This is a somewhat belated post, in one sense because I wrote almost all of it a while ago and then… forgot? I don’t know. In another sense, because it rather relates to the 4th, and what people have written about that over the weekend, but I didn’t think to write anything special for the holiday, because I can’t keep track of such things.
In the comments to my previous essay on partisanship that became about Conquest’s 2nd Law, Mike H. and I got into a discussion of empires, and I wanted to expand a bit on that. There are two main points I wanted to make (See the post A Model of Empire):
1: Empires have problems for rulers on a spectrum that is mostly a function of population and area. A smaller number of people or a smaller area pose fewer problems for rulers, while a larger number of people or a larger area poses more. Problems are directly proportional to Diversity, and Diversity is directly proportional to both Population and Area.
2: The problems of rulers are the problems of getting people to go along with the rulers’ wishes, that is to say exercising power.1 Some things can mitigate these problems, and some things make them worse. As the problems get greater the empire gets harder and harder to keep together while making the subjects do what the rulers want.
Those are pretty high level, but I think useful structures to think about this more, and model how things work over time, explaining some of the oddities we are seeing now. I want to argue that the USA has accidentally become an empire within its own borders, and that the internal friction we are seeing is is a result of getting close to the “start breaking up” Happiness threshold caused by a combination of increasing rule Strictness and Population Size, over a large Population Area as described in the previous Model of Empire.
Model Refresher
In the model essay I defined Happiness as general stability, with higher Happiness values implying people are willing or desirous to be under the state, and lower Happiness implying people want out. A state, being the highest level of control over a group of people in a given area, starts drifting into what we call empire when that Happiness threshold where people or regions want to break off from and seek independence from the state.
Happiness itself is a function of how Strict the state’s laws are and how much they deviate from the populations’ preferences, how large the Population is, and how large an Area the population resides in, mitigated by the Technology level. Something like this:
Happiness = -dev(Strictness) * (PopulationSize*Area) / Tech
A would be ruler with a given technological level then has a much easier time making a small, very concentrated population do what he wants, or at least can enforce many rules without facing instability (assuming the rules match the preferences of the population), as compared to a very large population spread out all over the place with many different preferences for legislation.
What’s an Empire Look Like?
The definition of empires is a little fuzzy, hence the need for a new model, but when asked to name empires, a few come to mind. Let’s compare those on the dimensions of population and area:
Roman Empire (~150 AD). According to estimates discussed here, at the peak of ~150 AD there were some 65 million people in about 1.93 million square miles.
British Empire (1920). At its peak, apparently about 450 million people in around 13 million square miles.
Soviet Empire (USSR 1992). About 290 million people in about 8.5 million square miles.2
United States of America. (2021) About 330 million people in ~3.5 million square miles. Note: those numbers don’t include non-citizen areas to my understanding.
Let’s compare these a bit. The modern US has more people than all but the British Empire, crammed into less space than the USSR or British Empire but more than Rome. Now, you might say no one really lives in Alaska, but no one really lives in Siberia or large desert stretches of the old British Empire either. Hell, most of Roman era Europe would seem damned near empty by modern standards.
Among those four empires, the US is kind of right smack in the middle. And it should be; the US spans a continent, a non trivial portion of the entire hemisphere, with both coasts heavily populated. With so many people spread over such a large area, it is inevitable that very large divides in culture should develop, even without the wide range of ancestry in the US.3 Earlier empires tended to conquer their neighbors (or people really far away in the case of the British Empire), and the US did its share of that, but a good bit of growth seems to have been due to immigration and relatively high birthrates mixed with high wealth driven life expectancy gains. To the extent the US is an empire, it is largely a voluntary one.4
The voluntary nature of an empire does not detract from the fact that it is an empire. Very large numbers of people spread out over a very large area present the same problems of enforcing the will of distant rulers regardless of whether the recalcitrant subjects were recently stomped into submission or born under the boot. The problems are exacerbated if everyone’s grandpa is still around to tell stories about The War, but the problems are still there if grandpa is telling stories about how everything was better before. Problems of getting people who aren’t like you and live far away to willingly do what you tell them to do are always going to be with us.
In essence, I am arguing that the distinction between empire and all the other kinds of state is a false one. All types of state or government from the level of hunter gatherer tribe to the galactic federation have friction between the will of the rulers and that of the subjects. The hunter gatherer tribe gets big enough and it will split into two. If the kingdom gets too sprawling it will tend to collapse into smaller fiefdoms. Add enough people, and so long as there is enough space for them to live under separate rulers, they will split apart. You might have a nominal single empire, like the Holy Roman Empire, but in reality there were many little warring independent bits. Just ask Samuel von Puffendorf5.
So why do we make this distinction without a difference? I think it is a post facto definition: a state is an empire after it starts to creak and strain under its size and the problems can’t be ignored. If your far flung regions don’t take up arms against you too often, you are a kingdom. Once you get a few rebellions that start trying to set up local rulers, then you are an empire.
Now ask yourself: does it seem a bit like there are a lot of people in the USA who would like to have different governments than the one they happen to currently have? Not merely “I wanted someone else to win the last election, oh well” but more “When my guy wins the election, we are going to shake the shit out of the government.” It is one thing when elections are about who heads institutions, and quite another when elections are about whether or not those institutions are burned to the ground.
So, what? Why does an accidental empire matter?
