Wildly exaggerated rhetoric is one of the most visible manifestations of how dysfunctional U.S. politics have become. Donald Trump clearly leads the pack of political candidates in this, but nonsensical and inflammatory claims bubble out of all sides of the political spectrum.
Many have an apocalyptic tone. If this candidate is elected, that law enacted, or some Supreme Court appointment made (or not made), America’s economy and government will be at an end. When you hear this sort of nonsense, reflect on a sage observation economist Adam Smith made 229 years ago next month.
In 1777, John Sinclair, a bright and civic minded young Scottish peer, told Smith that the recent surrender of British general John Burgoyne at Saratoga, N.Y., would “ruin” the United Kingdom. Smith responded that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” By that he meant that nations like the United Kingdom are far more resilient than alarmists and demagogues assert. This can be applied today. Nations survive setbacks that may seem catastrophic in the immediate aftermath. Often they end up thriving.
That proved true then. Burgoyne’s surrender was a military disaster because it motivated the French to join the colonists’ winning team, tipping the balance toward independence for the 13 colonies that became the United States. That loss was a blow to British pride and caused short-term economic dislocations. But Britain was on the cusp of a century and a half of its greatest economic and military power, a period in which its living standards would rise greatly. Smith was right. Sinclair had been overwrought.
Despite nonsense to the contrary, the United States is a great nation and it will continue to be for some time, regardless of who wins elections in a few weeks or the years to come. We each may have clear preferences in the races on which we will vote. I certainly do. But U.S. political, economic and civil institutions are broad-based and deeply-rooted. For over two centuries, they have survived great political and economic turbulence, and they will survive much more. Any single president may, on balance, do good or harm, but it is nearly impossible for one to ruin our nation.
Why does such rhetoric find willing ears? One reason is that many people — and candidates — err in identifying causation in history. They assign too much weight to the effects of government on the economy. They believe a president has far more power over the economy than any actually does. And they believe our country has much more control over events elsewhere in the globe than it does.
If one looks back at the sweep of U.S. economic history from before independence, there are important trends: the inexorable movement westward, the development of canals and railroads, technological innovation in agriculture, and the development of steel and other heavy industry.
Discrete actions of government played a role in all of these, from the Northwest Ordinance that fostered settlement of “the old Northwest” to the Morrill Act of 1862 that established land-grant colleges. But such government policies pale in importance compared with broader forces of demography, technology, economic culture and factors outside our border, like the development of Britain’s cotton textile industry. One now can argue that particular laws or policies pushed development toward one path or another, but these were secondary factors. And many of the most important effects of government policy were unintended and even unforeseeable at the time they were enacted.
The role of presidents in all of this was also limited. Yes, our financial system might have developed somewhat differently if Andrew Jackson had not vetoed the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States. Westward expansion might have followed a somewhat different path if Jackson and Zachary Taylor had lost their respective elections. The Panama Canal might not have been built for years if an assassin had not boosted Teddy Roosevelt into the White House. If William Taft had won in 1912, instead of Woodrow Wilson, getting a central bank might have been delayed.
However, in all such things that we identify with a specific president, the details were far more complex. Congress always plays a role. Key congressional leaders, now unknown to most U.S. citizens, often played a larger role than presidents. Indeed, up to the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, Congress, rather than the president, was the keystone of year-to-year governance. In the gaps between Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, no single president effected much change in the broad course of U.S. history.
Nearly everyone falls into a post-hoc fallacy of assuming that because something happened while a specific person occupied the Oval Office, that person caused it. This is seldom the case.
Herbert Hoover’s response to the developing Great Depression was hapless, but Wall Street’s crash seven months after his inauguration would have occurred anyway and he had no control over the Federal Reserve’s disastrous mismanagement of the money supply. Both these far outweighed what the president could have done. Yet so-called “Hooverville” encampments existed during his administration. And note that the Depression lasted well into the progressive Roosevelt administration that followed.
The strongest period of employment growth of the last 70 years was during Jimmy Carter’s administration, but that was overwhelmingly due to a flood of baby boomers reaching working age, not from anything he initiated. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama presided over the periods of the highest unemployment in the same post-war era, but in both cases, it was due to recessions already under way when they first swore their oaths. One can laud or fault the wisdom of their specific policy initiatives, but in none of these cases did such initiatives have nearly the long-term effects on the economy that many think.
On foreign policy, a political variety of enthocentricity dominates views on both left and right in our country. If the Brazilian military ousted president Joao Goulart in 1964 or insurrection broke out in Libya in 2011, it must have been because of something our country did. In both cases, events were well under way regardless of U.S. policy.
The successive dramatic economic growths of Japan and China, the creation of the European Union, and the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc all were due to domestic historical forces within the countries in question and not to something we did. All these have had effects on our domestic economy, and U.S. foreign and economic policies had some effect at the margins but were always secondary. And there were few instances when a single U.S. president had more than a contributing role in shaping long-term U.S. policy.
Yes, champions of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan argue that these presidents steered the helm during “tides in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood” did lead to historic change globally. And yes, a potential president in thrall to Vladimir Putin, who is derisive of our long-standing defense relationships and who vows to reverse 80 years of bipartisan trade policy could do great harm.
But in the end, Smith will be proven right. It does take a great deal to ruin a nation. Whichever candidate wins, even with favorable majorities in both houses of Congress, our nation will survive. Whether it will also thrive out of this period depends much more on our collective willingness to cooperate as citizens than on the outcome of any particular election.