won’t be affordable for long. Devolving all nonessential functions of the central government to the individual states, as the US constitution mandates, might just cut costs to the point that some semblance of civil peace and democratic governance can hang on for the long term.

That probably doesn’t seem like much to those whose eyes are fixed on fantasies of a perfect world, and are convinced they can transform it from fantasy to reality as soon as everyone else stops being unreasonable and agrees with them. Still, it’s better than most potential outcomes available to us in the real world—and again, we don’t live in Neverland.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Restoring the Commons

The hard work of rebuilding a post-imperial America, as I suggested in last week’s post, is going to require the recovery or reinvention of many of the things this nation chucked into the dumpster with whoops of glee as it took off running in pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The basic skills of democratic process are among the things on that list; so, as I suggested last month, are the even more basic skills of learning and thinking that undergird the practice of democracy.

All that remains crucial. Still, it so happens that a remarkably large number of the other things that will need to be put back in place are all variations of a common theme. What’s more, it’s a straightforward theme—or, more precisely, would be straightforward if so many people these days weren’t busy trying to pretend that the concept at its center either doesn’t exist or doesn’t present the specific challenges that have made it so problematic in recent years. The concept in question? The mode of collective participation in the use of resources, extending from the most material to the most abstract, that goes most often these days by the name of “the commons.”

The redoubtable green philosopher Garrett Hardin played a central role decades ago in drawing attention to the phenomenon in question with his essay The Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a remarkable work, and it’s been rendered even more remarkable by the range of contortions engaged in by thinkers across the economic and political spectrum in their efforts to evade its conclusions. Those maneuvers have been tolerably successful; I suspect, for example, that many of my readers will recall the flurry of claims a few years back that the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom had “disproved” Hardin with her work on the sustainable management of resources.

In point of fact, she did no such thing. Hardin demonstrated in his essay that an unmanaged commons faces the risk of a vicious spiral of mismanagement that ends in the common’s destruction; Ostrom got her Nobel, and deservedly so, by detailed and incisive analysis of the kinds of management that prevent Hardin’s tragedy of the commons from taking place. A little later in this essay, we’ll get to why those kinds of management are exactly what nobody in the mainstream of American public life wants to talk about just now; the first task at hand is to walk through the logic of Hardin’s essay and understand exactly what he was saying and why it matters.

Hardin asks us to imagine a common pasture, of the sort that was common in medieval villages across Europe. The pasture is owned by the village as a whole; each of the villagers has the right to put his cattle out to graze on the pasture. The village as a whole, however, has no claim on the milk the cows produce; that belongs to the villager who owns any given cow. The pasture is a collective resource, from which individuals are allowed to extract private profit; that’s the basic definition of a commons.

In the Middle Ages, such arrangements were common across Europe, and they worked well because they were managed by tradition, custom, and the immense pressure wielded by informal consensus in small and tightly knit communities, backed up where necessary by local manorial courts and a body of customary law that gave short shrift to the pursuit of personal advantage at the expense of others. The commons that Hardin asks us to envision, though, has no such protections in place. Imagine, he says, that one villager buys additional cows and puts them out to graze on the common pasture. Any given pasture can only support so many cows before it suffers damage; to use the jargon of the ecologist, it has a fixed carrying capacity for milk cows, and exceeding the carrying capacity will degrade the resource and lower its future carrying capacity. Assume that the new cows raise the total number of cows past what the pasture can support indefinitely, so once the new cows go onto the pasture, the pasture starts to degrade.

Notice how the benefits and costs sort themselves out. The villager with the additional cows receives all the benefit of the additional milk his new cows provide, and he receives it right away. The costs of his action, by contrast, are shared with everyone else in the village, and their impact is delayed, since it takes time for pasture to degrade. Thus, according to today’s conventional economic theories, the villager is doing the right thing. Since the milk he gets is worth more right now than the fraction of the discounted future cost of the degradation of the pasture he will eventually have to carry, he is pursuing his own economic interest in a rational manner.

The other villagers, faced with this situation, have a choice of their own to make. (We’ll assume, again, that they don’t have the option of forcing the villager with the new cows to get rid of them and return the total herd on the pasture to a level it can support indefinitely.) They can do nothing, in which case they bear the costs of the degradation of the pasture but gain nothing in return, or they can buy more cows of their own, in which case they also get more milk, but the pasture degrades even faster. According to most of today’s economic theories, the latter choice is the right one, since it allows them to maximize their own economic interest in exactly the same way as the first villager. The result of the process, though, is that a pasture that would have kept a certain number of cattle fed indefinitely is turned into a barren area of compacted subsoil that won’t support any cattle at all. The rational pursuit of individual advantage thus results in permanent impoverishment for everybody.

