WHEN WAS THE ROAD OPEN TO THE ENEMY?
WHO IS THE ENEMY?
In "When Was the Road Open to the Enemy," Manuel Hinds explores how societies collapse not primarily due to direct attacks from external enemies but through internal decay that leaves them vulnerable. Drawing on historical examples and economic theory, Hinds argues that civilizations often fall because they abandon the principles, institutions, and values that made their communal lives strong, thus becoming divisive and filled with hatred. The "enemy" in this sense finds the road open only after a society has weakened itself by replacing social cohesion and civic responsibility with divisiveness and mutual hatred. The essay serves as a warning against self-inflicted decline and as a call to preserve the foundational elements that sustain freedom, individual rights, and communal spirit.
Finally, Hinds shows that all the conditions for a collapse are present in the current United States. They will act if no measures are taken to prevent the fall.
THE BOOKS
“Hey Jack!” said Pere, entering, as usual, full of enthusiasm at Dante’s Café, interrupting whoever was talking at that moment, “we are falling into the mistake of this era, dismantling events by the disciplines we use to study each of them—these are economic facts, these others the political ones, those others the anthropological aspects, and son—while the facts we are facing are not fragmented but part of a whole that follows a different logic from that of the parts, things dragged by the currents of turbulent rivers coming together at a single point.
“These currents are not new and should not surprise us. The signs were all there from a long time ago. In this session, I will quote liberally from three books that saw the great crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy we are now living through more than two decades in advance. All were written by Manuel Hinds. They were based on long-term analysis, not on reading a crystal ball.
“Even in the oldest of these books, that published in 2003, the author recognized the similarity of the new world with the first few decades of the twentieth century, and in particular the 1930s; identified the danger of new fundamentalisms emerging not just in the Middle East but also in the West; the drastic deterioration of the income and wealth distribution in the most advanced countries in the world, especially the United States; the return of the financial crises in the developed world, absent since the Great Depression; the polarization of politics; the emotional destruction of free trade and the global order, and the mortal threat to democracy. In all cases, the author had problems finding a publisher, because most people, even in 2021 and 2024, could not believe that a crisis of this magnitude could be waiting for capitalism and liberal democracy. How come these problems were not perceived?
I quote from these books everything contained in the following discussion of the current problems.[1]
THE QUESTION
‘We are not addressing the questions Naum Korzhavin posed so rightly in the first stanza in this poem Little Tanya:
How could you allow such woe to take place?
How could it happen despite your deeds?
In what dammed year or month
Was the road open to the enemy- -
Naum Korzhavin[2]
“The first question to understand what is happening and when it began is, who is the enemy?
WHO IS THE ENEMY?
Carl Schmitt, a German constitutionalist lawyer who thought Hitler’s government was legitimate and who is now back in vogue, clearly identified the condition that can kill liberal democracy: divisiveness, which when taken to extremes results in social and political chaos. This is what killed democracy in the interwar Italy and in the Weimar Republic, and destroyed the possibility of creating democracy in Russia, China, and so many other places.
He has not been the only one who has made this argument. George Washington worried about this possibility. He was not the brightest of the Founding Fathers. He swam in waters populated by geniuses like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. Yet he occupies an unparalleled place in the history of the country. Curiously, he was not subject to envy in his times. His colleagues gave him his exalted position from the very beginning. He occupied this place not because he was intelligent, which he was, or courageous, which he also was, but because he was wise. His peers recognized him as irreplaceable in the foundation of the new country.
His wisdom can be found in his decisions, in his mediations among his fellow Founding Fathers, and in his Farewell Address, which Alexander Hamilton and James Madison drafted for him. In this address, Washington chose divisiveness as the most critical danger to the country. Bear with me the old-fashioned English, which though awkward today, conveys meanings that a more direct language cannot. He was telling his fellow citizens the gist of what he had learned could determine the success or the failure of the new democracy. He did not worry for the love of liberty, which he took for granted in the American people. He worried about unity.
Interwoven as is the love of liberty with every ligament of your hearts, no recommendation of mine is necessary to fortify or confirm the attachment. The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. [3]
What Washington described as the main danger is what is happening today. The sacred ties that linked together the various parts of American society throughout its history have been cut in the last few decades, posing the most dangerous threat to it.
WHAT ROADS ARE WE OPENING TODAY?
