In March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of a nation in crisis. He moved boldly, persuading Congress to adopt a barrage of laws within his first hundred days in office.

Roosevelt's initiative transformed American life. It also set a benchmark for every new president since. Before inauguration day, new presidents are pushed to set audacious legislative goals for their first hundred days. And, in April, they are judged on their success in signing major new laws.

White House advisors have railed against the benchmark for decades. But it persists. The benchmark has even been exported. German chancellors, British prime ministers and French presidents have all been held to a standard invented in the early days of the American New Deal.

Now President-elect Joe Biden is wrestling with the benchmark. During the 2020 campaign, he leaned toward New Deal-style boldness, telling journalists that challenges facing the United States might even "eclipse what FDR faced" and that there was an opportunity for "really systemic change."  

But Biden has also tried to limit expectations about his first hundred days. In December, he seemed to play down the idea of a legislative onslaught, proposing a more limited set of hundred-day goals tied to handling the pandemic.

Yet many Democrats are pushing Biden to follow FDR's example. Soon after election day, Senator Chuck Schumer declared that the first three months of a Biden presidency should "look like FDR's," delivering on a "big, bold agenda." Success in the Georgia senatorial races – and recovery of Democratic control in the Senate – has produced even more calls for FDR-style boldness.

But the lure of the hundred-day benchmark should be resisted. Experience has revealed it to be an unhelpful template for newly-elected presidents.

More fundamentally, the comparison to 1933 is misguided. The United States today is a more complex society, facing a different kind of crisis than in 1933 – a crisis that might actually be intensified by following FDR's path.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the last national leader to be inaugurated in March rather than January. Facing an unprecedented economic disaster, he immediately called an emergency session of Congress. That session continued until June 1933 – almost exactly one hundred days.

Congress passed fifteen major laws intended to pull the country out of an economic abyss in that timespan. The country was taken off the gold standard and a bank holiday was declared. The banking and securities industries were fundamentally restructured. Agricultural and industrial production was brought under federal regulation. The federal government gave aid to farmers and homeowners and established national programs for public works and emergency relief.

In June 1933, Senator Clarence Dill celebrated "these first 100 days" as "the greatest peaceful revolution in the annals of organized government." Roosevelt himself recounted the "crowding events of the hundred days" in a radio address in July 1933. The first hundred days proved the United States "had a government that could govern," wrote columnist Walter Lippmann three months later.

During World War II, journalists coined a phrase – “legislative blitz” – to  describe what Roosevelt had done. Gradually, it became the expected approach for newly-elected presidents to take. Aides to President Harry Truman promised "swift action . . . with the idea that the first 100 days were easiest" after the 1948 election. But harsh appraisals followed when Congress foiled Truman's plans. "He oversold himself," one journalist complained in April 1949. "The first 100 days make him look like a minor league statesman." 

When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, some of his supporters also promised an FDR-style blitz to reverse the New Deal. But Eisenhower, like Truman, fell short. His early performance, one critic complained in April 1953, was "spasmodic." At the same time, a New York Times columnist conceded that the benchmark was a "synthetic event."

It took a Harvard historian – Arthur Schlesinger Jr. – to breathe new life into the “hundred days.” The second volume of his history of the Roosevelt presidency, 

(1958), exalted FDR's first three months as "a period of intense drama and prodigious legislation" that restored national confidence.

Schlesinger's book quickly shaped public opinion. After the 1960 election, there was "talk all over town about 'another Hundred Days,'" according to Richard Neustadt, an aide to President-elect John F. Kennedy. 

 expected that Kennedy would "move swiftly . . . to ram through Congress as much legislation as possible in the first 'one hundred days.'"

Yet Kennedy’s legislative blitz did not succeed. Congress approved just one-quarter of the administration's major proposals in the first three months. Kennedy was wary when another aide, Walt Rostow, pitched the idea of a major address to mark the hundredth day. And after the Bay of Pigs debacle in mid-April, Kennedy decided to let the day pass without comment.

The allure of the benchmark did not fade. After the 1964 election, President Lyndon Johnson commanded his staff to get as much legislation passed in the first hundred days "as is humanly possible." His congressional liaison, Lawrence O'Brien, was instructed to "jerk out every damn little bill you can." In April 1965, Johnson bragged to journalists about breaking FDR's record for new laws. 

President-elect Richard Nixon also could not resist the allure of the concept. In 1968, speechwriter Ray Price warned his boss, against playing by "the old rules" of measuring progress in the first hundred days. But Nixon set up a Hundred Days Group within the White House – and delivered a special message in early April. Pundits were unimpressed. Nixon's first hundred days, 

 pronounced, were "Eisenhowerism without Eisenhower."

Pollster Pat Cadell warned Jimmy Carter in 1977 that "the country doesn't want another 100 days." But journalist Robert Shogan got inside access to document the new administration’s first hundred days, and advisor Stuart Eisenstadt was tasked with tallying the administration's "significant achievements."  

Promises to Keep: Carter's First Hundred Days

 that Carter quickened the pace of work as April approached. The result was "a jumble of programs and deadlines, forced marches and sudden retreats." Journalist Hedrick Smith declared that Carter had "fallen well short of the legislative blitz achieved by Franklin D. Roosevelt."

