The U.S. is becoming less stable

The first contested presidential election in the history of the country; an election now considered probably or definitely illegitimate by nearly a third of Americans.

...You can disagree with how any one political faction is characterizing the above events, or how I’m characterizing the above events.

Rest assured, there is no 'can' about it; anyone with a middle school-level knowledge of American history is disagreeing with your characterization of those events. (I'm sorry, what? The first? Er, how about the 2000 election going to the Supreme Court, which you should remember personally? The 1960 election? The Compromise of 1877? The 1864 election where half the states didn't even vote due to a little thing called 'the Civil War', how legitimate do you suppose 'a third of Americans' thought Lincoln's re-election? The 1824 election where the allegations of illegitimate corruption & election theft helped the populist fury elect Jackson the next time around in 1828? The 1800 election which killed Hamilton?)

I strongly agree that this is a serious concern. In my opinion, I think 1-2% per decade is the wrong model; I think the risk is higher than that in the next decade, but front-loaded in the next couple of presidential elections, which could get especially weird with AI-powered election interference. My primary threat model here is of the form "Trump (or a Trump successor) attempts another bureaucratic coup, but this time succeeds." I am particularly worried about this because I think it would very substantially undercut the possibility of international cooperation on AI governance, as I mentioned here [LW · GW].

That being said, one other thing I'll add is that I am less concerned about this right now than I was before Moore v. Harper. That case was definitely a positive update for me here that a second attempted bureaucratic coup would be harder than the first. Of course, a second attempt need not follow the same pathway as the first, so Moore v. Harper might not actually matter that much.

since 1989 I think it has been appropriate to have a degree of knightian uncertainty in predicting the eternal dominance of this or that regime, on the basis that modern technology and secret police make resistance impossible.

This heavily revolves around the definition of "resistance". Generally, opposition from elites (who are decentralized in the US) is what's considered here, and those are very complicated dynamics.

I'm positing that public opinion is probably riding the current rather than driving it (still being an indicator as you said). The current post-WWII system is less than 8 decades old, while the War on Terror is more than 2 decades old, the end of the Cold War is more than 3 decades old, and ubiquitous smartphones are around 1 decade old. The world as we know it isn't just changing faster, it's just not very old to begin with; every passing decade is 10% of the distance from 100 years ago when everything was massively different.

In this specific case, democracy is not as intuitive to people as it was 20 years ago because millions of people now have a more nuanced understanding of corruption (long time coming over the last 60 years), how the military controls the military, etc and the old gentlemanly system where politicians step down for the sake of institution strength is not believable anymore, even if it was desired (which people don't desire because of the intense political environment that everyone now has exposure to due to social media).

The idea of public opinion hacking is less than 8 years old in the public conscious (accusations of russian social media bots in the 2016 election), so that sticky situation is very much unfolding (if you ask people about russian bots being AI-powered, most people stumble, even EA adjacents, but that domino could fall at any time). But, at the same time, something that extreme is exactly the sort of thing that democracies and autocracies around the world look at and think "oh yeah, if anything could be the nail in the coffin for democracy, that would be it". But at the same time, you can have the elections and public opinion twist inside and out, get inverted, etc, it doesn't have to pull the rug out from under the elite networks and regime like in East Germany.

On a different note, a quote someone emailed me today shows the Ukraine war isn't even 1.5 years and it's still a new paradigm that's unfolding:

Remarkable how seductive folks find the 'tough guy' rhetoric of authoritarians, which invariably posit liberal democracies as 'weak,' when a fair reading of modern history suggests the deep legitimacy of democracies makes them terrifying when they 'go mad together' as it were.

We don't know which side will win the war, only that it's a war of attrition, and many people are arguing that Russia was betting on the possibility of western unity dissolving in order for the invasion to be positive-EV (I have no idea whether they're right). If true, then we have to wait to see the outcome of this specific war in order to know what's going on with democracy, and the people running each side of the war probably know this.

I agree that this is happening to some degree, but I think it is at least plausibly more of a symptom of the adoption of dumber / more insane / more extreme object-level beliefs (which itself might be an effect of some other cultural or technological phenomenon, e.g. social media, cost disease, safetyism), rather than a cause.

Or, put another way: while the examples of democratic backsliding described here are alarming, it would possibly be even more disconcerting, or at least very strange, if people and factions in power continued to adopt more and more insane and extreme object-level behaviors and beliefs without damaging their legitimacy or having any other negative knock-on effects.

A possible implication is that, to improve democratic legitimacy, we should focus on fostering the adoption of saner object-level beliefs and positive-sum policies that lead to noticeably good outcomes. Do enough of that (via ordinary activism within the existing system), and maybe democracy will naturally heal itself.

