–Abraham Lincoln, 1858
My last post on our national anxious frenzy provoked a number of strong reactions – mainly from those who felt I was invalidating their personal experiences of anxiety in this time. It was not my intention to cast judgment on personal experiences – only to question the larger media-driven echo chamber fear narratives that are running full-tilt these days.
I am personally not particularly anxious about Covid-19, or the conservative shift of the Supreme Court, or racial bias, or our actions and policies surrounding immigration, or the abortion debate, or gun control. That’s not to say I don’t care about these issues. I do care, as I have for all of my life. At the same time, our current contentious-compromise positions on all of these issues are well within historical norms. We have, as a nation, had both more liberal and more conservative policies surrounding abortion in the past, more laissez-faire and more vehemently xenophobic immigration policies, more serious pandemics, and more dramatic ideological shifts in the Supreme Court.
I am, however, anxious about the decade or so ahead of us. But the primary factor of concern to me is not any of the issues discussed daily in the fear-news, but rather the increasingly crystallized polarization of our populace into two opposing camps, approaching the bounds of historical record in the United States. Two camps who so hate each other that states are openly considering secession, that partisan anger supersedes family ties, that the opposing side is blamed for disasters and problems with no evidence, that gun-toting opposition groups are facing off in the streets of major cities, that cross-partisan disaster response coalitions are met with criticism rather than praise, that it is often seen as traitorous and unacceptable to maintain empathy and friendship across this divide.
This level of division has very dangerous precedents. When a group of people loses all respect for another, effectively dehumanizing them, previously unthinkable violence becomes possible and, at some point, inevitable. When one group has a numerical or technological advantage, the result can be a genocide along the lines of the Holocaust or the destruction of Native American cultures. When there is a clear geographical divide between ideologies, the result is a civil war. When the divide is geographically patchy and the power difference unclear, the result is insurrection, guerilla warfare, and breakdown of the rule of law with an attendant rise in criminal warbands (e.g. Mexico and much of Central America), and potentially failure of the republic (e.g. Somalia). Given the demographic makeup of the United States – pockets of liberal and conservative dominance, with both factions present in most places – this latter fate would be the most likely dystopian future for our nation.
We are making ominous steps in that direction. Increasingly, it seems, we are seeing rogue individuals act to produce chaos and destruction. Arson, school shootings, drug-fueled crime sprees. Earlier this year a UPS truck driver was shooting at cars along Interstate 5 for months before he was caught. It doesn’t take many of these acts to inject fear into the population, and when that fear begins to be projected falsely against political enemies we have a major problem. Claims that “antifa” started Oregon’s destructive wildfires were widespread on the political right, despite a complete lack of evidence and well-documented sparking power lines.
Such a descent into chaos and violence is not inevitable. Our nation has seen similar levels of division before – around 1770, 1860, and 1930. There is a cycle to this, it would seem. Unlike in 1770 and 1860, we don’t have an overarching insurmountable divide (English monarchic rule or a slavery-based economy, respectively) that tips the scales toward war. And I think most of us would, given the choice, rather live in a nation where our adversaries have their way than in a failed state. Most people who are pro-choice would rather live in a nation where abortion is illegal than in a country with militia checkpoints on the highways and bribes owed to cartels for the privilege of conducting business. Most people who are pro-gun would rather have a ban on assault rifles than a world in which assault rifles are an essential tool and dodging bullets is a daily survival skill. That gives me hope for de-escalation in the years ahead. Most of us, regardless of our political leanings, do not wish to experience the endgame of our intractable divisions.
The economy behind the scenes
Although the rhetoric that leads us into war is often based on moral or social issues, the discontent that renders us vulnerable to such rhetoric is almost inevitably economic. In the 1770s, it was extraction of wealth by the English crown – “no taxation without representation” was a rallying cry of the revolution. In the 1860s, it was in part a conflict between a blossoming industrial economy in the north and a slavery-based agricultural economy in the south, resulting in irreconcilable differences in desired national policy. In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought misery and austerity to a large proportion of the populace.