This may seem like common sense. It is common sense, but when Hardin first published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in 1968, it went off like a bomb in the halls of academic economics. Since Adam Smith’s time, one of the most passionately held beliefs of capitalist economics has been the insistence that individuals pursuing their own economic interest without interference from government or anyone else will reliably produce the best outcome for everybody. You’ll still hear defenders of free market economics making that claim, as if nobody but the Communists ever brought it into question. That’s why very few people like to talk about Hardin’s tragedy of the commons these days; it makes it all but impossible to uphold a certain bit of popular, appealing, but dangerous nonsense.

Does this mean that the rational pursuit of individual advantage always produces negative results for everyone? Not at all. The theorists of capitalism can point to equally cogent examples in which Adam Smith’s invisible hand passes out benefits to everyone, and a case could probably be made that this happens more often than the opposite. The fact remains that the opposite does happen, not merely in theory but also in the real world, and that the consequences of the tragedy of the commons can reach far beyond the limits of a single village.

Hardin himself pointed to the destruction of the world’s oceanic fisheries by overharvesting as an example, and it’s a good one. If current trends continue, many of my readers can look forward, over the next couple of decades, to tasting the last seafood they will ever eat. A food resource that could have been managed sustainably for millennia to come is being annihilated in our lifetimes, and the logic behind it is that of the tragedy of the commons: participants in the world’s fishing industries, from giant corporations to individual boat owners and their crews, are pursuing their own economic interests, and exterminating one fishery after another in the process.

Another example? The worldwide habit of treating the atmosphere as an aerial sewer into which wastes can be dumped with impunity. Every one of my readers who burns any fossil fuel, for any purpose, benefits directly from being able to vent the waste CO2 directly into the atmosphere, rather than having to cover the costs of disposing of it in some other way. As a result of this rational pursuit of personal economic interest, there’s a very real chance that most of the world’s coastal cities will have to be abandoned to the rising oceans over the next century or so, imposing trillions of dollars of costs on the global economy.

Plenty of other examples of the same kind could be cited. At this point, though, I’d like to shift focus a bit to a different class of phenomena, and point to the Glass-Steagall Act, a piece of federal legislation that was passed by the US Congress in 1933 and repealed in 1999. The Glass-Steagall Act made it illegal for banks to engage in both consumer banking activities such as taking deposits and making loans, and investment banking activities such as issuing securities; banks had to choose one or the other. The firewall between consumer banking and investment banking was put in place because in its absence, in the years leading up to the 1929 crash, most of the banks in the country had gotten over their heads in dubious financial deals linked to stocks and securities, and the collapse of those schemes played a massive role in bringing the national economy to the brink of total collapse.

By the 1990s, such safeguards seemed unbearably dowdy to a new generation of bankers, and after a great deal of lobbying the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act were eliminated. Those of my readers who didn’t spend the last decade hiding under a rock know exactly what happened thereafter: banks went right back to the bad habits that got their predecessors into trouble in 1929, profited mightily in the short term, and proceeded to inflict major damage on the global economy when the inevitable crash came in 2008.

That is to say, actions performed by individuals (and those dubious “legal persons” called corporations) in the pursuit of their own private economic advantage garnered profits over the short term for those who engaged in them, but imposed long-term costs on everybody. If this sounds familiar, dear reader, it should. When individuals or corporations profit from their involvement in an activity that imposes costs on society as a whole, that activity functions as a commons, and if that commons is unmanaged the tragedy of the commons is a likely result. The American banking industry before 1933 and after 1999 functioned, and currently functions, as an unmanaged commons; between those years, it was a managed commons. While it was an unmanaged commons, it suffered from exactly the outcome Hardin’s theory predicts; when it was a managed commons, by contrast, a major cause of banking failure was kept at bay, and the banking sector was more often a source of strength than a source of weakness to the national economy.

It’s not hard to name other examples of what I suppose we could call “commons-like phenomena”—that is, activities in which the pursuit of private profit can impose serious costs on society as a whole—in contemporary America. One that bears watching these days is food safety. It is to the immediate financial advantage of businesses in the various industries that produce food for human consumption to cut costs as far as possible, even if this occasionally results in unsafe products that cause sickness and death to people who consume them; the benefits in increased profits are immediate and belong entirely to the business, while the costs of increased morbidity and mortality are borne by society as a whole, provided that your legal team is good enough to keep the inevitable lawsuits at bay. Once again, the asymmetry between benefits and costs produces a calculus that brings unwelcome outcomes.

The American political system, in its pre-imperial and early imperial stages, evolved a distinctive response to these challenges. The Declaration of Independence, the wellspring of American political thought, defines the purpose of government as securing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s more to that often-quoted phrase than meets the eye. In particular, it doesn’t mean that governments are supposed to provide anybody with life, liberty, or happiness; their job is simply to secure for their citizens certain basic rights, which may be inalienable—that is, they can’t be legally transferred to somebody else, as they could under feudal law—but are far from absolute. What citizens do with those rights is their own business, at least in theory, so long as their exercise of their rights does not interfere too drastically with the ability of others to do the same thing. The assumption, then and later, was that citizens would use their rights to seek their own advantage, by means as rational or irrational as they chose, while the national community as a whole would cover the costs of securing those rights against anyone and anything that attempted to erase them.