The kind of object-level positive-sum change I have in mind, and how to go about it, is what Balsa Research is working on, I think:

Low-hanging improvement is often as simple as not restricting supply and not subsidizing demand. A sample: Reforming NEPA, the NRC, zoning and the FDA including a right to try for drugs, pandemic preparedness, repealing protectionist policies (Jones Act, Dredge Act, ‘made in America’, etc), ending qualified immunity and civil forfeiture, legalizing marijuana, avoiding 100%+ marginal tax rates, increasing high-skill immigration, fixing student loans, and NGDP level targeting by the Federal Reserve. The civil service and procurement urgently need reform.

There is far more hope for improvement than almost anyone realizes. Lobbying when done right is remarkably cheap and effective. Secret congress can be productive. Many marginal improvements are highly valuable, with no substantial downsides and compounding benefits.

I don't think it's mild.  I'm not American, but follow US politics with interest.

A majority of blue-collar/conservative US now see the govt as implacably biased against their interests and communities, eg see recent polling on attitudes towards DOJ, FBI eg https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/HHP_May2023_KeyResults.pdf

There is widespread perception that rule of law has failed at the top levels at least - with politically motivated prosecutions (timing of stacked Trump indictments is clearly motivated by his candidacy) and favored treatment of Hunter (majority of US population see corruption in Biden's VP doings).

And worst of all a substantial fraction of US do not believe results of 2020 elections were legitimate.  In recent polling: "61% of Americans say Biden did legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, and 38% believe that he did not".

The traditionally middle seeking and sense-making Media has become implacably polarised, with steadfast silence on or spinning of stories inconvenient to their 'side'.

The greatest concern must be that the rate of descent into extreme political and institutional Tribalism and differential treatment on that basis. Long term that can only lead to a violent collapse in rule of law, or repressive policing.

The only antidote is dogmatic enforcement of even-handed treatment at all levels, govt employees must be seen to be scrupulously non-partisan or everything will inevitably fall apart.

I largely agree with the sentiment of your post. However, one nitpick:

The world's largest protest-riot ever, when measured by estimated damage to property.

This claim is questionable. The consensus is that the economic cost of the George Floyd Protests was between one and several billion. Perhaps it was the most expensive riot in US history (though when inflation-adjusted the LA riots may give it a run for its money) and the most expensive to be cleanly accounted for economically, but intuitively I would imagine many of the most violent riots in history, such as the partition riots in India and Pakistan, caused more economic damage.

Some possibly relevant data:

• As of 2020, anti-government protests in North America rose steadily from 2009 to 2017 where it peaked (at ~7x the 2009 number) and started to decline (to ~4x the 2009 number in 2019).
• Americans' trust in the US government is very low (only ~20% say they trust the USG to do what's right most of the time) and has been for over a decade. It seems to have locally peaked at ~50% after 9/11, and then declined to ~15% in 2010, after the financial crisis.
• Congressional turnover rates have risen somewhat since the 90s, and are now at about the same level as in the 1970s.
• Congress seems to pass fewer bills every year since at least the mid-1970s (though apparently bottoming out in 2011, following the 2010 red wave midterms).
• The volume of executive orders seems fairly stable or even declining since WWII.
• DSA membership is down to 85K in 2023 from a peak of 95K in 2021. I can't think of an analogous right-wing group that publishes membership numbers.

I've noticed this and been worried, but there's one thing about the US which makes me slightly less worried, which is that the US has a natural release valve for a lot of these issues if people are finally forced to pull it, and that's devolution.

The US used to be more devolved, and that time is still technically within living memory. The federal government grew tremendously in power between 1930 and 1990, which most of the growth happening in the years between 1940 and 1970. This reflected the needs of the country given the times it found itself in: the Great Depression, then WWII, and then the Cold War.

But since roughly 1990 the federal government hasn't made big power grabs. Mostly this is because it's already made all the useful grabs to make and has mostly been expanding its power within the domains it already controls, but also because there's a contingent of folks in the US who continue to support the right of the states to govern themselves without federal interference. Although "states rights" is right coded, it's in practice employed on the left as well. On the right this is used for things like limiting taxes, restricting abortion, and protecting gun ownership. On the left for raising taxes to support more generous social services, permitting federally-prohibited drugs by hampering enforcement, and restricting access to guns.

If faced with a crises at the federal level, the natural move would be for the US to devolve powers back to the states. Although states are not as robustly independent as they were 100 years ago, because they are so heavily involved in the day-to-day administration of the state they would be able to carry on and rebuild local capacity to make up for lost federal assistance in several years.

