“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
--James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10, 1789
“Look, you want to know what the biggest national security threat to this country is right now? The total dysfunction in Washington”
--Leon Panetta (Former White House Chief of Staff, Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Defence), 2014
A December Day in New England
December 14, 2012, dawned cold and crisp in Newtown, Connecticut; a proper New England day. The city is located in Fairfield County, about 60 miles north of New York City, a place where bankers provide a placid, even idyllic, country life for their families. Leafy and affluent, Newtown is indeed the sort of quietly congenial place successful people aspire to spend their days, a small town of 27,000 where everyone knows everyone else, where the word ‘community’ actually means something.
Beyond being wealthy and family-centred, best of all Newtown was safe. Before that December day there had been only one homicide in the town in the prior decade. Newtown is the sort of protected place where things are carefully arranged so they simply do not go wrong. And all was well. Until December 14, 2012.
20-year-old Adam Lanza had lived in Newtown practically all of his odd, sequestered life. Bright, a loner, socially maladroit, he had been in and out of both the public and private school systems, as well as being home-schooled at times by his single mother, Nancy, an outgoing, warm woman who had devoted herself to his care. Left well off after her divorce from Adam’s father, Nancy told friends Adam had Asperger’s Syndrome, making it hard for him to relate to and empathise with those around him. Those with Asperger’s are overwhelmingly not prone to violence.
But Adam certainly was. What was to follow later that morning—the second worst shooting in American history—amounts to almost a chemical equation; a deeply disturbed person has easy access to guns that are designed to mow people down en masse, rather than being used for sport. Carnage is the inevitable and utterly foreseeable result.
Nancy was a gun enthusiast with at least a dozen firearms in her possession. She had often taken Adam target shooting throughout his life; the shared passion was a precious source of bonding for the two of them. But it was also the ember that lit an unquenchable fire.
For that December morning Adam began his day by killing Nancy, shooting her in the head four times with her own rifle while she slept. He then took four guns all legally registered to his mother—an assault rifle, two semi-automatic handguns, and a shotgun he was to leave in the trunk of his car—and drove just down the road to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where many years before he had been a pupil.
The cold, bloodless, clinical way to put it is that he proceeded to shoot 20 first graders at the school, aged between 6 and 7, as well as six adults, including the school principal and the school psychologist, before finally turning a handgun on himself. But to truly understand what happened, we are forced to look at the nature of evil just a little more closely.
At around 9.35AM, Lanza entered the school by shooting his way through a glass panel next to the locked front entrance doors, closed daily as a safety precaution. Wearing black clothing and tinted sunglasses, Adam looked like a character from the violent video games he liked to play. He headed for two classrooms near the door, which housed the first graders. The greatest concentration of teachers and students—17 in all—found murdered, were huddled together in the bathroom off one of the classrooms where the substitute teacher had tried to hide them. The only survivor, a girl aged six, endured by pretending to be one of the victims. When she was finally able to reach her family she said, ‘Mommy, I’m OK, but all my friends are dead.’
She went on to tell police she heard a boy in the classroom screaming, ‘Help me! I don’t want to be here.’ Lanza indifferently replied, as if from the bowels of Hell itself, ‘Well, you’re here,’ followed by a hammering sound that could only have been gunfire. He shot all but two of his victims multiple times, methodically executing them.
By now, quickly alerted from adults within the school, the police were already on their way, at lightning speed. By around 9.40—less than 5 minutes after Adam had entered Sandy Hook, it was all over. Hearing the impending arrival of the authorities, Lanza took his handgun out of his belt and shot himself. He left no suicide note, nor any other explanation as to what his motivations were.
What is beyond dispute is that in less than five minutes, Lanza had fired 154 bullets from his mother’s .223-calibre Bushmaster XM15-E23 semi-automatic assault rifle, slaughtering 26 utterly defenceless people, most of them little children, looking forward to school that day as the plan was to make gingerbread houses for Christmas. In less than five minutes.
To my shame, my immediate response to the tragedy was one of weary resignation. When my horrified European friends hoped aloud that something so outrageously gruesome must surely move my country to change its gun laws, I replied quietly—if accurately—‘Nothing will happen.’
I then forgot about the incident almost as quickly as it had been raised, as it was just another in a seemingly endless series of shootings I had become used to. It is so easy to fail to even begin to try to solve society’s immense problems, and even easier to abdicate responsibility for them as I did. But it is decadence, and it is the precisely the disease that is destroying the western world.