In the first place, it explains why the US is straining so much lately, why people write about civil war, dissolution and revolution and it comes across as a fair possibility. Although the borders of the US have been fairly stable for many decades, population growth and the distribution between rural and urban areas has been reshaping the demographic regions of the US. Increasingly populations have sorted themselves among the mega cities of the coasts, the small cities of the interior, and the towns and rural areas surrounding. The dense cities have a preference for rules very different than the rest of the nation, as evidenced by the gap between Republican and Democratic voter preferences and their distribution in 20166:
If you doubt the gap between party preferences in the US… well I wish I didn’t live in the past 20 years, either. Or the past 2-3, for that matter. Still, looking at recent history, the senses of propriety on the left and right have gotten quite far apart. People argue about which one, if not both, moved farther towards extremism, but the key point is that those living in the blue counties there have a very different sense of what the rules should be than the red counties.
It also suggests a solution. Highly centralized empires don’t work; you just can’t get everyone to willingly agree to the same rules. If you can decentralize down to the generally agreed upon rules, and leave the contentious aspects to the local regions, you can stick together as a whole. The recent Roe v Wade overturning is probably a strong step in that direction, kicking the decisions about abortion down to the states. More powerful is the decision regarding the EPA and by extension all administrative state entities that wield powers not directly legislated, but that’s another matter. The whole point is to not try and get huge numbers of people to follow all the same rules because that will never work, but rather to have only the bare minimum of universal rules and leave the rest to smaller states. You know, federalism, giving the federal government only a few enumerated powers and leaving the rest to the various states. I seem to recall reading about that in the Constitution somewhere.
Yet there is another step, one we Americans are perhaps a little less enamored of: splitting states. Because the dividing line does not run along state borders7, but rather between the cities and the rest of us.
Yet this problem is not simply one of urban density driving cultural differences. We need to remember that modern states, like modern cities, have become vastly more populous. The entire US population in 1776 was about 2,500,00; according to the 2021 census that teeming urban sprawl we call Kansas had 2,937,880 people. The entirety of the US at the time of the signing of the Articles of Confederation would merely be roughly 37th in population among the modern states.
Even our modern cities dwarf the original USA: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago all have more than 2,500,000 people these days, with Houston not far behind. One wonders if New York employs more or fewer government employees than the entirety of the early US state and federal governments. Honestly, I wouldn’t be willing to bet either way… but I have a guess.
If the original USA was too big to run without remaining 13 individual states with a tiny federal government, should we expect a country ~130 times more populous to be run well with 50? Is that really enough to make up for the huge population and regional differences?
I doubt it, although I would be willing to dismember the federal administrative state and hand power and responsibility back to the states first, and see how that works out first. It is entirely possible that the simple expedient of a much lighter governing hand would do the trick; remove the opportunity for seizing great power, and people will stop fighting so hard to get it. That is the most important first step, with further breaking up of the governing structures into smaller, more manageable units the next.
The big point here is that we as a people, as a nation, as a species, have got to come to terms with the fact that our modern world is very little like the world of 200+ years ago. For starters, there are absolutely swarms more of us. Many US cities would be considered phenomenally powerful city-states in pre-modern times, yet they are just part of a larger state apparatus, itself part of a larger national governmental leviathan.
The non-linear effects of population and space on culture and the ability for government to rule has not fully been appreciated. We have stuck with the same state and national boundaries for a very long time, and since they didn’t move much we figured everything was basically the same. Now we look around and wonder “What the hell happened? Why is everyone so crazy and at each other’s throats?” Turns out we are not the little country united by a desire to live free, to raise our families, do our work and worship our gods as we see fit, not any more. Now we have “culture wars” where everyone seems hell bent on imposing their way of life on everyone else through the power of the state, and people are lucky if they commit fewer than three felonies a day.
In other words, we have become an empire, and they are fragile things indeed.
Happy July 4th!
Or exercising state capacity, if you’d like.
If you don’t like those examples of empires, the links there cover most of the other main examples.
Writing this, I find myself wondering how many nation states can claim to have citizens from every other human nation in the world. Can the US? Could the British? It seems possible, but it would probably have to be a modern phenomenon, right?
Well… ok people will argue about the whole Civil War thing, and how voluntary membership in the Union really is. I think that supports my argument of the USA as empire as much as anything, however.
“De statu imperii Germanici”.
From “For Democrats, the Road to Victory in 2020 Runs Through Rural America. This Report Offers a Road Map”. Note: the map is somewhat more extreme than reality due to being based on voting results, not the registration numbers (which are oddly hard to find). There is likely a more gradual gradient between the deep blue and deep red regions.
Unless you live in Oklahoma or West Virginia, apparently.
One complication is how exactly you draw the boundaries of the American empire. I'd argue that the informal boundaries - the large collection of vassal states - make the imperial system much larger than just the borders of CONUS ... which doesn't make administrating the beast any easier.
Redrawing state boundaries to e.g. split apart red counties from blue cities might help keep the peace. On the other hand, resistance would be significant. Redrawing the map in such a fashion would result in red states vastly outnumbering blue states, meaning the Senate would be perpetually dominated by red team; blue team won't go for that.
The other issue is that Congress ends up ballooning in size. It's already dysfunctional with hundreds of members; what does it look like with thousands?
Re: footnote 6. Yes, there is probably a more gradual gradient between deep blue and deep red, but there is probably more red than the map shows. Take, for example, San Bernardino County, CA. (It's not hard to find--it's the largest county on the entire map.) Most of the population (and most of the blue population) is in the extreme southwest of the county. The rest is desert sparsely populated with red-teamers. So Southern CA is much redder than the map shows (by area, not population, of course).