AMERICA IN INTENSIVE CARE
Jerry Harkins
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when America started into decline. It may have been in 1973 when the Arab oil embargo signaled the end of post-war prosperity and ushered in a decade of hyperinflation, skyrocketing interest rates, simultaneous stagflation and a bear market that persisted for nine years. It may have been in 1981 when IBM introduced its first personal computer igniting both the information revolution and the global economy. The computer created enormous benefits but also exposed millions of workers, especially office workers, to “redundancy.” Or maybe it happened in 1994 when Newt Gingrich led chanting white-shirted Republicans marching down Pennsylvania Avenue waving copies of their “Contract with America” and presaging the emergence of the Tea Party and the Trump Party. But make no mistake about it: flawed as it has always been, the world’s most important and successful experiment with democracy has been on a downward spiral for more than a generation, maybe for two.
There have been moments of hope, notably the end of the cold war in 1989 and the resilience of the economy in the face of the existential threat of the Great Recession of 2008. We have continued to make incremental progress in civil rights, women’s rights and human rights. More encouraging than any of these, however, was the rejection of Donald Trump and his replacement by Joe Biden in 2020. Election Day 2020 may have been a decisive hinge of history.
Decisive, of course, represents a hopeful interpretation of what happened. Biden won by a margin of 7,059,840 votes or a hair more than 4.5% of the votes cast. Not a landslide but not close either. Hopeful, but also frightening in the sense that a Biden presidency may be our last best hope to save the American dream and the American experiment from disintegration and disaster. The damage done by Republican mendacity, hypocrisy, self-dealing, obstructionism and just plain stupidity has been monumental.
A large majority of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump were the principal victims of America’s decline and the failures of our civic, religious and corporate institutions. They had legitimate grievances with the status quo and were willing to risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. They nearly did. Had the coronavirus not happened or had it been managed with a modicum of intelligence, we would now be confronting four more years of unbearable tragedy. Still, as Winston Churchill said of the victory at El Alamein, the Biden victory “…is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The agenda facing us is daunting and overcoming the pandemic is the easy part. In spite of the Republican politicians, scientists have produced promising vaccines and treatments. We may lose some hundreds of thousands more Americans but the end is on the horizon. We will be better prepared next time and we can hope that no future President will propose injecting ourselves with Clorox to kill the virus. The residual challenge is to restore the economy and it too may turn out to be less difficult than experts now worry. Not easy but manageable. One of the virtues of American capitalism is its resiliency. And there is a silver cloud if we can turn the pandemic into an opportunity to address longstanding problems in the economy, some of which have been exacerbated by the lockdowns. Among these are income inequality, the changing demographics of an aging population, increasing pressures on the vital small business sector and structural changes in the labor market brought about by the continuing march of automation and artificial intelligence.[1] These and many other issues are complex and controversial. They interact with and affect each other and, more importantly, challenge the foundations of our entire social order and economic framework.
The success of the so-called American Dream is based largely on the commitment of successive waves of immigrants to a better future for their children and grandchildren. This, however, becomes less tenable when economic pressures constrict the prospects of every age cohort. At present, the young are burdened with the decline of traditional career-establishing employment opportunities and, for many, crushing debt from college loans. The middle aged often share the same educational debts while simultaneously having to assist their parents. The elderly are faced with the high cost of medical care and inadequate retirement savings.[2] Since 1970, the total U.S. annual expenditures for health care increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion. In 2019, only about half of all families had any retirement savings and they had an average of $255,130, mostly in real estate, and a median of only $65,000.
Solving these problems will require major social adjustments not the least of which is decreasing the average age of retirement in order to create better employment opportunities for younger generations, especially those in what should be the family-forming years. At the moment, workers are postponing retirement as long as possible because they rightly fear a reduction in income. Meanwhile, the government is trying to increase the retirement age by manipulating the Social Security eligibility age. The idea is to “save” Social Security from bankruptcy resulting from the aging population demographics. This is a real problem but it is subsidiary to the broader economic squeeze affecting every age cohort. To solve that, the retirement age should be reduced to no more than 55 years and, perhaps, 50. This would require creating programs to train workers for retirement careers outside the mainstream job market. It might also necessitate requiring workers to maintain a retirement financial plan similar to the health insurance mandate of Obamacare that was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012.[3] Finally, it might require employers to contribute to such a plan. As controversial as all this is, the fact remains that the American workforce is going to decline in the coming decades regardless of what policies the government adopts or fails to adopt. Meanwhile, the population will continue to increase. The Biden team is correct in projecting a growth in the number of family-friendly[4] jobs if we pursue such things as alternative energy and infrastructure repair but these will be more than offset by overall declines brought about by automation.