The lure of the hundred-day benchmark should be resisted. Experience has revealed it to be an unhelpful template for newly-elected presidents. 

Soon after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, a 

columnist declared that "the First Hundred Days is claptrap." But the Reagan White House took it seriously, drafting a Hundred Days Plan that paid homage to the "hallowed reputation" of FDR. 

Events interceded: Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. on Day 70 of his new administration. Yet assessments were largely favorable. Reagan had not delivered much legislation, 

 conceded, but he had shown determination to "change the tides of history."

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reappeared as Bill Clinton’s inauguration loomed to warn that the benchmark had become a "100-days trap."  Still, Clinton fell into it. But his promise of "an explosive 100-day action period" that would produce "a sweeping package of legislation" was stymied by Congress. Clinton's media director Jeff Eller shifted into reverse in that moment, dismissing one hundred days as "an artificial landmark."  

A few years later, aides to President-elect George W. Bush argued that 180 days was a more reasonable standard. Few were persuaded. The hundred-day benchmark is "genetically encoded in people who study presidents," observed historian Michael Beschloss in early 2001. 

The benchmark made a powerful return by 2008. Journalist John Heilemann reported that many of President-elect Barack Obama's advisors were reading about FDR's hundred days. Obama himself told 

 that he wanted to emulate FDR's performance. In 

, Jean Edward Smith explained that Americans "expect their presidents to hit the ground running."

But Obama found it difficult to make progress, despite Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The administration secured passage of an economic stimulus law, but fell short on other priorities such as healthcare reform. While Obama did give a press conference in April to review his accomplishments, his advisors dismissed the benchmark as a "Hallmark holiday" – a meaningless date. Still, 

 concluded, Obama’s hundred days was "hardly a New Deal." 

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump unveiled 100-day action plans during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump promised ten major laws in his first hundred days, including a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. In April 2017, the White House boasted that Trump had enacted more legislation than any other president since Johnson. In fact, only one of Trump's promised laws was introduced in Congress, and it was not adopted. Not exactly a legislative blitz – even though Trump's party controlled both chambers of Congress.

People who dismiss the hundred-day benchmark observe that Roosevelt launched his presidency under extraordinary circumstances. And they are right.

Historian Jonathan Alter has described the early months of 1933 as "one of the darkest moments of American history."  The federal government was operating blind. No one really knew how many businesses had failed and how many people had lost their jobs. The country was wracked with strikes and protests. Machine guns were deployed to defend the Capitol on Inauguration Day.

"The country was in such a state of confused desperation," Walter Lippmann wrote in May 1933, "that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go."

A collapse in political opposition gave Roosevelt another advantage. The 1932 election slashed Republican numbers in the House and Senate. Opponents also suffered from an exhaustion of ideas. Four Republican senators had endorsed Roosevelt in 1932. Kansas’ Republican Governor, Alf Landon – later a Republican presidential candidate – announced in March 1933 that he was ready to "enlist for the duration" of Roosevelt's recovery effort.

The media was in Roosevelt's corner too. Conservative newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst backed Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt charmed newspapermen with informal briefings that signaled a dramatic change from the aloofness of the Hoover White House, and dominated the new medium of radio as well. Half of America’s population heard his first "fireside chat" a week after his inauguration.

Roosevelt’s final advantage was that he was not trying to turn a massive ship. Federal government was a small and ramshackle enterprise in 1933. Often, there were no existing policies that had to be squared with new legislation. Bills could be drafted by advisors cloistered in smoky hotel rooms without lengthy inter-agency consultations. And there were fewer organized interests to defend the status quo. Much of U.S. government was a blank slate. This made FDR’s legislative blitz easier. 

Speed also had its price. Roosevelt’s administration made serious mistakes as it worked to revive confidence. "What people forget," one of Roosevelt's key advisors, Thomas Corcoran, said years later, "is that many of [the Hundred Days laws] were declared unconstitutional or had to be redone."

The second law adopted during FDR’s blitz of 1933 – the Economy Act – was one such mistake. Roosevelt had campaigned in 1932 on the traditional Democratic plank of a balanced budget. The Economy Act tried to deliver on the promise by slashing government spending. But it was exactly the wrong measure for that moment. The Roosevelt administration struggled to reconcile austerity with the need for more spending on relief and public works. Cabinet secretaries fired staff and slashed salaries as they attempted to launch new programs. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes lamented that "radical cuts" in his department were causing work to be "seriously curtailed."

The Economy Act also caused unnecessary political trouble. Cuts to veterans' benefits led to complaints of heartlessness, and Congress threatened to reverse the cuts even before the hundred days had ended. Roosevelt made concessions to keep the peace. Congress eventually passed legislation to reverse the cuts in in March 1934, and Roosevelt's veto of this legislation was easily overridden. Ickes called this battle the president's "first serious political setback." 

Many of FDR’s hundred-days statutes were poorly drafted. None was more flawed than the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave a new federal agency – the National Recovery Administration – the power to approve codes regulating competition throughout the economy. The law was too vague and ambitious, and businesses quickly learned how to exploit the system. When the Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional in 1935, many progressives were relieved. "It has been an awful headache," Roosevelt admitted. "Some of the things they have done in the NRA are pretty wrong."

