The Olympics have provided a showcase for China’s real leap forward, from the edgy Bird’s Nest stadium to the huge new terminal at the Beijing airport, which is twice the size of the Pentagon and claims to be the largest building in the world. But you don’t have to look to a giant nation that has scarily fused capitalism and authoritarianism to see nations moving ahead. Dubai is building a subway and Vancouver is working on an ambitious expansion of its SkyTrain.
And where is America? Our airlines are collapsing — have you read about the CEOs cutting back on fuel to save money, raising safety concerns, or United pilots worrying about maintenance standards? Amtrak is seeing a record demand due to higher gasoline prices and the sheer awfulness of flying — but years of underfunding are causing it to struggle. Cities face huge roadblocks and long timelines to build transit systems they should have had years ago. America, which once led the world in accomplishments, seems tired, decadent, gridlocked — especially in the face of new global realities.
This was especially brought home when I saw an article in Trains magazine about the two-year-old Central Station in Berlin. It’s an architectural landmark of the kind of modernism I find tedious, but never mind that. Built under difficult conditions, with budget fights and NIMBYs, it was nevertheless built. It serves 300,000 passengers and 1,100 trains a day. It also has 80 stores, travelers lounges and office towers. On display is a 21st century transportation network that can handle global warming and Peak Oil.
Meanwhile, we talk — talk — about repairing "our roads and bridges" in our 1965 transportation system. Our elected leaders include Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who said Democrats "want Americans to take transit and move to the inner cities. They want
Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, [and] take
light rail to their government jobs. That’s their vision for America."
This is not the country I grew up in. We fought two world wars and a cold one to save civilization, created the greatest economy and middle class in history, landed men on the moon and built gleaming cities with beautiful parks, inspiring public spaces and majestic buildings. Now we’re even seeing our lead in computers, software and biotech slip away. We long since stopped worrying, apparently, given President-elect McCain’s standing in the polls, about providing the best health care in the world to our citizens.
The "conservatism" that has largely governed the nation for more than a quarter century worships "market forces," profit and the rich. Economics, an inexact and prejudice-prone science, has been exalted to an infallible god, especially when it supports the contentions of, say, ExxonMobil. The public good has been lost. Sprawl has built ugliness into the American bones. Tax cuts and property rights extremism have ham-strung local and state governments. Now we also have security extremism, helping to ensure that whatever replaces the World Trade Center will be dreary and militarized.
So we limp along and muddle through, drugged by television and stuff. We do not aspire to more, apparently. This is the way we live now. I am living in a foreign country.
There are, I think, five toxic myths that the American right used to gain power. They started this project in the early 70s and used repetition and tweaked outrage to create an alternative reality for untold millions of Americans:
1. We didn’t lose Vietnam. Liberals did. And they spit on our vets when they came home.
2. Whites are the real victims of society. Blacks need “civil rights” because they’re lazy. If you see a black person in a good job, it’s because a more-qualified white person was passed over.
3. America is a Christian nation secularists have kidnapped. Abortion is the core evil in our society. Gays and feminists are the vanguard of a decadent modernism.
4. Corporations know best. CEOs are justly compensated because they’re producers. Workers are mostly lazy and unions destroy initiative and profits. We should run America like a corporation.
5. There is no such thing as the environment. People should be able to do anything they want with their property. Environmental scientists are liberals who want to socialize the outdoors to keep productive people from making profits.
Right-wing populism’s primary epistemology is anti-intellectualism. Interestingly, Michelle Bachman used to be a Democrat but became a Republican after reading Gore Vidal’s Burr in the 1970s. She thought Vidal “snotty” and “realized” she was a Republican.
But it’s the right’s overarching mythology which makes it such a powerful force. The demonology interweaves a strong sense of grievance about modernity. Not only is it necessary to hold back the dawn, time itself can be commanded to bring back an American that has been lost.
Since reality is not exactly correspondent with mythology, problems arise. The all-encompassing explanation becomes increasingly bizarre as it tries to reconcile seeming opposites like runaway budget deficits and fiscal conservatism. The myths are powerful, however, because they validate a tribe’s sense of identity and grievance. Every religion has gaps in logic that only faith can somehow overcome.
America is paralyzed because its citizens are hypnotized. Reason, patience, and historical record are useless against hypnosis. Belief is ultimately more powerful than truth for most people. It will take bigger shocks than we’ve seen in the past eight years to wake us.
“Leadership” and “vision” are two terms which have been rendered banal through constant abuse. And though they may seldom be evident as genuine qualities among our political representatives, I think that these problems cannot be ascribed to merely personal failings of character, imagination, or insight.