President Obama’s first impulse—to his immense credit—was a more human one. Visibly moved in a way he has rarely been, Obama was an eloquent man was at his rhetorical best following the massacre. When he spoke on the night of the shooting, the President’s cri de couer could not have been more plaintive; “I know there’s not a parent in America that doesn’t feel same overwhelming grief that I do.”
But as he led the nation in mourning, the president went beyond that, seeing the tragedy as a clarion call to do something about gun control. “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this regardless of the politics.” Everyone knew immediately what the president meant by ‘the politics.’ To get any gun control measure through Congress—however meagre—the White House would have to directly confront one of the most powerful special interests in the country: The gun owners lobby, led by the feared National Rifle Association (NRA).
Just two evenings later, at the memorial service for the Newtown victims, the president made clear what the moral and political stakes were. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?” And certainly, in the immediate aftermath of Newtown, something was in the air; shaken by the massacre, there did seem to be a groundswell of support for some form of gun control by the vast majority of the American people.
A USA Today/Gallup poll, taken just days after the shooting in December 2014, found an overwhelming 92% of those questioned in favour of a law requiring background checks for all gun show sales; at the same time a law banning sales and possession of high cartridge magazines, such as Lanza had employed to such murderous effect, was backed by a solid 62%.
Strikingly, and despite everything, the single measure that could do the most practical good—a law banning assault weapons, which had once been in effect in the 1990s—was still opposed by a bare majority, 51%. But the mood of the country seemed to be irrevocably moving in the direction of at last getting serious about gun control at the national level.
Beyond the palpable change in mood, the White House had a number of facts on its side in trying to win over the moderate majority of Americans--who neither think that the Second Amendment (protecting the right of citizens to bear arms) is absolute, nor who believe gun ownership in general is a crime. There are 300 million guns in America; almost one per person.
Perhaps not unrelated, the American murder rate is four times that of Britain, and fully six times that of Germany. There are more registered gun dealers in the US than major supermarket branches, just as there are more gun sellers than there are McDonalds. Within 10 miles of the Sandy Hook Elementary School there are an astounding 36 gun dealers.
One can believe—as I, the President, and a majority of Americans do—that gun rights ought to protected in general, but that like all constitutional rights, they have inherent limits. You are not allowed to use your right to free speech to recklessly yell ‘fire’ in a crowded and darkened theatre; no more should you be allowed to buy assault weapons that serve no sporting purpose.
The modern fetish of gun ownership—particularly the insane safeguarding of weapons designed to kill people rather than be used for hunting—was probably not what the Founding Fathers of America had in mind when the Second Amendment was ratified, as they were discussing the need for a well-regulated militia. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has clearly stated that semi-automatic weapons such as the assault rifle used by Adam Lanza, “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose.” The Founders probably assumed we had a modicum of sense. But as the above statistics make clear, we do not.
But Barack Obama--known for his icy caution--now put everything on the line politically. On the evening of Newtown, the recently re-elected President announced to a room full of his senior staff that he now planned to make gun control a ‘central issue’ of his Second Term. Announcing the creation of a task force headed by Vice President Joe Biden—the White House’s primary dealmaker with Congress—Obama announced to the world that by mid-January he would have a concrete legislative programme on gun control to put forward.
When it reported back, the President kept up the political pressure, baldly stating, “This is our first task as a society, keeping our children safe. This is how we will be judged.” He made it clear that the new legislation was his overriding priority, “I will put everything I’ve got into this—and so will Joe—but I tell you the only way we can change is if the American people demand it.”
On January 16, 2013 the Biden task force came back with three primary legislative proposals. First, it advocated universal background checks for all firearms purchases. At the time this was seen as a legislative no-brainer, both in terms of its modest policy impact and because fully nine in 10 Americans backed such a stance. In truth universal background checks was a policy proposal merely designed to close a legislative loophole; at the time as many as 40% of all gun purchases were being conducted without a background check, through guns purchased over the internet or at gun shows, skirting the intent of an earlier, poorly written law instituting background checks in the first place. It merely amounted to legislative housekeeping.
Second, the Biden task force advocated limiting magazines to ten cartridges, in an effort to limit the damage—as Adam Lanza had made so horrifyingly clear—that could be done in a blink of an eye. Third, and the policy jewel in the crown of the Biden task force, a ban on assault weapons was proposed. Weapons that served no other purpose than hurting large numbers of people and quickly, would be taken off the streets. This was a seminal break from the pre-Newtown status quo, and would have amounted to genuine gun control.