 Some errors had global impact. When diplomats gathered in London in June 1933 to fashion a common response to the economic crisis, the unfamiliar economic and political landscape made negotiations complicated. Even the American delegation was confused about what its position should be. Continuing discussions might have allowed participants to discover common ground. But Roosevelt quickly killed the conference – and prospects for international cooperation – with a harsh telegram that became known as the Bombshell. 

Some scholars justify Roosevelt's telegram as an intelligent response to circumstances. But the reality is that Roosevelt was distracted and exhausted. The telegram was drafted without advice and – in the words of one historian – with "great haste and frustrated anger."

Missteps and shortcuts abounded during the hundred days. Banking reform was watered down to increase the odds of quick passage. Initiatives to help Black Americans were abandoned to appease southern Democrats in Congress. Roosevelt fought an unwise and futile battle against federal deposit insurance.

Perhaps these errors were unavoidable. The pace of work was relentless, and FDR was not the only person under strain. "Washington was in the grip of a war psychology," advisor Raymond Moley recalled. "None of us lived normal lives. Confusion, haste, the dread of making mistakes, the consciousness of responsibility . . . made mortal inroads on the health of some of us and left the rest of us ready to snap at our own images in the mirror."

President-elect Biden has felt the pull of FDR's example. In October 2020, he revealed that he was reading Jonathan Alter's book on FDR's hundred days, 

. A few days later, Biden gave a speech in Warm Springs, Georgia – the location of Roosevelt's Little White House between 1933 and 1945.

"Clear the decks for action," Biden declared, promising comprehensive reform plans for the economy, healthcare, climate change and racial justice.

However, post-election planning has sometimes struck a different tone. In early December, Biden announced "three key goals for my first 100 days" that sidestepped broad structural reforms entirely. Biden promised that his administration would deliver 100 million COVID-19 vaccine shots, work to open a majority of schools, and encourage the public to wear masks as a "patriotic act."

This attempt to contain expectations about the first hundred days makes sense. Prospects for sweeping legislative reforms may be poor in the short run. Republican opposition is not as weakened or demoralized as it was in 1933. The election showed that elements of Trumpism remain very popular. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is now smaller and less manageable. Even after the Georgia run-off elections, Democratic power in the Senate is precarious, hinging on the support of Democratic senators from more conservative states.

There is another reason for caution in the first hundred days. The crisis of 2021 is fundamentally different than the crisis of 1933. FDR confronted an economic collapse. Biden faces a crisis of national unity. The country is profoundly divided on basic questions about national goals and the role of government. An aggressive legislative agenda might intensify that split. It would reinforce the perception of national politics as a high-stakes, winner-takes-all struggle.

The United States has experienced deep internal divisions before, and other countries live with such divisions today. Fractures like this can be managed successfully. Leaders of divided countries often have a particular style, acting more like diplomats rather than activists. They do not launch legislative blitzes. Instead, they pick battles carefully. They broker deals where possible. They accept compromises rather than resting solely on principle. They try to keep the temperature below boiling point.

This style of governing can be slow, quiet and sometimes uninspiring. But leaders in divided countries behave this way for good reason – to minimize the risk of political dysfunction, civil unrest, and national disunity.

Every new president faces a distinctive set of challenges, and must make their own calculation about how to navigate through those challenges. Sometimes the wise choice is to move quickly and boldly, and sometimes not. The basic difficulty with the hundred-day benchmark is that it ignores this need for strategy to reflect circumstances. It prescribes the same medicine – an FDR-style legislative blitz – for every new president. 

The benchmark of a hundred days might have made sense in 1933. In our more complex and fractious world, holding leaders to that standard may only produce frustration and disharmony. 

 is a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and director of its School of Public Policy.  His books include 

Cover Photograph: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the TVA Act, establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority on May 18, 1933. (National Archives and Records Administration)

Photo of U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021: Tyler Merbler / Wikimedia Commons 

100 Days 2.jpg

Is an FDR-style legislative blitz the best way forward in our present crisis? 

The Hundred Day Mistake

Twenty years ago, the nation-state was pronounced dead.

Kenichi Ohmae, a Japanese management consultant whose book 

 was published in July 1995, broke the news. “Nation states, have 

 lost their role as meaningful units of participation in the global economy of today’s borderless world,” Ohmae wrote. “The nation state is increasingly a nostalgic fiction.”

reaffirmed by French diplomat Jean-Marie Guéhenno in his own book, 

. States had been “bypassed by transnational games,” said Guéhenno, and no longer functioned as “the natural space of solidarity and political control.” The state was “too remote to manage the problems of our daily life … [and] too constrained to confront the global problems that affect us.”

A year later, British academic Susan Strange piled on with her own announcement that world markets were now more powerful than states. “Heads of governments,” 

, “may be the last to recognize that they and their ministers have lost the authority over national societies and economies that they used to have.”

What caused the nation-state’s supposed death?

The main culprit was alleged to be economic globalization. In the 1980s and 1990s, governments around the world dismantled barriers to international commerce. The Treaty on European Union came into force in November 1993, followed by the North American Free Trade Agreement in January 1994 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. In the United States and Europe, there was handwringing about deindustrialization as container ships queued outside booming Asian seaports. International financiers were strutting in New York and London. 