Devolution seems likely to me because any would-be dictator or just sufficiently hated president would, given the current political climate of the US, find that ~half the population doesn't like them and a sufficient majority of ~1/3 of the states would not like them enough to rebel in various ways. I don't mean a civil war, but more like kicking out federal agents and taking local control of services and institutions. This is likely to work because of an extremely strong norm within the military to not move against its own citizens or getting involved in politics, and the January 6th riot was an excellent demonstration of their continued restraint here.

Thus I expect that if political conflict at the federal level comes to a head, some of the states will just nope out. Not of the US entirely, but of permitting the federal government to exercise all powers that it's claimed in the last 90 years. And after a lot of noise, they'll basically be allowed to do it, same way this is being permitted today on a small scale with things like drug decriminalization, gerrymandering, and sanctuary cities.

I don't expect devolution to be painless, but I do expect it to be functional and for the US to come through surprisingly intact. Internally may look like things are falling apart, but on most measures we will barely notice that anything is happening.

Since Republicans now believe that the arrests are politically motivated, and that Democrats are defecting against longstanding political norms, they are pressuring their politicians to escalate

The problem is that Donald Trump in turn broke democratic norms hugely on January 6th 2021. And so if you don't prosecute him in any way for it, that just sends a signal instead that such things will go unpunished, and therefore, why not try them every time?

The rift and erosion of unspoken norms are a problem either way. But the question is which one is the biggest, and appeasement in general doesn't have a great history of working.

Your "world's largest protest-riot ever" measure ought to adjust for inflation.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), I read the word "destabilitzing" in the title as "US is causing instability in other places" rather than "US is in the process of becoming less stable".

I don't actually disagree, but you could easily set the starting point much earlier than 1989.  Riots in the 60s, Vietnam war failure and reaction to it, and Watergate are all likely contributors to the overall decline of belief in legitimacy of government.  I also suspect the trend is worldwide, not just the US.  

I don't have a strong opinion on whether the trust and legitimacy that seems to have held earlier in history was ACTUALLY legitimate.  There were large parts of the population seriously dienfranchised, poverty was common and much deeper than today, and it seems to have been common belief that the class and race disparities were God-given correct expectations.  I find it easy to believe that things are unstable BECAUSE the stability we used to have was based on a bad equilibrium.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

Yes? Obviously? 

This is not something you need to piece together yourself from first facts, nor is doing so likely to keep up with the state of the field. A lot of very solid work on this has been done, already collecting a lot of evidence, getting a lot of perspectives, doing a lot of reasoning and historical comparisons and sociological analysis.

This has been extensively discussed in mainstream news in the US and internationally, analysed academically (e.g. whether this will necessarily escalate to another civil war, and how the dynamic might be different under modern conditions, how the US is situated in global democratic backsliding trends); this topic became popular to the point where there are TED talks and books on it, just google US second civil war. It is essentially accepted fact internationally, to the degree where large scale nations and unions have altered their internal and foreign policy under the assumption that the US is now an unreliably ally or weakened enemy because their political system has become unstable, though we have been watching curiously whether Biden might stabilise some of this again. The current instability is not without historic precedent, but is still unstable to an extremely worrying degree in a country so powerful. "Do you reckon the US will slip into civil war?" is absolutely something you can discuss with friends in a bar in the EU, and everyone present will have an opinion on whether, when and how (e.g. whether we would see one massive escalation past a tipping point, or intermittent escalations). In Germany especially, we are analysing parallels to Germany's own fall extensively, down to students discussing it in school. From ordinary housewives to conspiracy theorists, everyone agrees that this situation in the US is unstable, the question is mostly how and whether it can still be stabilised, and what exactly will happen if it is not. Our politicians have been holding speeches over how the EU can be changed to deal with the US suddenly getting flaky, because everyone agrees we cannot bank on the US functioning anymore. Heck, the literal Wikipedia article on democratic backsliding ended up with such a long subsection on democratic backsliding in the US that it became its own article. You could present this conclusion as a premise at a conference, and if anyone actually spoke up and disagreed, I would suspect the person is disingenuous and wants attention unless they had a really great argument coming through historical comparisons on how this stuff historically righted itself and they are seeing hints of that now.

I think putting it at 0.8 to 0.75 is putting it very charitably.

Heck, this list is incomplete.

The US supreme court was politically vulnerable from the start (the judges are appointed by the president?!?), and is now politically stacked (a supreme court, politically stacked, how is this even a thing?).