But the president, in waiting a month for the task force to report back—had already made a fatal political error; he had given his well-funded and determined enemies time to organise. Immediately following Newtown, Wayne LaPierre--The NRA’s able Chief Executive--had already formulated a counter-narrative for the Newtown massacre. The problem was not that there had been guns in Sandy Hook elementary school; the problem was that there had been too few of them.
LaPierre baldly stated at a December 2014 Press Conference, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It was troubled individuals, rather than their easy access to legally obtainable firearms, which was to blame for the spate of mass shootings.
Even with five million members and an annual operating budget of $220 million, the NRA leadership played a cautious, sophisticated game following Newtown. While being stridently against both the assault weapons ban as well as the limit to cartridges in a magazine—in other words reforms that actually accomplished something—for a time the NRA was coy with Congress and the White House about extending the background check law. In the face of initially fierce public opinion, the gun lobby’s main pillar feigned reasonableness, all the while continuing to gauge the changing face of public opinion, waiting for general nationwide anger to abate.
Ironically, in the end it was pressure from smaller, but even more absolutist gun organisations—such as the Gun Owners of America—that tipped the NRA’s hand; it was more worried about its friends in the gun movement losing faith with it than with the political might of the White House.
The NRA decided to walk away, even from the Manchin-Toomey Bill--sponsored by conservative Democrat and NRA member Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia as well as undoubtedly conservative Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania—which merely universalised background checks, a policy change that would have done nothing to prevent Newtown at all.
And now with American anger fading, the NRA swung into action against all three planks proposed by the Biden task force. As one recently retired Congressman put it, “That was one group where I said, ‘As long as I’m in office, I’m not bucking the NRA’.” Republicans in Congress needed an ‘A’ grade from the NRA in terms of their voting records on gun issues to see off primary challenges from their right in their districts, while rural Democrats throughout the country feared the lobby’s highly effective attack ads.
The NRA mobilised its members to blanket the Senate with calls, emails, and letters, before the votes on the Biden task force’s proposals; in Senator Toomey’s office calls were running 9-1 against the bill, while in Manchin’s office it was a staggering 200-1.
At the time of the mid-April vote, the Democratic Senate leadership--led by Majority Leader Harry Reid—and the White House decided to break up the legislation into three separate pieces, when Reid made it clear to the administration that only the universal background check stood any chance of passage. The Obama team decided that passing something—however slight in policy terms--was better than passing nothing at all. However, in reality, even before the climactic series of Senate votes, meaningful gun control had already been taken off the table with the abandonment of a push for an assault rifle ban.
As it was, this decidedly unambitious reform strategy came to nothing. Sixty votes were needed in the Senate to override a filibuster, the practice of allowing Senators to talk a bill to death, designed to protect minorities from majoritarian rule. With the parents of the murdered children of Sandy Hook present in the Senate gallery, the chamber went about its shameful business. The legislation proposing an assault weapons ban was decisively turned back 40 votes to 60. The proposal limiting magazine cartridges was cleanly defeated 46-54. And on April 13, 2013, even that faintest of protests for Newtown, the Manchin-Toomey bill, went down to defeat, with 55 votes in favour, and 45 against.
As with most political catastrophes in Washington, there was plenty of blame to go around. The gun control push was turned back in the Senate as much by cowardly Democrats, as by fervent Republicans. Four Democratic Senators elected from rural red states (states that tend to vote Republican)—where gun rights are considered almost absolute--blanched at casting votes that could well cost them their careers, with the NRA in full battle cry against them. Despite the Democratic majority in the Senate, Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota all voted against their party’s leadership, giving the Republicans easy victory.
But practically, the impetus to gun control reform never even came close. Once the measures failed in the Democratically-controlled Senate, the Republican-dominated House simply ignored the whole sorry mess, never bothering to vote on the reforms at all. It is highly unlikely that should the Senate somehow miraculously have passed the watered-down background check reform, the lower chamber would have concurred. Instead, the stark, horrifying fact is that the murder of 20 children did absolutely nothing to change the debate over gun violence in the US.
The term for it is decadence.