Early in the afternoon of November 18, 1863, a tall, lanky, ungainly man stood up in a landscape of rolling hills in Pennsylvania to deliver a short address. He wanted to summarize the essence of the history of his country—past, present and future—in a few words that would also spell out the rationale for the war that was bleeding it. In an unforgettable first paragraph, he chiseled, as in rock, the concepts of liberty and equality as fundamental to the nation:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
In this extraordinary speech, Lincoln portrayed American history as an eternally unfinished business, a work that would continue to be in progress through the ages, a struggle to ensure that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people would evolve and change in accordance with circumstances—but would not die. In this approach he followed the path of the Founding Fathers, who saw the social order they were creating not as a static framework but as a dynamic vessel that would lead the United States into an extraordinary adventure of freedom, democracy, and equality. Like all adventures, this grand experiment could produce good or bad results, depending on what Americans did with their free lives.
Having been conceived, as Lincoln said, 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. 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.
By choosing freedom over direct authority, and flexibility to adjust and correct over a search for a perfect utopia that would remain unchanged through time, the Founding Fathers designed an incredibly adjustable and resilient social order. No other political system from that period survived without change into the twenty-first century — except the one they established in the United States.
Loose enough to allow for unprecedented freedom, the American social order has resisted three great crises, each followed by momentous and unforeseeable changes that radically transformed the life of the country. The crisis of the 1770s and 80s led to the creation of the institutional setting of American liberal democracy, the social order that would hold the country together through the first stage of the Industrial Revolution. This social order then survived the second crisis, the Civil War, and with substantial institutional changes prepared the country to absorb successfully the second stage of the Industrial Revolution, driven by heavy machinery, electricity, the internal combustion engine, and ultimately air travel and advanced telecommunications. Of course, Lincoln did not know this change was coming, but he trusted the flexibility of the spirit of freedom to handle whatever might follow.
The third crisis, the Great Depression, again put the US in danger of being split apart, not geographically but socially, economically, and politically. The worst economic disaster in known history pushed people in the US and throughout the world to consider changing the basis of liberal democracy, abandoning freedom for stability and perpetual dynamism for the static order of tyrannies. Many countries moved in these directions with disastrous results. The United States sailed into this dark storm not knowing what it would find on the other side, yet continuing to trust that the legacy of freedom, equality, and individual rights inherited from the Founding Fathers and maintained by generations since would keep its citizens safe and creative while navigating these treacherous waters.
The sailing was not easy. Production and employment fell by a quarter in the early 1930s, recovered only weakly in the middle years of the decade, and then again plunged in 1937-38. It seemed that the country had lost its knack of creating wealth in the midst of freedom. In 1937, when the country, after a weak recovery, was sinking into a depression within the Great Depression, Henry Morgenthau Jr., the treasury secretary, feeling the fear taking hold of the country again, told President Roosevelt that his son had asked him what exactly would be the correct New Deal response to this second floundering. What had the New Deal achieved, exactly?
Morgenthau told Roosevelt that he had told his son that “the United States had come through this terrific turmoil and…the individual in this country still had the right to think, talk, and worship as he wished.”[4] This important point was the essence of the American Dream, which had remained unaltered since the inception of the country.
Yet the crisis did not end there. There were still eight years of economic hardship and world war to endure. But by that time it was already clear that the social order created by the Founding Fathers had succeeded again, and that the Big Adventure was progressing toward ever greater triumph. The world that emerged from World War II was radically different from that which had preceded the Great Depression. Again, the country’s institutional setting changed to accommodate this new world, which witnessed the United States becoming the most powerful country on the planet. The vessel invented by the Founding Fathers had delivered what was expected from it, not automatically, but because the people had trusted it and fought for it.
A fourth crisis is brewing. The United States, in fact the entire world, is again facing “times that try men’s souls.” Like the first three crises, this one is emerging from deep changes taking place in society, so deep that they demand changes in the institutional setting. As it happened in the last two, those of the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1920s and 30s, the current crisis is being driven by a technological revolution that is deeply altering the relationships between different members and strata of society. And again, doubts about the ability of liberal democracy to face these changes without breaking are becoming increasingly common.
This book is a defense of that noble vessel, liberal democracy, which has served well not just the United States but many other countries, the most advanced in the world. Not just the vessel but also the entire conception of life as an adventure that cannot be predicted or controlled, only sailed in full freedom and in equality with all our fellow human beings. I do it based on two reasons. First, the memory of all those who gave their lives, not just in so many battlefields but also in their working places, their homes, and communities to be able to transfer the baton of freedom that they had received from their parents to the next generation. Seen from today’s perspective, the genius of Lincoln in Gettysburg was to give an unending perspective of this process of baton transferring, when he said,
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
His words apply as much today as in 1863. The honored dead are all the preceding generations that kept the ideals of liberal democracy as their compass in their journeys not only in the United States but in all other liberal democracies. They have relived the lives of the Founding Fathers as they have adapted themselves to differing circumstances in order to keep the nation’s vessel on the course of freedom, equality, and individual rights. In this sense, the nation has been founded as many times as there have been generations, all of which have kept intact the sacred legacy. Our generation cannot be the one that ends this ennobling tradition.
