Why America Is Choosing Self Destruction

Confronting The Pressure Cooker of Greatness

A general, a preacher, and a millionaire industrialist sit down to break bread in late 1970s America. It sounds like an improbable dinner party. It sounds like the start of a bad joke.

Aren’t they natural enemies?

Their goals conflict and they’ve opposed each other through several periods of US history. Why would they form an alliance?

But the weirdness of their pact isn’t unique. Across history, unlikely bedfellows have often allied when external threats or all-consuming national projects drive them together.

This “pressure cooker” dynamic of external forces delivering internal harmony — but also polarization — explains why America became the standard bearer of capitalism, democracy, and laissez-faire policies. It's also why America is now tearing itself apart.

Building a new pressure cooker in an age of lowered temperatures may offer a way out of our morass.

The 1980s American Pressure Cooker:

The unlikely “Reagan coalition” united in the late 1970s because they found something bigger than each other to oppose — the Soviet Union.

“Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents ... Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”
― Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

The Soviets were an expansionist power that US military hawks were desperate to drive back. They were godless atheists hated by the religious right, and sworn enemies of capitalism, which antagonized business interests.

Animosity toward communism and any American with socialist leanings transformed politics. Many internal divisions were papered over. Everyone “on side” agreed to overlook each other’s faults — there were bigger fish to fry.

This coalition was the next step in the “self-caricature” that had warped the Soviet Union and United States for twenty years, each slowly contorting to maximize their differences and ideological purity¹.

It is impossible to prove cause and effect in politics. But what’s clearly true is that each country was previously less ideologically extreme than it became during the Cold War.

America Before The Reagan Coalition

The United States of the 1980s and 1990s might have surprised earlier Americans. The US had only intermittently been as religious, and as late as the 1970s had been far more comfortable with socialism, big government, and economic intervention. (See footnotes on faith² and government/economic³ changes.)

The Reagan coalition wrestled with serious problems in the US, but its caricature competition with the Soviets forced an ideological purity on it that deprived it of many policy options. When the only tool you’re allowed is a hammer, all your problems look like nails. Luckily, America's problems were very amenable to being hammered.

The Republican Reagan coalition was so successful and the American caricature so enticing that Democrats abandoned their old ideology and shifted right. Ironically, one of the most successful proponents of Reagan coalition ideology was a Democrat — Bill Clinton.

Although there were downsides to its self-caricature, the US did well by becoming more “extremely American.”

The Soviets Transform In The Pressure Cooker

We think communism was a complete, ideologically pure product implemented wholesale in the Soviet Union. But communism’s initial rollout was so disastrous in Russia that many ideological policies were retrenched. The Soviets moved away from central planning under Lenin. See footnote⁴.

But faced with the pressure cooker of fascist Germany next door and the capitalist democracies further out, Joseph Stalin doubled down on Communism to build an ideological moat. This resulted in a major famine from 1932-33, but also significant progress in industrialization. He again had to reauthorize limited market economics during World War II before again doubling down on Communism in the Cold War era.

Just as the Red Scare led Americans to ostracise anyone vaguely communist, the Russian “Great Purge” era liquidated anyone insufficiently loyal or ideologically pure. And so Russia and America sketched more extreme caricatures of themselves to inhabit.

America’s self-caricature was mostly beneficial, but the Soviets’ was a form of slow suicide by constrained policy options. The Soviets had only a screwdriver, but few of their problems were screws. By the time the Soviet Union was ready to change, it was too late to save it.

Vae Victrīcī

Victory wasn’t what we expected.

America was surprised by the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse and we glided on dazed momentum for a decade before realizing the emperor had no clothes. The policy positions and alliances of the Cold War didn’t make sense without credible outside threats to unite against. The general, the preacher, and the millionaire now look at each other askance, recalling how little they have in common. I call this the “victory turn,” and we see it repeatedly in world history.

“But the famous Reagan coalition of economic conservatives and evangelical zealots —one wing devoted to getting government off our backs, the other to putting government in our beds — is already collapsing before our eyes. A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today. The question before us now is what lies beyond Reaganism -- what the character of "post-conservative America" (will be)?” — Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 1991.

The 9/11 attacks temporarily gave the coalition new life, but five years on it was clear the Islamists weren’t an existential or ideological threat.

Political Scientist

Francis Fukuyama

’s predicted “end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government⁵,” didn’t happen. Liberal democracy beat its ideological competitors and proved effective, but without a unifying pressure cooker, ideological splintering skyrocketed. The “victory turn” began.

Many Americans are turning away from liberal democratic precepts, occasionally heading towards the ideologies their parents venomously opposed. We’re polarizing away from “outgroup” citizens, again caricaturing ourselves. The political parties are drifting apart and policy positions are freewheeling for the first time in decades.

Anybody Got A Pressure Cooker?

It would be great to get off this self-destructive rollercoaster. Might we hope to be thrown into another pressure cooker and reunited with our brothers in polarization?

Life is full of surprises, but we can only assess the chessboard as it stands.

