As a young man, author and blogger Dmitri Orlov witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now living in the United States, Orlov detects many of the same signs of economic, social and political disintegration that he saw in his homeland during the late ’80s and early ’90s. I’ve recently re-read Orlov’s book, “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.” It’s an eye-opening book. Borrowing from the famed five stages of grief described by psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Orlov has defined what he calls the “Five Stages of Collapse:”
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, “The Mountain People”). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago”).
Whatever your view of Orlov’s “Five Stages” or how it may apply to the United States, it is clear (to me, at least) that we’re at the vector intersection of multiple converging crises, from the immediate threats of debt, default and depression; to the ongoing problems of war, terrorism, and energy insecurity; to the gathering storms of climate change and global resource scarcity. The fact that few people today, on either side of the political divide, believe in the capacity of political elites to deal effectively with these problems points to a deeper, more profound crisis: the collapse of institutional legitimacy.
Legitimacy is to a political system what investor confidence is to a financial system: the glue that holds the entire edifice together. In the words of political philosopher Dolf Sternberger, “legitimacy is the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right.” In his groundbreaking work on democratic government, Political Man, American political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote:
The stability of any given democracy depends not only on economic development but also upon the effectiveness and the legitimacy of its political system. Effectiveness means actual performance, the extent to which the system satisfies the basic functions of government as most of the population and such powerful groups within it as big business or the armed forces see them. Legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society. The extent to which contemporary democratic political systems are legitimate depends in large measure upon the ways in which the key issues which have historically divided the society have been resolved. While effectiveness is primarily instrumental, legitimacy is evaluative. Groups regard a political system as legitimate or illegitimate according to the way in which its values fit with theirs.
Max Weber, the German sociologist and economist, identified three sources of political legitimacy: charismatic, as in the legitimacy conferred on populist dictators; traditional, as in the legitimacy conferred on monarchs by long-entrenched habits of mind; and rational/legal, as in the legitimacy conferred on secular democratic systems based on the rule of law, equal representation, and other democratic procedural values.
Political legitimacy in the United States rests on the deep attachment of the American people to their Constitution (rational/legal), as well as the mythological superstructure embedded in conventional interpretations of the nation’s founding and history (traditional). The general precondition for political legitimacy in the United States was uniquely defined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, when he wrote: “That Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government …”
The key phrase in Jefferson’s famous passage, above, is “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends.” Today’s crisis of institutional legitimacy derives from the widespread conviction – again, present on both left and right – that our political elites and the system they embody are not merely ineffectual and incompetent, but positively destructive of the rights of citizens. This summer, Americans in large numbers may well be concluding that while our present “Form of Government” was sufficient for securing our rights in the past, it has now failed to do so catastrophically, and that the events and figures of our present represent a decisive break with our history. If that happens, both the traditional and rational/legal sources of legitimacy will have been undermined, perhaps irrevocably, creating the conditions for a root and branch rejection of the present system. Such a development would represent a kind of political “event horizon,” beyond which lies accelerating social conflict and either collapse, revolution, or dictatorship.
All of this was a long time coming, and probably inevitable given the lies we’ve told ourselves for much of our history. Most of the deformations in our national character spring from the conception of America as a “shining city on a hill,” a nation set apart, enjoying a divine dispensation from the vicissitudes of history. That notion, always false, may soon be decisively contradicted by history itself. Over the course of two hundred and thirty years we have become a great power, a global empire. But every empire that rises also falls. And the situation we face today fits neatly into the many of the historical conditions that marked the tumble of all great powers: foreign overextension, debt, inequality, cultural excess, political-structural failure, and the loss of institutional legitimacy. This year and next, Americans may discover to their surprise that there are no exemptions from history or human nature, and that reports about a shining city here below were, quite simply, fanciful.
I’m not sure exactly where we are in Orlov’s Five Stages of Collapse, but it seems to me that the trending is very serious, and perhaps irreversible. Or, as the poet Bob Dylan once put it: “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
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