The End of Power (43 page)

IF THERE IS A MOUNTING RISK TO DEMOCRACY AND LIBERAL SOCIETIES
in the twenty-first century, it is less likely to come from a conventional, modern threat (China) or a premodern one (Radical Islam) than from within societies where alienation has set in. As examples, consider the rise of movements that express or exploit social anger—from the new far-right and far-left parties in Europe and Russia to the Tea Party movement in the United States. On the one hand, each of these growing movements is a manifestation of the decay of power, as they owe their influence to the decline of the barriers that sheltered incumbents. On the other, the inchoate rage they express results in large part from alienation as the traditional markers of order and economic security have come down. And their search for a compass in the past—for instance, in nostalgia for the Soviet Union, eighteenth-century readings of the American constitution advocated by characters dressed in period costume, Osama bin Laden's exhortations about the restoration of the Caliphate, and Hugo Chavez's paeans to Simon Bolivar—reveals just how much the decay of power, if we fail to adjust to it and move it toward the social good, may backfire and turn destructive.

THE FIRST AND PERHAPS MOST IMPORTANT IMPLICATION OF THIS
book is the urgent need to change the way we think and talk about power.

One way to start is to refocus the conversation about how power is changing, what its sources are, who has it, and who is losing it and why. While we cannot anticipate the many changes that flow from the decay of power, we
can
adopt a mindset that will provide maximum flexibility, enabling us to plan better for the future and minimize the effects of the risks just mentioned.

It is important to recognize that the effects of the decay of power on the future now commonly envisioned by scholars, opinion makers, and political leaders have been just as discombobulating as in every other field.

Consider how fragmented and incomplete so much of the prevailing discourse has become. Take international politics, for example, and more specifically the debates about which country will dominate the twenty-first century: The United States or China? The emerging markets? No one? In the business world, one school of critics points to consolidation, oligarchy, and the cementing of power by a global corporate—and especially financial—elite, while an equally fervent set of views points to hyper-competition and the disruptive effects of new technologies and business models. Similarly, trends in global religion are either grounds for deep concern over fundamentalism and intolerance or healthy signs of social participation that can help advance moderation and liberty and peaceful coexistence.

All these arguments—and their opposites—crowd the shelves in bookstores, the opinion pages of newspapers worldwide, and of course, more stridently, our television screens and social media. And none of them are wrong. Or rather, advocates of each one can marshal a set of facts and evidence to make their own plausible and thought-provoking case.

Indeed, it's striking how little consensus exists about the direction of change in our world and what threats we need to anticipate as a result—let alone how to deal with them. For all the flood of data and opinions available today, we lack a reliable compass: a clear framework to help make sense of changes taking place in all these realms that are more and more connected. Any road map for the future will fall short if it lacks a better understanding of the ways in which power is changing and their consequences.

The implications of the decay of power are momentous and manifold. But it will be impossible to distill them and integrate them into the world-view and the mindsets of decision makers—in people's homes, in presidential palaces, or in boardrooms—unless we create a different conversation that takes into account what is happening to power.

And the first step in changing the conversation about power is to get off the elevator.

Much talk about power today is still fundamentally traditional—and thus often dangerously antiquated. Exhibit A is the continued prevalence of elevator thinking: the obsession with who is going up and who is coming down—which country, city, industry, company, political leader, business potentate, religious patriarch, or pundit is gaining power and which, or who, is losing it. Elevator thinking is deeply rooted in the instinct to rank and to proclaim
Number One.
It is the allure of the sports league table, or the horse race.

You can, of course, rank competitors at any given time by their assets, power, and achievements. At the global level, states do compete with each other, after all, and factors such as a country's economic output, its network of military installations and resources, population, landmass, manufacturing prowess, and so on offer metrics for measuring and ranking. But the picture they offer is ephemeral—a snapshot with ever shorter exposure—and, worse, it is misleading. The more we fixate on rankings, the more we risk ignoring or underestimating how much the decay of power is weakening
all the competing parties, not just the ones in apparent decline but also the ones on the rise.

Many Chinese writers and scholars are bullish on China's rise; likewise Indians, Russians, and Brazilians for their respective countries. Europeans are consumed by their continent's increasing marginalization in the world's geopolitical chess game. But the bulk of elevator conversation comes from the United States, where analysts tirelessly argue whether the decline of the country is terminal, treatable, transient, or indeed an illusion. Others make more nuanced arguments about the “rise of the rest” and the passage to a world where geopolitics is “multipolar.”
¹

Other books that analyze the diluting effects on power caused by the proliferation of new countries capable of influencing global outcomes also do so without getting off the elevator or transcending the perspective that uses the nation-state as chief protagonist and the main unit of analysis. Charles Kupchan, a respected international relations theorist, argues that “the western order will not be displaced by a new great power or dominant political model. The twenty-first century will not belong to America, China, Asia, or anyone else. It will be no one's world. For the first time in history, the world will be interdependent—but without a center of gravity or global guardian.”
²
This is also the view of author and business consultant Ian Bremmer, who called it “G-Zero: a world order in which no country or durable alliance of countries can meet the challenges of global leadership.”
³
And both of these authors echo Zbigniew Brzezinski's assertion that “we have entered a post-hegemonic era,” meaning that in the years ahead no country will be able to call the shots in global politics as much as some of the great powers did in the past.
⁴

It is hard to disagree with any of this, and in
Chapter 5
we examined the many forces that conspire against the permanent dominance of any single nation-state. But keeping our lens focused on the nation-state—even when arguing that none of them will dominate world affairs—can blur our view of the other forces reshaping international affairs: the decay of power in domestic politics, business, and the rest.

