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According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), drug traffickers also move contraband across the border using drones and other unmanned aircraft systems. Another method is to use compressed air cannons to launch bundles of drugs to awaiting vehicles on the other side of the fencing. The CRS says traffickers cut holes in barriers, and use vessels to move drugs offshore into the Pacific and then across the southwest border. They also move drugs across land areas where there are no constructed barriers.

The U.S.-Mexico border poses a growing security challenge, including an evolution toward cartel-waged electronic warfare, that demands new technological capabilities, experts say.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is quickly adopting various innovations to enhance its enforcement.

Writing in the journal Domestic Preparedness using evidence from recent Hope for Justice investigations and case-work, and their own long backgrounds in law enforcement and intelligence, they explain: “The diversification into human smuggling and trafficking is a simple business decision for [the crime groups] who have no regard for human life and make no distinction between drugs and human commodities.

“Profits effectively triple with minimal effort while providing an endless supply of personnel and diversified illicit business opportunities should the narcotics trade become disrupted. With money as a prime motivation for these illegal activities, transnational crime is likely to increase until authorities challenge the high-profit, low-risk paradigm.”

Given the dispiriting state of U.S. democracy, it is hard not to give in to the temptation to blame the democratic model itself and start to imagine that non-democratic alternatives might do better in delivering basic governance. But this is misguided thinking. Chronic short-termism, an unwillingness to accept short-term pain for long-term gain, undue policy influence of the wealthy, a startlingly high level of division and conflict within the society, and voter ignorance and irrationality all do appear in many democracies. They are not, however, inevitable characteristics of democratic governance. They can be limited, sometimes greatly, through smart policies and good leadership. Feeling the weight of these issues now, Americans should not lose sight of the fact that some other democracies have been doing better on these fronts and take seriously the need to overcome our country’s longstanding avoidance of learning from the domestic political experiences of other countries. Nor should Americans slip into thinking that authoritarians naturally or usually avoid these problems. Many authoritarian governments struggle with the same issues as much or more than the United States and other democracies do.

In short, Americans concerned about the state of U.S. democracy need to focus less on what they might believe to be shortcomings of democracy itself, and more on what specific and often distinctive elements of the U.S. political system are exacerbating these issues. Blame for our current political predicament belongs much less with the idea or model of democracy than with ourselves.

There are times when it makes sense to leave health policy to the states. Some health threats are truly local. Consider an unsanitary restaurant. It probably doesn’t require a nationwide solution. By leaving restaurant inspections to states and local governments, the public is more likely to be protected against unsafe meals. Likewise, states and local governments are in a far better position than the federal government to provide many on-the-ground health services, from sexually transmitted disease clinics to tuberculosis screenings. The day-to-day work of public health departments depends in large measure on their placement in and relationships with local communities.

States, territories, and tribal government can also serve as “laboratories of democracy,” to borrow Justice Louis Brandeis’ term. They can develop innovative health policies that other governments and even the federal government can copy. For example, Massachusetts 2006 health care reform law served as the model for the federal Affordable Care Act. States and cities have also led the way in tobacco control, banning youth access and indoor smoking years before the federal government made a serious effort to reduce cigarette consumption.

Americans have long been proud of our federalism, the way that we divide governmental power between the states and national government. As former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy famously explained, the framers of the U.S. Constitution “split the atom of sovereignty” creating “two political capacities, one state and one federal, each protected from incursion by the other.” In theory, this political invention serves to preserve liberty while bringing the government closer to the people. It allows red states to enact laws to their pleasing, and blue states to do the same. But in today’s public health, political and legal environment, our federalism has become deadly. Rather than permitting the governmental units that can best tackle health problems to do so, federalism invites partisan litigation and thwarts interstate cooperation. As a result, both the states and the federal government are increasingly unable to meet the nation’s health threats, even as those threats become ever more complex and dangerous.

This is not the first time our federalism has harmed health. Despite its many benefits, from the Constitution’s founding until the Civil War, federalism served to support slavery. Even after the Civil War and abolition, it perpetuated racial oppression, providing a rationale and legal defense for state laws that enforced segregation and imposed racial discrimination. By so doing, federalism helped to sow and maintain the racial inequities in health that continue to this day.