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In the aftermath of this huge legislative setback, the President was a bitter as I have ever seen him. Immediately after the universal background check bill went down to defeat, he fulminated, “It came down to politics—the worry that the vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.” Whatever his demerits as a political leader, the president has always been a first-class analyst. And what he says here must be taken on board as we consider what is causing Washington’s almost-total sclerosis.
If those votes in the aftermath of Newtown in the Spring of 2013 paint a ghastly picture of what ails the politics of the country—if Washington can no longer solve the country’s problems—then the second half of Gibbon’s definition of decadence has played out since. Having failed to lift the blight of gun violence from the land, the country has quickly moved onto abdicating responsibility for it.
By December 2014—just two years after the Newtown massacre—support for gun control had reached a new low. In a Pew Research poll that month, a majority of 52% of those polled now said it is more important to protect the right to own guns, with a minority 46% saying the priority had to be the control of gun ownership. Since Newtown those saying a gun does more to protect someone from being a victim of crime is up nine points (from 48%-57%); just 38% thought they put people’s safety at risk.
Incredibly, Wayne LaPierre’s argument that more guns are needed to deter gun violence has won the day. Given this shift in public opinion--coupled with the fact that Republicans control both the House and the Senate—it is a safe bet that absolutely nothing will soon pass at the national level limiting gun rights in any way. The NRA has decisively won the post-Newtown battle.
But the final, crushing abdication of responsibility for Newtown—the real act of giving up—is what happened in the village itself, quietly and out of the spotlight of the nation’s capital, shortly after the massacre. On January 31, 2013, the Newtown School Board voted unanimously to take Wayne LaPierre’s advice, asking for an armed police officer presence in all its elementary schools.
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The Founders of the American Republic, surely one of the ablest ruling generations ever to grace a country, worried about ‘factions’—as they called special interests—primarily fearing the problems such movements could cause if they constituted a fleeting political majority. As such, Madison, Hamilton, and the rest designed the American system as one replete with checks and balances, to prevent such interests from easily coming to dominate the rest of us, despite any temporary ascendancy they possessed.
Madison defines faction in the 10th Federalist Paper succinctly as citizens, “who are united or actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the prevention and aggregate interests of the community.” In other words, it is a group heedless of any sort of broader national interest, selfishly pursuing only its own immediate gains, come what may.
The Founders’ fatal intellectual flaw—and the basic reason for the present mess in Washington—is that for all of their myriad abilities, they overwhelmingly worried about the tyranny majorities could visit upon minorities, not the other way around. They catastrophically believed that popular sovereignty would on its own surely thwart minority factions from exercising power, a false premise made glaringly clear by our Newtown vignette, and one which is politically imperilling America.
Newtown illustrates the seminal power of a passionate minority—a special interest—to politically overcome the half-hearted unfocused majority. The underlying politics of the modern gun control story in America has always been the same until the post-Newtown environment: the majority of the country agrees that there should be limits and controls on weapons intended only to kill large groups of people and not for sport, but they are outmanoeuvred and outfought by a fervent minority which thinks about little else and acts on this issue above all else. This is how modern special interests win, why Madison was wrong, and why nothing is getting done in the national interest, all rolled up into one.
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But it must be made crystal clear by me that selfish interests are not the sole or even primary preserve of the right in America. The Newtown example aside, the American left is every bit as much a captive of interests as are its GOP adversaries. Every thinking American knows there will be no legal reform in the country as long as the Democrats are in the pockets of the trial lawyers, nor does that august party seem very interested in education reform given its fondness for teacher’s unions.
It is here that progressives can very quickly become reactionaries; US educators are immediately resistant to any hint that—as happens in any other line of work in the world—good teaching should be rewarded, and bad teachers fired. The Washington, DC School Superintendent recently offered teachers there much higher pay in return for less job security, and the union immediately showed its true colours and balked. Rather, teachers cling to the antiquated (and found wanting) East German labour system, where jobs were guaranteed for life, regardless of ability. This is not exactly in the national interest, either.
Interests have always been around, but rarely have they so dominated the American political landscape. A Rasmussen Reports poll of February 20, 2015 finds that only a miniscule 16% of those surveyed believe Congressional lawmakers are doing a good or excellent job; inextricably tied to this is the feeling they are fully dominated by powerful special interests. When asked if most Senators and Representatives are willing to sell their vote for cash or campaign contributions to outside interests, a whopping 62% said they were, with only 18% saying endemic corruption has not overwhelmed the people’s chambers.
