PUBLIC POLICY IN OUR TIMES
A July 4th Moment
In Public Policy in Our Times: A July 4th Moment, Manuel Hinds argues that the United States faces a pivotal crisis not simply because of authoritarian figures like “The Prince,” but because of deep societal divisions and the breakdown of liberal democratic values. Drawing parallels with past transformations like the Industrial Revolution and the decline of Rome, Hinds contends that the current "Connectivity Revolution" has created both long-term shifts in how societies operate and short-term dislocations—leaving many behind economically and fostering social resentment. This has led to “divisionism,” a dangerous political strategy that exploits hatred and identity-based conflict, threatening national unity and democracy. Hinds proposes six tasks to reverse this decline: rebuilding the American Dream through communal life; forming a civic movement to reaffirm liberal democracy; separating economic and political power; investing in human capital; rebuilding national and global networks; and redesigning institutions. He urges Americans to revive the spirit of July 4th by embracing civic responsibility, recognizing that democracy’s survival depends not on ideology but on upholding principles of justice, restraint, and mutual respect—echoing the warnings of George Washington, John Adams, and Abraham Lincoln.
“Hey Jack! I don’t like the word “Resistance” they are using to oppose The Prince. It defines such opposition in the terms established by The Prince and is, well, reactionary. It suggests that everything was perfect before The Prince escalated power, and this is not true. The Prince is there for a reason because many people believed they were on the short end of society and wanted change. Their move toward The Prince proved suicidal because his ideas are not solutions for the people but only for a small group of entrepreneurs and politicians. So, if we want a novel with true heroes, we must sketch the problems we see in the country and the ways to resolve them.
“I agree,” said Nicco. “Let me try my hand at diagnosing the problems and proposing solutions.”
Nicco started his presentation.
THE CONNECTIVITY REVOLUTION
“Similar to the Industrial Revolution, the Connectivity Revolution has dramatically transformed how we interact with one another across local communities, countries, and the world. This transformation has both temporary and lasting effects.
The Lasting Effects
“These effects stem from the nature of new technologies, as illustrated by the shift from rural to urban environments that most people experienced due to the Industrial Revolution.
“In our times, we can identify three lasting impacts of the Connectivity Revolution.
“First, the Industrial Revolution expanded our world from small local areas to nations a hundred years ago, and the Connectivity Revolution is extending this trend from countries to the entire globe.
“Second, while the Industrial Revolution increased the power of the muscle, the current transformation is increasing the power of the mind.
“Third, the Industrial Revolution focused on machines, the current one on relationships, communications and control. That is, within one generation, intellectual production associated with communications and control at the global level is becoming the primary source of high incomes.
The Temporary Effects
“Temporary effects are caused not by the characteristics of new technologies but by change itself. They are all based on the fact that not all people adjust to a technological transformation at the same speed. Some take advantage of the new technologies and increase their share of the progress made possible by them, while others only see their skills and equipment turned obsolete by the new ways of doing things. This has at least three consequences that we can see all around us: the concentration of wealth and income, the economic and financial instability and the emergence of a class of people left behind, which threatens liberal democracy.
The solution to these problems would be to educate the entire population, including the left behind. Yet, thirty or forty years have passed since this process started and nothing has been done to help them to integrate to the new era. Contrarywise, they have become a source of political instability for the entire country.
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EFFECTS
The temporary effects have left many people behind. Instead of benefiting from new technologies, they have suffered because their skills have become outdated, and they can't find jobs to replace those they lost during the country's deindustrialization.
“In another dimension, people have grown too close for comfort in their neighborhoods and across the world through social networks and economic and social connections. This weakens the institutions meant to facilitate interactions within industrial economies, pushing them toward their breaking point and threatening the survival of liberal democracy.”
The Corrosive Effect of Divisionism
“For centuries, until very recently, the United States was characterized by social unity. There were no class conflicts or collective hatreds; being part of a social or racial class did not morally define anyone. Social resentment was not a significant force. All Americans were simply Americans, and they took pride in that.
