Success breeds failure. That’s a lesson taught by America’s current woes: the stumbling attempts to cope with a novel coronavirus and the all-too-familiar scripts for responding to police misconduct and violent riots.
What worked once upon a time no longer proves functional; policies which once enjoyed consensus now evoke multivarious complaints; procedures that long proved availing suddenly seem dysfunctional.
Providing evidence for that proposition, over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes, “Our orientation toward over-policing and our slow-footed response to fast-moving pandemics both stem from an inability to adapt our safekeeping institution to the realities of the 21st century.”
A quibble. There are legitimate criticisms of “over-policing” — do SWAT teams’ cast-off military equipment really stop crime? — but over the past quarter-century, the story of policing has been overwhelmingly one of success.
Look at the numbers. New York City, under Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, led the way as it reduced its annual homicide tally from 2,245 in 1990 to just 289 in 2018. Others contributed as well. Nationally, homicides declined from 24,700 in 1991 to 14,164 in 2014.
This reflects, among other things, a sharp decline in violent behavior by black people in the United States, who have long accounted for a disproportionate share of violent crime. Parents, teachers, and counselors who have shaped this generation of young African Americans deserve much credit for the 55% decline between 2001 and 2017 in the incarceration of young black males.
Simultaneously, there has also been a sharp drop in police shootings, of both blacks and others, and the proportion of black victims of such shootings is below that of black offenders. The death of George Floyd, captured on horrifying videotape, is thus atypical of national trends — the exception rather than the rule.
Why do so many people feel otherwise? Because success breeds failure. The success of American policing has made the continued existence of abuse seem like an intolerable failure.
There’s a larger phenomenon at work here. The successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, coming on top of (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out) big income and education gains for blacks in the 1940s and 1950s, were abruptly followed by the deadly late 1960s urban riots —again, success breeding failure.
Peaceful protests and, especially in recent weeks, violent rioting came after the election and reelection of the first African American president. Expectations raised by successes that are quickly taken for granted can provide the basis for perceptions of failure.
And not just perceptions. Genuine expertise based on past accomplishments is not a guarantee against future failure.
Example: On Jan. 21, Dr. Anthony Fauci said COVID-19 “is not a major threat to the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.”
This is not the only thing U.S. government experts have got wrong. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched the development of a COVID-19 test and failed to keep count of COVID-19 cases by, among other things, relying on fax machines. The Food and Drug Administration delayed test development with nitpicking and contradictory requirements.
But careful nitpicking, FDA admirers can argue, produced what many consider its greatest historic success — its refusal in the 1950s to approve the fetus-harming drug thalidomide. The CDC’s procedures perhaps also stemmed from traditions instilled by past successes. Once again, success breeds failure.
As for Fauci, surely there’s no expert on infectious disease better equipped, through knowledge and vast experience. He’s performed successfully through six presidents’ administrations and has remained ready to acknowledge mistakes and to confess ignorance when warranted.
Similarly, probably no one in the world knew more about the financial history of the Depression of the 1930s than Ben Bernanke, when he was appointed Federal Reserve chairman in 2006. Yet in a May 2007 speech, he said, “We believe the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited.”
Indeed, one can argue, as his biographer Sebastian Mallaby does, that the great success of Bernanke’s predecessor Alan Greenspan in suppressing inflation and stimulating growth created an overconfidence and complacency that contributed to the 2008 market crash. In other words, success breeds failure.
How to prevent this? Perhaps by examining success more skeptically — and by viewing failure more imaginatively. The hardest thing for political campaign strategists to do, I’ve observed over the years, is to distinguish the nine times out of 10 when they should ignore constant demands to change campaign strategy, from the one time out of 10 when they should do it. Some people are pretty good at this. But even for them, success can breed failure.