Whether the United States is a hegemon, an indispensable power, or an empire at sunset, and whether China or some other rival stands to take its place, may be a debate that consumes international relations. But its terms are not adapted to a world where power is decaying—where unprecedented forms of fracturing are under way within each of these countries and across systems of trade, investment, migration, and culture. Identifying who is up and who is down is less important than understanding what
is going on
inside
those nations, political movements, corporations, and religions that are on the elevator. Who is up and who is down will matter ever less in a world in which those who get to the top don't stay there for long and are able to do less and less with the power they have while there.

A second important implication of this analysis is our heightened vulnerability to bad ideas and bad leaders. In short, once we have gotten off the elevator, we need to get skeptical, especially toward the latter-day version of Burckhardt's “terrible simplifiers.”

The decay of power creates fertile soil for demagogic challengers who exploit disappointments with incumbents, promise change, and take advantage of the bewildering noise created by the proliferation of actors, voices, and proposals. The confusion created by changes that come too fast, that are too disruptive and undercut old certainties and ways of doing things—all by-products of the More, Mobility, and Mentality revolutions—offer great opportunities for leaders with bad ideas. Top bankers who championed toxic financial instruments as creative solutions, US politicians who promise to eliminate the fiscal deficit without raising taxes, and, at the other extreme, the French president François Hollande's decision to levy an extraordinary 75 percent tax on the income of the rich are only a few examples. Information technology evangelists, those who believe that technological “fixes” alone will solve hitherto intractable human problems, also tend to overstate their claims and end up being “terrible simplifiers.”

These dangerous demagogues can be found in all of the areas discussed in these pages: the entrepreneurs and thinkers who argued that Internet companies with minimal assets and meager or no revenues deserved higher valuations than “old economy” companies with steady cash flows and vast assets, the strategists who promised that invading Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and the invaders would be welcomed as liberators or that the war would “pay for itself” thanks to Iraq's oil revenues. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other murderous movements also depend on the terrible simplifications that they successfully manage to popularize. The promises and assumptions of the “Bolivarian Revolution” inspired by Hugo Chavez or, at the opposite extreme, those of the US Tea Party are also rooted in terrible simplifications immune to the lessons of experience and, for that matter, to data and scientific evidence.

Of course, demagogues, charlatans, and snake-oil peddlers are nothing new; history is replete with the stories of those who have gained power and whose stay at the top had terrible consequences. What
is
new is an environment where it has become far easier for newcomers—including those with toxic ideas—to acquire power.

Being on the lookout for the terrible simplifiers and denying them the influence they seek has always been necessary. And strengthening our ability—individual and collective, intellectual and political—to detect them in our midst is even more of a priority in a world undergoing rapid, bewildering change. That starts with embracing the reality of the decay of power and, again, changing our conversation to reflect it. Not just in the corridors of presidential palaces, corporate headquarters, and university boardrooms but even more so in encounters around watercoolers in offices, in casual conversations among friends, and at the dinner table at home.

These conversations are the indispensable ingredients of a political climate that is less welcoming to the terrible simplifiers. For as Francis Fukuyama correctly argues, to eradicate the vetocracy that is paralyzing the system, “political reform must first and foremost be driven by popular, grassroots mobilization.”
⁵
This, in turn, requires focusing the conversation on how to contain the negative aspects of the decay of power and move us to the positive sloping side of the inverted U-curve. For this to happen, we need something that is very difficult: an increased disposition in democratic societies to give more power to those who govern us. And that is impossible unless we trust them more. Which is of course even more difficult. But also indispensable.

Although the decay of power affects all realms of organized human activity, the consequences in some are more ominous than in others. The lessened ability of business executives to impose their will or retain power is less problematic than when that happens to elected leaders who are paralyzed by the vetocracy.

And at the international level the level of paralysis is even more ominous. Global problems are multiplying while the capacity of the international community to contain them is stagnant or dwindling. In other words, the inability of some business executives to make things happen threatens us all less than when national and international leaders are, like Gulliver, immobilized by thousands of small “micropowers” that tie them down.

When was the last time you heard that a large number of countries agreed to a major international accord on a pressing issue? Not in more than a decade and, for some important issues, that span of inaction stretches to even two or three. The inability of European nations—which ironically had already adopted shared governing arrangements—to act together in the face of a crippling economic crisis is as revealing of this paralysis as is the inability of the world to do something to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. Or the inability to stop massacres like those that erupted in Syria in 2012.