Politicians work to serve their constituents. Moreover, in a system (such as exists in the United States) where private funding of political campaigns predominates, and where most private funds are donated by businesses and wealthy individuals, the interests of some constituents speak louder than others.
Legislators seem willing to subsidize the construction of projects such as privately owned ballparks or stadiums, which will increase the profits of select businesses and (theoretically) improve government sales tax revenues; but projects which serve the public weal, such as basic infrastructure, though ultimately supporting business as well, have no direct constituents lobbying for them — or if so, none of consequence as regards campaign financing.
Compare this to many European countries, where public elections are publicly funded.
In addition, in the United States the range of acceptable political discourse is both narrower and centered further to the right than in Europe. Single-payer health care is but one example. In Europe it’s common, but here it’s branded socialist — a label which in American politics is the kiss of death. As a result, it cannot even be discussed by serious candidates: witness the recent, ignominious retreat of the so-called “liberal” presidential candidate Obama on this issue. In fact, any use of public funds, outside of police and penal services, is likely to be subject to such criticism (and even those are woefully underfunded).
It’s important to note, however, that in certain important respects these biases have shifted further to the right of the political spectrum over the last few decades. This, incidentally, is true for Europe as well as for the United States, though Europe, beginning from a position further to the left to begin with, remains comparatively progressive.
I think it’s worthwhile to take a moment, to examine why this is the case.
As Mr. Talton has pointed out, in America during the first few decades following World War II, and corresponding to the height of the Cold War, we saw the far-reaching and systematic development of basic infrastructure; intensive public investment in research and development; the G.I. Bill and other substantial loans for housing and education; the growth of bread-and-butter unionism (and consequently the expansion of jobs offering good pay and benefits); and increased subsidization of education and health care. As a consequence, America saw general improvements in its standard of living and the expansion of its middle class.
(It might also be worth pointing out that, during this period, corporate and personal income taxes for the upper brackets were quite high compared to recent decades, yet instead of economic stagnation this produced steady economic growth while funding public works and allowing the government to avoid high levels of debt.)
The question is, what motivated all of this? Was the political leadership of America’s golden years simply that much more mature, imaginative, and insightful than today’s?
Perhaps, but I would argue that what really motivated it was the specter of Communism and competition from the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the world’s citizens. Not only was there a propaganda war at work, but there was an understanding that a strong middle class and the general advancement of society was the best bullwark against Communist propaganda. People who own their own houses, have a good paying job with guaranteed health-care and retirement benefits, and have realistic prospects of maintaining or even improving this over the long term, are unlikely to support a revolution overturning everything and leading to a big question mark.
Europe, which was not only geographically closer to the Soviet Union, but was also older and more cosmopolitan than America, and had strong Social Democratic parties predating the Second World War, possessed a much broader tradition of political and public discourse than the United States.
So, while the elites of both Europe and the United States made concessions to preempt Communist influence, Europe started off much further to the left than America.
In Europe, the response of Social Democratic parties to Soviet totalitarianism was the repudiation of Marxism — a shift to the right — but this was predicated upon a compromise in which more conservative parties agreed to support bread and butter unionism and progressive political platforms. This is how the European political mainstream was forged, but the position thus established for their political center was decidedly to the left of the American political center.
In the United States, the political response to Communism was similar, but represented an overall shift to the left. The response began with the Great Depression, which threatened the very foundations of American capitalism, and the New Deal policies of F.D.R. (in contrast to his conservative predecessors, whether Republican or Democrat).
After the war, it was quickly recognised that the best way to preempt Communist influence was a combination of carrot and stick, in which radicals would be weeded out of positions of social influence (especially in the leaderhsip of the union movement) while simultaneously giving those willing to accept the basic system a stronger motivation for doing so.
The moderating influence of Communism on American politics was truly remarkable, and went well beyond the purely economic sphere. Examination of primary source documents of the period show that, for example, the U.S. government’s response to the civil rights conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s was substantially influenced by the prospect of a Soviet propaganda victory (had the socially conservative philosophy of the United States in this period been permitted to dominate).
Since the demise of Communism as a serious competitor (a process which began prior to the actual end of the Soviet Union, incidentally), there has been no specter of “something worse” motivating American (or European) conservatives to compromise. And it must be admitted that in the general case, the wealthy elites of any country or region — the ones who own businesses and other property and are able to consolidate such ownership — are more likely to be conservative than not.
As a result, we have seen in America an erosion of the middle class, as progressive advances made in past eras are permitted to decay or are actively rolled-back by regressive laws, underfunded enforcement, and a culture of nepotism and corruption between business and regulatory bodies; simultaneously, restrictions governing the business, trade, financial, and tax responsibilities of these elites have been relaxed or eliminated.