That is to say, the core purpose of government in the American tradition is the maintenance of the national commons. It exists to manage the various commons and commons-like phenomena that are inseparable from life in a civilized society, and thus has the power to impose such limits on people (and corporate pseudopeople) as will prevent their pursuit of personal advantage from leading to a tragedy of the commons in one way or another. Restricting the capacity of banks to gamble with depositors’ money is one such limit; restricting the freedom of manufacturers to sell unsafe food is another, and so on down the list of reasonable regulations. Beyond those necessary limits, government has no call to intervene; how people choose to live their lives, exercise their liberties, and pursue happiness is up to them, so long as it doesn’t put the survival of any part of the national commons at risk.

As far as I know, you won’t find that definition taught in any of the tiny handful of high schools that still offer civics classes to young Americans about to reach voting age. Still, it’s a neat summary of generations of political thought in pre-imperial and early imperial America. These days, by contrast, it’s rare to find this function of government even hinted at. Rather, the function of government in late imperial America is generally seen as a matter of handing out largesse of various kinds to any group organized or influential enough to elbow its way to a place at the feeding trough. Even those people who insist they are against all government entitlement programs can be counted on to scream like banshees if anything threatens those programs from which they themselves benefit; the famous placard reading “Government Hands Off My Medicare” is an embarrassingly good reflection of the attitude that most American pseudoconservatives adopt in practice, however loudly they decry government spending in theory.

A strong case can be made, though, for jettisoning the notion of government as national sugar daddy and returning to the older notion of government as guarantor of the national commons. The central argument in that case is simply that in the wake of empire, the torrents of imperial tribute that made the government largesse of the recent past possible in the first place will go away. As the United States loses the ability to command a quarter of the world’s energy supplies and a third of its natural resources and industrial product, and has to make do with the much smaller share it can expect to produce within its own borders, the feeding trough in Washington DC—not to mention its junior equivalents in the fifty state capitals, and so on down the pyramid of American government—is going to run short.

In point of fact, it’s already running short. That’s the usually unmentioned factor behind the intractable gridlock in our national politics: there isn’t enough largesse left to give every one of the pressure groups and veto blocs its accustomed share, and the pressure groups and veto blocs are responding to this unavoidable problem by jamming up the machinery of government with ever more frantic efforts to get whatever they can. That situation can only end in crisis, and probably in a crisis big enough to shatter the existing order of things in Washington DC; after the rubble stops bouncing, the next order of business will be piecing together some less gaudily corrupt way of managing the nation’s affairs.

That process of reconstruction might be furthered substantially if the pre-imperial concept of the role of government were to get a little more air time these days. I’ve spoken at quite some length here and elsewhere about the very limited contribution that grand plans and long discussions can make to an energy future that’s less grim than the one toward which we’re hurtling at the moment, and there’s a fair bit of irony in the fact that I’m about to suggest exactly the opposite conclusion with regard to the political sphere. Still, the circumstances aren’t the same. The time for talking about our energy future was decades ago, when we still had the time and the resources to get new and more sustainable energy and transportation systems in place before conventional petroleum production peaked and sent us skidding down the far side of Hubbert’s peak. That time is long past, the options remaining to us are very narrow, and another round of conversation won’t do anything worthwhile to change the course of events at this point.

That’s much less true of the political situation, because politics are subject to rules very different from the implacable mathematics of petroleum depletion and net energy. At some point in the not too distant future, the political system of the United States of America is going to tip over into explosive crisis, and at that time ideas that are simply talking points today have at least a shot at being enacted into public policy. That’s exactly what happened at the beginning of the three previous cycles of anacyclosis I traced out in a previous post in this series. In 1776, 1860, and 1933, ideas that had been on the political fringes not that many years beforehand redefined the entire political dialogue, and in all three cases this was possible because those once-fringe ideas had been widely circulated and widely discussed, even though most of the people who circulated and discussed them never imagined that they would live to see those ideas put into practice.

There are plenty of ideas about politics and society in circulation on the fringes of today’s American dialogue, to be sure. I’d like to suggest, though, that there’s a point to reviving an older, pre-imperial vision of what government can do, and ought to do, in the America of the future. A political system that envisions its role as holding an open space in which citizens can pursue their own dreams and experiment with their own lives is inherently likely to be better at dissensus than more regimented alternatives, whether those come from the left or the right—and dissensus, to return to a central theme of this blog, is the best strategy we’ve got as we move into a future where nobody can be sure of having the right answers.