But there is another fundamental reason to defend liberal democracy. As during the previous crises, liberal democracy remains the best social order in the face of dramatic change and crisis, not just because it protects the rights of the individual, but also because it is the most flexible and creative system, the best to deal with uncertainty—and not with false sense of security, but with the true security that creativity and the ability to correct its mistakes give when the vessel is about to enter a dark storm.
DIVISIVENESS
American politics has been progressively dominated by what the philosopher John Rawls called comprehensive doctrines — doctrines made up of overarching views of what should be done to improve society in all its dimensions. When such doctrines become “unreasonable,” their believers have a predetermined answer to every question, and demand that their ideas, and theirs alone, should determine the direction of social action in each and every dimension. Comprehensive doctrines, especially unreasonable ones, have not typically been part of American political thought and behavior.[5]
Such doctrines have a long tradition in Europe, where philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche provided an intellectually coherent basis for communism and Nazism, respectively. In the United States today, these doctrines have been structured based not on philosophical constructs but instead as agglomerations of single-issue movements, each of which demands total support for its ideas in exchange for its own support of the ideas of all the other members of the same agglomeration. This tendency has made these comprehensive doctrines extremely rigid – and unreasonable. Ideas that some of the constituent groups would have been willing to negotiate because they were not central to their welfare must be defended unyieldingly because they are central to the interests of other groups in the same coalition. Since nothing is negotiable, each party tries to impose its comprehensive order on the rest of the population. The result is a polarization in American culture to a degree unprecedented since the 1930s, possibly without any comparable precedent.
Broadly speaking, there are two main comprehensive doctrines in the United States, one associated with conservative and the other with so-called progressive attitudes. These two attitudes have always existed in the country, but they were not strictly defined in all dimensions of life, so that generally conservative and generally progressive people could easily agree on many specific issues. Also, not all generally conservative people shared the same opinion on any conceivable issue. The same happened with progressives. Now, conservatives and progressives attach themselves to their respective comprehensive doctrines so closely that in practically all important issues the country has been split in half.
One of the results of this polarization is that large numbers of people on both sides of the ideological spectrum no longer want to elect middle-of-the-road, or centrist, politicians. Rather, they support determined fanatics. And they ask from them total ideological consistency. Even if the current comprehensive doctrines do not have an ideological basis as explicit as communism or Nazi-fascism, they have the same practical implications: they expect people to accept their ideas in their entirety, without exception. And hatred is quite visible in their attitudes, their language, and their actions. Predictions of civil war, something unheard of for almost a century in the US, have become frequent. These predictions are wildly exaggerated, but their existence shows the temperature of the emotional exchange.
And there we see the enemy coming, identified by Naum Korzhavin in the stanzas that follow those I quoted above. After asking when the road was open to the enemy, he continues:
That sly phrase ‘In the name of’
Meaning that everything is allowable
If, in theory, it leads to the good.
Evil in the name of good!
Who could invent such nonsense!
Even in the darkest day!
Even in the bloodiest struggle!
If evil is encouraged,
It triumphs on earth- -
Not in the name of something
but in itself.
That is the fountainhead of the ominous whirlwinds now presaging tragedies like those of the first half of the twentieth century. Evil in the name of good. Intolerance. Justifying the evil means by the supposedly good ends, which cannot be good if they are to be reached through evil, which will contaminate whatever is attained. The Prince is entitled to have his own opinions and to defend them in a liberal, democratic way. He is not to impose them on half the country´s population. The same is true of his opposition. Liberal democracy and freedom do not impose limits on the ends. They are about the means used to attain them.
OUR 1776 MOMENT
Our challenges are similar to those faced by the Founding Fathers in 1776 as they worked to design a new society that should live in freedom and progress in a future they could not foresee. At that moment they were not looking for policies but for institutions best suited to attain their objectives over the long life of the nation.
Thus, we are faced with a 1776 moment. Our challenge is to create the pillars that will structure social life during the twenty-first century without knowing what challenges this century will pose. To grasp the nature of our quest, we must understand what differentiates societies that react positively to the dissolution of the old order and those that react negatively to it. We must also understand the effects of change itself in the social order.
As the famous economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote, “Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in the tempestuous seasons they simply tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”[6] We shouldn’t look at the calm that follows the storm, but at the storm itself, which is the process of economic, social, and political actions and reactions that the Industrial Revolution triggered in the industrializing nations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which the Connectivity Revolution is triggering in our times. In the midst of tempests, ships may navigate upstream and end up miles away from where they should have rested had they just followed the flow of the river in calm weather.
