Postwar America Was Fundamentally Unsustainable

It's something so central to the human experience that it has become a running joke - an older generation complaining to a younger one that things simply aren't the way they used to be. It has gotten to me in a peculiar way that I'm not sure how to describe that a sentiment so common and basic to the human life cycle could become such a devastatingly effective political slogan, "Make America Great Again."

Upon examination, it isn't all that difficult to understand why people from my parents' generation, or more specifically white people from my parents' generation, seem so fascinated by the America of yesteryear. They grew up in a country which was extraordinarily prosperous and powerful, and their demographics ensured them a secure place within it. That power and prosperity, however, was the product of very specific historical circumstances.

After the second World War, almost all of the industrial powers of the time were left in ruins. Germany, France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and Japan all had relatively large industrial capacities which were crippled by the war, and while it wasn't an economic power at the time China was devastated on a similar scale. The fact of the matter was that the practicability of large scale manufacturing in those countries was very limited as they demobilized and tried to rebuild their industrial infrastructure.

In short, industrial production was easiest in the United States, which aside from a naval base in Hawaii had been essentially untouched by the war and which had spent six years aggressively building up its industrial capacity to supply the war effort. The only countries at the time that might have competed with the US for that business had been on the front lines in the war.

That unique state of affairs, made possible by the indescribable destruction of World War 2, put the American worker in an unusual position of power. The political response to the Great Depression had recently empowered labor unions, and that power peaked as America became the only feasible place to mass produce. Because companies had limited options with regard to production elsewhere, the workers as a whole were able to bargain for an uncommonly large proportion of the benefits.

It was the prostration of the industrially active world by the war that allowed the American middle classes to become so prosperous, and the consumer driven economy to develop. I should point out here that law, custom, and the internal politics of labor unions all tended to concentrate the benefits in the hands of white people. This is important not just in the interest of historical honesty and acknowledgement of the treatment of nonwhites in this country. It has a significant bearing on the reaction of White America to the decline of the industrial base.

That decline was, after all, inevitable. Considered in the above light, it seems obvious that eventually other countries would rebuild. Their industrial capacity would be restored to an extent that allowed their products to compete for world markets, which put American workers and the companies they worked for in an awkward position. 

The workers had bargained for a significant proportion of the surplus they had helped create, but as American companies once more faced serious competition at home and abroad the available surplus diminished. The uncompromising logic of profit and competition dictated that the companies either had to make the American workers settle for less, or use fewer of them. They chose a combination of the two.

In the time it took for that process to play out, an entire - and in fact an enormous - generation of Americans was born and came of age entirely after the war. They had no frame of reference to viscerally understand that the economic circumstances in which they grew up were unusual. The expectation that some education and a little effort were sufficient to secure a comfortable middle-class existence became embedded.

There is an assumption, built into our mythology of the United States, that the free market and elections were all that was necessary to secure both our victory in the war and the subsequent prosperity. There is a startling lack of national self-awareness in our failure to acknowledge that it was the war itself that permitted our living standard to become so broadly based - again, broadly based primarily among a white population.

When that base inevitably diminished the white population in particular, having disproportionately felt the benefit of midcentury prosperity, felt itself to be falling behind. The tendency to blame nonwhite and specifically black populations for "causing trouble" when they campaigned for a more equal society combined with the loss of status from a diminishing middle class to create a powerful feeling of persecution among whites which, while grounded in their economic frustrations, was wholly incongruous with their privileged position in society.

That is why when white people hear things like "Make America Great Again," that pean to the old America evokes both economic and racial resentments. The prosperity and security that they remember was built not only on unique historical circumstances but also on a system of racial inequality which they inherited and from which most of them, like most of us, were content to continue profiting. Not only is it impossible to reconstruct the circumstances that lead to the prosperity in the first place without a catastrophically destructive world war, but the unusually equitable distribution of it among whites was made possible significantly by its restriction to whites. 

We should not want to return to that place. It may be more difficult to find our way in the modern world and search for a basis for a more equitable prosperity, but it is simply the right thing to do. "Make America Great Again" is a siren song, offering White America a return to its comfortable, oblivious past. What it will give us instead is a dystopia riven by inequalities and racial tensions. Those tensions cannot be ratcheted up indefinitely for political gain without their being released, probably violently. Only a sound historical understanding of how and why we are where we are can give us the insight to prevent it.

A Critique of The Democratic Party's Performance in Opposition

It has now been very close to a year since the formal beginning of the Trump presidency. The Democrats have found themselves in opposition - in both houses of Congress as well as out of the presidency - for the first time since early 2007. It has been an opportunity for the party to do some soul searching and find out what it stands for in the post-Obama, post-Clinton political world. In practice, they have repeatedly opposed harmful things that President Trump has attempted or proposed, but refused to follow the logic of their opposition to a policy that addresses the fundamental principle.

They opposed and ultimately stopped the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but there is still substantial establishment and conservative pushback against proposing a single-payer bill that would establish healthcare as a right. As a result of this equivocation, the official party position on healthcare is defending a law that is being crippled by deliberate sabotage at the federal level. "I like how things are" is hardly a progressive position to take when premiums continue to increase out of all proportion to medical inflation.

