The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls

On the optimism of preparation in a time of democratic decay.

My earliest political memory is watching the Berlin Wall fall. I was six years old. We watched together on the nightly news—strangers embracing, people swinging hammers at concrete, everyone laughing. I didn’t know what the wall was or why it mattered. I remember how happy everyone looked. I remember thinking that smashing the wall looked like a lot of fun. I wanted a hammer too.

I’ve spent my career as a political scientist learning why moments like that almost never happen. And why, sometimes, they do.

On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, Frances Perkins was having tea near Washington Square when she heard screams. She ran toward the smoke rising from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and arrived in time to watch 146 workers—mostly young immigrant women—burn to death or leap from ninth-floor windows. The doors had been locked to prevent theft. The fire escapes collapsed. The city’s tallest ladders reached only the sixth floor.

She witnessed it all. She later called it “the day the New Deal was born.”

Perkins understood that the fire was a policy outcome. Every death had been produced by specific legal choices—the absence of fire codes, the permissibility of locked exits, the treatment of workers as inputs rather than persons. The horror of that day was not that the system failed. It was that it was functioning exactly as designed.

I keep a dataset of cross-national comparisons. The OECD—the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—tracks outcomes across thirty-one wealthy democracies. These are our peers. On metric after metric, the United States stands apart from them. American exceptionalism is real, but not in ways worth celebrating.

Start with work and economic life. Americans work longer hours, pay more out-of-pocket for college and childcare, lack parental leave, and enjoy less economic mobility. The share of income going to the top 1 percent is nearly double the OECD average. American CEOs earn, on average, 354 times as much as their workers. More workers are trapped in poverty-wage jobs. Collective bargaining covers fewer workers. And social protections are less generous for those who fall on hard times, with the government raising less in taxes and spending more on the military.

The economy is just the beginning.

We spend nearly twice as much on healthcare as other wealthy countries do. Yet life expectancy is well below average, infant and maternal mortality rates are alarmingly high, and more Americans remain uninsured.

We suffer from overlapping public health crises—the highest rates of teenage births, drug overdoses, obesity, and gun deaths among peer nations.

We have more lawyers per capita and the world’s most profitable legal services industry. Yet we rank 101 out of 114 countries—behind Afghanistan—in ordinary citizens’ ability to access and afford legal services. The average American is outmatched by wealthy interests who can purchase the representation that justice supposedly guarantees.

Our criminal justice system is discriminatory and excessively punitive, with an incarceration rate five times the OECD average. Yet it can seem easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than to send a wealthy American to prison.

These outcomes flow from a political system designed to suppress participation and amplify affluent voices. Americans express similar interest in politics as citizens of other democracies. Yet our turnout remains depressed through deliberate barriers—voter ID laws, purged rolls, Election Day on a workday, gerrymandered districts.

Our society generates enormous prosperity while deliberately withholding it from those who need it most. That is the American exception.

A reasonable person might conclude that the American project is in terminal decline. But the same numbers that document the dysfunction point toward a different, more optimistic conclusion.

America’s problems are solved problems.

Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between.

There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful.

To see this, you need only compare outcomes in the US with its peers. The graphic below illustrates a simple thought experiment: What would happen if the United States simply matched the average performance of our 31 peer nations in the OECD? We don’t need to become a shining city on a hill to transform Americans’ lives. We just need to become average.

Perkins saw what this country wasn’t but could be. After the fire, she did not wait. She dragged legislators through factories and sweatshops until they saw what she had seen. She worked alongside organizers like Rose Schneiderman who understood that reforms don’t happen unless workers were organized enough to demand them. Frederick Douglass put it plainly: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

By 1914, New York had passed dozens of new labor laws—fire codes, limits on hours, restrictions on child labor. Perkins achieved this before she could vote for the legislators who enacted them.

Over the next two decades, she kept building. As Industrial Commissioner, she made New York the proving ground: minimum wages, unemployment insurance, workplace safety. The policies dismissed as radical in Washington became ordinary in Albany.

When Roosevelt named her Secretary of Labor in 1933, she walked into his office with a list: a 40-hour work week, a federal minimum wage, unemployment insurance, abolition of child labor, workplace safety protections, social security. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before,” she told him. “You know that, don’t you?” She had the blueprints in hand—and she made clear she would not take the job unless he was prepared to build from them.

I know how this moment feels. I watch the dismantling too—the corruption displayed without shame, the institutions hollowed from within, the coordinated campaigns of cruelty and dehumanization. It is easy to believe we are watching an ending.

But scholars who study democratic collapse see it differently. “The United States is in a very good place to resist,” Steven Levitsky said recently. “There is a very high likelihood that Trump will fail.”

The regime dismantling our institutions does not command majority support. It never has. Trump’s approval ratings have remained underwater throughout his presidency. The policies being enacted poll badly, often catastrophically. This is not a popular revolution. It is a minoritarian project exploiting a counter-majoritarian system—and regimes built that way are inherently unstable.

The corruption is no longer hidden. Trump accepts $400 million planes from foreign governments while making billions from crypto schemes. Cabinet positions go to mega-donors. Supreme Court justices vacation with billionaires who have cases before the court. This nakedness is not strength but a vulnerability borne of arrogance. Corruption has been the grievance that unites disparate opposition and sweeps strongmen from power. Hidden corruption persists because it is difficult to mobilize against. Exposed corruption shifts the axis of politics from left versus right to clean versus corrupt, people versus oligarchs. That’s a fight authoritarians lose.

And then there are the generations now rising. They are less credulous, more pragmatic, less patient with institutions that fail to deliver. They want specific reforms addressing problems they can name.

The old playbook was caution: promise little, deliver less, call it pragmatism. A new cohort of leaders is done with that. You can hear it in how they speak. When Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as mayor of New York City, he promised to govern audaciously. “We may not always succeed,” he said, “but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”

Political pragmatism is not about fighting only the battles you expect to win. It is the refusal to let probable failure dictate what you attempt. This is the Perkins disposition. She did not know the Depression would come. She did not know Roosevelt would call. She prepared anyway, because preparation is itself a form of politics—a way of insisting that the world you are ready for is a world that could exist.

My deepest fear is not that we fail to survive this moment—it’s that we survive it only to return to the status quo that made it possible. That we exhale, declare victory, and leave in place the Electoral College, the filibuster, the gerrymandered maps, the money-soaked elections that allowed a minoritarian movement to capture the state in the first place. The point is not to get back to normal. Normal is how we got here.

The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.

---

This is my last column before parental leave.

My wife and I will soon welcome our first child. I’ve been thinking about what it means to bring a new person into a country whose vital signs look like ours—the falling life expectancy, the missing safety net, the captured political system. And I keep coming back to Frances Perkins watching the fire.

Having a child is an act of radical optimism—a bet that the future will be worth living in, a refusal to accept that the world as it is represents the world as it must be.

I watched the Berlin Wall fall when I was six. No analyst predicted it would end the way it did—suddenly, peacefully, crowds streaming through checkpoints sealed for decades. Perkins spent twenty-two years preparing for a moment she couldn’t know would come. It came.

Those who say these problems can’t be solved are really saying they can’t be solved here—confessing a belief that Americans are uniquely incapable of what dozens of other democracies have achieved.

Despair makes sense when nothing can be done. We know exactly what can be done. We can see it working.

The work now is the same as it was in 1911: document the failures, design the remedies, prepare for the moment.

The America described above is not some utopian dream. It is a set of solutions waiting to be implemented. And soon there will be one more American worth building it for.