On a flight toward failure, or another chance?

Our democracy is imperiled, but capitulation to decline is not inevitable

Failure changed the destination of this red carpet, but in failure can be the seeds of success. (RS photo)

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In the golden age of air travel — the “Mad Men” era of well-dressed passengers being served hot meals on china by white-gloved stewardesses — Trans World Airlines hired the influential Finnish architect Eero Saarinen to design a terminal at the international airport in New York City, then known as Idlewild. Starting in 1956, Saarinen created a building with a distinctive wing-shaped thin shell roof, its tall windows offering views of arriving and departing jets, with plush red-carpeted tubes extending to the gates.

Not to be outdone, Pan American Airlines quickly commissioned construction of a new terminal nearby, which came to be known as the Pan Am Worldport, with a four-acre “flying saucer” roof projecting out so that jets could park beneath and protect boarding passengers from inclement weather. For several years, it was the world’s largest airline terminal. The Worldport opened in 1960, the TWA Flight Center in 1962.¹

Now the Worldport is gone, demolished in 2013 to make room for jet parking, and the main structure of the TWA terminal at what is now John F. Kennedy International Airport is a hotel. The latter is a fairly swank place, I can testify after a recent night there, with a rooftop infinity pool, a classic 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible displayed in front and a museum featuring a collection aimed at recalling what Saarinen considered “the drama and specialness and excitement of travel.”²

But both TWA, which used to carry more transatlantic passengers than any other carrier, and Pan Am, for years the world’s largest airline, have vanished. Pan Am’s iconic Manhattan skyscraper on Park Avenue is now called the MetLife Building; TWA, long the domain of Howard Hughes and once known as “the Lindbergh Line,” was absorbed by American Airlines after a string of embarrassing bankruptcies.

A stay in the TWA Hotel can inspire nostalgia, just as in-flight service of a little bag of pretzels and a paper cup of water these days can make you yearn for those flights that featured chef-created menus and free cocktails. But the reality of that earlier era of travel wasn’t always golden: Tickets on 1960s flights often cost ten times what they do now, making air travel a privilege for a relative few, and trips were more often dangerous: In 1972, the worst year for airline safety, there were 72 crashes that killed 2,373 people. No wonder kiosks in airports sold last-minute flight insurance policies — fear was rational. Today’s air travel is safer, faster and more accessible.³

Still, you have to mourn the loss of the brands that epitomized the dream of travel to distant lands, and you might crave the idealism that was visible in the futuristic design of those huge terminals. And it’s not just about flying: There’s little wide-eyed wonder in America anymore, and the most visible slippage of power is far beyond corporations that owned airlines: it is that of the nation itself.

Indeed, the capriciousness and transactionalism of Donald Trump have eroded the sense that America will stand up for democratic ideals, and the economic strength that made the United States the dominant world power is imperiled by ballooning debt and countless instances of irrational policy, even as political polarization fueled by the president tears at the fabric of our communities.

As I walked the red carpet toward my TWA Hotel room the other night, I wondered what lessons a nation in decline might take from the failure of those powerful airlines. Many once-skyrocketing companies have failed, of course — Kodak, Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Polaroid, Toys R Us, Lehman Brothers — and business schools look to their experiences as cautionary tales. With our nation in the hands of a man who brags of his business prowess — though his companies filed for bankruptcy six times, and his own reputation rebounded only because of a myth-building reality TV program — it’s reasonable to ask if America itself might be a case study in incipient failure.

Might Donald Trump be leading the nation we love to failure? Can we still avoid a crash?

Airline history is unlike other sectors because companies born in the free-for-all of a new technology early in the 20^th century were first pressed into a scheme of government regulation and then suddenly deregulated, in 1978. That makes them different from, say, retailers; people sold stuff and the marketplace established most of its accepted rules over thousands of years before anybody boarded a plane.

Federal regulation was launched in the 1920s to set up air traffic control, establish routes for airlines and subsidize carriers with federal postal revenues. But the system eventually was seen to be discouraging competition and keeping ticket prices artificially high, so the administration of President Jimmy Carter pushed through a deregulation that led to a wave of airline startups, takeovers and failures. Within a decade, both Pan Am and TWA were failing — in TWA’s case, with a push from Carl Icahn, a boss whose actions yielded the term “corporate raider.” (In 1988, for example, Icahn made nearly a half-billion dollars by adding roughly that amount to TWA’s debt.) Pan Am stopped flying at the end of 1991; TWA made it for another ten years. It was the end of a celebrated era in aviation history.⁴

But it’s worthwhile to look more broadly at company failures than to focus specifically on airlines, because there are patterns that can be detected — and that may seem familiar to students of American history. In his 2009 book “How the Mighty Fall,” the noted business researcher and consultant Jim Collins identified five stages of decline that typically characterize failing businesses.⁵

Collins has titles for the stages: Hubris Born of Success, Undisciplined Pursuit of More, Denial of Risk and Peril, Grasping for Salvation, and Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death. A nation is not a business, of course, but a simple reading of that list inevitably leads to speculation of how a nation — specifically, our nation — could well be on a path toward failure.