It is in terms of economics that special interests on both sides of the aisle are most noticeably endangering America’s future. If Europe is burying its head in the economic sand, America, too, is failing to deal with the perilous structural problems that lie dead ahead. The imminent rise of the American debt burden--and both parties’ signal inability to confront this reality--epitomises the cancer lying at the heart of the American political system.
On the face of it, everything in America is rosy, certainly compared with the endemic euro crisis across the Atlantic. Since President Obama took office at the height of the Lehman Brothers crisis—which almost brought global capitalism to its knees—unemployment has declined from 10% to under six percent, and America has created 10 million new jobs—more than in Japan, Europe, and every other advanced economy combined. By December 2014, there were three million more people at work than a year before.
Growth has averaged 2.3% of GDP since the recovery began in July 2009, respectable enough on its own, but relatively amazing, given continued problems in Japan and Europe, and a slowdown in many Emerging Markets. Growth is projected to remain a healthy 2.4% when the 2014 numbers are crunched. Even better, the IMF reckons growth will hurtle forward to 3.6% in 2015, a wonderful number for an advanced economy and faster than the rate of the world economy as a whole. Given all this unambiguously good news, how in the world can I posit that America is in any sort of decline at all?
The problem is that while America under President Obama dodged the immediate bullet of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the underlying medium-term health of the economy remains grim, especially in terms of the country’s unfunded entitlement programmes and debt. The yearly deficit peaked at $1.4 trillion in 2009, amounting to a massive and unsustainable 9.8% of GDP.
With the crisis in abeyance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts that the 2015 Federal budget deficit will be $468 billion, or only 2.6% of GDP, which would amount to the lowest since the Obama administration began. Yet, while the pace of indebtedness has slowed, overall public debt is already approaching dangerous levels. The CBO projects that US debt will stand at 74% of GDP by the end of 2015, the highest rate in any year since 1950.
But the real peril is what comes next, as all those spendthrift baby boomers retire and demand their ‘rights.’ The CBO projects that annual federal spending will increase by $2.6 trillion, or 75%, between 2014 and 2025. Almost 90% of the increase comes from just four sources: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and interest on the national public debt. The brief fiscal respite of the present will come to an abrupt end, as the real tsunami hits; when the profligate, feckless baby boomers retire en masse. The reason for this is a series of long-term bills coming due at the same time the American political system seems chronically unserious about tackling the country’s structural economic problems.
As many as 45% of American households made up of adults of working age don’t have any retirement savings at all. The National Institute on Retirement Security calculates an overwhelming 92% of households are financially unprepared for retirement and that there is a canyon-sized savings gap of between $6.8 trillion to $14 trillion between what individuals have saved and what they will need in order to retire.
This can of course be dealt with in policy terms, but only by individuals realizing the problem, and being prepared to make genuine sacrifices to master it, for the math is simple. The average period of retirement has increased from 13 years in the 1960s to 20 today as people live longer. There only three solutions to the coming economic train wreck: Baby Boomers will have to retire and live on less; they will have to work longer (at present the average age of retirement in America is 64, lower than it was in the 1960s when people did not live as long); or they will have to defer their gratification and save more.
A generation never known for their self-sacrifice is at last going to have to change its ways, if the rest of us are not to be economically swamped. We are allowing demographics to determine national priories--with the elderly amounting to the most powerful interest group of all--as spending is overwhelmingly lavished upon them, despite the fact that they are the richest segment of American society, which is absolutely ruining the economic health of the country.
Clearly, failure to dramatically alter this scenario will hasten American decline. And there are absolutely no signs this overwhelming problem is going to be dealt with, given the power of the elderly as the ultimate special interest. For example, during his January 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama did not even mention entitlement reform once, because it is so hated by the Democratic Party base, conditioned as it is to dole out largesse to various interests, rather than to think through how to save the country.
The root cause of this is decadence.
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America has had one Republic, the French five. Uniquely, there was almost no revolutionary violence following victory at Yorktown, even when the Jeffersonians swept the Federalists from power in the election of 1800. The secret behind this two-century record of political success has been the ability to compromise, to see one’s adversaries as patriots, even if misguided ones. That is the precious asset being lost, a tragedy that largely derives from the cultural laziness that has permeated American life. It is certainly a form of decadence, and it is destroying a country that still amounts to—in Lincoln’s timeless words—the last, best hope of earth.
John, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Decadence, and I read every word.