Eras of invention, in which these disruptive technologies are devised, tend to be followed by periods of innovation. The era of innovation can last decades or generations, while entrepreneurs figure out how to use the new technologies in one economic sector after another. James Watt dramatically improved the steam engine in the 1770s, but it was not until the 1830s that steam-powered locomotives and steam-powered factories began to transform the landscapes first of Britain and then of the U.S. and other nations. The internal combustion engine and practical electric motors and electric lights were invented around the same time, in the mid-19th century. But it took until the early 20th century for their effect to be felt in electrified factories based on mass-production conveyor belts and the electric grids and highway grids that underlay a new, dispersed, suburban civilization. The transistor and other elements of the information revolution had been invented by the 1960s, but the new machinery only gradually began to revolutionize the economy a few decades later, by means of innovative adaptations like the Internet, personal computers, smartphones and sophisticated software apps.

Each of these successive industrial revolutions has undermined existing structures of business, commerce and government.  The misalignment between government and the technology-transformed economy often grows for decades, until there is a cataclysmic event like the Civil War and Reconstruction or the New Deal and World War II that brings about long-delayed reform.

For example, the locomotive and the telegraph made an integrated continental American market possible before the Civil War, but modernizing economic reforms had to await the Lincoln administration’s support for the transcontinental railroads and the Union Army’s defeat of the states’ rights South.  A few generations later, the success of the second industrial revolution had created new problems that the Lincoln-era framework could not cope with, including gigantic industrial corporations and predatory electrical utility empires. The shock of the Great Depression allowed Franklin Roosevelt and his successors in both parties to modernize American government and public policy in order to adapt it to the challenges of the second industrial era, like the need for economic security for the wage-earning majority that had replaced a nation of farmers.

In our own time, the IT revolution and the reorganization of business and commerce it has caused is undermining the political and legal structures of the New Deal era. Many of the corporate regulations and labor laws of the New Deal assumed an economy based on national, vertically integrated corporations. But globalization — made possible by a combination of computers, satellite communications and container ships — has created a new kind of global corporation drawing on supply chains in many nations and subject to overall regulation by none. Similarly, America’s unemployment system, designed in the mid-20th century to help well-paid industrial workers in brief recessions, is ill-suited to 21st century America, with its prolonged “jobless recoveries” and the growing ranks of poorly paid service-sector workers in hospitality and healthcare.

Even in the absence of the Great Recession, at some point in the early 21st century the challenges of the IT revolution would have forced radical reform of America’s inherited political and legal system. America’s values of equal opportunity and bold enterprise can only be preserved in changing conditions by intelligent reform. What is needed is nothing less than a generation of creative thinkers and visionary statesmen who can renew and reinvent America in our time as the generations of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did in theirs.

Unfortunately, even the trauma of the Great Recession so far has failed to discredit and dislodge obsolete thinking about the economy on both sides of the partisan aisle. What are passed off today as bold, original ideas are rooted in ideologies of the 1960s and 1970s — archaic ideologies that took shape before the IT-induced wave of economic revolution was understood or got underway. On the right, in particular, conservatives and libertarians mindlessly cling to the half-century-old dogmas of right-wing opponents of the New Deal like Milton Friedman. Proposals like privatizing Social Security and Medicare were stale and discredited ideas on the libertarian right even before Ronald Reagan was elected to the White House in 1980. The beat of American politics has a distinctly retro 1970s disco sound.

Perhaps it will take a cataclysm even greater than the Great Recession to shatter the hold of establishment dogmatism and force fresh thinking. Or perhaps it will take a new generation of leaders too young to care about refighting the battles of the New Deal era and the Reagan era that followed it.

One thing is certain. The chief obstacle to prosperity lies with our institutions and our ideas, not with a lack of innovation or resources. In government, academic and commercial labs in the U.S. and across the world, revolutionary new technologies like exascale computing, additive manufacturing, robotics, phonemics and genomics are being invented or developed. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money are looking for profitable investments, even as enormous numbers of potentially productive workers in the U.S. and around the world remain unemployed. If the technology, the money and the labor can be mobilized, with support from politicians more interested in shaping the future than in defending the past, the potential exists for unprecedented advances in prosperity, health and wealth in America and the world.  