Today we are in the midst of a snowballing economic crisis that has no name and is seldom officially acknowledged, but is patently obvious to anyone earning less than six digits in annual income. It is not reflected in the stock markets, which have bounced back from the so-called “Great Recession” to all-time highs. I’ll call it the Great Squeeze, because that’s what it feels like. Every year health care costs go up by 5-10%, tuition goes up by 5-10%, housing costs (rent or purchase) go up by 5-10%, and income goes up by 2-5%, if we’re lucky enough to avoid having our jobs downsized, outsourced, or eliminated by Covid restrictions. So every year, despite getting an annual raise, we have fewer financial resources at our disposal.
The Great Squeeze has generated some sobering statistics. Sixty percent of Americans do not have enough savings to cover a $1000 financial emergency. Fifty-two percent of young adults aged 18-29 now live with their parents – the first time this has been over 50% since the Great Depression. A healthy majority of US citizens are financially insecure, living on the edge of solvency, anxious, and angry at the system that is failing them.
From my perspective, the Great Squeeze is a direct result of a longstanding imbalance between the financial economy and the real economy of goods and services. This has occurred as growth in the real economy has been slowing toward steady-state – an inevitable result of the human population beginning to stabilize and the world beginning to confront resource limits on a finite planet. We simply cannot, after a point, farm more land, cut more timber, sell more iPhones, or build more factories. In order for the financial economy to outpace the real economy, it must necessarily transition from being coupled to the real economy to extracting wealth from the real economy.
Here’s what that looks like. During widespread economic growth, investing in a company was a win-win proposition. If business plans are successful, companies can use investment funds to hire a large workforce, pay them well, plan for the future, and still provide a hefty return to investors. Nowadays, many of the better investments are directly extractive. Mortgage-backed securities. Credit card debt. Student loans. Personal loans. Rental housing. These generate returns not proportional to the success of the debtor or renter, but simply by extracting a fixed amount of wealth from them regardless of their ability to meet their other financial needs.
Even corporate stocks have become extractive. As an example, ask anyone who works for a railroad what they think of “Precision Scheduled Railroading”, an oxymoronic corporate-speak buzzword that is all the rage these days. In theory it means an increase in operational efficiency. In practice, it means mass layoffs, facility closures, deferred maintenance, reduced train velocity, increased employee responsibilities, decreased morale, decreased emergency resilience, and customer dissatisfaction. It means, in short, driving the company into the ground in pursuit of short-term profits and shareholder value. This sort of thing has become ubiquitous across corporate America, as shareholders demand financial returns that the real economy simply cannot produce.
Whether we are paying returns promised to pensioners based on unrealistic market predictions, or maximizing shareholder value by laying off employees, or making millions off of student and consumer debt; we are hollowing out our real economy, bankrupting our government, and neglecting our critical infrastructure to maintain the truth of the economic doctrine that money must always make money, in the face of a real economy that is facing hard and insurmountable limits to growth. This simply cannot continue much longer without transforming us into a third world country, and quite possibly – through social unrest – into a fractured or failed state.
Fight the story, not the people!
One of the lessons we can learn from Nazi Germany is that – under the right circumstances – almost anyone can believe any story. A majority of German citizens, enamored by Hitler’s passionate orations of national glory, either actively supported or turned a blind eye to his murderous and inhuman pogrom of ethnic cleansing. We could tell ourselves these were all bad people, but to do that we would need to convince ourselves that – in their position and experiencing the grueling economic fallout from WWI defeat – we would have chosen differently. The only other option is to believe that a majority of Germans alive at that time were somehow genetically defective or morally bankrupt. We might all believe that we are better than that, but history tells us otherwise.
If good people can be seduced by bad stories – if our own children can sometimes be indoctrinated into cults – that means we must fight the stories rather than fighting the people who believe them. To fight the people is to reinforce the story, as a person under attack will cling to their beliefs and will most certainly not embrace the beliefs of the folks doing the attacking.