The Democrats protested loudly when Trump revoked DACA protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children. They then turned around and started negotiating changes to the immigration system designed to prevent people from poor countries particularly, and poor people in general, from being able to relocate to this country as a bargaining chip to get DACA back. When the congressional GOP is motivated to avoid allowing those protections to lapse permanently, offering significant concessions as a reward for restoring an obviously just policy - which should never have been revoked in the first place - seems like an unjustifiable capitulation.

Far from attempting either to rein in the war-making powers of the President or to limit our involvement in what is now essentially a region-wide war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the Middle East, they have continued to turn a blind eye to our complicity in campaigns in Yemen that are textbook atrocities. They have failed to exert any pressure to end an involvement in Afghanistan that is rapidly approaching 17 years in length and is little closer to a final resolution than it was ten years ago. The Democratic Congressional leadership also secured the passage of a continued authorization for only-thinly checked surveillance of Americans on domestic soil without a warrant in certain situations.

But the apparent allergy of the Democratic Party toward staking out a bold policy direction in the new era under Trump, when they no longer have any duty to defend the policies of a sitting president with their letter next to his name, is only half of their failure in the first year of Trump. The other half has been focusing entirely on him. In a way they are two sides of the same issue, because with all the Trump Talk there has scarcely been any time left over for serious policy discussions.

I don't mean to say that the Russia investigation isn't extremely serious, or that Trump's behavior and demeanor aren't alarming and disgraceful in a head of state. I happen to believe that both of those things are very true. But the exclusive focus on him as an individual implies that he himself is the problem, and as a corollary that removing him would make everything better. That is a delusion.

Just switching the people in office will not produce appropriate changes at a time when the inadequacy of the existing framework is comically obvious. If Trump were not president, the distribution of wealth would not narrow of its own accord. Racism would not vanish. Our wars would not end. Unjust and unlawful violence by law enforcement officials would not magically stop. Our nonviolent offenders would not be released from prison. Healthcare would not become accessible to everyone.

The fact of the matter is that the ruling crust of the Democratic Party has become far too comfortable. No party that claims affinity with the political Left should be comfortable enough with the status quo to be content presiding over it.

I supported Hillary Clinton in the primary, primarily because I felt that abandoning the path President Obama took for a more aggressive approach would give a powerful congressional GOP an opening to paralyze the legislative branch, as they successfully did for the last six years of his presidency, and prevent anything at all from being done. But at this point, faced with a Congress and administration that is already aggressively dismantling as much of the progress in social policy that was made under Obama as they possibly can, there is no principled reason for the Democratic Party to adopt a temporizing tone.

The inequalities that exist in this country are egregious and widening, but they were all here long before Trump came into office. Trump's obvious ineptitude in office presents an opportunity to aggressively sell a more progressive, egalitarian vision to a country wracked by conflicts - both foreign and domestic - that are fundamentally about inequality.

What the Democratic Party is currently doing is taking the easy way out by riding the wave of anti-Trump feeling and trying to upset as few people as possible between now and the Congressional elections in November. They will probably do very well in those elections. But as an opportunity to make an impact and aggressively fight for those who are held back by social barriers, the Democrats have thus far wasted the Trump presidency.

Michael Wolff's Book

The political news this week has been all about the contents of Michael Wolff's new book about the first year of the Trump administration. The picture painted therein is one of staggering incompetence, both on the part of the president and those around him. Indeed, the book itself would not have been possible without a profound misunderstanding by most of the Trump inner circle with regard to how reporting works and what statements are considered fair game.

Wolff himself is a person most often described by compound expressions containing the word "sleaze," but to his credit he has done something extraordinary in modern American politics. He has shown that he is willing to sacrifice the relationships he cultivated while writing the book in order to tell the real story. For most political reporters, these relationships are their livelihood, and great care is taken to abide by certain informal arrangements which prevent anything the source considers egregious from being published. It is an unusually sure bet that Wolff has burned those bridges, and in doing so closed the door on substantial future benefits for himself. His motives are still probably selfish - I imagine he prefers the glamor of being the guy who gave the administration the finger - but the choice involved sacrifice, and happens also to perform a valuable public service.

The reason that Wolff's book is a public service is because it makes inescapably clear, in compact form, what the body of reporting from the beginning of Trump's campaign has told us about the kind of person he really is. He is vain, insecure, and cheerfully ignorant of and uninterested in public policy, yet still obstinate in clinging to his whims in the face of counsel and evidence. He is unashamedly corrupt. He values loyalty over competence. He views his administration not in terms of the people who put him where he is or even the policy he seeks to enact, but in terms of himself. He is, in sum, a near-perfect approximation of the sort of person who ought not to occupy any public office, least of all the Presidency.

A number of powerful Republicans have willfully deceived themselves regarding Trump's fitness for the office he holds. In spite of his behavior, they have stuck by him because he has helped them win policy victories, because they are too cowardly to criticize a president still popular with their own base voters, and because cheering anything the other side hates has become second nature. But at certain moments - the Access Hollywood tape, the Corker feud, the Charlottesville response - their inner doubts have surfaced publicly in spite of themselves.

One effect that I hope the book will have is to strip the veneer of respectability from a position that pretends not to notice what has become painfully obvious - Trump as the President of the United States is a danger to himself and others. It would be a very long way from a solution to our problem, but certainly it would be a very welcome first step for everyone to finally acknowledge that the emperor is naked.