But that promise will not be realized in the absence of leadership adequate to the challenges of our age. America has plenty of politicians willing to seek election by seeking the lowest common denominator. Where are the leaders willing and able to rise to the occasion?

And yet there never was a time when James Madison (1751 – 1836), a third-generation slave owner, did not believe slavery was evil — or a time when he did not recognize the capabilities of African-Americans. In 1791, Madison wrote admiringly about the “industry & good management” of a free African-American landowner who could read, keep accounts and supervise six white hired men on a 2,500-acre farm. In April 1800, Madison dined with Christopher McPherson, a confident and free African-American, who came as a guest to Madison’s plantation home, Montpelier, to deliver books and letters that Madison and Jefferson sent to each other. During Madison’s terms as president, he often heard out his private secretary, Edward Coles, who objected to slavery as a violation of the natural rights doctrine that Jefferson and Madison espoused. In 1816, Jesse Torrey, a zealous abolitionist, visited Montpelier and treated Madison to a tirade against slavery, afterward sending a letter of apology — only to receive, in reply, a letter from Madison saying no apology was necessary. In 1824, Madison endured with good grace the disapproval of Lafayette, then on a triumphal tour of the United States, who visited Montpelier and told off the retired president, expressing disgust that both Jefferson and Madison, such champions of liberty, should still own slaves and support such a vile institution. In 1835, Harriet Martineau, an outspoken abolitionist and an old friend of Madison’s, visited him for the last time, afterward reporting that her host “talked more on the subject of slavery than on any other, acknowledging, without limitations or hesitation, all the evils with which it has ever been charged.”

Like Madison himself, his biographers treat slavery as a kind of dirge, faintly heard offstage and nearly drowned out by the stirring music of the freedom fighters making an American Revolution and the framers of the Constitution going about the glorious work of creating a democratic republic. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, however, wants us to listen to that more troubled theme, and the result is a revelation. In “A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons,” we’re asked to consider Madison as a “garden-variety slaveholder”: “He followed the basic patterns and norms for slaves’ living conditions and treatment that had long been established on Virginia plantations and like most owners respected the customary “rights” — such as Sundays off — that enslaved people had come to consider their due.” If it is not oxymoronic to say so, Madison was a humane slaveholder. He was also not very enterprising, in that his human holdings constituted — as they did for Jefferson — a losing economic proposition. As soon as her husband died, Dolley Madison, whose Quaker father had freed his slaves, sold off batches of her slaves in order to pay off debts.

Ms. Dowling crafts a narrative in which African-Americans are virtually never out of sight. And that makes a great deal of sense: It is unlikely that Madison ever spent a day without relying on the services of a slave. He took at least one of them with him when he traveled. And Paul Jennings was the last one out the door, clutching some of Dolley Madison’s treasures, as the British advanced during the War of 1812 and set fire to the White House.

Harriet Martineau observed with some surprise how Madison could discourse on the evils of slavery, even as slaves served him at table. It is that Madison we see in Ms. Dowling’s narrative. Here is a sample sentence: “The Virginia Resolutions [1799] was yet another appeal against tyranny that Madison drafted at the place where he lived with scores of slaves.” When Lafayette comes to Montpelier, Jennings is there beside Madison, listening, although we do not know what the slave thought. And this silence forces Ms. Dowling, all too often, to resort to what “must have been” going through Jennings’ mind. It is no wonder, then, that most historians and biographers are much more comfortable dealing with Madison’s well-documented mind. Thus Kevin R. C. Gutzman writes a stirring narrative, showing his subject’s dexterity as politician and statesman, while Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg portray how well the tag-team of Madison and Jefferson served their country.

The concluding pages of Richard Brookhiser’s concise biography seem to come closest to revealing why the mild-mannered Madison both deplored slavery and supported it; started the War of 1812, even as he was trying to negotiate peace with the British; and fought stoutly for maintaining the Union, even as he remained very much a son of the South. Mr. Brookhiser sees Madison as the epitome of the legislative mind. Madison was the man of principles who made deals, making sure the words “slave” and “slavery” did not appear in the Constitution, but also paying off his Southern vote-counting brethren with the three-fifths compromise. Slaves were partial “persons” for purposes of exerting political power. This political accommodation jibed with Madison’s statement that slaves were part of his family, but only a “degraded” part.

