CommentsPOLITICAL FOLLIES-There’s a sense of optimism -- maybe relief is a better word -- breaking through the clouds of American collapse.
The Blue Wave was a reality — a momentous step forward, which I’ll come back to. Still, America is hardly out of the woods yet. I want to discuss briefly what the contours of the future -- or maybe the stakes of American renewal -- are, and end with a little reflection on the meaning of this contentious idea, “America.”
Here is the central question: is going back to the status quo ante -- the time before the rise of extremism -- good enough? One reality that I think America hasn’t really confronted yet is this: going back to the way things were before Trumpism reared its ugly cartoonish head isn’t good enough. It is that dismal reality, and its inequalities, injustices, and bigotries which gave rise to Trumpism. Let me put that another way. America might not quite know it, but it is at a turning point. The question before it isn’t: can it “recover”, as in rewind to the social contract, economy, and polity of 2016, 2006, or 1996. It is whether it can really build ones fit for this century -- by way of understanding that none of the preceding ones were good enough, and that is why extremism arose.
There are three great trends which shape American decline -- and the central challenge of American renewal is somehow reversing them, not just mitigating them slightly. The first is stagnant incomes. The second is falling life expectancy. The third is that Americans are broke. To put these in perspective, America is the only country in the world with these dismal realities.
Now, these might sound like idle statistics to you. But to me they tell a larger story. As people grow poorer, they turn on their neighbors and peers and friends -- the rise of extremism. The rise of such fresh poverty in the midst of plenty points to a deeply dysfunctional set of institutions. Living at the edge of ruin, perpetually, brings with it a set of social malaises, with which Americans are all too familiar -- and the world reels at -- from the rage and disconnection that fuel constant mass shootings to the depression and trauma and loneliness that pervades society, especially amongst the young. Poverty — which is what most Americans live in now, at least the relative kind -- costs us more than we suppose: relationships, meaning, belonging, purpose, grief, the deeper consequences of a lack of deserved and fair chances, opportunities, and right.
Hence, if the best that America can do as a result of the Blue Wave is to rewind a few years -- instead of taking a quantum leap forward -- then the pattern of now is simply likely to repeat. The same old frustrations and resentments, which stoke the same old bigotries and hatreds, are likely to go right on boiling over into the same old nationalism and fascism. That might strike you as a remote possibility, in this suddenly optimistic moment -- but it is, in my eyes, a pattern that marks declining countries: a kind of oscillation between hope and despair, which masks a downward pattern in general. Running desperately back to yesterday is not the same as moving towards tomorrow.
Now, all that might strike you as somewhat obvious when I put it that way. But I wonder -- and you should too -- whether Americans, and especially their leaders, really understand that the stakes aren’t going back to the status quo ante. Already, the Democrats are going back to their old ways. They are proposing half-baked, minor-league policies -- like “reining in prescription prices” (whatever that means) and whatnot. I could go on, but let’s just use this example.
What do Americans really need -- to combat the great megatrend of falling life expectancy? They need universal healthcare, elderly care, mental healthcare, retirements, and freedom from the anxieties and stresses of mega-capitalism, which send them to early graves, having exploited them to the bone. What they don’t need is an opposition who imagines that capitalism can give people decent healthcare, because it suddenly grew a heart, and thus goes on embarking on the same old wild goose chase all over again, which Obama did, and failed at (love Obamacare all you like, but it doesn’t work at a social level -- hence, falling life expectancy, not to mention ever other indicator of healthiness and happiness).
It’s true that minor league policies to cap some drug price here or there will help some people -- probably sick and desperate people -- but they are unlikely to help enough people, in significant enough ways, to change the fortunes of the average American in any way whatsoever. And where there is a trend of falling life expectancy, which means rising illness, an inability to care for the elderly and the young alike, not to mention one’s own self, you can expect extremism and fanaticism to go on rising. Does that little example make sense? Do you see how the socioeconomic and political dots are connected?
Now take that example and think about it for my other two mega trends which mark American collapse — stagnant incomes, and nonexistent savings. How are those to be reversed? Again, if the best that Democrats can do is to propose minor-league capitulations to mega-capitalism -- “I know, let’s throw more money at Amazon!!” -- then, those trends are not likely to reverse. What will it take to reverse them? It’ll take at minimum a new wave of trust-busting -- but even that’s small potatoes. Beyond that, it’ll take new institutional designs, which don’t place an entire economy’s resources, possibilities, fate in the hands of hedge funds and investment banks, whose only concern is to profit maximally this nanosecond. That means redesigning things like “corporations”, “banks”, and even “profit” itself, to reflect whether or not the average person is actually made better off by all this.
Do you see how fundamental that challenge is? It’s not just about politics -- it’s also about ideas. And that is where America is really deficient. A half-century of mainstream thought which can be boiled down to “more capitalism!” has left America without many good ideas for the future. American thought simply presumed that leaving everything in the hands of capitalism would result in utopia, and the hidden consequence was that America more or less stopped thinking about better ideas for how to build a working society, economy, polity -- much less a social contract. That wave of thinking stopped dead, in my estimation with FDR’s Second Bill of Rights -- that was the last time, I think, that American thought really took anything beyond capitalism seriously. Since then, nearly every idea in mainstream American thought can be reduced to capitalism’s underlying notions -- Darwinism, self-interest, cruelty, greed, and aggressive, brutalizing competition.
That’s a lot of work, isn’t it? First there is the political work. Then there is the social work, and then there is the intellectual work. Who should do it? Luckily for America, it has a generation of young people who are already beginning to understand, I think a little intuitively, the scale of the challenges above. They are running for office (and winning), beginning to rethink the failures of their society, and going out and exploring a world that left America in the dust. Those are good things.
Still, I think we don’t talk about the stakes enough these days. It’s not enough to go backwards in search of an illusory stability. The idea that I think the Democrats still have -- “if only we can go back to 2016! Everything will be fine then!!” -- is not a very good one. Because going backwards in a time of collapse only ends with you tumbling back down the very same hole. The way out of American collapse is forwards -- not backwards. With a reimagined society, social contract, economy, polity, and society.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we should or must leave the good things about America behind. Far from it. I think, probably, that we are due for a time in which we rediscover them, really begin to reinterpret them, understand them anew, and express them, too, with our very own lives, days, moments, paths.
Here is what I’ve come to think is truly remarkable about America. There are these old shining ideals — freedom, truth, justice, which, in a way, just mean the fullest expansion of possibility in each and every life, towards its noblest self. And here we are, searching ourselves for those very ideals. Do they exist in us, still? Are we really American, in that truest sense? Or have we become something smaller, something lesser?
Now, every nation has fine and grand ideals. They are not what made America something singular. You see, not every nation goes on, despite itself, when it is weary, weak, afraid, still searching itself, through the deserts of strife and time, to uncover and reveal whether they still glimmer there beneath the dust. Not every nation burns with this need to reveal the truth of itself. That lonely and difficult quest makes Americans wanderers of the soul. Journeying through all the long midnights of history, towards a forgotten, impossible destination that, more often than not, the world laughs at. That beautiful and remarkable journey -- which is so often misunderstood as naivete, as childishness, as thanklessness -- is the essence, I’ve come to think, of America, of being American, of the thing we call an American way. Let that quest go on.
(Umair Haque’s essays appear on Medium.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
