We're seeing peristroika (restructuring) in the Soviet Union. How about some peristroika in the good old US of A? It is appropriate for us to celebrate the profound changes underway in that rigid and repressive society in the East. They give hope for a more peaceful and cooperative world. But it is a mistake for us to be too self-congratulatory about this Soviet peristroika. Rather than using this new Soviet revolution as an occasion for declaring victory in our ideological war, we should see it as a challenge to our own society. If a closed, reactionary society like the U.S.S.R. can confront its shortcomings and recast itself in a more viable form, can't a free and vibrant society like America do so as well? Smugness appears to be an obstacle. Our great adversary has admitted, implicitly, the bankruptcy of the communist system and is moving more toward ours. We won! Our way is right! One symptom of the excessive complacency in America is the enthusiasm with which an essay about our ideological victory has been received in some mainstream circles. In an article appearing this summer in The National Interest, Francis Fukuyama goes beyond just saying that our system has prevailed over the communism of the U.S.S.R. He argues that the question of history --how should human society be organized?-- has at last been resolved. The economic and political systems of the West, he suggests in "The End of History?", appear to represent the final form of human institutions. But are we really sitting with a pat hand? Has our system really shown itself ready, in Fukuyama's phrase, to "govern the material world in the long run?" I think not. We don't have long lines for toilet paper or meat, as they do in the communist countries. But we suffer from a different, ultimately perhaps more terrible shortage: a shortage of vision of how to find our way into a viable future. Our system now reveals serious problems that remain to be confronted. Some are particular to the present state of American political economy. Other problems are intrinsic to the market system itself. Both reveal a serious need for "restructuring" the way our systems work. Consider what our chronic federal deficit says about our political economy. Deficit spending was proposed by the Keynesian economists as a way of countering downturns and preventing depressions. But our leadership has made taxes such a dirty word that the very same decade that has seen the longest sustained economic expansion in our lifetimes has also witnessed a virtual tripling of the national debt accrued through two centuries of American history. This shows more than our system's tendency to disregard the future. The accumulation of huge public debt at a time of growing private prosperity reveals how little we value what we own in common. So to finance our debt, the government sells off public assets, calling the proceeds "income." Future generations are being both saddled with debt and deprived of their common heritage. It is more than 30 years since John Kenneth Galbraith remarked on the ingrained prejudice of the American political economy that systematically cultivates private wealth and public poverty. And he hadn't even seen the 1980s. Now we have witnessed a decade in which the sale of luxury cars has skyrocketed (BMW sales up 300%, Jaguar up 800%). But the condition of the roads and bridges on which they'll be driving is steadily deteriorating. Our contempt for our common property has left the American "infrastructure" in need of perhaps $1-2 trillion in repairs. In California, the boom in real estate values has multiplied the wealth of property-owners. But the state of California could not find the funds to make earthquake-ready that sandwich freeway in Oakland. We put our money where our values are. In part, this skewing of expenditures is a natural off-shoot of an ideology that sees people as social atoms each working for his self-interest, while society is but an arena for individuals to make transactions. Has this ideology indeed gained clear possession of the future? No matter how luxurious the private cabins on the Titanic, they all got wet when the ship went down. Imagine peristroika in America. In this remade America, tomorrow's needs count as much as today's convenience, and our commons are given loving care like our own separate gardens. The deficit and the neglect of public investment might be regarded as a temporary American aberration. But there is another problem built into the market economy. This is the systematic devaluation and destruction of the natural world. God shed His grace on America, the song says. But in exploiting a new continent, as in theology, grace is something we don't earn. And the market system treats the free gifts of nature as if they are worth what we paid for them. So it is that we enjoy cheap and abundant grain, while the market ignores the fact that for every bushel of corn Iowa grows a bushel of its precious topsoil washes away. A system that treats its capital as though it were income needs to be restructured. Our economic system translates our love of fine furniture and red meat directly into the stripping of tropical forests. That this plundering of the earth threatens upheaval in the global climate does not register in the market's pricing mechanism. Imagine peristroika in America, where we have structured our economy so that prices reflect the real costs and benefits to the whole system. In this America, the cost of fossil fuels would not be just the costs of getting them out of the ground and ready for combustion, but would include taxes large enough to reflect the impact of their burning. In this America, the cost of solar energy would reflect not just the inefficiency of current solar devices but also the large stake of future generations in our urgently developing better technology. [President Ford vetoed a strip-mining bill in the 1970s, saying that we could not "afford" to restore the land ruined by stripmines. After peristroika in America, no one would think he could afford to throw a party he couldn't afford to clean up after.] This peristroika will allow us to keep both the market economy and our democratic polity. But it will demand an imaginative restructuring of the relationship between the two. Our survival requires that wise collective decisions be far more powerful in channeling private transactions. Evidence indicates the American people are out in front of their leaders on many of these issues. But leadership is necessary to crystallize the new vision and mobilize our movement forward. Such leadership is not in sight: if we're winning today, why change our gameplan? Just as some of us are declaring victory, many are coming to recognize that some kinds of winning are a losing proposition. As ecologist Gregory Bateson said, "No creature can win against its environment for long." No system in all history has been so relentless as ours in winning against the biosphere on which our survival ultimately depends. Unless we restructure, we may indeed be "the end of history."

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.