The legislative mind, Mr. Brookhiser suggests, has trouble with the idea of exerting executive power. Since Madison believed that he could secure no agreement among slaveholders to abolish slavery — let alone arrange some kind of compact with the North — then nothing could be done short of shipping African-Americans off to Liberia. But that strategy would work only if African-Americans themselves consented, Madison argued, and most did not. And the cost of reimbursing slaveholders proved a problem too large for Madison’s limited capacity as an economist.

But there is an even more important factor to consider in exploring why Madison, a mover and shaker of public opinion when it came to engineering such triumphs as the “Federalist Papers” to support the Constitution, never mounted a credible campaign to abolish or even attenuate the institution of slavery. From 1780 to 1784, William Gardner, Madison’s slave, resided in Philadelphia with his master, who attended meetings there of the Continental Congress. Upon Madison’s return to Virginia, Madison left Gardner behind, writing that his factotum’s mind had been “tainted” with ideas — the “contagion of liberty,” as Elizabeth Dowling Taylor puts it. This episode is reminiscent of that scene in Frederick Douglass’s autobiography when his white mistress is advised not to teach him to read, because doing so will only give him “notions” that do not befit a slave.

Madison’s idea of the American polity had no place for educated black men and women, let alone the masses of freed slaves that he believed had trouble governing themselves. No matter which biography you read, all of them eventually disclose this fundamental fact: Madison did not believe that white and black Americans could live side by side on terms of equality and amity. His failure to imagine a world more capacious and tolerant than his own helps explain a good deal of subsequent history, and America’s resistance to the very practice of equality that Madison otherwise did so much to foster.

King, author of “The Execution of Willie Francis,” observes that Florida, despite its “boundless capacity for racial inhumanity,” was considered “south of the South”; it had somehow managed to escape the scrutiny of, say, Mississippi or Alabama (site of the similar and better-known Scottsboro Boys case of 1931) despite recording more lynchings than any other state. Within hours of the Padgetts’ claim, three suspects — World War II veterans Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin and teenager Charles Greenlee — were being held for the crime. Hundreds of men stormed the jail, clamoring for a lynching. When the mob was turned away, crowds descended upon black Groveland, shooting into houses and burning down the home of Shepherd’s father, who had managed to buy land to farm independently rather than working in the citrus groves, as blacks in rural Lake County were expected to do. A fourth suspect, Ernest Thomas, escaped into the swamps, only to be later caught and killed by a large mob.

“The American justice system was wholly stacked against powerless blacks,” King writes, and the bulk of the narrative concerns the appalling twists and turns of the legal case against the defendants, known as the Groveland Boys. Under the brutal interrogation of Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, all three were beaten and whipped until they confessed to the crime. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, having monitored the disturbing news reports about the case from the beginning, decided to become directly involved. The defense was handled first by Franklin Williams and eventually by future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, who was by then already a celebrity known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” With the white supremacist Sheriff McCall and the Ku Klux Klan holding a tight grip on the county, Williams, Marshall, and the other black attorneys and reporters who traveled to and from central Florida to work on the case risked their lives to do so.

Williams later described the first trial in unreal terms, as “a story that I was living through,” replete with a stiflingly hot courtroom, a judge who whittled cedar sticks throughout the proceedings, and hostile white spectators crowding the benches. To this day it is not at all clear that a rape took place, but the NAACP lawyers had to find ways to defend the Groveland Boys without ever hinting that a white woman, even one known around town as “a bad egg,” might be lying. Despite prosecutorial misconduct and extremely weak evidence, the three defendants were quickly found guilty, with Shepherd and Irvin sentenced to death.