As it was the case with the Industrial Revolution, our current storm is the result of a profound technological transformation. How we respond to that revolution could be the key to creating a flexible, horizontal social order in the spirit of the Founding Fathers, or it could result in a vertical social order capable of the destruction of liberty and equality. Look at the political manipulation of data, the misuse of social media, fake news, and even the creation of parallel versions of political realities spanning not just a few instances of false stories but the entire political environment. Also look at the reaction of The Prince and his enablers who do not care about the rights of people who think differently from them. Confusion and destructiveness do not arise from the technologies. They arise from the tensions of the transformation. They are responses to change.
WHO IS THE ENEMY, AGAIN?
Certainly, we can identify the events that created the turbulent economic, political, and social flows and the individuals who threw us into them. But they are not causes of our disintegration. They are symptoms of it. People like The Prince and the individuals who mount campaigns to impose their ideas by deleting other people in social networks and other social milieus will always exist. We will always have turbulent problems in life. How we react to them will determine the difference.
Considering it this way, we face two fundamental enemies: divisiveness and intolerance. They are not external to us; they exist within us.
Arnold, who you know, presented these ideas in three quotations. The first one refers to the most important trend in our transformation: the unstoppable development of communications, which brings the world together, even if we don’t want to. Arnold noted this trend in these words:
Industrialization, like Democracy, is intrinsically cosmopolitan in its operation...Finding the World divided into small economic units, industrialization set to work, a hundred and fifty years ago, to re-shape the economic structure of the World in two ways, both leading in the direction of world unity. It sought to make the economic units fewer and bigger, and also to lower the barriers between them. [7]
The difficulties encountered by The Prince when attempting to uncouple the globalized economy from communications demonstrate the strength of this current. Not even the most repressive regimes can achieve such decoupling.
Arnold expressed the second current in this way:
We conclude that a given series of responses to successive challenges is to be interpreted as a manifestation of growth if, as the series proceeds, the action tends to shift from the field of an external environment physical or human to the for intérieur of the growing personality of civilization. In so far as this grows and continues to grow, it has to reckon less and less with challenges delivered by external forces and demanding responses on an outer battlefield, and more and more with challenges that are presented from itself to itself in an inner arena.[8]
Then, when analyzing the reasons for the collapse of civilizations, he summarized them as resulting from three events:
…the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole. [9]
All three are acting in the United States at this moment. Nobody could argue that the dominant minority, with its desire to force society to return to the 1950s, is creative or provokes the mimesis necessary to guide the country in harmony. The loss of social unity is evident.
Of course, no historical law mandates that this process must continue until the country collapses. The country is free, at least today, and can reverse the process through a change of heart in individuals. How to do it is a matter for other essays.
Will we have to go through wars and domestic conflicts like those of the twentieth century? Of course, we don’t know. But the answers we find in history provide a stern warning about the dangers lurking in our future, dangers that we thought had disappeared with the twentieth century when, in fact, they were just hiding, waiting for the next turn in history. These answers are only obliquely related to economics. They are anchored in values and culture, which, in turn, give shape to institutions, both economic and non-economic. As it has been in the past, it will be in the future. Our values will shape the future. We will have nobody to blame but ourselves if we fail. That is the essence, the spirit of liberal democracy.
“That is a good basis to start the discussion,” said Nicco, and they all assented.
…..
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. His website is manuelhinds.com
[1] Manuel Hinds, The Triumph of the Flexible Society: The Connectivity Revolution and Resistance to Change, Westport, Connecticut, Praeger, 2003; Manuel Hinds, In Defense of Liberal Democracy: What We Need to Do to Heal A Divided America, Watertown, Charlesbridge Publishing Inc., 2021; Manuel Hinds, Nuevo Orden Mundial: La reconfiguración del mundo tras las guerras en Ucrania y Medio Oriente, Mexico, Penguin Random House, 2024.
[2]Naum Korzhavin, Little Tanya, quoted by Alexander S. Tsipko in Is Stalinism Really Dead?, pp. 41.
[3] Washington’s Farewell Address 1796, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
[4] Quoted by Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2007, pp. 341.
[5] John Rawls, Political Liberalism: Expanded Edition, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, Kindle Edition, Locations 164-175.
[6] John Maynard Keynes, The Tract on Monetary Reform, MacMillan and Co., London 1924, available in http://delong.typepad.com/keynes-1923-a-tract-on-monetary-reform.pdf.
[7]Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridged Edition by D.C. Somervell, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1946, Volume I, pp. 287-288.
[8] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement, 2 vols., by D. C. Somervell, Vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 208.
[9] Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement in two volumes by D. C. Somervell, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1957, pp. 246.