A friend told me that I was being apocalyptic in my view of America.
In the late 1800s, a French painter by the name of Georges Seurat created a style of painting called pointillism. Pointillism is the aggregation of thousands of tiny dots that in their entirety create an image. That’s the way we need to look at America today; the thousands of incidents of corruption and hubris, of lies and self-dealing that have been in the news for decades that, if you stand back and look at them in their entirety, create an image of a failing empire, a failing America.
Our painting has been taking shape over many years, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt; Eisenhower gave speeches about it. And so when a friend tells me that I’m overreacting to the little man’s election, I wonder how he can’t see the portrait before us, how the thousands of details indicating our demise aren’t readily apparent. The outline’s been clear to the interested observer at least since Reagan and has grown ever more obvious since.
This is not just a Republican or conservative failure, although Republicans have certainly been the driving force that’s gotten us here and its primary beneficiaries (from a political perspective). It’s been equally a failure of Democrats, us liberals, to create a compelling counter-narrative, to show Americans a viable alternative that makes fairness less threatening. Liberals have stood on nuanced intellectual arguments that people don’t have the time or patience to consider while conservative have hammered fear and religious imperative (the same thing, really).
I spent my career in the construction industry, an industry where people arrive at the job site at six in the morning and work all day in the cold and the heat doing physically exhausting work and go home at four and collapse with a beer in front of the TV and don’t have time or energy to consider the subtle and complex arguments about guns, race, abortion, healthcare, immigration, climate and all the rest. The Republican arguments are immediate, visceral and readily understood: Buy a gun, be safe from people who are different; abortion kills pretty white babies.
Republicans (and a lot of Democrats trying to stay relevant), make the argument that government should be run like a business, with efficiency and cost as the measures of success. Do we really want efficiency to be the yardstick? How would it be if government picked up the phone when you called and took the time to understand your concern rather than have you wade through a computerized voice menu that specifically doesn’t include your concern and then has you spend hours on hold as a reward? How about elementary and high schools that the private sector can’t compete with because, how could they? How about a healthcare system where your doctor talks with you for an hour about whatever ails you and you never see a bill? How about a system of higher education that was cheap and easy to get into and graduation a notable accomplishment? How about a system of education that taught the building trades (I’m a builder, so that’s where my sympathy lies) with the same demands and focus as a college education and rewarded with a similar status and income? How about an immigration system that welcomed immigrants as the physical and creative force that they are? How about a social welfare system that took people off the street, fed them, housed them and gave them the attention they need to keep both them and society safe?
How about a tax system that prevented the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezos, and the Mark Zuckerbergs of this world from accumulating so much wealth that they compete with our elected government for power, power that is taken directly from our votes, yours and mine? How about if we taxed those people like we taxed them under Eisenhower and used that revenue to fund wellbeing for all of us? Conceptually, it’s just not that hard. But it’s not going to happen; we’ve already given our power to the fine fellows listed above, and they’re not giving it back.
We celebrate at the alter of capitalism as though it’s a higher order. It’s not. It’s simply a way of ordering productivity. But in late-stage capitalism, that’s where we are today, it deliberately stratifies society to the ends of owners, rewarding them at the expense of the people who do the actual work. And we don’t question it. We look around and mumble our mantra, America’s the greatest empire that ever was and one day I, too, will be rich enough to buy fancy houses, sports cars and politicians while the little people do my work. Meanwhile, they’ve already stolen your future.
This didn’t have to happen. If only we’d put together the dots and seen our portrait sooner.