The NAACP appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1951 overturned the convictions and ordered a retrial, calling Florida’s discriminatory handling of the case “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.” But the case took a nightmarish turn when Sheriff McCall, transporting Shepherd and Irvin from death row to their retrial in Lake County, shot the two men multiple times on a deserted back road, claiming they had tried to escape. Shepherd died instantly, leaving only the wounded Irvin to be represented by Marshall at his retrial. Irvin was promptly convicted and sentenced to death a second time, but after some dramatic maneuvering by Marshall, which included his barging in on a card game between Chief Justice Fred Vinson and President Harry Truman and convincing Vinson to sign a stay of execution, his sentence was eventually commuted by Florida’s governor.

There is much that shocks in King’s wrenching account, from the small indignities, like the prosecutor mistaking the black lawyers for the defendants, up to the monstrous crimes. These include not just the highly suspicious killing of Shepherd by McCall (who managed to continue what King calls his “reign of terror” as sheriff until 1972, despite 49 separate investigations of misconduct charges) but the subsequent murder of Harry Moore, killed along with his wife when their house was bombed. Moore, the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States, was the NAACP’s executive secretary in Florida and a tireless advocate on behalf of the Groveland defendants. Nobody was ever charged in the Moores’ deaths.

Throughout the book, the author periodically widens his focus to explore the case’s broader context, noting that the alleged rape gave McCall and his deputies “an excuse to do some heavy housekeeping with regard to black troublemakers and potential instigators.” Their list would have certainly included returning veterans like Shepherd and Irvin and independent farmers like Shepherd’s father — all viewed as “uppity” by whites who tolerated blacks in Groveland only so long as they understood their place, providing cheap labor for the white-owned citrus groves.

King also provides insight into Marshall’s long-range legal strategy of chipping away at injustice. He fully expected to lose jury trials in the South, but you fought, he explained, “so that you lived to fight another day,” by establishing grounds for appeal. Just before arguing the landmark Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall emerges as a heroic figure, facing great risk with courage and gallows humor. King writes that “there is not a Supreme Court justice who served with Marshall or a lawyer who clerked for him that did not hear his renditions, always colorfully told, of the Groveland story.” While the case, until now, has been mostly forgotten, Marshall, for good reason, never forgot it.

Salon spoke with Petroski over the phone about human error in design tragedies, how the recession is influencing the future of design, and just how long a bridge can last.

It’s been two and a half decades since the publication of your first book, “To Engineer is Human,” which focused on mechanical and structural failures. Your new book, “To Forgive Design,” takes your original analysis a step further, focusing on the interconnectedness of technology and culture.

I wanted to talk this time about larger systems, things that are much more complicated than just a building or a bridge. Especially things that rely to a large extent on human operators that can make mistakes.

I have been fascinated with historic bridge failures, in part because they tend to be dramatic and in part because they are so revealing. Over the past century and a half or so, there has been a major bridge failure about every 30 years, which is about the length of time of an engineer’s career. The bridge failures, taken collectively, illustrate how a failure can shock us into paying much closer attention to design. But human beings sometimes have short attention spans, and so they soon forget the lessons learned from the last failure and become careless in designing new bridge types. This carelessness leads to another bridge failure, which occurs about 30 years from the last.

The 1940 failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge is especially fascinating, because it occurred almost exactly a century after the engineer John Roebling figured out why early 19th-century suspension bridges were being destroyed in the wind. By studying the failures that did occur, Roebling figured out how to design and build suspension bridges that not only stood up to windstorms but also were able to carry railroad trains — something that no one before Roebling could figure out. Over the next century, suspension bridge designers took Roebling’s masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge, as a model of success and little by little eliminated the very features that made it work. Eventually, this led to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was so light and flexible that it was brought down by a moderate wind in 1940. Had the bridge designers of the 1930s remembered and heeded Roebling’s lessons learned, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge might be still standing.

The most famous bridge disaster in recent memory occurred in Minneapolis, in 2007, and it raised a host of questions about the strength of America’s bridge infrastructure. How long can a bridge last?

