Political Decay: Comparing America's decline to the fall of the Han Dynasty
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
I often ponder what it means to be born into a failing empire. There is no doubt that our current leadership class is driving country into the ground on most metrics. The question is whether the younger cohort can figure out how to put it back on the path of sustainability and thriving. In order to do that we have to understand what is going wrong, and what potential solutions might be.
If you follow economic news you’ve seen that China, Russia, and a host of other major nations are making moves toward toppling the US Dollar as the world reserve currency. There is no telling what that would do to our economy, but it would almost definitely result in massive inflation, reduced military prowess and a massive diminishing of American power abroad. As other nations stop saving in treasuries and using USD in international trade, they are less and less economically connected to the health of the US. In other words, it will be the end of the empire as we know it.
In my reading this week I continued with the Origins of Political Order and studied the Han dynasty. I want to take a couple excerpts from that and consider what we modern Americans can learn from another failed empire. This will help us identify political decline and play our part in fighting against it.
The Han Dynasty:
The Han dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history. It saw significant population growth, increased urbanization, and unprecedented growth of industry and trade. It lasted for 400 years, from 206BC to 220AD and was perhaps the first successful modern, bureaucratic state in human history. It was staffed by scholars chosen on merit rather than social status, which was a major innovation at the time.
The collapse of the Han dynasty and subsequent disorder led to the death of forty million Chinese between 157 and 280 AD, 2/3 of the entire population. That’s the equivalent of 220 million Americans dying due to a great unraveling of the state in the next century.
Political Decay (quick refresher):
If you read the blog last week you learned about political decay. Here is a quick refresher:
Political decay refers to the gradual decline in the effectiveness and legitimacy of a political system, resulting from the erosion of institutions, norms, and values that sustain it. It often leads to an inability to address pressing social and economic challenges, and a loss of public trust and confidence in the government.
So, basically, Political Decay is why empires collapse. From what I can tell in my studies so far, countries always experience a pattern of the decline and disintegration of their institutions before they collapse. The decaying of their institutions is why they collapse. They don’t collapse because of ‘meddling’ by other countries or some bad apples. They fall because of a mass systemic decline that destroys their ability to coordinate efficiently and effectively.
Understanding political decay is like understanding the mechanisms of a disease. You have to know how it works in order to combat it.
Removal of adversaries
Nations rise because they are innovative and they are innovative because they are meritocratic. They fall when they become ‘political,’ which can be seen as the opposite of meritocratic.
The eunuchs’ rise threatened the position of the bureaucracy of the Confucians, who began an anti-eunuch campaign in 165 and eventually succeeded in having them exterminated.
The Confucians and the eunuchs (yes, actual eunuchs, there was an interesting reason for it) were the two most powerful forces in the Han government under the Emperor. Both played key roles in administration and the functioning of the state. But when the eunuchs got too powerful after helping the emperor exterminate a rival clan, the Confucians got paranoid, triggered a purge, and had them all banished or killed.
Lesson 1: the attempt to eliminate rivals is a sign of Political Decay.
A well known example of this in the United States was the Red Scare. Certain Republicans would see Communists around every corner and so administered a purge themselves. They accused their progressive adversaries of being communist agents and sought to discredit, punish, and strip them of position.
We can see a modern version of it with the Democrats and the ratcheting accusations that their rivals are also Russian agents (only this time not communists), while lately escalating the charge to domestic terrorist.
Things get messy out there. But someone accusing their opponent of being a terrorist is a sign that they’ve lost the plot. The US government kills terrorists without due process. They throw terrorists in black site prisons off shore and torture them. Politicians and media pundits throwing around the term terrorist to try to gain political ground are harbingers of political decline and need to be resisted.
