CommentsGUEST WORDS-Like me — take a look at the pic above — right about now, you might be asking yourself: “Is America fixable?”
I want to think about this question as simply and clearly as I can. I’ll think about classes, groups, and institutions. I don’t pretend that I’ll have the one true answer, but I do think that we, meaning sane and sensible people, need to ask: has America reached the point of no return?
Let’s begin by thinking about America’s political elites.
On the right, the American political elite has degenerated to something like a Soviet or North Korean style joke — it’s literally happy to absolve a President of crimes even while admitting he’s committed them. LOL — what? The rich world hasn’t seen the like since the rise of Nazis — a theme we’ll return to. On the left, though, we have the bizarre spectacle of the Democrats — an “opposition” who, having funded concentration camps, can’t then try a President for them. Having sided with capital — just like the right — it can hardly be on the side of the average working person. Wait — what? Hence, on both sides, America’s political class is paralyzed, captured, and only really good for one thing, which is what it’s been doing for the last few years: letting the bad guys win, either by enabling them, or, cowed, by refusing to really challenge them.
Then there’s America’s “thinking” class — its intellectual elites.
I put that in quotes because the tragicomic truth is that it too is, to put it kindly, a weird joke. Nobody in the world takes it seriously because — well, how can you take a thinking class seriously that let it’s society slide into this kind of disrepair? Who takes these ideas seriously — people shouldn’t have healthcare, capitalism should run everything, kids should pay ‘lunch debt’? Only — in the whole world, only — America’s intellectuals. To everyone else — literally — they’re grotesque and bad jokes. To consider them “ideas” is an insult to intellect.
And yet, weirdly, America’s thinking class — like medieval theologians — in an act of astonishing hubris, thinks it knows the answer to everything, but in fact knows self-evidently precisely nothing. That answer is always exactly the same: capitalism’s cruelty, selfishness, and greed. Hence, it has literally no explanation for any of the following things: why capitalism failed, why America collapsed, why fascism arose, how authoritarianism carried the day, how slavery and segregation laid the groundwork for all this. (Sure — there are thinkers here and there who connect these dots, but by and large, they are rejected viciously from the establishment.) The establishment, meanwhile, is busy “interviewing” literal Nazis, like Jake Tapper, or the NYT, or publishing defense of climate change denial, or repeating the fantasy that the same old dead ideas — capitalism for everything! Make those kids pay their lunch debts!! — can work.
Then there are American ideas — another thing we should think of as an institution, but don’t.
If you understand that American history can be divided up into three chapters — slavery, segregation, and capitalism — what’s the common thread? I often say that Americas really only ever had one idea, and that’s violence — and Americans get mad, and start to…violently insult me (LOL). And yet what else links those three clear chapters of American history but violence — exploitation, abuse, cruelty?
America built its riches by constructing an international slave trade — think of how horrific that is for a moment. Today, thanks to extreme capitalism, Americans are made to beg one another for pennies to pay for basic medicine online — or. . .die.
Do you see the link? I do. Exploitation, abuse, cruelty, selfishness.
Violence is the rule by which America has always been run. Sure, violence to slaves is hardly the violence of denying each other medicine. Or is it? The strong survive, the weak perish, and that is the moral law. But how can that idea — which is the only one America ever really had — result, ultimately, in anything but the kind of brutal authoritarianism finally arising now? Violence — first slavery, then capitalism, now authoritarian-fascism — is the American Achilles’ heel. But those three words are just different expressions for the same idea: extreme, total, systemic violence, in the form of exploitation, whether of those with the wrong skin color or the lack of money or status, as a way to order society.
What about that, the social order, as in, how classes cooperate — or conflict? That brings me to the next piece of my little analysis.
American society. Instead of the kind of society a healthy democracy is made of — a broad middle, moderate inequality, and an ever-shrinking number of poor — America’s social structure is now the complete opposite. The middle class imploded — and is now a minority. The ranks of the poor therefore swelled — to a point the United Nations calls a crisis. These people — which are something like 90–99% of Americans — are now one class: the new working class, the new precariat. They are proles exploited by the whip of capitalism so extreme it would have made the Victorians blush.
Meanwhile, a tiny, tiny number of people have grown so rich that they could literally pay off America’s student debt. . .fund its education system. . .cancel its healthcare debt. . .overnight, put together. There is no reason — none — for them to have grown so rich. No, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates didn’t make people “better off” — why are life expectancy and income and happiness all still cratering? This argument, beloved of American economists and pundits, is facile, idiotic, on its face. The riches of America’s capitalist overlords are precisely what they appear to be: profoundly obscene. Obscene as in: “made of misery, decline, poverty, and collapse.”
A nation that’s become a sea of exploited proles, on the one hand, and capitalist wage-slave-masters, on the other, can hardly cooperate. It must conflict. So, America never developed the things Europe enjoys, which depend on cooperation — public goods, expansive social systems, a modern social contract.
Without those essential features of modernity, America’s ultra-rich have become a class much like new medieval overlords — and the people they rule over are as much or more serfs as proles.
They will die in debt, unable to pay off their bondage. What the. . .? What do we call a person that’s born in — and dies in — “debt” that they can never pay off? Well, we can’t call them free, because that means they never really own anything at all. Americans are the world’s newest class of serfs. But whose fault is that?