James Carville, an advisor to President Bill Clinton, told 

 in 1993 that if he were to be reincarnated, “I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

Technological changes had also played a hand. The world was beginning to rewire itself with scant regard for national borders. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the concept for the World Wide Web. There were 

only 45 million Internet users in 1995, but this was still three times as many as there had been in 1993

, when the first widely used web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was released. The general public was discovering the virtues of electronic mail. (“It has the immediacy and intangibility of a phone call, so you needn’t write for the ages. … it is perfectly acceptable to peck out an unbaked notion, hit a button, and send it off into cyberspace,” Elle magazine assured its readers in 1993). In the developed world, most households now had access to cable television, while newscasters had access to improved satellite technology; the result was pervasive, real-time coverage of events around the world. 

 and predicted that it would undermine the autonomy of foreign ministries and military commanders.

The Internet may threaten national sovereignty, but so did the railroad and long-range bomber. 

The nation-state has always struggled to manage large social & economic forces.

The third cause of the death was said to be the shift in geopolitics in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The Soviet Union, a totalitarian regime that had threatened the West since the end of the Second World War, 

, and the Soviet threat stiffened the backbone of the state in the West as well, countering the 

tendencies toward “indecision, disunity, and disintegration”

 that many people believed were intrinsic to democratic politics. At the same time, 

the 40-year conflict caused both superpowers to support autocratic client states in other parts of the world

. The end of the Cold War was heralded as a moment of liberation for many nations, but it provoked anxiety, too. Without an existential threat, there appeared to be no real check against the dissipation of order within democratic states, and in relations between them.

The overwhelming impression was that states had lost control over the events around them. Old institutions were crumbling, and old causes and alliances were slipping away. It seemed that governments had surrendered sovereignty over their own territory: money, goods, and information now flowed easily, often invisibly, across national borders. Power had been given up to arbitrageurs in London, technocrats in Brussels and Geneva, and manufacturers in Shenzhen; to well-intentioned global alliances of human rights and environmental activists, 

and to “dark networks” of radical Islamists, smugglers and money launderers

. Many different things were happening at once, and quickly, and uncertainty about what might happen next encouraged hyperbole. It was not enough to predict that the role of the state would change. Instead, the era of the nation-state was said to be “slamming shut.”

This analysis was built on an ignorance of history, which caused many people to exaggerate how much the nation-state had ever had control of events in the world around it. As 

 said, the capitalist economy has always been a shapeshifter, constantly metamorphizing and slipping from the grasp of politicians and bureaucracies that want to tame it.

The Internet might have threatened national sovereignty, but so did the advent of railroads and the invention of the long-range nuclear bomber. Borders might have seemed more open in the 1990s than they had been in the 1960s, but they were not nearly as porous as they had been in the 19th century. The international order might have been shaken after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but not so profoundly as it had been after the First World War, 

which let loose “blind, irrational and demonic forces,” as Peter Drucker observed in 1939

The reality is that the nation-state has always struggled to manage large social and economic forces. It does this by 

, the administrative apparatus of government. This process takes time. In democratic systems, the public must be persuaded that the existing apparatus is inadequate and that certain reforms are necessary. And after this, the exercise of actually constructing new institutions may take years. Look at the American response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression: the new architecture for economic management was not completed until the publication of the first 

, in 1947. That is a span of 18 years. It would have been rash to say in the early 1930s that the global economic collapse had conclusively demonstrated the impotence of western democracies. Those nations simply needed time to regain their footing. And yet we made a similar rush to judgment in the mid-1990s: we forecast the death of the nation-state, without allowing for its capacity to adapt and rebound.

And the nation-state has adapted to new conditions, in ways that have preserved its capacity to control territory, people, and events. Consider what has happened to the Internet. In the 1990s, this new technology was heralded as a powerful way of circumventing and challenging state authority. 

The activist John Perry Barlow issued a “declaration of independence” for the Internet in 1996

. “Governments of the World,” it began, “You have no sovereignty where we gather. … You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have true reason to fear.” Barlow did not anticipate 

the Golden Shield Project run by China’s Ministry of Public Security

, which today censors content for 600 million Internet users, and is only one part of the “Great Firewall,” a larger effort to “re-establish the control of the governing authorities.” Nor did he anticipate the massive capacity for Internet surveillance that was built up by democratic nations and revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Journalist Glenn Greenwald concluded from Snowden’s leaked documents that the U.S. National Security Agency has “one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.”

The capacity of the state to counter new forms of opposition is often underestimated. For example, some people argued that the Internet would make it easier for officials to leak sensitive information and hold governments accountable for abuses. The WikiLeaks project, and Snowden’s own revelations, seemed to bolster their case. But governments responded by developing sophisticated new methods of “insider threat detection” to prevent further leaks. Antagonists like Snowden (now exiled in Russia) and WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange (marking his third year of involuntary residence in Ecuador’s London embassy, as he evades extradition to Sweden for questioning in sexual assault allegations) were shunted aside. And the leaks themselves proved to be less threatening to the established order than expected. It was a similar story with regard to the alleged capacity of the Internet to enable powerful new forms of social mobilization, such as the anti-globalization and Occupy movements. 

