If You’re Worried About the Future of Our Country, Do Something About It

Opinion|If You’re Worried About the Future of Our Country, Do Something About It

In the early 1990s, when I was a co-senior partner at Goldman Sachs, younger people sometimes asked me for advice. I told them, “First, become really good at what you do, and then branch out to get involved in activities and issues in the wider world beyond your work.”

Our country and world face unprecedented and exceedingly complex threats, yet many people might feel that advice is less applicable than it used to be. We have no shortage of reminders that many of the forces affecting our lives, not to mention world history, are beyond our control.

But I believe that for these exact reasons, civic engagement — involvement in issues beyond the immediate scope of one’s personal life and work, undertaken for the greater good, however one defines it — is more important than ever.

Widespread engagement is especially needed — and especially powerful — at a time when democracies like ours face threats from autocracies abroad and intense social and political strain at home.

One of the gravest challenges we face today is the way the world’s autocracies — in particular Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — are increasingly working together to undermine the position of the United States. I would personally much rather live in a democracy, and I suspect nearly everyone I know would say the same — and the major autocracies face serious economic and social difficulties of their own.

At the same time, we are seeing that centralized government brings certain advantages in a dangerous world. For example, when China’s leaders decided in 2023 to move forward in their relationship with Russia, they didn’t need to give weight to the will of the people or the possibility of a backlash.