Does America need an Arab Spring? That was the question on my mind when I called Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of \u201cThe End of History and the Last Man.\u201d\u009d Fukuyama has been working on a two-volume opus called \u201cThe Origins of Political Order,\u201d\u009d and I could detect from his recent writings that his research was leading him to ask a very radical question about America\u2019s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a \u201cvetocracy\u201d\u009d \u201d\u201d from a system designed to prevent anyone in government from amassing too much power to a system in which no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a crisis of authority, and we\u2019re not prepared to think about it in these terms,\u201d\u009d said Fukuyama. \u201cWhen Americans think about the problem of government, it is always about constraining the government and limiting its scope.\u201d\u009d That dates back to our founding political culture. The rule of law, regular democratic rotations in power and human rights protections were all put in place to create obstacles to overbearing, overly centralized government. \u201cBut we forget,\u201d\u009d Fukuyama added, \u201cthat government was also created to act and make decisions.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
That is being lost at the federal level.<\/p>\n