The Challenges that Confront the United States

With the inauguration of the new president approaching, I thought it might be worthwhile to review some of the challenges that the new administration will confront.[1] Although I was not a supporter of Trump during the election, I do wish his administration success for the good of the country, for the challenges that he will confront are myriad and formidable. If he is able to address them successfully, he may go down as one of the great presidents in our republic’s history.

The American Economy. Although the economy continues to grow, the effects have not been felt by everybody, reinforcing the divide between the rich and the poor. With a shrinking middle class, one of the key requirements for political stability for any regime, as Aristotle has noted, social and economic conflict has spilled over into political instability. Movements like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party combined with the inability of the federal government to pass a budget under normal order are the latest manifestations of the people’s discontent. The federal government’s dysfunction only fuels the anti-government sentiments of movements like Black Lives Matter, revealing a vast disconnect between our national political institutions and the people for whom they are supposed to serve.

But what makes the matter worse is that the government is limited in its options to address these problems by inheriting an almost $20 trillion debt, not to mention a budget where entitlement costs continue to rise (e.g., health care and social security alone now nearly account for 50% of the budget). Democrats want to enhance revenue, while Republicans want to cut spending; but most economists agree that we need to do both – raise taxes and cut spending – if we want to avoid the “fiscal cliff”: the federal government defaulting on its payments both home and abroad. Unfortunately, neither political party has been honest about raising taxes and cutting spending to balance the budget and to lower our national debt. Both are afraid that if such a proposal were offered, that party would be brutally attacked by its opponent in the next election cycle.

Decline of American Standing in the World. One the paradoxes of the Obama’s legacy that I already have discussed is that in spite of his failure at foreign policy (with the exception of killing Osama bin Laden), Obama is a popular president abroad. But the resurgence of Russia has eclipsed any re-set; the rise of ISIS and the general chaos in the Middle East have made a mockery of Obama’s “soft footprint”; the disarray in Europe with its economy, refugees, Brexit vote, and nationalist parties has made them look inward rather than be willing partners of the United States; and the Chinese control of the South China Sea, the Philippines abandoning of America, North Korea’s emboldened disposition, and our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership have all made our pivot to Asia look like a paper tiger. The overall result is a perception of American weakness and decline in the world regardless of whether such a decline is actually real. Donald Trump inherits a world that is less friendly and less deferential to the United States. Facilitating a foreign policy whereby America regains its preeminent role in global politics is the biggest challenge he confronts besides the economy.

American Citizenship and Civic Culture. The heated and ugly debate about immigration this past presidential election as well as the culture wars of the past twenty-five years are really proxies for a debate about what constitutes the core elements of American citizenship: what does it mean to be an American in the twentieth-first century of globalization, multiculturalism, and perceived American decline? Do we emphasize identity as the leading idea of American citizenship or universal principles; and if the latter, which ones? For, as Tocqueville has famously shown, liberty and equality can both complement and contradict each other. This debate about citizenship has become manifested in many forms – whether in the content of high school textbooks, debates about the Fourteenth Amendment, or disagreement about immigration policy – but we have not confronted the issue directly as a nation. I’m not hopeful that the Trump – or, for that matter, any administration – will address this issue, but it is something that we as academics can start to address; for until we, as a nation, can come to some common agreement about what it means to be an American, there will continue to exist the two Americas.

Constitutionalism, Elections, and Technology. The Russian interference with the American election process demonstrates a need to secure our election process. It still eludes me why Obama did not initiate a worldwide treaty on cyber warfare the way Kennedy did about nuclear testing. A successful negotiation may be several years away but at least our adversaries would have a mechanism to discuss with us about these matters when breaches, like in our presidential election, occurs.

Trump’s skepticism about Russian interference in the election is probably explained by his fear that such acknowledgement would undermine the legitimacy of his election. With Jill Stein demanding a recount in Wisconsin and Democrats pleading electoral college delegates to be faithless, one cannot entirely blame him. But these acts of the Green and Democratic Party, including Clinton’s refusal to concede on election night when it was clear that she had lost, raise reservations about respecting both the formal and informal constitutional processes in our country. Because of the anonymous nature of cyberattacks, they feed into the paranoia that this country experiences from time to time from both the left and the right and consequently can undermine the legitimacy of democratic elections.

As far as the election itself, we had another presidential race where, yet again, we had no serious discussion of some the most serious problems that this country currently confronts: the federal government’s debt crisis, the growing social and economic inequality among our citizens, and reforming our education system to make it competitive in a globalized economy. Primarily this stems from the candidates and voters themselves but technology, particularly social media, plays a crucial role in creating echo chambers for each political party. The result is two different political realities where we, as a country, cannot even agree whether Trump has a mandate to govern (and it is not clear what that mandate would be since both campaigns lacked any serious discussion of the problems this country confronts and since fewer voters went to the polls for either candidate than in any recent presidential election). What role technology plays and whether it should be regulated and by whom remains a critical issue that needs to be addressed if we wish to move past our divisions in this country. But we also must not fall into the trap of technological scientism, about which Voegelin has written in his fear of the Orwellian authoritarian impulse inherent in technology and their masters.

Other and Unpredictable Problems. There remain the persistent problems of climate change, race relations, underfunded infrastructure, gun violence, and poor education as well as the more recent ones of cyber privacy, food and water security, affordable health care, and the drug epidemic in rural America. Of all these, affordable health care and infrastructure seems the most likely to be addressed by the Trump Administration. Hopefully the government will take a flexible and pragmatic approach to these problems.

I suspect there are several issues that I have neglected here, like the rise of India, global pandemics, and new technologies such A.I. and CRISPR, but, like the President, there is only so much time in a world of so many problems. And Voeglein has taught us, there is no arc to history so who knows what unpredictable event may transpire that will confront the president. My hope is only to identify what seems to be the pressing issues at this moment and pray that the incoming administration is more than up to the task in confronting them.

Notes

[1] Many thanks for Scott Robinson for his comments and review of this essay.

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