Perhaps my greatest frustration in the Trump era is that Donald Trump has successfully goaded Democrats into playing his dangerously divisive rhetorical game, on his terms, and that Democrats have almost no self-awareness of this. Whether it’s Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark or the continuous blue-media assertions that support for Trump is an outgrowth of racism and bigotry, the effect is to condemn all of those people who believe Trump’s story, and thereby ensure that they will cling to that story even harder. What Democrats should be doing instead, of course, is telling a different but equally convincing story to the same people – one that speaks to their anxiety and financial insecurity and offers real change rather than empty promises.
Donald Trump, like Adolf Hitler, is a narrative-mastermind conman who can tell a convincing story to people who are feeling abandoned and insignificant. His business success arose more from the brand and caricature he was able to create than from sound financial decision-making, and he naturally expanded into pageantry and reality TV. Like Hitler, he offered a vague but grand vision of national revival (“Make America Great Again!”) and a collection of false scapegoats (illegal immigrants, antifa, fake news, etc.). Associating with Trump brought a connection to his glitzy wealth and power and his celebrity family – the same sort of motivation that inspires ordinary folks to read People magazine. Unlike Hitler, his interests do not appear to extend beyond narcissistic self-aggrandizement to mass death, so I am not convinced by fears on the left that he is a despot-in-waiting, but nonetheless he is playing a dangerous game.
Although Trump’s tariffs have helped a few manufacturers, and his carefully-orchestrated factory and mine reopenings make good news bites, his story is 99% hollow. Trump, a real-estate speculator, is a professional wealth extractor, and he has no interest in recoupling the real and financial economies and redistributing wealth in a way that would truly return a sense of security to his constituents. Instead he speaks like a farmer rather than a lawyer, tells a convincing story, taunts the other team, and maintains a tenuous alliance with the traditional platform of the Republican party. That was enough to give him a narrow victory in 2016 and – absent any sort of effective counter-narrative aside from “Orange Man Bad!” – may well keep him in the White House in 2020.
Wherefore art thou FDR?
Joe Biden is not the leader we need in this time. Neither, unfortunately, is Kamala Harris. Both are moderate democrats who embrace social progressivism and neoliberal economics. They are, in a way, Obama-Biden 2.0. Trump gathered a following and furthered our descent into dangerous territory by naming the true problem but offering a false and divisive narrative as a solution. We can’t handle too much more discord before the street fighting begins and progression toward failed state status becomes difficult to reverse. I’m pretty sure we can make it four more years if we can get past this election, regardless of who wins, but by 2024 we had damn well better have a candidate who is able to offer real solutions, who sidesteps the hot-button social issues and talks about real economic change. Affordable housing. Living wage. Affordable healthcare and education. Respect for the working class. And not as campaign buzzwords but as scalable solutions. And not by driving the government further toward bankruptcy but through austerity for the wealthy. Limits on rent, loan forgiveness, changing corporate focus from shareholder gains to employee compensation and morale. If a rising tide lifts all boats, then a slack tide had damn well better level all boats. Because if the yachts keep rising and the canoes take on water, then we have a big problem. And the slack economic tide – in terms of real goods and services – is here to stay.
We need a candidate for the history books. Washington, Lincoln, FDR. A shakeup of the two-party system or a takeover of the left. Not socialism, communism, or any other such crazy idea, just democracy as it was meant to work. Listening to the needs of the majority and making it happen. New Deal 2.0. And for those of you who earn top-level salaries, or who have investment portfolios or retirement plans or who make a living managing other people’s wealth, this is going to hurt. It has to. The current level of return cannot be maintained in the absence of real economic growth without hollowing out our country to a breaking point that it is in everyone’s interest to avoid. So yes, the sort of change we desperately need is going to hurt, but it won’t hurt nearly as much as the alternative – criminal gangs marauding through burned out cities, or militia checkpoints on highways, or the anxiety of living in a nation at war with itself.
If we are going to stand a chance of addressing climate change, of transitioning away from fossil fuels, of adapting to the challenges of the 21st century, we first need to make sure we still have a nation in 20 years. And to do that we need to reach out across the barriers that the narrative-masters have used to divide us – race, religion, pro-life/pro-choice, urban/rural, white-collar/blue-collar – and create the change that we really need.