How to Maintain a Stable Government
Robust institutions must constantly be guarded from elite capture. Diverting the government away from its public mission is a reliable way to radicalize its citizens.
It’s one thing to develop a government that can serve its people, but maintaining it is a never-ending project.
Francis Fukuyama’s book Political Order and Political Decay explores the ways that modern governments have been able to develop and endure. He also shows how elites capture state institutions for their benefit and erode the kinds of impersonal structures that ensure every citizen is treated equally. Fukuyama also has a specific definition of political order in mind:
“Political order is not just about constraining abusive governments. It is more often about getting governments to actually do the things expected of them, like providing citizen security, protecting property rights, making available education and public health services, and building the infrastructure that is necessary for private economic activity to occur.”
Public schools and robust public health responses are only some of the things that citizens expect from their governments. Much opposition to things like public school funding comes from dissatisfaction with the state of public education rather than a belief that the government shouldn’t be involved at all. (Although, that point of view has its adherents, too.)
The aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crisis also shows how government failures can pave the way for more extreme leaders who will target traditional institutions. Voters noticed that banks recieved government bailouts while support for ordinary people was lacking. The percieved capture of institutions by the most elite class paved the way for Donald Trump to not only come to power, but to use it as an instrument of revenge against the government.
Why US Government Became Stable in the First Place
One of the reasons the United States had stable institutions in the first place was its ability to bring people together under a single banner. Fukuyama explained:
“Americans in some sense worshipped their Constitution, which embodied universalist values making the assimilation of new, culturally different immigrants relatively easy. As Seymour Martin Lipset used to point out, in the United States one could be accused of being ‘un-American’ in a way that one could not be ‘un-German’ or ‘un-Greek,’ since Americanism constituted a set of values that could be adopted voluntarily rather than an inherited ethnic characteristic.”
Americans can subscribe to the ideals articulated in the Constitution. Latvia, which has a similar constitution to the United States, has a large ethnic Latvian population. That additional loyalty to an in-group means that immigrants can be accused of being un-Latvian for having a different background.
Being able to remove that layer of loyalty made room for Americans to be loyal to the state being built alongside immigrants from around the world. It’s one less point of tension that created a buffer between civil conflicts like the Balkanization of the 1990s.
It doesn’t prevent all violence—the United States still experienced a civil war—but its a source of stability that contrasts with other parts of the world that have struggled to build stable governments.
Coming Out of Colonialism
Large parts of sub-Saharan Africa were colonized by European governments without any investment from the Europeans. They got what they wanted from these countries and left. That approach had important consequences for post-colonial stability:
“Due to the late start of colonialism and its short duration, the colonial rulers succeeded in undermining existing traditional sources of authority while failing to implant anything like a modern state that could survive the transition to independence…Colonialism on the cheap left Africa with very little by way of modern political institutions when the Europeans decided to leave in the decades after World War II.”
In contrast, the British invested in government infrastructure in India. It was a civil service that Indians worked in during the colonial years. After the British finally left, there were experienced civil servants and the outline of a government for India to run.
That doesn’t mean that colonialism was a gift to India. The British could’ve brought railroads to India without stealing the country’s wealth or suppressing its culture. What India does show is the difference between investing in a government and failing to do so.
Getting the government to do what its people want is difficult. Institutions may be flawed, but they shouldn’t be taken for granted, either. It’s a fine line to walk that will be more difficult to balance on as voters continue to feel the world’s instability and take it out on leaders who fail to ground them.