“It has only been in recent years that politics shifted toward blaming entire social identities or classes as the root of all problems—similar to what has happened in communist and Nazi fascist countries. The politics of hatred began with social identities and has caused troubling divisions across the country, weakening social cohesion. This division has split the nation. Hatred has been exploited by both the Left and the Right, with the former using 'deletions' and the latter employing other tactics. Recently, MAGA and The Prince have taken the lead, using this hatred to push their authoritarian agenda. It’s easy for them because, as everyone knows, to dominate a society you only need to divide and conquer.
“It is time to realize that the true enemy is divisionism. This is the force that must be defeated. The fact that singling out groups of people as targets of injected hatred is not viewed as extremist is a symptom of the true problem leading to a tyranny: the disintegration of society. ti
“George Washington worried about this possibility in his Farewell Address, which Alexander Hamilton and James Madison drafted for him. In this address, Washington chose divisiveness as the most important danger to the country.
“In that speech, Washington highlighted America's strong love for liberty and stressed that the unity of the federal government is essential to protect that liberty, as well as national independence, peace, safety, and prosperity. He warned that enemies—both domestic and foreign—will try to weaken this unity through subtle and persistent efforts. Therefore, he urged Americans to cherish the union deeply, to stay loyal and committed to it, to speak of it with respect, to defend it vigilantly, and to reject any efforts to divide the nation or weaken the bonds that hold it together.[1]
“What Washington described as the main danger is what is happening today. For the country to survive as the great power it is, unity must be attained—though not at the cost of the rights of groups or individuals.
“The solution is complicated and hard. People have lost the skill of debating and begin by insulting and mocking one another right away. This will not solve the world's problems. On the contrary, it will accelerate chaos, and with it, tyranny.
Blaming Minorities
“Adolf Hitler explained in his book Mein Kampf (written in the early 1920s, many years before he escalated power) the connection between divisiveness and unification:
“The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of its unified action, and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced. The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader’s following may easily begin to be dubious about the justice of their own cause if they have to face different enemies…Such uniformity intensifies their belief in the justice of their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility towards the opponent.”[2]
“Hitler’s response naturally arises from a society descending into chaos, as Germany was in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There is nothing a society fears more than chaos, and people will accept any tyrant rather than the final dissolution of chaos.
“Many respond to any mention of Hitler or strong words like chaos, noting that nobody has started to kill people in death camps in the United States. They forget that Hitler did not start his government with death camps, which came only with the Final Solution in January 1942, or with massacres in the open air as those the Nazis committed in Eastern Europe after 1941. Hitler wrote this before 1925, when he was in jail.
“The most disturbing aspect of Hitler’s words is that they can be applied by any leader, whether from the right or the left, and that, in the United States, hatred is growing on both sides. This hatred, more than any proposed policy, is the greatest threat to American Liberal Democracy and the country as a whole. While The Prince is fanning the flames and destroying the institutions of Liberal Democracy, he is not the cause of this decline. He is a symptom.
SIX TASKS
“I have singled out six tasks needed to start dealing with this threat. They can be classified in two categories. The first is lowering the temperature and reaffirming the American Dream along traditional communal lines.
Rebuilding the American Dream
“In Invertebrate Spain, José Ortega y Gasset begins his analysis of the formation and decline of nations with a quote from the great historian of Rome Theodor Mommsen: "The history of every nation, and especially of the Latin nation [Rome], is a vast system of incorporation."[3] This incorporation is not the development of a family or a clan that is getting bigger, but the articulation of different collectivities into a higher unit. Thus, Rome began as the union of two Romes, that of those who lived on the Palatine Hill and on the Quirinal, and then incorporated the Etruscans and Samnites, and then all of Italy and beyond until it formed the empire. Thus, nations grow not only in size but also in diversity. The efficient management of this diversity becomes essential to achieve growth and development.
“But, says Ortega y Gasset, along with this cohesive force that is emerging, centrifugal forces remain that try to crack the superior unity. These forces manifest as soon as the cohesive force weakens. Ortega y Gasset says:
“But Mommsen's sentence [about incorporation] is incomplete. The history of a nation is not only that of its formative and ascendant period; it is also the story of its decline. And if the former consisted of reconstructing the lines of a progressive incorporation, the latter will describe the reverse process. The history of the decline of a nation is the vast history of a disintegration.