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale.

Take, for instance, the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states.

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale.

Take, for instance, the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states.

There is a problem with engaging in such interventions to improve U.S. democracy, however. While affective polarization is growing quickly in the United States, it is actually not much higher there than in many European countries. In other words, many European countries show affective polarization at about the same level as that of the United States, but their democracies are not suffering as much, suggesting that something about the U.S. political system, media, campaigns, or social fabric is allowing Americans’ level of emotional polarization to be particularly harmful to U.S. democracy.16

Affective polarization is unlikely to be causing democratic backsliding or political violence on its own. The problem is not polarized emotions alone but how those feelings interact with voting systems, candidate incentives, and personal relationships.

Thus, the heart of the MPF model is the relative wage and the wealth pump that it powers. When the relative wage declines, it leads to both immiseration and elite overproduction. Both, as we now know, are the most important drivers of social and political instability. However, outbreaks of instability—violent anti-government demonstrations and strikes, urban riots, terrorism, rural uprisings, and, if things really go to hell, state collapse and full-blown civil war—are the results of individual people’s actions. How does the model connect the structural drivers to people’s motivations? It assumes that the key role in all such events is played by extremists, those who have been radicalized and primed for aggression. When such radicals are few in relation to the rest of the population, they offer no serious threat to the stability of the regime, because they are easily isolated and suppressed by the police. But if they are many, they start coalescing into extremist organizations, which can credibly challenge the ruling class. The number of radicals in proportion to the total population, therefore, is a key variable that the MPF model needs to track.

The process of radicalization works like a disease that, as it spreads, changes people’s behaviors and makes them act in violent ways. The compartment of the MPF engine connecting structural drivers to unrest thus needs to model this dynamic of social contagion. It is quite similar to equations used by epidemiologists—for example, in forecasting the dynamics of COVID outbreaks.

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale.

Take, for instance, the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states.

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale.

Take, for instance, the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states.

State and local governments long have been considered “laboratories of democracy” that spawn valuable innovation. But recently states have taken this a step farther entering a risky new phase that pits blue states against red ones and blue cities against red states, and threatens democracy as a whole. As opposed to tolerating policy experimentation by different jurisdictions, some leaders are seeking to impose their own policy views on other places. Taken to an extreme, this behavior likely would intensify conflict and escalate policy nullification on a broad scale.

Take, for instance, the recent intensification of arguments over immigration. Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have bussed unwanted arrivals from the southern border to New York City, Washington, DC, and Martha’s Vineyard as a way to express their discontent with national policy. These leaders are upset over so-called “sanctuary cities” that are pro-immigrant and seeking to attract media attention to their cause. While successful at generating press coverage, this confrontational stance puts innocent people in the middle of policy disputes and disrupts social service delivery in the targeted states.

Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996; Dikötter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and extinction.

A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely to have major wars. States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever) go to war with one another (Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalculation might be a particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and disincentives for accurate information, leading to well-known strategic disasters such as Hitler and Stalin’s blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993). War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by raising the chance of weapons of mass destruction being used.

It is often argued that a country's long-term performance depends to a significant extent on the quality of its institutions, including its political and legal institutions (Acemoglu et al., 2005). Economic research mostly focuses on explaining long-term differences in growth rates. As seen above, some researchers argue that high inequality will reduce growth rates, among other things, because it can worsen institutional quality. However, besides facilitating economic growth, public institutions have other functions that matter from a long-term perspective. For example, disaster preparedness, education, public health, foreign policy, science policy, and many other areas could influence the expected value of the long-term future. If such things go badly, they could increase existential risk. Conversely, good institutions will help reduce existential risk. For many existential risk reduction strategies likely require public goods and collective action, which in turn require good public institutions (among other reasons, because some such public goods are unlikely to be provided by markets). So, it seems reasonable to assume that, with most other societal goals, good institutions can help deliver existential risk reduction. Here is a cheesy analogy: targeted actions like washing your hands regularly or getting a flu shot can reduce your risk of dying from an infection. But you will also do well investing in a strong immune system, as that is an ‘all-purpose good’ in lowering your risk of dying from any bacterium or virus. Investing in good institutions might similarly be an all-purpose-good: rather than tackling individual sources of existential risk directly, we improve conditions for tackling whatever existential risks may come our way.