The activist David Graeber thought that the Internet

 would help to launch “a vast global uprising against neoliberalism.” And it might have —

 had governments not responded with a massive and coordinated effort to toughen the policing of mass protests

In some respects, the new millennium is a golden age for nation-states, precisely because of technologies that were expected to undermine them. 

The anthropologist James C. Scott wrote in 1998 that

 the “great achievement of modern statecraft” was the capacity of the state to make society 

 — that is, to produce a detailed record of its terrain and all the activity within it. The ability of developed nations to engage in this sort of mapping and surveillance was already well-developed in 1998, but it has improved dramatically since then. Because financial transactions are digitized, economic activity is easier to monitor. 

Similarly, the behavior of citizens can be analyzed through the vast streams of data that are produced 

, cell phones, computers, Internet service provider records, television set-top boxes, automotive telematics systems, and other devices. As Scott observed in 1998, legibility matters because it is a precondition for social and economic regulation. The more that a state knows about its domain, the better its ability to govern within it.

Even in the sphere of international affairs, states have maintained their influence. Twenty years ago, there were people who thought that the creation of the WTO marked the advent of a new system of “world government” — a “globe-girdling regime from which there is no escape,” according to the American conservative Pat Buchanan. 

American journalist-turned-diplomat Strobe Talbott saw the WTO and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as

 “protoministries of trade, finance and development for a united world.” But negotiations to extend the power of the WTO have been frustrated since 1995, as nations in the developing — as well as the developed — world have dug in their heels on critical issues. Meanwhile, countries such as Malaysia and Argentina have resisted IMF pressure to adjust their domestic economic policies.

Even in Europe, the nation-state continues to put up a fight. 

The 1992 Treaty on Economic Union was supposed to impose “binding constraints”

 on spending and borrowing by Eurozone countries. Enforcement mechanisms for these rules were strengthened by the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact, 

 “one of the most remarkable pieces of policy coordination in world history.” However, after the world economy slowed in 2001, major Eurozone countries ignored these rules. (One observer wrote that the rules were “set aside when they clashed with economic and political reality.”)

In 2007, European finance ministers insisted these fiscal rules were still “a key priority.” But they were again disregarded after the advent of the global financial crisis. The response was yet another strengthening of enforcement mechanisms — first by regulations adopted in 2011, and then by treaty in 2012, and again by regulations adopted in 2013. The 2012 treaty, known as the Fiscal Compact, requires that governments adopt balanced-budget legislation that forces “automatic” corrections when governments deviate from budget targets. 

But the Compact also recognizes the “prerogatives of national Parliaments”

 to decide whether corrections should be adjusted in exceptional circumstances. Once again, nation-states insisted on having the last word.

Of course, there are other ways in which nation-states have asserted themselves. The United States did not hesitate to flex its military power after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A year and a half later, many jurists doubted that an American invasion of Iraq could be justified under international law. The planned invasion also triggered global protests that were, 

according to the political scientist Sidney Tarrow

, “the largest example of collective action in history.” Still, the invasion went ahead. President George W. Bush 

responded to the international protests by insisting that he would not “decide policy based upon a focus group,”

 and at the start, most Americans agreed with him. President Vladimir Putin showed similar disregard for international opinion when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

In 1992, Strobe Talbott predicted that “nationhood as we know it” would become obsolete 

in the 21st century. “All states,” he said, “will recognize a single, global authority.” In reality, what we have seen is a revival of the old game of great power politics. Today, some Americans worry about the growing influence of China, a country that is building up armed forces, asserting sovereignty over land and sea routes, and crafting alliances that secure its access to critical resources. In short, China is behaving like a conventional nation-state. And the United States is responding in like manner by rebuilding its diplomatic and military capacities to meet the challenge posed by this rising power. This is a “substantial national project,” 

according to Kurt Campbell, a former Obama administration diplomat

, that is intended to produce “a vast and dynamic increase in U.S. focus and depth of engagement” in the Asia-Pacific region.

A large number of Americans worry about another issue: the extent to which economic inequality has led to political inequality. Nobel laureate 

Joseph Stiglitz is one of many people who complains that the American political system has been “captured by moneyed interests.”

 But this is also an old refrain in American politics. A century ago, there was

 a strikingly similar debate about the rise of a “new plutocracy.”

 It is the kind of debate that proceeds on the assumption that the nation-state still matters. After all, we might not care whether government had been captured by the rich if we believed that real power laid elsewhere.

Indeed, Americans would be right to think that there is an air of unreality to the claim that the nation-state has ceased to matter. Many of the vital questions of today’s politics bear on the relationship between the state and the people over whom it asserts authority. How should government deal with illegal immigration and the American-born children of undocumented immigrants? Are racial minorities adequately protected against police abuses? Should gays and lesbians be allowed to marry? Is the right to vote respected? Do citizens have adequate access to affordable healthcare or postsecondary education? Should insolvent debtors be bailed out, or allowed to repudiate their debts?

The nation-state is not dead. The reality is that the influence of the state over daily life is more extensive than ever, with good consequences as well as bad. Certainly, nation-states are susceptible to influence from other centers of power, as they always have been. But this does not mean that the autonomy of the state has collapsed.