The Inability to Respond to Disaster
Another huge nail in the coffin of the Han was the occurrence of a staggering set of natural disasters in just a ten year timeframe:
173 AD - Epidemic
175 AD - Floods
176 AD - Famine
177 AD - Famine
179 AD - Epidemic
182 AD - Epidemic and Famine
183 AD - Famine
They experienced 8 major disasters in just a decade. And their incompetent and corrupt government couldn’t respond to them. The next year a peasant rebellion broke out. More on that below.
Lesson 2: Political Decay can be hidden until the government is challenged by a trial
Balaji Srinivasan makes a great point that Americans’ blind faith in their government is observable through our films. He gives an example with the film Contagion, where a super competent government agency (perhaps the CDC) has to combat a pandemic. Predictably, they step in and save the day with the incredible latent capacity that’s always there in time of need. According to the movies anyway. Balaji then contrasts that with our actual Covid response which by any metric was mediocre at best and riddled with censorship and calls which contradicted the best science, even at the time. The bottom line is if the CDC of the film Contagion was real, we would have led the world in disaster response and come out of it with more faith in the ability of our institutions to handle tough problems. Instead it was the opposite.
Hurricane Katrina is another good example.
Elites use the government to enrich themselves
“One of the most important causes of the decline of the Han Dynasty was the recapture of the state by different elites… The former Han had gradually eliminated territorially based pockets of elite influence, so when aristocratic families reasserted themselves, they did so not by rebuilding local power bases but by inserting themselves directly into the apparatus of the central government.”
These aristocratic families used the government as a tool to enrich themselves.
This had the consequence of increasing the overall disparities in wealth and concentrating it in the hands of a small group of noble families, and of steadily depriving the government of revenue as these landowners were able to shield more and more of the country’s productive agricultural land from state taxation… These families were thus an early version of what we could today label a rent-seeking elite, who made use of their political connections to capture the state and use state power to enrich themselves
Does this sound familiar?
Lesson 3: Elites will use the Government to Enrich Themselves
A modern day example of the above is finance, weapons manufacturing and military contracting, pharmaceuticals, big ag, fossil fuels, among others. The corrosive effect here is not just that we give more and more of our national wealth to bombs that turn to smoke, or pills that cost the government 20x the cost of a generic that is just as effective. It’s not just the channeling of the money away from productive uses and into wasteful ones designed to enrich elites. It’s that the government can only focus on pleasing so many constituencies at a time. The size and attention of legislators is fixed. Once there are this many powerful elites lobbying and getting their way in Washington, there is simply no attention left to give to the issues of the average citizen. They’ve been crowded out by elite influence. We’ve known for a long time that this is where we are as a nation.
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” - Princeton Study
The Reaping
All of the above lead to the Yellow Turban Peasant Rebellion which lasted for 20 years and led to the deaths of 500k people. By the time it was quashed the government only lasted 15 more years before it shattered into dozens of territories ruled by warlords. This following extremely violent period called the Three Kingdoms consisted of 60 years of nearly perpetual war. There wouldn’t be another stable united Chinese empire for centuries.
Sometimes when empires fall, they fall very hard. This is something that should concern Americans greatly.
Conclusion:
History is a pattern. It doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. As we can see from the above, the forces that took down then Han Dynasty are the same ones that modern America is plagued by. I almost put “modern America is grappling with,” but in fact we are not. That is the problem. We’re not grappling with the causes of our political decay because we’re still under the elite spell that if we just play their game and vote for the party on the side of ‘good,’ to vanquish the other party which is clearly “hateful” or “racist” or “communist,” we’ve done our part. But that message is designed to neutralize you. It actually prevents you from seeing the situation clearly and playing a proper role in healing the country.
The difference between us and the Han is that we are a democracy and we the people can determine outcomes. We can collectively choose how we play this hand. We are in decline and will continue to be until we redesign our institutions. We don’t have to shatter into civil war the way the Han did, but our best chance of avoiding catastrophe is to proactively fix our institutions now, not wait for a collapse.
“The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Until next time.
Matt Harder runs the public engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.