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helpful, therefore, if responsible intellectuals and policymakers stopped rearranging the same boxes in different managerial patterns to advance specific causes and started understanding that, as our institutions of government have become dysfunctional, so, too, has our nation state ceased to exist in any meaningful way.
This is not a new argument. As early as 1993, Kenichi Ohmae argued:
The nation state has become an unnatural, even dysfunctional, unit for organizing human activity and managing economic endeavor in a borderless world. It represents no genuine, shared community of economic interests; it defines no meaningful flows of economic activity. In fact, it overlooks the true linkages and synergies that exist among often disparate populations by combining important measures of human activity at the wrong level of analysis.45
Might this very structure then be contributing to our collective problems, as it suggests the nation state has devolved into a situation where the component part known as the state has suppressed the dignity of individuals and groups within the nation? This certainly supports arguments made by Demott, Galbraith, Thurow, and others, who predicted in the 1990s the state organization itself was falling victim to oligarchical interests that stood ready to strip the country of its wealth and
stature by suppressing minority interests to
their plan.
It has already been mentioned how corporate interests and lobbying efforts are hollowing out the middle class; but it is also troublesome that our policy analysts seem incapable of providing answers or solutions to our collective problems.
It is also concerning that those to whom citizens and others might turn in hopes of reform–namely, policy analysts–are, oftentimes, in the employ of think tanks who represent special interests. Eric Lipton and Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore point out in their research policy solutions put forth to address our nation’s ills are more often than not skewed by by the interests of individuals
corporations whose donations finance their research and publications.. Given such concerns, might it be better to think of alternative theories and governance structures that would get to the core of our problems instead of populist, globalist, or nationalist paradigms?
Returning to Our Roots: A Society in Search of New Ideas
Interestingly enough, such circumstances leave America in much in the same position it found itself during the revolutionary war. At that time, revolutionary war leaders argued England had violated the social contract; but equally, they argued, contrary to the theories of Hobbes and Locke and their own personal experiences, this did not necessarily place them in a “state of nature” of one against all. Instead, there existed, through common social and civil arrangements, a political society that needed new institutional forms to give it expression.
As Forrest MacDonald demonstrated, in a work entitled Novus Ordo Seclorum,47 American
society and its corresponding forms of government underwent significant changes from the time it was a colony to the time when
it became a constitutionally structured republic.
If it is true that the nation state may fundamentally be contributing to our troubles, might it be better to think of alternative theories and governance structures that would get to the core of our problems instead of populist, globalist, or nationalist paradigms?