And so the three questions that have traditionally been at the center of politics are likely to remain there. Who controls the state, and in particular, is it sufficiently responsive to public opinion? How do we protect citizens from arbitrary and unfair state action? And how do we reform the administrative apparatus of the state so that it is capable of delivering essential services and managing the powerful forces that operate around it?

is a professor of law at Suffolk University in Boston. In September 2015, he will become a professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs at the University of Missouri. His books include 

The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government

 (Oxford University Press, 2011). His website is 

notdeadyet.png

In the mid-1990s, many academics declared an end to the nation-state. Twenty years later, the influence of the state over daily life is more extensive than ever.

The Nation-State: Not Dead Yet

Late last November, the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks achieved the greatest triumph in its short history. A consortium of major news media organizations — including 

 — began publishing excerpts from a quarter-million cables between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic outposts that WikiLeaks had obtained. The group claimed that the cables constituted “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.” The Guardian predicted that the disclosures would trigger a “global diplomatic crisis.”

This was the fourth major disclosure orchestrated by WikiLeaks last year. In April, it had released a classified video showing an attack in 2007 by U.S. Army helicopters in the streets of Baghdad that killed 12 people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency. In July, it had collaborated with the news media consortium on the release of 90,000 documents describing U.S. military operations in Afghanistan from 2004 through 2009. These records included new reports of civilian casualties and “friendly fire” incidents. In October came a similar but larger set of documents — almost 400,000 — detailing U.S. military operations in Iraq.

WikiLeaks’ boosters said that the group was waging a war on secrecy, and by the end of 2010 it seemed to be winning. The leaks marked “the end of secrecy in the old-fashioned, Cold War–era sense,” claimed 

 journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. A Norwegian politician nominated WikiLeaks for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that it had helped “redraw the map of information freedom.” “Like him or not,” wrote a 

 magazine journalist in December, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had “the power to impose his judgment of what should or shouldn’t be secret.”

Did the leaks of 2010 really mark the end of “old-fashioned secrecy?” Not by a long shot. Certainly, new information technologies have made it easier to leak sensitive information and broadcast it to the world. A generation ago, leaking was limited by the need to physically copy and smuggle actual documents. Now it is a matter of dragging, dropping, and clicking Send. But there are still impressive barriers to the kind of “radical transparency” WikiLeaks says it wants to achieve. Indeed, the WikiLeaks experience shows how durable those barriers are.

Let’s begin by putting the leaks in proper perspective. A common way of showing their significance is to emphasize the sheer volume of material. In July 2010, TheGuardian described the release of the Afghan war documents as “one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history.” Assange, an Australian computer programmer and activist who had founded WikiLeaks in 2006 (and is currently in Britain facing extradition to Sweden on rape and sexual molestation charges), compared it to perhaps the most famous leak in history. “The Pentagon Papers was about 10,000 pages,” he told the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, alluding to the secret Pentagon history of America’s involvement in Vietnam that was leaked in 1971. By contrast, there were “about 200,000 pages in this material.”

The Afghan war logs did not hold the record for long. In October, they were supplanted by the Iraq disclosures, “the greatest data leak in the history of the United States military,” according to Der Spiegel. Within weeks, WikiLeaks was warning that this record too would soon be shattered. It boasted on Twitter that its next release, the State Department cables, would be “7x the size of the Iraq War Logs.” Indeed, it was “an astonishing mountain of words,” said the two Guardian journalists. “If the tiny memory stick containing the cables had been a set of printed texts, it would have made up a library containing more than 2,000 sizable books.”

Gauging the significance of leaks based on document volume involves a logical fallacy. The reasoning is this: If we are in possession of a larger number of sensitive documents than ever before, we must also be in possession of a larger proportion of the total stockpile than ever before. But this assumes that the total itself has not changed over time.

In fact, the amount of sensitive information held within the national security apparatus is immensely larger than it was a generation ago. Technological change has caused an explosion in the rate of information production within government agencies, as everywhere else. For example, the leaked State Department cables might have added up to about two gigabytes of data—one-quarter of an eight-gigabyte memory card. By comparison, it has been estimated that the outgoing Bush White House transferred 77 terabytes of data to the National Archives in 2009. That is almost 10,000 memory cards for the White House alone. The holdings of other agencies are even larger.

The truth is that a count of leaked messages tells us nothing about the significance of a breach. Only six percent of the State Department cables that were leaked last year were classified as secret. And the State Department has said that the network from which the cables were extracted was not even the primary vehicle for disseminating its information. In the period in which most of the quarter-million WikiLeaks cables were distributed within the U.S. government, a State Department official said, “we disseminated 2.4 million cables, 10 times as many, through other systems.”

The 2010 disclosures also revealed fundamental problems with the WikiLeaks project. The logic that initially motivated Assange and his colleagues was straightforward: WikiLeaks would post leaked information on the Internet and rely on the public to interpret it, become outraged, and demand reform. The antisecrecy group, which at the start of last year had a core of about 40 volunteers, had great faith in the capacity of the public to do the right thing. Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was WikiLeaks’ spokesman until he broke with Assange last fall, explained the reasoning in Inside WikiLeaks, a book published earlier this year: “If you provide people sufficient background information, they are capable of behaving correctly and making the right decisions.”