All bridges are designed to have a specific lifetime. Typically, highway bridges have about 50 years. But over in England, they have iron bridges approaching 250 years. In France there are Roman aqueducts that are approaching 2,000 years old. So a bridge can last a very long time if it’s built properly in the first place, and then maintained properly. Large suspension bridges are constantly being painted to prevent caustic air from reaching the steel. Maintenance is very important. Some engineers said you can build a bridge to last forever if you maintain it properly. That’s hyperbole, but it gets across the point. Bridges that tend to collapse by surprise are those that aren’t properly maintained or inspected.

Failures are much more dramatic than successes, and people like drama. I think this is why automobile races draw such crowds. People expect spectacular crashes, which we tend to find more interesting than cars just racing around the track. The same is true of bridges, buildings, or any structure or machine. Intellectually, we appreciate the achievement of a success, but after a while successes become commonplace and we do not pay very much close attention to them anymore. Failures, on the other hand, are dramatic. They also teach us a lot more than successes. When something succeeds, we learn little more from it than that it did succeed. When something fails, however, we are driven to try to understand why it failed. This leads us to investigate and study the failure until we get to the heart of the matter. The knowledge gained by studying failure enables us to design more successfully the next time.

Why should we as a culture learn to anticipate failure and focus less on success?

If you do everything exactly the same as the successful example you’re trying to follow, you’ll probably be successful, too. But mostly we make slight changes in what we think are improvements in any successful model, and ultimately that’s what leads us to fail. On the other hand, if we anticipate failure and think, “what will happen badly if I do this?” You can eliminate a lot of bad actions by thinking about failure. Chances of success are greater that way.

How does a recession affect our attitudes toward good design?

The recession has caused a lot of projects to be canceled. Tall buildings especially, even in areas like Dubai, which is booming, have either been canceled or put on hold. Designers are not likely to cut corners on design in this kind of environment, because having something fail or go wrong is more harmful to them. If they design something that turns out to be a failure, it’s not only an embarrassment and potential legal liability but it gives the engineer a bad reputation. There have been plenty of examples throughout history of engineers who have designed bridges that collapsed, and that engineer doesn’t get any more commissions.

There was a call to renew American infrastructure during the recession. Do you think this was a missed opportunity? Do you think it’s too late? And what projects do you think are the most important?

It’s not too late. The question is do we have enough money to answer all the calls to invest in infrastructure. I think the last number I saw for the U.S. alone to bring our infrastructure up to levels that experts think it needs would be $2.2 trillion over five years. That’s the kind of money that people are beginning to understand, it’s a lot of money. Right now in Congress there are a lot of debates going on about transportation, which is just part of the infrastructure. Even finding money for the transportation part of infrastructure is not easy. People are starting to look for alternative ways to fund infrastructure other than government. Back in the 19th century, most infrastructure projects were privately financed. People invested in a bridge with the expectation of getting a return on their investment through the toll charge. Some experts are looking at that kind of model again, as a way of improving the infrastructure while not trading public revenue sources. There’s been a lot of talk about high-speed rail in the U.S., but to do that properly would take so much money that nobody is really talking about it seriously. I think roads are such an important part of America. If the roads get deteriorated to the point where it’s going to cause increasingly much to bring them back, it will be a disaster. Roads and bridges, I would put at the top. Not necessarily a single project, but an all encompassing project.

Is design more or less important in our culture now that it has been in the past?

Design has been important throughout civilization, and I think it will always be important. Everything we do is designed whether we’re producing a magazine, a website, or a bridge. Design is really the creative invention that designs everything. You could argue that a society that isn’t as advanced may be more into design than a country that is advanced. We (America) are sort of on automatic pilot right now, we’ve got plenty of design, design ideas and designers, but we don’t have the money to implement it. So if you interpret design in a much broader sense, to try to fix the system, we are in need of that kind of design. Can we come up with new ideas and new ways of keeping our society at a level of quality of life that we’ve become used to and we think is appropriate? That’s going to take some creative ideas, and creative ideas mean creative design.

When a design tragedy happens, how is it decided where the blame ultimately lies?

There’s no simple answer. First of all, it usually depends on how many people might have been killed. If a significant number of people have died or there is a large environmental impact, there usually will be a pretty high level investigation. Sometimes this even takes the form of a presidential commission as it did when the space shuttle exploded. Sometimes these commissions have a very difficult time pinpointing exactly who might be to blame. In part because of the complexity, but also in part because the sequence of what happened and how the accident progressed is sometimes very difficult to pin down.

