Why For the U.S., Failure IS an Option

Short answer: Because our political and economic institutions are moving rapidly toward exactly the kind of plutocratic control that causes nations to fail.

Long answer: All 463 pages of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson's brilliant, fascinating and terrifying Why Nations Fail.

It's not geography. It's not natural resources. It's not technology. It's not education. It's not race, religion, climate, modernity or even democracy.

It's inclusion versus extraction.

Acemoglu and Robinson methodically demonstrate that dating back to the earliest pre-Roman societies, in every part of the world, one factor separates nations that succeed from nations that fail.

Nations with political and economic institutions that include all citizens succeed. Nations with political and economic institutions that extract power and money from the majority to benefit a minority fail.

And while both kinds of nations - extractive and inclusive - tend to perpetuate their existing institutions, it is possible for a nation to change its fate.

A nation may rise from extractive institutions to inclusive institutions and thus from repeated failure to success, as Brazil did over 30 years starting in the 1970s thanks to Lula's Workers Party, and the American South did starting in the 1950s thanks to the Civil Rights Movement.

A nation may also fall from success to failure by allowing extractive institutions to overcome long-standing inclusive ones. Japan and Germany did so in the 1930s, nearly destroying the world as a consequence.

Although the authors never say so explicitly, the current economic crisis in the United States contains all the conditions necessary for an extractive takeover, particularly the concentration of both wealth and political power in the hands of a tiny elite, and the simultaneous withdrawal of both from the majority.

I have grossly oversimplified the argument in Why Nations Fail, which is the least of many reasons you should read it yourself.

But it is no coincidence that voter suppression is shrinking the franchise and budget cuts are shredding the social contract at the same time that the obscenely rich have an enormous share of the national wealth that they use to buy elections.

The success of the Plutocracy means not just a lords-and-serfs economy in which the vast majority of citizens suffer poverty and oppression.

The success of the Plutocracy means that the United States itself ... fails.