Failure after failure after failure. Bubbles that end in busts. Wars that aren’t won. Stimuli that don’t stimulate. All together plunging the United States into the worst economic slump since the 1930s. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, America faces a geopolitical rival that is also an effective economic competitor — a combination not seen since the kaiser’s Germany.
Into this grim situation, Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum step forward to offer hope. Or do they?
For there is an unnerving tension at the core of That Used to Be Us, a discordant emotional counterpoint. I don’t think it’s a disagreement between the authors so much as a disagreement within each of them.
Friedman and Mandelbaum repeatedly describe themselves as “optimists”, albeit “frustrated” optimists. Yet the stories they tell repeatedly suggest very different and less reassuring conclusions.
The main line of the book’s argument will arrive with congenial familiarity. Friedman is one of America’s most famous commentators, Mandelbaum one of its most distinguished academic experts on foreign policy. Their views – and their point of view – are well known. They speak from just slightly to the left of the battered American political centre: for free trade, open immigration, balanced budgets, green energy, consumption taxes, health care reform, investments in education and infrastructure.
There is a lot to like and admire in this approach. It is progressive and liberal in the best senses of both those words. It has resulted in a book that is at once enlightened and enlightening. Friedman is a very good reporter. He takes us with him to visit a high school for disadvantaged youths that sends 100 per cent of its graduates to college, then to view a new fighter jet that runs on fuel 50 per cent of which is derived from the oil of pressed mustard seeds. The partnership with Mandelbaum has been fruitful, curbing Friedman’s notorious verbal excesses and stiffening the book with extra analytic rigour: a chart detailing the collapse of federal support for research and development is especially disturbing.
Together they offer a range of examples of how America can do better than it has done in the recent past. Despite its slightly misleading subtitle, That Used to Be Us is not really a “how to” book, not really a policy book. Friedman and Mandelbaum go very light on the programmatic details. Instead, they emphasise the power of good examples: instance after instance of forward-looking CEOs, effective military commanders, tough educational administrators, responsible politicians who have made things work. The book is more a demonstration than an argument: the situation isn’t hopeless! Success is possible! See here and here and here and here.
And yet, Friedman and Mandelbaum also point out things like this: new military recruits arrive much less physically fit than previous generations because of a lack of exercise, and they come in with what Gen Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calls “a mixed bag of values”. Dempsey goes on: “I am not suggesting they have bad values, but among all the values that define our profession, first and most important is trust. If we could do only one thing with new soldiers, it would be to instill in them trust for one another, for the chain of command and for the nation.” OK, so that’s alarming.
How about this statistic from Friedman and Mandelbaum: “Thirty years ago, 10 per cent of California’s general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 per cent to prisons. Today nearly 11 per cent goes to prisons and 8 per cent to higher education.”
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The “frustrated optimists” describe a country whose people are falling behind, a political system increasingly paralysed and institutions that seem ever more inadequate to meet ever more intractable challenges. They remark that China led the world until it bumped into a series of “bad centuries” after 1644. That fate could overtake America too.
Prophetic warnings usually culminate with an “unless” clause. The casual reader will flip through the book searching in some frustration for the Friedman-Mandelbaum “unless”. Their main recommendations tend to stop a block short of the destination: the solutions are unspecific, when they are not outright fanciful, like their yearning for a third-party presidential campaign.
Friedman and Mandelbaum at one point praise the beauty of solutions that rise from the bottom up as opposed to the top down. This praise is not consciously insincere, but pretty plainly it does not accurately represent their operational plan. Friedman and Mandelbaum are men of the American elite, and they write to salute those members of the American elite who behave public-spiritedly and to scourge those who do not. They are winners, writing to urge other winners to have more of a care for their fellow citizens who are not winners.
And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that! Societies inescapably generate elites. Those elites can be public-spirited and responsible or they can be selfish and shortsighted. American society has had a big serving of that ugly anti-elitist spirit in the recent past. It could use more of the generous responsible spirit Friedman and Mandelbaum recommend. They say less than might be wished about what a more public-spirited American elite might do. But they have eloquently described what such an elite should want to do.
THAT USED TO BE US
How America fell Behind in the world it invented and how we can come back
Thomas L Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
380 pages; $28
©2011 The New York Times News Service