Europe also has seen such an erosion; but having started out more progressively, they have further to fall. As elites consolidate their influence in both parts of the world, the differences will narrow over time.
In much the same way that Mr. Talton fears that McCain will win over Obama even with all the evidence of what that would mean, I feel that the USA has begun the long fall of empire. We’ve seen it many times before, but the complacent citizens of powerful empires always believe that theirs will reign forever.
Empires have always fallen before and there is no indication that we will do differently. Others have remained stable for hundreds or even thousands of years, but we came in at Industrial Era speed and now are living at Internet speed, so don’t count on the old timescales.
It is possible that we will recover from this and go on for some time. We did recover from two World Wars and the Great Depression.
I have seen some signs that the long pendulum swing to the right has stopped, but it has not yet begun to swing back towards center. Too bad.
My wife and I just returned from a visit to Denver, her hometown and a place where the Rogue Columnist has resided.
We went out to Red Rocks, the beautiful amphitheater carved into the — wait for it — red rocks just outside the city.
There was a statue memorializing the CCC workers who built the facility between 1936 and 1941. It’s a beautiful, lasting, wonderful piece of infrastructure that has served Denver for decades. My wife (and countless thousands of others) had her high school graduation ceremony there. I once went to a concert there.
When we were at Red Rocks this week, there were hundreds of people just looking at the place, walking around and enjoying it, even though there was no event taking place.
Yet somehow the use of public money for such community enhancements is labeled wasteful and unnecessary. But we can spend $2 billion apiece for a fleet of bombers we’ll never use.
I read recently that federal payments to private contractors in Iraq are expected to total $100 billion by the end of 2008. And of course, that doesn’t begin to touch the spending on military procurement for weapons, transport, communications, and other gear and supplies.
When I referred to police and prisons above I was thinking chiefly of local government funds. But despite conservative philosophical support for police and prisons, those agencies and facilities are chronically underfunded, whereas the military-industrial complex has few complaints.
The difference, I think, is that public safety is non-profit, whereas subsidizing military suppliers is a kind of Keynesian economic stimulus, though of course politicians seldom if ever speak of it in those terms, especially before a general audience.
The real question is whether massive subsidy of that particular sector of the economy is the best use of those funds. If progressives could ever get sufficient influence over the terms of national debate to force U.S. politicians to admit that they already practice a kind of limited socialism (after all, these companies have only one market for their products, the government, which uses tax dollars to pay their running expenses, salaries and profits), it might then be possible to broaden the discussion. Of course, one has to admit that many of these military manufacturing jobs are high-tech and pay well.
(The fact that some politicians involved in oversight of military procurement eventually accept lucrative, private sector positions as executive consultants with such companies, may of course also influence their attitudes.)
Speaking of problems with basic infrastructure, today’s (8/23/08) Arizona Republic contained a short news item among the “Arizona Briefs” which mentioned in passing that “Tucson’s only burn unit will close in September and patients from southern Arizona will need to be treated in Phoenix.” It also mentioned that “St. Mary’s has operated Tucson’s only burn unit since 1969.”
The article quoted a St. Mary’s rep who “cited a decreasing patient population as one of the factors leading to the closure”.
No explanation to the lay-reader of what this could mean, in a city whose population is roughly 550,000 and has grown consistently if slowly every year for the last 10 years. It’s not as though Tucson is an old mining town suffering demographic
hemorrhaging after the boom went bust. But the “reporter” is content to get St. Mary’s press release blurb and leave it at that.
Also no word on how cost-effective this is in a larger context, involving long-distance emergency transport of burn victims, or increased severity of trauma due to treatment delays, leading to the need for more intense and sustained treatment and recovery therapy. I suppose these additional costs might be partially offset by a higher mortality rate among serious burn victims. The article doesn’t discuss social costs or priorities.
This is what happens when health care is left to the decisions of individual private companies and religious non-profits.
Whether St. Mary’s has a funding problem or not, I can’t say. Whatever the problem, nobody else is stepping up to the plate — nor have they for the last 40 years — to handle this apparently unprofitable but essential service, so it appears that “world class” is an adjective best reserved in America for hotel-casinos, sports stadiums, and convention halls.
The very brief article was preceeded by a slightly longer one speculating that pigweed was responsible for the deaths of some Chino Valley cattle. That article contained a detailed, multi-paragraph scientific explanation of why pigweed can be toxic to cattle. No word on why Metro Phoenix readers would or should care.