The important point to deal with is that all these problems are highly complex. There are no easy solutions that derive from any ideology and no methodology that will not involve trial and error. In other words, the problems are not amenable to politics as currently practiced and there is no appetite for making significant changes. For example, one of the first principles of democratic governance is the idea of the equal value of every vote and every voter. If we truly believe in equality, then our Electoral College is a patently undemocratic institution. Five times the presidential candidate with the most votes lost the election.[5] It would take a constitutional amendment to institute majority rule which would require the approval of three-fourths of the states. But 31 states, more than 60%, benefit from the current system.
It is likely that Plato had just such “paradoxes” in mind when he proposed that the ideal state should be governed by a “philosopher-king.” Plato was writing about a man (women could not vote in Athens) who was literally a “lover of knowledge” who lived simply and promoted justice.[6] But when you think of great political leaders, there are probably no philosophers on your list. Rather you think of such as the Roman Emperor Charlemagne, the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the American President Abraham Lincoln and the Lakota Sioux war leader Crazy Horse.[7] But the challenges such men faced tended to be readily definable and the solutions, while difficult, were also both limited and obvious. Such is not the case in America today.
Before we can successfully address any of the major problems we face today, it will be necessary to effectuate a prodigious shift in in the public attitudes that have given rise to ideological conflict. We need to restore an American social contract that is shared by a large majority of citizens, including a consensus that extremism must not be allowed to cripple government. Unlike almost all other nations, America is not united by a common ethnicity or religion or history. Rather, from the beginning, its people have demonstrated a unique commitment to the future, a belief that life could and would be better for one’s children and grandchildren. Until recently, this was true enough for enough families to serve as the motive force of the boast engraved on every dollar bill, Novus Ordo Seclorum, the new order of the ages. America was indeed perceived as the Land of Opportunity by many Americans and others. Today, that perception is rare and, without it, we are little more than a mob.
We cannot rehabilitate a nation in which millions of people are convinced that the recent election was stolen from Donald Trump, millions reject the covid vaccine, millions are certain that people of color are inferior, immigrants are criminals and poor people are welfare cheats. At their root, these are all symptoms of a loss of faith and empathy which are, in turn, among the least common denominators of civility. If there is a silver lining to the current pandemic, it is the lesson that each of us relies on all of us. Advancing this idea until it becomes the paramount feature of our social contract is the sine qua non to solving the challenges confronting us and to restoring the promise of America.
[1] A good example of these pressures is the dilemma brought about by the need of restaurants to offer delivery service during the pandemic. Restaurants are low margin businesses and most cannot afford to build their own delivery services. Enter a new, high tech industry that delivers for many such restaurants using gig workers but charges the restaurants up to 30% of each check. The high end establishments that can afford this cannot risk the deterioration of their meals during transportation through rain, snow, sleet and city traffic. For others, the promise is a slower death.
[2] Since 1970, the total U.S. expenditures for health care have increased from about $70 billion to about $3.6 trillion. In 2018, they accounted for about 15% of the average household budget.
[3] National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519. This was a 5-4 decision and is currently being reconsidered by the court. Most observers believe the law will survive although the mandate might not.
[4] “Family-friendly jobs” is a term of art encapsulating the belief that workers are entitled to certain rights including safe working conditions, freedom of assembly and compensation sufficient to provide a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. It was enunciated as a moral right in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1890 and as a legal principle by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. It is a cornerstone of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
[5] In each case, the loser was the democratic candidate, most recently Al gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
[6] In the history of philosophy, there have been many who might meet Plato’s criteria but none that come easily to mind who would also make good rulers. As Winston Churchill said, “…democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. Of course, he also said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
[7] It may be disconcerting to note that all four of these leaders were skilled military strategists but the truth is that all of them were also profoundly spiritual souls, highly cultured, progressive, innovative and charismatic.
