The question I want to answer is, regardless of the form of government, what do you absolutely need? I’m not interested in talking about making a “good” government, only one that “works”. By that I mean one that is stable across time. By this definition, if a Communist government was able to stay in power for 1000 years, then it works. You might even be so bold as to call it legitimate. Same goes for a Nazi government, a democracy, or an anarchy.
If a government can sustain itself, it has some special ingredients that allow it to succeed. What are they?
Alignment
“Power to the people” is a good starting point. The statement suggests that a democracy may succeed, and it does. But more broadly, it suggests that you cannot simply steamroll over people’s desires. If the people want Communism, you’re going to have a hard time setting up a different government. You might say that your system will work much better if only people believed in it. Great, but without public support, it’s hard to imagine your new system working. Maybe you can convince enough people that you can set up your own country. But regardless of the system, it needs support. At the very least, most people should be indifferent.
So we’ve found the first ingredient of government: alignment. How you get alignment is up to you. You can try to force it, you can confuse people into believing in your system, or you can plainly give them what they want. Sure, force may not last, and a system based on lies will eventually fall apart. What works doesn’t depend on the the method used, only the end result. If you can keep a lie going for 1000 years, good for you.
Alignment is a sliding scale. Too little alignment means you can’t keep your people together and you’ll have infighting and gridlock. It’ll be hard to pass new laws. Too much might be a problem too. It means you’re predictable. Imagine a predictable chess player. What can be worse than having your opponents predict your every move?
In practice, many Muslim countries don’t separate church and state. Christian values are different and having more of them threatens the existing alignment. If people start converting, you get a population with conflicting goals. In the West, we believe that religion shouldn’t impact politics. The general principle is that conflict is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with the other ingredients, which we’ll get into much later.
Production
If you have a populace of aligned individuals, you’ve off to a great start. Now you need to find a way to feed yourselves. If you live on a coal mine, you could trade the coal for food and nearly anything else you might want. Whether you produce the food yourself or not doesn’t matter. As long as you can connect hungry mouths to food reliably, you’re set. Of course any government needs land, I’ll touch on that in more detail later.
Trade is necessary. Let’s take the coal mine example. Suppose you have no iron. You need iron to make steel for your coal mining equipment. To become self-sufficient, you’ll want to seize land that has iron ore. Self sufficiency is not easy. You can work your people harder. You can increase your population. The more you can produce, the more excess you’ll have, and the more you can trade for the things you want.
Self-sufficiency isn’t a binary. Think about all the materials around you. There are rare materials in your phone that come from around the world. To become truly self-sufficient you’ll need to conquer the entire plant. In reality, you always depend on others through trade.
Dependence doesn’t automatically mean you lose your independence. If your country needs socks, and there are 5 poor countries that can produce them, you don’t need to make them yourself. No single country has power over you by threatening to cut off your sock supply. But if a country has rare metals that you need for your gadgets, then they have power over you. You either accept it, look for other places to mine, or you conquer them.
You want other countries to depend on you more than you depend on them. Ideally what you make should be cheap and easy for you to produce, but valuable to others. If others know how to make what you make, you’re in for stiff competition. You’ll need to outwork the other guys to get ahead.
If you buy more than you sell, you’re in trouble too. You have to borrow money. Others may not want to lend to you in the future. No matter the form of government, it needs to produce in order to maintain itself. There are better and worse ways to produce. You don’t want to produce products others can get elsewhere for less.
Protection
We have two ingredients so far. You need alignment. You need production. What’s missing?
Consider this. Any group of people with guns can surround a group of aligned, productive pacifists and demand a cut of your profits. Your country will get protection whether you like it or not. Any government system that doesn’t take this into account has a wildcard on its hands. Rule by military happens. Ideally, you’ll have natural limits to what the military can do. Historically, I think guns served as a check on the government.
If you want peace, you should always be prepared for war. Just like your body has T cells to fight off infections, a country needs an army. Production cannot occur without some ability to direct violence. When you look at the illegal drug trade and prostitution, this underground economy doesn’t get to call the cops when something goes wrong. They have gangs to make sure drugs are paid for and goods are delivered.
Armies prefer contiguous plots of land, or land surrounded by water. They’re easier to protect. So yes, a government needs land as you might have guessed. I don’t split it out into it’s own ingredient because it fits well under protection. But it also fits under “production” since land may have valuable natural resources.