I have a chapter in the book on the Deep Water Horizon explosion in 2010. Presently, there are a lot of court cases, and that’s part of what they’re trying to establish, who is responsible? Because in that case there were three or four companies involved. There was British Petroleum, which had a lot of the visibility, but also there was Halliburton, who was operating the rig. And then there was the owner of the drilling rig, Transocean. And each of these blames the others because that’s what happens with contentious legal battles. At any given point, it’s not totally clear who is to blame. In part, because the jury is still out — literally. And in some cases, there are ultimately out-of-court settlements, which close the record and the outside world can’t easily get to it.

Historically there have been examples of very dramatic failures where it was concluded that no one was to blame because everyone was doing their job as expected, it was just that the technology wasn’t completely understood. You’d almost have to look at it case by case to find out who is to blame. One of the things I try to do is point out that a knee-jerk reaction, say when a plane goes down, is to say the plane was badly designed. More often than not, that proves not to be as simple an answer as it might seem at first. That’s why I call the book, “To Forgive Design.”

What’s the golden age of American design?

That would depend on whether you’re talking about big bridges that carried the railroads in the late 19th century or the highway system in the middle 20th century; if you’re talking about industrial design, product design that might have been the early 20th century. To me, it would depend on what aspect of design you’re talking about. My book has a lot of examples of bridges, but I also talk about automobile design safety in the 1960s and ’70s when interior safety features became focused on, like seat belts. I don’t think there’s a single answer.

How does America’s relationship to design differ from other countries?

In Europe there tends to be much more checking of designs in an independent way. If someone designs a bridge, another company that’s totally unrelated will check the bridge in a very official way. In America, we tend to rely on self checking within the same company. Practices are becoming global, differences that used to exist are becoming fewer and smaller. So the way a bridge is designed in America or Europe or Asia today pretty much is the same, because the same companies are often involved worldwide. An American engineering company might design a bridge in China, or at least be involved as consultants. Though China is growing and becoming increasingly independent, so they can do everything on their own. A smaller country, if they want to build a tall skyscraper they would generally hire a firm from outside the country because that’s where the experience would be. When Malaysia wanted to build the tallest building in the world a couple decades ago, they hired architects and engineers from the West.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

When the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”

Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history [and] only the strong… can possibly survive,” in this case reflecting on the failure of U.S. aggression and terror to crush Cuban independence.

By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” He was again referring to South Vietnam.

When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”

There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.

The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.

Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy system — demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance. And all well kept from the general population.

Gauging American Decline

With such lessons in mind, it is useful to look at what is highlighted in the major journals of policy and opinion today. Let us keep to the most prestigious of the establishment journals, Foreign Affairs. The headline blaring on the cover of the December 2011 issue reads in bold face: “Is America Over?”

The title article calls for “retrenchment” in the “humanitarian missions” abroad that are consuming the country’s wealth, so as to arrest the American decline that is a major theme of international affairs discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary that power is shifting to the East, to China and (maybe) India.

The lead articles are on Israel-Palestine. The first, by two high Israeli officials, is entitled “The Problem is Palestinian Rejection”: the conflict cannot be resolved because Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state — thereby conforming to standard diplomatic practice: states are recognized, but not privileged sectors within them. The demand is hardly more than a new device to deter the threat of political settlement that would undermine Israel’s expansionist goals.

The opposing position, defended by an American professor, is entitled “The Problem Is the Occupation.” The subtitle reads “How the Occupation is Destroying the Nation.” Which nation? Israel, of course. The paired articles appear under the heading “Israel under Siege.”

The January 2012 issue features yet another call to bomb Iran now, before it is too late. Warning of “the dangers of deterrence,” the author suggests that “skeptics of military action fail to appreciate the true danger that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose to U.S. interests in the Middle East and beyond. And their grim forecasts assume that the cure would be worse than the disease — that is, that the consequences of a U.S. assault on Iran would be as bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty assumption. The truth is that a military strike intended to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, if managed carefully, could spare the region and the world a very real threat and dramatically improve the long-term national security of the United States.”