This proposition was soon tested and found wanting. When WikiLeaks released a series of U.S. military counterinsurgency manuals in 2008, Domscheit-Berg thought there would be “outrage around the world, and I expected journalists to beat down our doors.” The manuals described techniques for preventing the overthrow of governments friendly to the United States. In fact, the reaction was negligible. “No one cared,” writes Domscheit-Berg, “because the subject matter was too complex.”

As the British journalist John Lanchester recently observed, WikiLeaks’ “release of information is unprecedented: But it is not journalism. The data need to be interpreted, studied, made into a story.” WikiLeaks attempted to do this itself when it released the Baghdad helicopter video. Assange unveiled the video at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., and packaged it so that its significance would be clear. He titled it Collateral Murder. The edited video, WikiLeaks said, provided evidence of “indiscriminate” and “unprovoked” killing of civilians.

Even with this priming, the public reaction was muted. Many people turned on WikiLeaks itself, charging that it had manipulated the video to bolster its allegations of military misconduct. “This strategy for stirring up public interest was a mistake,” Domscheit-Berg agrees. “A lot of people [felt] ... that they were being led around by the nose.”

The release of the Afghan war documents in July 2010 gave WikiLeaks further evidence of its own limitations. The trove of documents was “vast, confusing, and impossible to navigate,” according to The Guardian’s Leigh and Harding, “an impenetrable forest of military jargon.” Furthermore, the logs contained the names of many individuals who had cooperated with the American military and whose lives could be threatened by disclosure. WikiLeaks recognized the need for a “harm minimization” plan but lacked the field knowledge necessary to make good decisions about what should be withheld.

By last summer, all of these difficulties had driven WikiLeaks to seek its partnership with news media organizations. The consortium that handled the disclosures last fall provided several essential services for the group. It gave technical assistance in organizing data and provided the expertise needed to decode and interpret records. It opened a channel to government officials for conversation about the implications of disclosing information that WikiLeaks itself was unable to establish. Finally, of course, the news media organizations had the capacity to command public attention. They were trusted by readers and possessed a skill in packaging information that WikiLeaks lacked.

By the end of 2010, it was clear that WikiLeaks’ modus operandi had fundamentally changed. It had begun with an unambiguous conception of its role as a receiver and distributor of leaked information. At year’s end, it was performing a different function: It still hoped to serve as a trusted receiver of leaks, but it was now working with mainstream news media to decide how—or if—leaked information ought to be published. For WikiLeaks, this involved difficult concessions. “We were no longer in control of the process,” Domscheit-Berg later wrote. The outflow of leaked information was now constrained by the newspapers’ willingness to invest money and time in sifting through more documents.

For the newspapers that participated in the consortium, the rationale for publishing leaked information was simple. As The New York Times explained in an editorial note when the State Department cables were released in November, Americans “have a right to know what is being done in their name.” The cables “tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions.” This is the conventional journalistic argument in defense of disclosure, and there is no doubt that the WikiLeaks revelations provided vivid and sometimes disturbing illustrations of the ways in which power is wielded by the United States and its allies.

WikiLeaks itself wanted bigger things to flow from its work. It continued to expect outrage and political action. Assange told Britain’s Channel 4 News last July that he anticipated that the release of the Afghan war documents would shift public opinion against the war. There was a similar expectation following release of the Iraq war documents. But these hopes were again disappointed. In some polls, perceptions about the conduct of the Afghan war actually became more favorable after the WikiLeaks release. Meanwhile, opinion about American engagement in Iraq remained essentially unchanged, as it had been for several years.

There are good reasons why disclosures do not necessarily produce significant changes in policy or politics. Much depends on the context of events. When the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, they contributed to policy change because a host of other forces were pushing in the same direction. The American public was exhausted by the Vietnam War, which at its peak involved the deployment of almost four times as many troops as are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many Americans were also increasingly skeptical of all forms of established authority. The federal government’s status was further tarnished by other revelations about abuses of power by the White House, CIA, and FBI.

We live in very different times. There is no popular movement against U.S. military engagement overseas, no broad reaction against established authority in American society, no youth rebellion. The public mood in the United States is one of economic uncertainty and physical insecurity. Many Americans want an assurance that their government is willing and able to act forcefully in the pursuit of U.S. interests. In this climate, the incidents revealed by WikiLeaks — spying on United Nations diplomats, covert military action against terrorists, negotiations with regimes that are corrupt or guilty of human rights abuses—might not even be construed as abuses of power at all. On the contrary, they could be regarded as proof that the U.S. government is prepared to get its hands dirty to protect its citizens.

Indeed, it could be said that WikiLeaks was doing the one thing Americans least wished for: increasing instability and their sense of anxiety. The more WikiLeaks disclosed last year, the more American public opinion hardened against it. By December, according to a CNN poll, almost 80 percent of Americans disapproved of WikiLeaks’ release of U.S. diplomatic and military documents. In a CBS News poll, most respondents said they thought the disclosures were likely to hurt U.S. foreign relations. Three-quarters affirmed that there are “some things the public does not have a right to know if it might affect national security.”

As WikiLeaks waited fruitlessly for public outrage, it began to see another obstacle to the execution of its program. WikiLeaks relies on the Internet for the rapid dissemination of leaked information. The assumption, which seemed plausible in the early days of cyberspace, is that the Internet is a vast global commons — a free space that imposes no barrier on the flow of data. But even online, commercial and political considerations routinely compromise the movement of information.