Let’s sum up
Lack of alignment means you will continue splitting apart until the groups are cohesive enough that they last. This pushes countries to be smaller. That way you can keep people on the same page.
Production is important. You want to make all the special stuff in-house otherwise other countries gain leverage over you and chip away at your independence. This creates an incentive to grow.
Geographic limitations affect how protection works. When growing or shrinking, geography incentivizes contiguous plots of land and access to water.
To sum up you need alignment so people don’t sabotage each other. You then need this unified collective to produce. And finally, you need to protect what you have. If you can keep this going, you have a government that works.
You know you’ve messed up somewhere if you fall apart, get conquered, or if lose your independence.
Since no country exists in a vacuum, each of the ingredients should be measured relative to others. If you can produce, but another country is better at protection, they may conquer you. If you can protect, but not produce, you’ll conquer a place that can produce. If you’re aligned, you may lose against another that is more aligned still, since less of their energy is expended on infighting.
Alignment, Production, and Protection in America
Let’s use this system to analyze the US. Do we have all 3 components? Are any of these components weak?
Are we unified? If you consume lots of news, it’s clearly no. However, we also see that about a 3rd of Americans are politically disengaged. You might consider them centrists. If so, they act as the glue. But given that they don’t vote, it’s hard to see them as an active force in politics. It’s more likely that these people will slowly funnel into either the left or right as things get more heated.
But even the most pessimistic person has to admit that as of now, the US is far superior to much of the world. Practically, the roads are generally maintained, people stop at stoplights. People go out to vote, which implies they trust the system, despite what they may claim. People generally follow the laws. Separatists and militias are small and rare. In practice, we act in alignment with the existing system. We fear punishment for transgressions against it. We encourage others to avoid getting themselves in trouble. In this sense, we’re aligned as a country.
Are we producing? China makes a lot of our stuff, but our GDP is higher. We’re either the biggest economy, or in the running. But still, a lot of our tech is made in China. They are a competitor, and I suspect that they have the source code to some of our most popular tech products including iOS, Windows, etc. But for us to produce iPhones in the US would be a challenge. Apple and others are diversifying by putting factories around the world.
People still want to move to the US for a better life. But then again, less men over 25 are working than before and women are picking up the slack, which makes it harder for women to have kids. Kids are future labor. Less kids now results is less future labor. We can make up for it with technology and immigration, but you get the idea.
Can we protect ourselves? We have the most powerful military in the world. We spend more than the next several biggest countries combined. Our military also isn’t as stale as you might think. The “useless” wars may have done little to spread democracy, but they’ve kept us abreast of developments in modern warfare. However, we’re bipolar when it comes to the southern border. Democrats want to let people in, Republicans don’t.
Additionally, there are trends that show up on several levels.
People are more isolated than ever. Tech makes for a potent distraction, after all. This negatively affects our alignment at a level that makes protection difficult. You can’t put a border around just the liberals or just the conservatives. Even the most liberal cities aren’t universally aligned. In San Francisco in 2016, 85% voted for Clinton. In theory, this means we could be more aligned if we wanted to. Then again, I suspect that remote work, pandemic concerns, BLM, and election concerns have caused people to move to places that align with their political views.
With a roughly 50% divorce rate, we’re not setting future labor up for the best chance of success. Divorces are costly. People are spending their time and money on fighting each other rather than working together. Maybe this is the cost of women’s liberation. In any case, families that stay together produce more productive children. Modern families are less stable than before and this has a negative impact on economic production.
Obesity may not be a problem per se, but it’s symbolic of broader decline. There’s no technical reason why we couldn’t fix it. And we’ll all be happier and more confident as a result. We simply don’t have the collective willpower. Obesity affects our ability to produce and reproduce. In theory it could affect our ability to protect ourselves. The 40% who are obese won’t make for good army recruits.
Lots of people are on brain altering substances. This includes anti-depression medication, painkillers, Adderall, weed. It’s not the presence of these drugs that’s worrisome, but their prevalence and our dependence on them. 13% are on antidepressants. Depressed people don’t make for good workers. They are less likely to be vigilant about protecting their country. But again, we do spend more on the military that other countries. And we have nukes.
What ingredients is America missing?
The most lacking ingredient that I see is alignment. We see politics continuing to polarize in every branch of government. But that’s just my opinion. I think the best thing about seeing government via APP (Alignment, Production, and Protection) is that it’s a tool you can use no matter what your politics may be.