The Real Story of American Decline

David Rothkopf interviews Edward Luce, the author of Time to Start Thinking: America In The Age of Descent:

FP: So in the U.S., what has the political situation gotten us?
EL: People tend to make a fetish out of Washington and blame Washington on itself, as if somehow it is just in suspension from the society that elected it. But some of the reasons for my skepticism about how easy it will be for America to rejuvenate itself stem from that fact that polarization in Washington is deeply rooted in trends beyond the Beltway, in the real America. This is the case with the gradual hollowing out of the middle class and the decline in income or benefits and all the social problems that come with that.
The American system is designed to work best when there's cooperation between factions and parties and when there's some degree of working together. It's no surprise, therefore, that when you get the wrong kind of parliamentary politics, namely discipline and ideological divisions, cooperation becomes impossible, gridlock becomes the norm, and it becomes almost inconceivable to imagine the kinds of reforms that in a parliamentary system a majority government can very easily push through.
FP: What's the most broken in our system? Is it fiscal fecklessness? Is it gerrymandering? Is it the way the Senate works? Is it filibustering? Is it campaign finance?
EL: Those are all symptoms. As a foreigner, I do sometimes see campaign finance as the root of all evil, but I also understand that the First Amendment makes it very hard for people to envision a scenario where it's going to be properly controlled. And I think the Supreme Court's going in the wrong direction. But when you ask ‘What's the most broken?' there's a richness of embarrassments to select from. Take the Supreme Court, for example. I don't know how they're going to rule on "Obamacare" in June, but I do know that eight of them are pretty much spoken for and there's one swing vote.
You could also look at the polarization of the Senate, which can't be explained by gerrymandering since state boundaries are fixed. [It] now has an essential tool of paralysis -- the filibuster -- that the minority use as a matter of routine, as they do in California. I do think in this respect California is very much America's future, in positive technological ways, but also in the political sense. Sacramento is barely capable of functioning. I think Washington is taking on those features and that makes governing really difficult. If you believe that America is a story of essentially the government being out of the way and then the nation flourished, then this might all look fine. But if you have a proper understanding of American history and you know what role government played in American development and in American capitalism, then this isn't fine at all.

The whole thing is worth reading.  I found his take on casinos interesting.  I agree that often fools and desperate people gamble at the casino, but I've always figured most folks expect to lose some when they go there.  To me, the casino issue is, why not have Ohioans blow their money in Ohio casinos instead of Indiana casinos. Now that the fout casinos have morphed into four casinos and seven racinos, I'm thinking that it might not work out as rosily as I imagined.   In a way, his analysis made me feel a little culpable that I welcomed giant money suckers into the state.  I generally don't look at things that way because I just don't figure on ever really gambling there.  Point taken.