That brings me to an oft overlooked institution — the populace. The American people themselves.
Can a nation of bereft, helpless proles — or serfs — really ever develop a modern society? Or are they just powerless to descend into hatred, violence, and ignorance?
America can be divided, broadly, into three groups.
Thirty percent Americans are, to put it kindly, crazy: they’d be quite happy living in an Irani style theocracy, or a North Korean dictatorship. That should be one lesson of the last few years (but is it?). Another 40% or so are bewildered, confused, and paralyzed. They’re the ones who say, in polls, that they want better healthcare, education, higher incomes, retirement, and so on — but when the chance to actually vote for such things, or to back such candidates, arises, they throw it away. Their teeth seem to chatter in nervous fear, and they turn right back to the status quo. So about 60 to 70% of Americans as a society just don’t seem to be interested in actually overcoming the parlous state of their society.
Then there’s about 30% of Americans, in my estimation, on the other side. They’re sane, intelligent, thoughtful people. But they are concentrated in areas where they have little political power — cities on coasts, that wield little to no clout, thanks to America’s bizarre political system, itself an institutional leftover of slavery. Those 30%, as much anger and despair as they feel, are impotent. Their votes don’t matter — and their attitudes don’t, either. What about those, attitudes, though? Are they really good enough, sophisticated enough, advanced enough, to power America to becoming something vaguely resembling a civilized society?
That brings me to my next area: norms. America’s developed a bizarre, grotesque, obscene set of norms over the last few years — or perhaps it always had them.
The Prez passes ethnic bans, and puts kids in camps, and declares himself above the law. Americans take to Twitter to rage about it. But they simply won’t call all that what it needs to be called: authoritarianism, fascism, democratic collapse into the worst kinds of abuses. Sure, some do — but they’re a tiny minority. Americans choose to use the vocabulary of plutocracy, not fascism — if they speak at all. But that is like calling a vampire a pickpocket. A plutocracy is one thing — but most plutes don’t put kids in camps or ban entire religions and continents from personhood or want to annihilate Mexican babies.
America has, in other words, developed all the norms you might expect from an imploding society, one collapsing into genuine authoritarianism.
Silence is perfectly acceptable and is legitimized every day by pundits asking rhetorical questions (“My God! What is the GOP doing?”) Complicity reigns — and is normalized as people merely “doing their best.” Aggression and cruelty are present in increasing amounts from the extremists who are capturing society wholesale. In other words, culturally, growing cowardice from the good people is the norm now, while increasing hostility, abuse, and violence is the norm from the bad ones. How can a society like that make anything of itself, redeem much in itself, much less ever progress again?
Let me finish with one last institution — the economy. Driving all the above is a very simple and grim reality. America has been through something that is precisely like an Invisible Depression for decades now, longer and more vicious than the Great Depression.
Yes, really. Incomes haven’t risen for fifty years. Savings have fallen to negative levels, meaning the average American dies in debt. Half of Americans now work in “low-wage” jobs and 75% struggle to pay basic bills. The social effects of poverty have been what they always are: social bonds blow apart, relationships fragment, social groups begin to turn one another, punching down in the hierarchy. The declining middle punches down on the old working class and poor, who became the Trumpists, that punch down on hated minorities, blaming them for all their economic woes.
Stagnation and depression are the original sins of political economy. They breed all the ills that we know of.
Hate, violence, despair, decline, rage, fury. Those malign sentiments organize into fascism and authoritarianism, led by demagogues. Which capture polities. Which pervert norms. Which subvert institutions. Which corrode democracy. Which replace any semblance of democracy and its ideals, aspirations, and values — justice, peace, equality, truth — with just this: might makes right.
When people grow poor enough, all those fundamentals of democracy — truth, equality, justice, peace — stop mattering. Nobody can afford them anymore.
That is why we say today in America that “reality doesn’t matter anymore.” Or that, seeing a President walk away, above the law, that justice doesn’t matter. Or that, seeing a class of billionaires rich enough to pay off society’s entire “student debt,” that equality doesn’t matter. Poverty and deprivation of the kind America let itself degenerate into — systemic, social, chronic, absolute, inescapable — means, in the hardest, concrete terms, that none of the fundamentals of democracy matter, either. When you are struggling to put bread on the table, like that poor, foolish Trumpist — maybe you’ll believe the lies. Probably they’re more comforting than the bitter truth. And who else is on your side, anyways, anymore — but the lie?
So. Let me ask again? Is America fixable?
I won’t answer the question. Having thought about it together, I’ll leave it to you. I’ll simply conclude with this. America was, not so long ago, the richest and most powerful nation in the world. And now it’s a nation of poor, desperate people, collapsing into authoritarianism, in denial about fascism, unable to imagine a better future collectively, fractured into tribes, at each other’s throats.
I think that America is a warning to the world.
About what happens when you believe a little too hard in your own catastrophically failed ideologies. When elites can’t let them go. When leaders refuse to step forward. When a populace grows morally weak and intellectually feeble. What happens when you don’t outgrow cruelty, hostility, aggression, violence, and anger as a way of life? What happens when your society is based on exploitation and abuse? What do people do when they grow so poor there’s nothing left to do but believe the lies, and cheer on the hate?
American collapse does.
(Umair Haque has been a Medium member since Jun 2018. He writes for Eudaimonia and Co … where this perspective was first posted.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.