This reality was quickly illustrated after the release of the State Department cables on November 28. Three days later, Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that rents space for the storage of digitized information, stopped acting as a host for WikiLeaks’ material, alleging that the group had violated its terms of service. The same day, a smaller firm that provides online graphics capabilities, Tableau Software, discontinued its support. The firm that managed WikiLeaks’ domain name, EveryDNS.net, also suspended services, so that the domain name wikileaks.org was no longer operable. On December 20, Apple removed an application from its online store that offered iPhone and iPad users access to the State Department cables.

All of these actions complicated WikiLeaks’ ability to distribute leaked information. Decisions by other organizations also undermined its financial viability. Five days after the State Department disclosures, PayPal, which manages online payments, announced that it would no longer process donations to WikiLeaks, alleging that the group had violated its terms of service by encouraging or facilitating illegal activity. MasterCard and Visa Europe soon followed suit.

Critics alleged that these firms were acting in response to political pressure, and many American legislators did in fact call on businesses to break with WikiLeaks. But direct political pressure was hardly necessary; cold commercial judgment led to the same decision. WikiLeaks produced little revenue for any of these businesses but threatened to entangle all of them in public controversy. A public-relations specialist told Seattle’s KIRO News that it was “bizarre” for Amazon to assist WikiLeaks during a holiday season: “I don’t think you mix politics with retail.” Worse still, businesses were exposed to cyberattacks by opponents of WikiLeaks within the hacker community that disrupted their relationships with other, more profitable clients.

These business decisions hurt WikiLeaks significantly. Assange said they amounted to “economic censorship” and claimed that actions by these financial intermediaries were costing WikiLeaks $650,000 per week in lost donations.

The leaks also provoked a vigorous reaction by the U.S. government. The Army came down hard on Private Bradley Manning, the apparent source of all four of the 2010 disclosures, bringing 34 charges against him. The most serious of these, aiding the enemy, could result in a death sentence, although prosecutors have said they will not seek one. The government is also investigating other individuals in connection with the leaks. Some in Congress have used the episodes to argue for strengthening the law on unauthorized disclosure of national security information, and federal agencies have tightened administrative controls on access to sensitive information. These steps, which may well produce a result precisely the opposite of what WikiLeaks intends by reducing citizens’ access to information about the government, have been taken by an administration that promised on its first day in office to “usher in a new era of open government.”

WikiLeaks is predicated on the assumption that the social order—the set of structures that channel and legitimize power — is both deceptive and brittle: deceptive in the sense that most people who observe the social order are unaware of the ways in which power is actually used, and brittle in the sense that it is at risk of collapse once people are shown the true nature of things. The primary goal, therefore, is revelation of the truth. In the past it was difficult to do this, mainly because primitive technologies made it difficult to collect and disseminate damning information. But now these technological barriers are gone. And once information is set free, the theory goes, the world will change.

We have seen some of the difficulties with this viewpoint. Even in the age of the Internet, there is no such thing as the instantaneous and complete revelation of the truth. In its undigested form, information often has no transformative power at all. Raw data must be distilled and interpreted, and the attention of a distracted audience must be captured. The process by which this is done is complex and easily influenced by commercial and governmental interests. This was true before the advent of the Internet and remains true today.

Beyond this, there is a final and larger problem. It may well be that many of the things WikiLeaks imagines are secrets are not really secrets at all. It may be that what WikiLeaks revealed when it drew back the curtain is more or less what most Americans already suspected had been going on, and were therefore prepared to tolerate.

To put it another way, much of what WikiLeaks has released might best be described as open secrets. It would have been no great shock to most Americans, for example, to learn about the United States’ covert activities against terrorists in Yemen. “The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises,” says the noted Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a professor at the European Graduate School. “The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: We can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know.”

In a sense, it was odd to expect that there would be great surprises. The diplomatic and national security establishment of the U.S. government employs millions of people. Most of the critical decisions about the development of foreign policy, and about the apparatus necessary to execute that policy, have been made openly by democratically elected leaders, and sanctioned by voters in national elections over the course of 60 years. In broad terms, Americans know how U.S. power is exercised, and for what purpose. And so there are limits to what WikiLeaks can unveil. Even New York Times executive editor Bill Keller conceded that the disclosures did not “expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places.” They provide only “texture, nuance, and drama.”

None of this is an argument for complacency about government secrecy. Precisely because of the scale and importance of the national security apparatus, it ought to be subjected to close scrutiny. Existing oversight mechanisms such as freedom of information laws and declassification policies are inadequate and should be strengthened. The monitoring capacity of news media outlets and other nongovernmental organizations must be enhanced. And citizens should be encouraged to engage more deeply in debates about the aims and methods of U.S. foreign policy. All of these steps involve hard work. There is no technological quick fix. A major difficulty with the WikiLeaks project is that it may delude us into believing otherwise.

, a former Woodrow Wilson Center fellow, is Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School. His books include 

Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age

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WikiLeaks’ tsunami of revelations from U.S. government sources last year did not change the world, but it did change WikiLeaks.

Alasdair Roberts