“We must therefore become accustomed to understanding every national unity not as an inert coexistence, but as a dynamic system. The central force is as essential to its maintenance as the dispersion force. The weight of the roof, gravitating on the pilasters, is no less essential to the building than the contrary thrust, exerted by the pilasters to support the roof.
“... In every authentic incorporation, force has an adjective character. The truly substantive power that drives and nourishes the process is always a national dogma, a suggestive project of common life... When the peoples surrounding Rome are subdued, more than by the legions, they feel grafted onto the Latin tree by an illusion. Rome sounded to them in the name of a great vital enterprise where everyone could collaborate; Rome was a project of universal organization; it was a superior juridical organization, an admirable administration, a treasury of ideas received from Greece that lent a superior lustre to life, a repertoire of new feasts and better pleasures. The day Rome ceased to be this project of things to be done, the Empire was dismantled. [4]
“That is the project that is cracking in the United States and, to a large extent, in the West. In his Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Timothy Carney concludes that the greatness of America is not associated with money but with communal life.[5]
“The materialistic view of the American Dream…misses the point. The worst analyses assume that wealth or the opportunity for wealth is the American Dream…But maybe the things we think accompany the American dream are the things that really are the American Dream. What if the T-ball game, the standing-room-only high school concert, the parish potluck, and decorating the community hall for a wedding—what if those activities are not the dressings around the American Dream, but what if they are the American Dream? [6]
“Carney’s question is rhetorical, and his implied answer is a clear yes. Community life fosters support, creativity, responsibility, a desire for growth, and role models—elements essential for adapting to both current and new challenges. Even economic success amid change is connected to this sense of community, which is another way of saying social interest. Carney demonstrates how this feeling of community has diminished in places that believe the American Dream is gone.
Forming a Civic Movement to Reaffirm Liberal Democratic Principles
“In our world deeply immersed in the swamps of unhinged individualism, the twin ideas that my personal wishes are all that matter, and that these wishes are only real if they can be measured in dollars and cents, lead us to believe that imagining the United States and the world at large can be moved by ideals is just as realistic as a fairy tale. Yet, this is not the first time that the United States has confronted a severe threat to its survival, and in the four occasions it has faced them it has gone out by the power of ideals, and the results have been very concrete. The United States responded to these crises—the one that led to independence and the creation of the United States; that of the Civil War; that of the Gilded Age, brought about by the first stage of the Industrial Revolution; and that of the Great Depression—with civic actions that went much beyond party politics. They rebuilt the nation in every one of these crises.
“The situation closely resembles that of the Gilded Age, characterized by wealth and income inequality, the unification of political and economic power that threatens democracy, widespread corruption, and the rise of an underclass that could fracture the country's unity. In those years, a civic movement called the Progressives took an informal shape and unified people all over the country, including Democrats and Republicans, politicians, professionals, entrepreneurs, and workers, in a series of actions that emerged from the grassroots up and resulted in the improvement of basic education, labor legislation, civic reorganization, and institutional strengthening. There were progressive Democratic and Republican presidents, they proliferated in the cabinets of both parties, and they redirected the country in the direction of Liberal Democracy. They were not perfect; they made mistakes, but they saved the country.”[7]
Separate Economic and Political Powers
“The dangers of mixing the two have been evident in every case of absolutist governments throughout history. The fact that it doesn’t matter which way the two powers are fused to create a tyranny—the government taking control of the economy or the private sector buying influence in government—was shown by communism and Nazism. Today, the harm this union causes can be seen even in the United States. This should be stopped at its root: preventing the buying of elections, something Elon Musk has shown can be very effective.
Investing in Human Capital
“In the Industrial Age, when workers’ education was not considered crucial for productivity, people argued, referring to investment in human capital, ‘first we must accumulate wealth, and then we can allocate part of it to education and health.’ Today, in the knowledge economy, wealth cannot be created without education and health. Try to manage Apple and all the major companies of our time with people whose median level of education matches that of industrial workers in the 1950s, and you'll see that the United States can no longer ignore the fact that the country cannot sustain its income and status without comprehensive education and health support. Education for everyone is no longer just a social ideal or the concern of those who will be educated; it is the responsibility of the entire nation. A society without machines could not advance in the Industrial Age. A society without an educated population, all of it, cannot progress in our days — it cannot even sustain itself.