First, the immense success of America’s democratic experiment through its 250 years has created pride that could make us assume we are immune to failure — the sort of hubris that is first stage of failure, in Collins’ view. What is American exceptionalism, which Trump’s MAGA supporters insist upon, if not blind assumption that America, blessed by God, is too good to fail? You might see hubris in the assumption that the nation can keep borrowing: The national debt hit $38 trillion this week, a growth of $2 trillion since Trump took office; it is growing by almost $70,000 per second. What could possibly go wrong?⁶

In the second stage of failure, Collins writes, organizations abandon discipline. “Taking action that is inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined,” Collins writes — as in, we might note, Trump’s embrace of anti-democratic regimes worldwide and his hostility to cherished civic values at home. The lack of discipline is reflected in yielding the public good to Trump’s clear lust for glory and personal wealth — the enforced adulation of Cabinet members, the open campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize, the fishing for such multimillion-dollar gifts as a jet from Qatar. Those are not the marks of a disciplined leader. If we read Collins’ text about business failure and substitute “the government” or “the nation” for “the organization,” we read this: “To use (the government) primarily as a vehicle to increase your own personal success — more wealth, more fame, more power — at the expense of (the nation’s) long-term success is undisciplined. To compromise your values or lose sight of your core purpose in pursuit of growth and expansion is undisciplined.” This is dangerous to long-term prosperity, Collins notes.

The third step toward organizational failure in the Collins model involves denial of risk and peril — in which “leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data,” Collins writes, adding, “Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility.” Might that include a president who fired the head of the government office that collected disappointing jobs data, and who routinely blames his predecessors — including one nearly a decade out of office — for today’s problems? Trump warns of risk, to be sure, but in creating boogeymen out of immigrants, journalists and political foes, Trump diverts attention from the real risk he creates by such actions as defying democratic norms and denying the reality of climate change.

The fourth step in decline, Collins writes, often is found in “lurching for a quick salvation” rather than returning to the discipline that built an institution in the first place. Common “saviors” in the face of a fear of decline, he writes, might include “a charismatic visionary leader, a bold but untested strategy, a radical transformation, a cultural revolution” rather than returning to “a calm, clear-headed and focused approach.” Part of what propelled Trump into the White House in 2016 was the sense that he offered a radical departure from the status quo, and indeed he has transformed the Republican party from conservatism to right-wing radicalism, and led a presidency that is anything but calm and focused.

The longer an organization stays in that fourth stage, Collins writes, the more likely it will spiral downward into its fifth and fatal stage, which he describes as “capitulation” to failure. In the case of a nation — this nation — that doesn’t mean that America would cease to exist; rather, the fifth stage of failure would be capitulation by citizens to the sort of anti-democratic future that many experts warn is what Trumpism promises. That is surely happening in many quarters now; most of the Republicans in Congress are unwilling to stand up to Trump’s worst impulses, though they cannot fail to recognize them, and many ordinary citizens are turning away, either in ignorance or apathy.

But this stage is not inevitable. “The path out of darkness begins with those exasperatingly persistent individuals who are constitutionally incapable of capitulation,” Collins writes. Might that be us?

It’s often said that success is bred in failure, and that has historically been true in both politics and policy. The election of Abraham Lincoln as the first Republican president, whose destiny was to save the Republic, arose from the collapse of the Whig party; and it was from the depths of the Great Depression that the New Deal emerged, bringing the permanent social safety net of Social Security, public works that modernized the nation’s infrastructure, and the protection of banks through the FDIC.

That point hit home for me as I bedded down in the TWA Hotel that night recently, because I had to be in a city 1,800 miles away the next day for lunch. Absent the airline deregulation that was partly to blame for the demise of TWA and Pan Am, would we have the abundant flights and relatively affordable air fares that made that possible? If tragedies hadn’t forced airline safety improvements, would we now have the security that comes from knowing that only 0.000001 percent of planes have crashed in the last decade?

If America is in fact plunging toward failure by the measures laid out in Jim Collins’ research, we may see in that fact, awful as it is, an opportunity for resurgence. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Winston Churchill, perhaps because on a flight to Scotland a few weeks ago I re-watched actor Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Britain’s wartime leader. (Incidentally, in-flight movies were pioneered in 1961, by TWA.) It’s worth recalling that Churchill, who inspired his nation to fight on despite early losses, once observed, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

Consider, then, our shared failure to prevent the worst abuses of Trumpism: The president is threatening to flood U.S. cities with more troops, which is apparently illegal, and he is ramping up international boat strikes that are killing civilians in peacetime, which is almost surely a war crime. His spending cuts are forcing sharply higher health insurance premiums, and he is refusing to negotiate to end a federal shutdown that seems likely to cause tens of thousands of families to lose child care for their preschoolers and toddlers. A judge has ordered him not to withhold reserve funds that could provide critical food assistance to tens of millions of Americans who need SNAP aid, but we don’t know at this writing if he will obey the court order. (In this regard, I can’t recommend highly enough the just-released New York Times editorial, “In Trump’s America, Are We Losing Our Democracy?”)

