Houses fall. All houses sooner or later. They must be restored or replaced. Either’s painful if you love the good old homestead. Fail to act and rot turns fatal.
Good old America creaks and totters, in need of repairs. Trump’s ominous prophecies are not absurd, though he represents the problem, not its solution. We the people aren’t mistaken – America is “headed in the wrong direction.” So which direction’s right? To renovate we need a plan.
Yesterday we discussed repairing our polity. Make it inclusive, so every citizen feels potent and every vote counts; rinse politics of big money; require our leaders to behave.
Our economy and morality need fixing too. What kind of America do we hope for? How do we get there?
Every system contains the seeds of its destruction. In time, what powers their success causes them to fail. Capitalism, for going on three centuries, has succeeded like a house afire. Dangling a dream of personal wealth, like the carrot before the donkey, made everyone work harder and smarter. America implemented capitalism first and best and profited mightily from our head-start. Our newness as a nation was our luck. We didn’t have to kill kings or displace aristocrats to commence.
The problem with capitalism, as Marx and many observed, is it divides, it does not unite. You can’t have winners without losers. Rich and poor are obverse and reverse of the same coin. Losers grow resentful as the rich grab more and more. That’s what’s been happening in America for the last forty years. The rich kept getting richer – and they like it that way. Democracy turns plutocracy. Now the rich want to ditch democracy because they dread their comeuppance. Justice and fairness might cost them an arm and a leg. Decency does not come cheap – and who’s going to pay!
The contest between rich and poor is an old story. Thomas More, a rich man who liked being rich, envisioned a Utopia without money. Ditto the French revolutionaries. Ditto Marx. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, both rich guys, strove to save capitalism by reining in the rich. JFK, another rich guy, summoned us all to self-sacrifice.
Tyrannies benefit the rich, democracies support the majority. Trump and his backers spend fortunes persuading Americans we’re better off stooges and slaves. Their success deluding the ill-informed defies belief. On November Fifth, tens of millions of Americans will vote against their practical self-interest to protect themselves from fantastic threats (illegal immigrants, persons of color, “cat ladies”, sexual exceptions, etc.). Well-meaning liberals shake their heads amazed: how can this be happening! “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” is an old saw of dubious origin. (No, Mencken didn’t say it – though he held that opinion.)
Assuming the right result November Fifth, how should we repair capitalism? By forcing it to act nice. Tax excessive incomes and excess consumption. Make healthcare, food sufficiency, adequate housing, conscientious childcare, effective education, safe schools, equal justice and a livable planet entitlements, not frills. Employ anyone willing to work (statistically, we’re almost there now). This is not communism but common sense. The rich will yelp we can’t afford such extravagance – while sipping old cognac on the decks of their yachts.
Goals for our polity and economy are obvious – but how do we repair our values? How to make humans want to be good?
Pendulums swing from idealism to cynicism (which the cynics call realism). Hitler spooked my dad’s generation into idealism. Unthreatened, my generation turned selfish, self-absorbed. Do you sense the exhausted pendulum reversing direction? I do – but that may be the intoxication of hope.