Others argue that the costs would be too high, and at the extremes some even point out that an attack would violate international law — as does the stand of the moderates, who regularly deliver threats of violence, in violation of the U.N. Charter.

Let us review these dominant concerns in turn.

American decline is real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the familiar ruling class perception that anything short of total control amounts to total disaster. Despite the piteous laments, the U.S. remains the world dominant power by a large margin, and no competitor is in sight, not only in the military dimension, in which of course the U.S. reigns supreme.

China and India have recorded rapid (though highly inegalitarian) growth, but remain very poor countries, with enormous internal problems not faced by the West. China is the world’s major manufacturing center, but largely as an assembly plant for the advanced industrial powers on its periphery and for western multinationals. That is likely to change over time. Manufacturing regularly provides the basis for innovation, often breakthroughs, as is now sometimes happening in China. One example that has impressed western specialists is China’s takeover of the growing global solar panel market, not on the basis of cheap labor but by coordinated planning and, increasingly, innovation.

But the problems China faces are serious. Some are demographic, reviewed in Science, the leading U.S. science weekly. The study shows that mortality sharply decreased in China during the Maoist years, “mainly a result of economic development and improvements in education and health services, especially the public hygiene movement that resulted in a sharp drop in mortality from infectious diseases.” This progress ended with the initiation of the capitalist reforms 30 years ago, and the death rate has since increased.

Furthermore, China’s recent economic growth has relied substantially on a “demographic bonus,” a very large working-age population. “But the window for harvesting this bonus may close soon,” with a “profound impact on development”: “Excess cheap labor supply, which is one of the major factors driving China’s economic miracle, will no longer be available.”

Demography is only one of many serious problems ahead. For India, the problems are far more severe.

Not all prominent voices foresee American decline. Among international media, there is none more serious and responsible than the London Financial Times. It recently devoted a full page to the optimistic expectation that new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels might allow the U.S. to become energy independent, hence to retain its global hegemony for a century. There is no mention of the kind of world the U.S. would rule in this happy event, but not for lack of evidence.

At about the same time, the International Energy Agency reported that, with rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use, the limit of safety will be reached by 2017 if the world continues on its present course. “The door is closing,” the IEA chief economist said, and very soon it “will be closed forever.”

Shortly before the U.S. Department of Energy reported the most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures, which “jumped by the biggest amount on record” to a level higher than the worst-case scenario anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That came as no surprise to many scientists, including the MIT program on climate change, which for years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too conservative.

Such critics of the IPCC predictions receive virtually no public attention, unlike the fringe of denialists who are supported by the corporate sector, along with huge propaganda campaigns that have driven Americans off the international spectrum in dismissal of the threats. Business support also translates directly to political power. Denialism is part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates in the farcical election campaign now in progress, and in Congress they are powerful enough to abort even efforts to inquire into the effects of global warming, let alone do anything serious about it.

In brief, American decline can perhaps be stemmed if we abandon hope for decent survival, prospects that are all too real given the balance of forces in the world.

“Losing” China and Vietnam

Putting such unpleasant thoughts aside, a close look at American decline shows that China indeed plays a large role, as it has for 60 years. The decline that now elicits such concern is not a recent phenomenon. It traces back to the end of World War II, when the U.S. had half the world’s wealth and incomparable security and global reach. Planners were naturally well aware of the enormous disparity of power, and intended to keep it that way.

The basic viewpoint was outlined with admirable frankness in a major state paper of 1948 (PPS 23). The author was one of the architects of the New World Order of the day, the chair of the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the respected statesman and scholar George Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning spectrum. He observed that the central policy goal was to maintain the “position of disparity” that separated our enormous wealth from the poverty of others. To achieve that goal, he advised, “We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and must “deal in straight power concepts,” not “hampered by idealistic slogans” about “altruism and world-benefaction.”

Kennan was referring specifically to Asia, but the observations generalize, with exceptions, for participants in the U.S.-run global system. It was well understood that the “idealistic slogans” were to be displayed prominently when addressing others, including the intellectual classes, who were expected to promulgate them.

The plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted that the U.S. would control the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British empire (including the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its commercial and industrial centers. These were not unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of power. But decline set in at once.

In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western discourse as “the loss of China” — in the U.S., with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss. The terminology is revealing. It is only possible to lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners assumed.

The “loss of China” was the first major step in “America’s decline.” It had major policy consequences. One was the immediate decision to support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony of Indochina, so that it, too, would not be “lost.”

Indochina itself was not a major concern, despite claims about its rich resources by President Eisenhower and others. Rather, the concern was the “domino theory,” which is often ridiculed when dominoes don’t fall, but remains a leading principle of policy because it is quite rational. To adopt Henry Kissinger’s version, a region that falls out of control can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” inducing others to follow the same path.

In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that the virus of independent development might infect Indonesia, which really does have rich resources. And that might lead Japan — the “superdomino” as it was called by the prominent Asia historian John Dower — to “accommodate” to an independent Asia as its technological and industrial center in a system that would escape the reach of U.S. power. That would mean, in effect, that the U.S. had lost the Pacific phase of World War II, fought to prevent Japan’s attempt to establish such a New Order in Asia.

The way to deal with such a problem is clear: destroy the virus and “inoculate” those who might be infected. In the Vietnam case, the rational choice was to destroy any hope of successful independent development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out — though history has its own cunning, and something similar to what was feared has since been developing in East Asia, much to Washington’s dismay.

The most important victory of the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto carried out massive crimes that were compared by the CIA to those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was reported accurately across the mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.

It was “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the noted liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the Times. The coup ended the threat of democracy by demolishing the mass-based political party of the poor, established a dictatorship that went on to compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, and threw the riches of the country open to western investors. Small wonder that, after many other horrors, including the near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was welcomed by the Clinton administration in 1995 as “our kind of guy.”

Years after the great events of 1965, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that it would have been wise to end the Vietnam war at that time, with the “virus” virtually destroyed and the primary domino solidly in place, buttressed by other U.S.-backed dictatorships throughout the region.

Similar procedures have been routinely followed elsewhere. Kissinger was referring specifically to the threat of socialist democracy in Chile. That threat was ended on another forgotten date, what Latin Americans call “the first 9/11,” which in violence and bitter effects far exceeded the 9/11 commemorated in the West. A vicious dictatorship was imposed in Chile, one part of a plague of brutal repression that spread through Latin America, reaching Central America under Reagan. Viruses have aroused deep concern elsewhere as well, including the Middle East, where the threat of secular nationalism has often concerned British and U.S. planners, inducing them to support radical Islamic fundamentalism to counter it.

The Concentration of Wealth and American Decline

Despite such victories, American decline continued. By 1970, U.S. share of world wealth had dropped to about 25 percent, roughly where it remains, still colossal but far below the end of World War II. By then, the industrial world was “tripolar”: US-based North America, German-based Europe and East Asia, already the most dynamic industrial region, at the time Japan-based, but by now including the former Japanese colonies Taiwan and South Korea, and more recently China.

At about that time, American decline entered a new phase: conscious self-inflicted decline. From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1 percent of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, which has been the major source of reputable data on these developments for years, is entitled “Failure by Design.” The phrase “by design” is accurate. Other choices were certainly possible. And as the study points out, the “failure” is class-based. There is no failure for the designers. Far from it. Rather, the policies are a failure for the large majority, the 99 percent in the imagery of the Occupy movements — and for the country, which has declined and will continue to do so under these policies.

One factor is the offshoring of manufacturing. As the solar panel example mentioned earlier illustrates, manufacturing capacity provides the basis and stimulus for innovation leading to higher stages of sophistication in production, design and invention. That, too, is being outsourced, not a problem for the “money mandarins” who increasingly design policy, but a serious problem for working people and the middle classes, and a real disaster for the most oppressed, African Americans, who have never escaped the legacy of slavery and its ugly aftermath, and whose meager wealth virtually disappeared after the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, setting off the most recent financial crisis, the worst so far.

[Note: Part 2 of Noam Chomsky’s discussion of American decline will be posted on Salon tomorrow.]

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