That’s where we find ourselves, then, on the failure scale: In a nation that is lurching, sometimes failing to look at the risk it faces, victim of a prideful and emotionally fragile leader. With clear-eyed awareness, we cannot deny how far toward failure we have fallen.

Yet the consequence of capitulation are too terrible to consider. The nation is not in fact like an airline, which might in its collapse make way for another carrier to pick up its routes and other uses be made of its terminals. It is rather like the metaphor of a ship that Walt Whitman summoned in Leaves of Grass: “Earth’s resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship!” From here, with our hard work, the journey of the ship of democracy must be completed, so that we can safely reach our destination.

1. https://www.airporthistory.org/kennedy-jet-age.html

2. Román, Antonio (2003). Eero Saarinen: an Architecture of Multiplicity. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1-56898-340-9. OCLC 50644049.

3. https://flyfright.com/plane-crash-statistics/

4. https://askthepilot.com/pan-am-30th-anniversary/#:~:text=December%204%2C%202021,of%20history’s%20most%20significant%20airline.

5. The book’s full title is “How The Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In,” but I have drawn here from a 2009 article in Businessweek by Collins, which he described as “a primer on the warning signs.”

6. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/u-s-hits-38-trillion-in-debt-after-the-fastest-accumulation-of-1-trillion-outside-of-the-pandemic

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Dispatches from our common ground *

Wherein we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see. These are drawn from some of the fine nonprofit newsrooms that are now an essential part of the nation’s information ecosystem.

COLORADO

Local governments step up to provide food for neighbors

Local officials in many places around the country are stepping in to fund anti-hunger programs as the federal government stops SNAP benefits, which provide food aid for 42 million Americans (about 12 percent of the nation’s population). In Colorado’s Arkansas Valley, the Chaffee County Board of County Commissioners voted to pull $75,000 from the county’s general fund to backfill for food pantries that serve 1,200 families in the rural county. Ark Valley Voice, a small nonprofit newsroom serving the central Colorado communities, reports that the City of Salida and the Town of Buena Vista have likewise chipped in some thousands of dollars. Local food gardeners are stepping up, too: “We got 20 pounds of carrots today,” a community foundation official noted. Colorado is one of the Democrat-led states that is suing the federal government over President Trump’s decision not to use available federal reserve funds that always before have kept SNAP food aid flowing during prior government shutdowns.

OHIO

Trooper who killed two at 120 mph returns to duty amid question: Are chases worth it?

In July, an Ohio trooper who was speeding at over 120 miles per hour while trying to catch up with a motorist on U.S. Highway 50 struck another car, killing a local couple and their two dogs. The speed limit on that section of the highway is 55 mph. Now, reports the Athens County Independent, a nonprofit newsroom founded in 2022, the trooper has returned to full duty, even as questions remain about the incident. By coincidence, the Independent had been investigating high-speed police chases in Athens County before the tragedy. Reporter Shiloh Antonuccio quoted a criminologist who has researched the issue saying the standard is that a high-speed chase should only be used for “the most serious of offenses” because of the danger to others. “Certainly when there’s no risk known … the question we have to ask is, ‘Why raise the risk for the public?’” the expert said. The trooper in this accident, who had twice been named Trooper of the Year at his post, was trying to catch up with an alleged traffic violator, but the Ohio State Highway Patrol has noted that it was not considered an active pursuit. OSHP has not confirmed whether the cruiser’s lights and siren were on and what alleged offense the trooper had noted.

ALABAMA

Dam hasn’t been checked, and many may be similarly imperiled

A project to stabilize a dam that protects the water supply for much of Birmingham has hit a snag because contractors discovered that the dam’s foundation was too weak to support the concrete that would shore up the structure. BirminghamWatch, an independent nonprofit newsroom, reports that a common dye test that would have uncovered weaknesses in the 115-year-old Lake Purdy Dam hadn’t been performed since the 1980s. Officials insisted the dam was safe, notes reporter Olivia McMurrey, because the reservoir is nine feet below its capacity, and it would take more than seven inches of rainfall in 24 hours to overflow and put thousands of homes at risk of a 40-foot wave stream. The board that controls the dam currently holds a $1 million insurance liability policy, but now is weighing raising that to $20 million, BirminghamWatch reports. The American Society of Civil Engineers has noted that dam safety is a national problem, with thousands of aging and high-hazard dams posing a significant risk due to a lack of funding, inadequate maintenance, and deteriorating infrastructure that was not built to withstand modern flood intensities.

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Our next class is Wednesday, Nov. 19, at 6 p.m. Eastern. Why not join us?

Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too!

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IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay, which is an earlier version of this week’s column, adapated for audio.

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.

-REX SMITH