The American Empire is in decline, and the elite does not see this for what it is - a breakdown of the ties that bind us together as Americans.
America, like much of the Western world is suffering from structural unemployment. In short, we have too many people and too few jobs to go around. Neither political party has a clue about what has to be done, and even if one did, its actions would be negated by the other party. Winning the game of politics has become much more important than serving the people.
If the problem were structural unemployment alone, we might look back to the Great Depression and develop "make work" programs such as the WPA, using the labor to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Sadly, this is not the case. Many of America's social problems go back to the post WW2 era, and the slow desegregation of American society. Whites did not want to have their children educated in the same schools as "colored" children, and busing began to be used to desegregate the schools. The Southern churches became a hot bed of activity on both sides of the battle.
Richard Nixon sensed that the South could be flipped from Blue to Red, and implemented the GOP's "Southern Strategy" - opposing busing at all turns, and aligning the party with fundamentalist ministries who, in the past, had no political allegiance. Within a generation, the South had flipped from Blue to Red, and the traditional mix of power in both political parties had changed for the worse. The Democrats became a party of urban liberals, while the GOP became a party of rural conservatives. No longer was there a tie in either party that held rural and urban states together.
Culturally, we have become very divided. Jonathan Haidt identified 5 basic moral triggers that people use to judge right from wrong, and they include:
- Harm/care: People are sensitive to suffering and have negative feelings toward those who are harmful and cruel. They value kindness and compassion.
- Fairness/reciprocity: A history of cooperation means humans have evolved a sense of fairness and reciprocity, leading to altruistic actions.
- Ingroup/loyalty: People place moral value on those who do what's good for the group; are loyal to the group; and dislike disloyal members.
- Authority/respect: Humans tend to respect authority and tradition.
- Purity/sanctity: The idea that we view our bodies as sacred. This idea ties into religious views about the body and human actions.
Liberals tend to care only about harm and fairness when considering whether something is moral or not, while conservatives have a more traditional moral structure, and tend to care about all five morality factors. Couple the conservative viewpoint with a belief that economic failure is a result of moral failure, and one will have problems when addressing major economic issues such as structural unemployment.
In the past, we once had common broadcast news outlets, where reporting bias had to be skewed toward the middle in order to keep a nationwide audience. Was there really much difference between CBS, NBC and ABC, save for their anchors (Cronkite, Huntley/Brinkley, and Smith)? I don't think so. Without the ability to choose narrowcasted news, the American public got a balanced idea of what was happening in the world. This is not the case today. Cable allows us to select the narrowcasted news outlets of our choice, and we are fed the pablum that our biases want to hear - be it Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN. It's much harder to see things clearly when our news outlets have been chosen because they reinforce our political biases.
Why is narrowcasted news a problem? In the past, objective news coverage from Vietnam helped cause the removal of American troops from that country and end an unneeded war. Today, with narrowcasted news, there is little pressure to check and balance what the politicians are doing - and this has allowed the Military/Business elite (that Eisenhower warned us about) to put us in a position of fighting a "forever war".
"Forever Wars" take resources away from the needed rebuilding of our country's physical infrastructure. As a result, we've seen bridges fail, water mains fail, the electric supply grid fail, among other infrastructure problems. And little is done. When Hurricane Sandy hit New York a while back, we were woefully unprepared. The rebuilding of infrastructure is costing much more than it should, as we no longer know how to build and/or repair things at a reasonable cost.
We've evolved to having an "us/them" society. If I talk about poverty, the first thought that comes to many minds is of a poor black "welfare mother" who leeches off our system. What most people don't see is that there is just as much rural poverty as there is urban poverty. Do those poor white mothers leech any less off our system? I doubt it. Both urban and rural poor are doing all they can do to get by on a daily basis - but the system is stacked against them. Strangely enough two of the best posts I've read about poverty in this country came from cracked.com, the humor site....
And the sentiment is now being echoed in mainstream websites, such as in this article appearing in slate.com.
What people aren't noticing is that poverty has now come to the supposedly "safe" suburbs. Structural unemployment has left many families in need. And now, suburban food pantries are just as busy as urban food pantries.
The business elite no longer feels that it has to be in the same boat as the workers in the firms they manage. In the past, a CEO would rarely earn more than 30x-50x the salary of the firm's average worker. Now, CEO's tend to get 300x-400x the salary of the firm's average worker. Are the CEOs any better than they used to be? I doubt it. A while back, the firm I worked for decided to merge with one of its competitors in the worst of economies. Cost savings, in part, would be achieved by letting people go - when the odds were very much against these former workers finding work at a livable wage. Who gained? The workers? No. The Stockholders? Not in a reasonable time frame. Upper Management? Of Course! But my old firm is only one of many. A major technical firm has outsourced many of its employees, so that it achieves the flexibility of having a labor force without rights. Who gains? Certainly not labor. Nor do the states where this firm has located its business units.
So, is there any hope? If we go back to Jonathan Haidt's moral value structures, we also find that liberals and conservatives have a lot in common - when they can stop talking past each other. They both want to resolve the problems of society, but they are caught in webs (as I see it) of tribal loyalties. If we can begin to recognize that all the stake holders in our society have legitimate grievances, only then can we start to repair the damage caused by our dysfunctional, disconnected elites....