The US voting system is absolutely not fit for purpose; it is crazy to me that the candidates getting fewer votes can still win, that one can only choose between two parties, that if you live in the wrong state, you might as well not bother to vote at all; the Bush vs Al Gore thing was already a travesty, and by the time Trump got elected, outside observers in the EU plain lost it, it was marked as complete madness. By the time the capital got stormed, this all just felt like watching a dumpster fire.

The US executive is scarily strong - the US president combines three roles that in European countries tend to be separate - and many Americans are in favour of making it stronger, not less strong.

Both parts of the US feel under existential threat, but for different reasons. E.g. in the left wing camp, the loss of reproductive rights has been felt by many not just to be inconceivably bad backsliding in rights, but a harbinger of more losses in rights to come, e.g. losses of privileges to queer people. Queer folks are terrified, women are furious. Fictionalised accounts of how the US might turn into a dystopia became bestsellers and extremely popular series, because this is on people's minds; there is a reason people dress like handmaids from The Handmaid's tale at protests - Atwood precisely wanted to drive home that rights can be lost again, and that we are seeing the warning signs. Meanwhile, the American right also feels existentially threatened. I think their fears are misguided, but they are legitimately agitated.

Throw into the mix that your country has a highly armed populace due to the gun rights, a hyper armed police and military wing and the death penalty, racial tensions, tensions on gender issues, climate catastrophes, the Russian interest in stoking riots in the US, a radical right actively preparing for combat, and modern social media escalating things, and the potential for violence is terrifying. Which is why people are putting a lot of thought into how this might play out, and how it might still be mitigated.

I'm glad to see one commenter has already mentioned George Friedman – I got a lot of reassurance from this podcast interview in April 2020, and by reading his book "The Storm Before The Calm".

Just hearing someone articulate a plausible-sounding theory for why the current instability is expected/predictable makes it a lot easier for me to imagine different futures, even if I don't agree with all of Friedman's premises.

Bonus points to Friedman for writing his theories down in ~2019, just before the notable instabilities started.

There's an old saying among my people about the Stupid Party and the Evil party. Whatever it does to your measures of "democracy" and "stability," the Stupid Party becoming (marginally) smarter is a good thing.

I agree with the title, but I don't think there's any dangers lurking per se. I think that the damage has already happened, and that we're merely seeing the consequences of it. If I suspect something is wrong with me and I want to go to the doctor, then going to the doctor is only going to reveal the truth. My diagnose would not be the cause of my illness, but the effect. Perhaps I'm just being pedantic here?

I think that a lot of things have been going wrong for many years now, and that were starting to see the effects of that. I don't think that these effects are unreasonable either. If the system is lying to you, then you'd be right not to trust it, even though it's problematic that the system can no longer be trusted, and a great shame that people are losing their trust.

The state of politics is far below anything I can respect. I also think that most controversies rely on Not Even Wrong misconceptions. There's such a disconnect that no constructive conversation can even begin. This website is a rare exception, of course.

I personally doubt the legitimacy of the democratic process, but as it's already akin to a giant popularity contest in which the goal is to ruin the reputation of the opponent, and with most people seriously involved here specialize in manipulating public opinion, I have a hard time feeling like we're selecting for anything of quality even if it does turn out to be legitimate. At this point, I think everything is so rotten that a partial reset might be the more healthy outcome. That's just my opinion though, and I expect most people to disagree with me for personal rather than rational reasons. So this comment will help me find out if this website is what it pretends to be.

Anyway. Prediction: We are heading towards a local minimum. There's turbulence ahead for sure. It's difficult to tell how much worse it will get before we'll see a push-back, and I don't know the exact power balance between the vocal crowd and those who are still remaining silent. My perception is likely more negative than reality as negative and extreme information is shared at a higher rate (and thus overrepresented), and I'm hoping this is the case.

On a more positive note, I don't think that election interference will become a very big problem. It can sway results by perhaps 10%, but any more than that and I think it would be easily detected (even the past elections have had a lot of comments from statisticians). Somebody who is hated by the vast majority would never get elected either way.

What US institutions are healthy enough to say that leaving them be would be a path to long-term stability?

It's interesting how nearly every point on your list is a direct or indirect result of something Donald Trump did.

Strong-downvoted. Lesswrong isn't the right place for political soapboxing.

As a bit of metacommentary, that your main thesis (the title) is presented and viewed as a significant insight in this year (2023), and is contested significantly in the comments, is to me a sign of how insular LW is.

Democratic backsliding isn't exactly the same thing but it rhymes, and the democratic backsliding of the US has been discussed outside of LW for over half a decade at this point.