Russia and China:

Russia is a corrupt petro-state struggling to digest a much smaller country we’ve armed with a 30-year-old US military surplus. China may be able to gobble up Taiwan, but it will be several decades before it can project significant military power more than 2,000 miles from its coast. Demographic decline and stultifying state control dampen long-term prospects in both states.

More importantly, China and Russia can no longer infect the world with their ideology and threaten America that way. Each has partially liberalized religion and adopted some semblance of free-market policy and trade, peeling off opposition from the preacher and the industrialist. Some politicians insist these countries are major threats to America, but polarization weakened the bloc that would have cared thirty years ago. They’re just not as threatening as the Soviet Union was.

Global Warming:

If it was going to unite us, it would have already. Perhaps if Miami takes a dip in the Atlantic.

Nuclear Holocaust:

The nuclear arsenals of China, North Korea, Russia, and (perhaps soon) Iran, are alarming. If we assume a 1% yearly risk of a nuclear exchange, nukes are the greatest existential risk humanity will face this century. But until a country ups the nuclear rhetoric more than Russia has since it invaded Ukraine, it seems an unlikely pressure cooker. Americans are used to a nuclear-armed world.

Other Existential Threats:

A black swan-style emergency might drive us together, but who knows what those might be? A meteor hurling toward earth and scheduled to hit in five years would likely do more to unite humanity than anything else. Hostile extraterrestrials showing up would have the same effect. Sputnik-style threats or technological challenges could do it. Out-of-control artificial intelligence or economic collapse as well.

A Low Risk of Pressure Cookers:

Although internally disunited, America is too rich, secure, and technologically advanced to be overly worried by external threats. Citizens and politicians judge internal threats —real or imagined — more dangerous than anything happening outside the country.

So what then? Is there no way to stop the infighting? Can we find a new basis for unity?

In the next few weeks I’m going to:

1. Establish that the external pressure cooker dynamic is not unique to this time and country, but perhaps an element of the human psyche, or at least a regular feature of American and world history. We’ll also see that our current “victory turn” into internal polarization and conflict is historically par for the course.

2. Suggest some possible solutions to the bleak position we’re in.

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1. We see early manifestations of a turn against the Soviet Union in the 1938 formation of the “Un-American Activities Committee” which investigated alleged disloyalty and subversive activities among private citizens and public employees. The committee mostly investigated communist ties. But the committee only became permanent when Soviet tensions heated up in 1946. After WWII, President Harry Truman thought the Soviet threat in Europe and Asia was real, declaring the Truman Doctrine of opposition to communism. He was skeptical that the US was infiltrated by Communist sympathizers, which was alleged. Republicans accused Democrats of being soft on Communism. As a way of countering this perception, he issued the "Loyalty Order", in 1947, which was designed to root out communist influence —or anyone sympathetic to vaguely-similar ideology, like socialism — in the U.S. federal government. The slow contortion continued over time as military threats, technological battles, ideological spread, and outright conflict ratcheted up.

2. American Faith: America was unusually religious from the start, but the 1980s-2001 moral majority era was on the more extreme religious end of the seesaw. Prior to the first, second, and third Great Awakenings, America experienced numerous prolonged periods of declining church attendance and religiosity. Americans began shifting from more moderate mainline protestant denominations to evangelicalism beginning in the 1960s, setting up the religious part of the later Reagan Coalition.

3. American Government/Economy: The extremes of small government, laissez-faire economics and anti-socialism that characterized earlier eras gave way during the pressure cooker of the 1930s Great Depression. Americans united under President Roosevelt. The government grew, launched massive social welfare programs, and took a large role in controlling the economy. The economy grew during WWII, and exploded in the following decades, winning widespread public support as quality of life improved.

This big government, pro-socialism status quo held through the first few decades of the Cold War, though the first cracks formed in 1948 when the Truman Doctrine was declared, opposing the expansion of the Soviet Union. The Red Scare, US economic stagflation, the space race, nuclear proliferation, and other internal and external troubles continued to ratchet up tensions between both countries. The US reached an apex of social and financial conservative liberalism during the 1980s and 1990s. The Regan Coalition was so strong it stole the thunder from Democrats, forcing that party to move right. It was, ironically, under Democratic President Clinton, adopting many Regan coalition talking points, that nearly paid off US debt and significantly paired down and reformed the social programs it had helped bring about.

4. Soviet Economy: The “War Communism” of the 1918-1921 Russian Civil War nationalized all industries, seized agricultural products, outlawed the private market, and centralized economic control. The results were disastrous. Industrial production plummeted to 20% of its 1913 level. Food shortages and starvation became rampant. Black markets and corruption spread.

Vladamir Lenin had no choice but to roll back communist policy, implementing the “New Economic Policy,” allowing private enterprise and free market mechanisms. The economy stabilized. There was enough food to eat. If the Soviet Union existed in a vacuum this feedback might have allowed it to end up with a more moderate form of socialism and government economic control. But it was in a pressure cooker, and that was never really an option. Only near collapse gave it freedom to move away from its ideology, and by then it was too late.

5. Fukayama, Francis. “The End of History?” Summer, 1989, The National Interest.