There are several reasons why higher inequality could weaken institutional capacities for longtermist public goods.

If the United States has a civic religion, then federalism is certainly at the heart of it. Federalism—an institutional design by which constitutional authority is divided between multiple levels of government—is one of the defining features of the American political system. Among countries with federal systems, such as Canada, Germany, India, and Mexico, the United States is an extreme case, because American federalism is especially decentralized. Relatively low levels of fiscal redistribution exist between regions, and the federated structure divides power not only between the federal government and states, but also between states and localities (Anton 1989; Gerken 2010). The structure of American federalism puts critical democratic institutions, including the powers of policing, election administration, and legislative districting, in the hands of the state governments (Lowi et al. 2017). In this volume (Mickey) and elsewhere, scholars have investigated the role of state governments in threats to electoral and liberal democracy in the United States. We take a different tack by considering the democratic challenges of federalism through the lens of political inequality (Michener 2018; L. Miller 2008). We argue that the democracy-enhancing benefits of federalism disproportionately accrue to elites who are already advantaged in the political system, while the democratically corrosive burdens of federalism are disproportionately borne by those with the fewest resources (politically and economically).

Although federalism is a political institution that both constrains and enables democratic participation, we argue that it does so unevenly, and in ways that deepen inequalities in the processes of democracy. Furthermore, we propose four mechanisms by which the institutional decentralization of American federalism obstructs or reduces democratic accountability and equality: (1) inequality in venue selection: more powerful groups are better able to pick and choose which geographic locations and levels of government to get politically involved in; (2) information asymmetry: with multiple overlapping levels of government, it is hard for less powerful groups to monitor what governments are doing; (3) an unequal exit threat: wealthier individuals and groups can better threaten to leave a city or state to politically pressure governments; and (4) decentralized accountability: multiple levels of government make it hard to know which authority is accountable for tackling political and economic problems. Taken together, these mechanisms both create and exacerbate advantages for economic and political elites, while generating and deepening daunting barriers to the full and equitable inclusion of nonelites, especially economically and racially marginalized Americans. The dynamics we highlight below point to ways that U.S. federalism can undermine possibilities for a robust democracy by undergirding political inequality.

In the American political tradition, federalism is a hallowed institution. It’s a bulwark against tyranny, it allows for policy experimentation, it creates competition for voters and businesses that incentivizes better performance, and it brings government closer to the people and holds it accountable.

But take a look at some of the research on federalism in the field of comparative politics and for each virtue of federalism you’ll find a flaw. The many levels of government meant to guard against authoritarianism often lead to the shifting of blame and credit being claimed where it’s not earned, muddling accountability. The various institutional layers often make government impossible to understand, leading to increased corruption. States competing with each other for business by lowering taxes can lead to a race to the bottom that exacerbates inequalities across the country.

For the set of likely future scenarios we face today, the climate science literature has not identified any approaching global tipping point after which runaway climate change intensifies beyond humanity’s ability to arrest it. While tipping elements of the climate system—like Arctic permafrost thaw and loss of Amazon forest area—do influence total warming, the magnitude of this influence is substantially smaller than the societal factors that will ultimately determine the planet’s climate trajectory.

To you, the reader, the lines above may feel stiff and overly qualified. They, like countless similar sentences in IPCC reports and academic papers, rely on very careful choice of terminology to maintain their accuracy. Yet such care seems increasingly incompatible with a climate discourse that, at times, nurses a weakness for spectacle while trying to satisfy a hunger for clarity about the future that researchers cannot yet provide.

Yet at the same time, the world may be closer than ever to turning a corner in the effort to corral climate change.

Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline.

First, the good news: climate scientists, as a whole, are not warning us to prepare for the apocalypse. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a group of hundreds of scientists working with the United Nations to analyze climate change research from around the world—names many serious risks brought on by the warming of our planet, but human extinction is not among them.1

“If I had to rate odds, I would say the chances of climate change driving us to the point of human extinction are very low, if not zero,” says Adam Schlosser, the Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a climate scientist who studies future climate change and its impact on human societies.