Rebuilding National and International Networks and Redesigning Institutions
“Doing all these things and leveraging new technologies requires rebuilding the strong ties that connected the United States with the rest of the world. These ties include not just economic and political interests but also soft power—the influence of culture that can only be gained through the United States' integration into the world’s cultural landscape. This calls for new institutions rooted in traditional liberal democratic values, which have served the world so well over the past two centuries.
A 1776 MOMENT
All of this is a full plate, but we need to think about it while considering two things. First, if these actions are not taken, not only the United States but the entire West will fall apart. When the two halves of the country believe they would humiliate themselves if they tried to understand each other's perspectives, they are essentially saying they don’t want a united United States. The country cannot avoid disintegrating when all its people want to break apart. Another point to consider is that the country has faced crises before, and it has recovered to a point where individual rights and communities built on good faith thrive.
“Many seem to believe that the permanent dimension of the public policy structure should concern the ideological orientation of the country, as when saying that fascism and communism will be prohibited, and that the temporary dimension should deal with the means (procedures), which may be allowed to change. Yet, all the values and principles of liberal democracy deal with means, not with ends. Liberal democracy is a system of means. It defines the things that will be permitted and prohibited when pursuing the ends. The most important principle of liberal democracy is that the end does not justify the means. The country may move in the direction its people want, but it must respect the rights of its individuals.
“Thus, the ends must be defined politically. The permanent institutions—the Constitution, the organization of political power and justice—are in the realm of the means, while the temporary dimensions are in the realm of the ends. The politicians will be in charge of defining how far to the right or the left policies should be within the means approved in the Constitution (due process, checks and balances, separation of economic and political powers, and so on).
“Mistakes will be made. Resentments will have to be forgotten. The spirit of July 4th, so close today, must be recovered.
“On June 6, 1826, John Adams wrote a letter in response to an invitation to dine with the citizens of his beloved hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In a short letter to the organizing committee, he excused himself on grounds of poor health but then offered this piece of his wisdom about the American Revolution:
A Memorable epoch in the annals of the human race; destined, in future history, to form the brightest or the blackest page, according to the use or abuse of those political institutions by which, they shall, in time to come, be Shaped, by the human mind.[8]
“Like Lincoln would do eighty-seven years later in Gettysburg, Adams put the responsibility for the outcomes of the new American social order squarely on the shoulders of American citizens. He and his comrades did not pretend to have created a perfect system, a static structure, a utopia that automatically would direct its citizens to do the right thing and attain perfection.
“Having been conceived, as Lincoln said in Gettysburg, in liberty, the entire social order was designed to guarantee precisely the freedom that would allow its citizens to act in good or bad faith, to make mistakes and recover from them, or not. In that short paragraph, Adams made it clear that the social order would be flexible by stating that the institutions they had created would be subject to change in an unforeseeable future. They knew that crises would come and the world would change, requiring institutional transformations, and that keeping the country on the right track defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would require work and sacrifice by generations to come.”
“That’s it.”
…..
Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Washington’s Farewell Address 1796, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
[2] Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Hurst and Blackett, Ltd, London, 1939, pp. 102.
[3] José Ortega y Gasset, España Invertebrada y OtrosEnsayos, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2020, pp. 36.
[4] José Ortega y Gasset, España Invertebrada y Otros Ensayos, Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2020, pp. 40 and 43. Emphasis by Ortega y Gasset.
[5] Timothy Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Harper, New York, 2019, Kindle Edition, pp. 62.
[6] Timothy Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, Harper, New York, 2019, Kindle Edition, pp. xiii.
[7] For the discussion of the crises caused by technological transformations and the way the country came out from them, see Manuel Hinds, The Triumph of the Flexible Society: The Connectivity Revolution and Resistance to Change, Praeger, 2003; and Manuel Hinds, In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal a Divided America, Charlesbridge, 2021. For the analysis of the Me society and the impact of the progressives in overcoming the Gilded Age crisis, see Robert Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garret, The Upswing: How we came together a century ago and how we can do it again, Swift, 2020.
[8] Letter from John Adams to John Whitney, 7 June 1826, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-8023