Making America Great Again….No, not MAGA, For Real
Anyone looking at America would be tempted to believe we’re on our way down the tubes. We’ve got horrible leadership, we have bad racism problems, it is national policy to ignore global warming, our diplomacy is a mess, income and wealth polarization are growing, COVID is growing, America’s public education system is deteriorating, our roads and infrastructure are deteriorating, China is eating our lunch, our jobless rate is through the roof, we’re killing necessary immigration, the President is likely to attempt to steal the next election and stay in power if he doesn’t do so successfully, our international reputation is abominable…..how much more of a list do you need?
For the time being we are going to see a lot of American deaths and some serious economic problems as institutions (like colleges and universities) and businesses can’t handle the lack of paying customers. That is likely at least until we get COVID under control, perhaps by vaccine, perhaps by convenient testing, But, given everything else that’s wrong, what then?
What I predict is an enormous American resurgence. I’m not sure how widely my opinion is shared, but it’s still what I predict.
My rationale comes in two parts. The first part you may find less convincing but if you read my source it will actually make sense. This part is based on a book called Generations, by Strauss and Howe. Even if you’ve never read it, you have heard a lot of its vocabulary, like Greatest Generation, Gen-X, Millenials. I”m going to present the theory briefly:
Strauss and Howe have looked at American history through a generational lens starting with the earliest British and Dutch presence (1500’s) through when the book was published. The model they use has proven remarkably consistent. They say that four types of generations happen in sequence, with one of them skipped if a major crisis happens at the wrong time and throws off the sequence. (Only one type of generation is ever skipped; the other three always occur.) When the country is most able to handle major crises is when the Greatest type of generation (“Greatest” just means the WWII-fighting generation; I forget what the name is of that type of generation) is in young adulthood, not just because of this generation but also because the other generations are ideally suited to their roles then. In American history since the foundation of the United States, this has happened twice: during the American Revolution and during WWII. It did not happen in the 1800’s because the slavery issue came to a head in the Civil War before the right generations were in place, triggering the skipping of the Greatest type. Now we are facing a major national crisis – actually a few related crises, some political, some business, some medical – but we are generationally at peak time for handling major crises successfully. This peak can last for maybe twenty years out of eighty years or so. If a crisis is going to hit, this is when you want it to hit. If it hits at the wrong time, not only do you get a mess like the Civil War, you get the mess that was Reconstruction. Keep this explanation in mind as you watch what’s happening now.
What makes the Generations model run? Each generation reacting to the one before, correcting what they don’t like and creating new problems in the process. Each generation is shaped by its upbringing. Gen-X was not a valued generation by parents. Movies were often about demon children. Parents weren’t all that protective, comparatively speaking. A lot of latchkey kids because of economic conditions. But when it shifted, it shifted fast. The next generation of children had very protective parents. My wife is in academia and her specialty is student development theory, so she watches this. You are familiar with the term Helicopter Parents. One year there was no such thing, the next year they were everywhere, not just by her observation but by the observations of her colleagues. You could watch the generational shift like you can watch a weather front.
When we’re in the midst of a bad trend, we tend to think that it will continue until things get awful, but that’s not what generally happens. Enough of the public reacts – in part for generational reasons, but we don’t need to focus on that now – that things change. We are not in the middle of a long, awful slippery slope. We are at the apex of a very violent swing of the pendulum. The worst conservative impulses have crossed a whole lot of lines. We’ve devalued equality (wealth and minority), we’ve devalued education, we’ve devalued science, we’ve devalued truth, we’ve devalued objectivity, we’ve devalued voting rights, we’ve devalued the environment, we’ve devalued patriotism in that we’ve devalued sacrifice, we’ve devalued government, we’ve devalued social responsibility.
When it comes to all this devaluing, we are now watching a Full Stop as the majority of America’s population runs out of patience. The pendulum is just about to pause and reverse direction. With a vengeance.
The consequences of this anti-science crap are becoming more and more clear to more and more people. The consequences of getting the Federal Government more and more out of the business of governing are also becoming more and more clear to more and more people for the same reason: We haven’t been able to react to COVID properly and the result is both a whole lot of awful economic consequences and a whole lot of dead. It is becoming more and more clear that those not wearing masks are protecting their right to make the rest of us sick, possibly killing us, and as more and more Americans get sick, more and more Americans die of this “hoax,” and more and more Americans know people who have caught this, we will collectively have less and less patience for this, particularly because COVID has now hit the red states badly.
But it’s not just COVID. In fact, the biggest and fastest change isn’t about COVID at all. It’s what Derek Chauvin inadvertently triggered, like Dylann Roof before him but to a much, much greater extent. We watched this happen a few years ago when in a matter of days the Confederate flag lost its national legitimacy. It happened with utterly amazing speed. The reaction to George Floyd’s killing was just as fast but at least an order of magnitude larger. America has done more to face its racism in the last few weeks than in the previous fifty years, and that reckoning has just started. This is what a generational shift looks like.
In the meantime, we’re all terrified that somehow Donald Trump is going to stay in office by rigging an election or just by refusing to leave. Don’t be. If you think the public reacted powerfully to the killing of George Floyd, keeping in mind that no one saw the scope of that reaction coming, triggering marches in small towns across America and even overseas, wait until you see how they react to their country being stolen. And it will start with probably all of us going to Washington, dwarfing anything we saw there during the Vietnam War protests, with the shortest slogan you’ve ever heard, one syllable, three letters:
OUT
What happens once we get a new administration, however we get it?
We will see Federal policies and initiatives out of necessity that would have helped America a great deal all along. Joe Biden, a rather moderate Democrat, is already prepared to get as drastic as FDR did. Who says so? Bernie Sanders. The Progressives have already had a much greater role in shaping the Party Platform than anyone expected. And, by the way, Biden’s first priority is getting rid of Betsy DeVos and replacing her with a teacher. What will change?
We can start with the environment and global warming. The biggest surprise the Progressives found during discussions with Biden and his people about the platform is that they didn’t have to push at all on this issue; Biden agreed with them right off the bat. There was nothing to negotiate.
Immigration? Pretty much instant fix. And this is a big one, because one of America’s biggest competitive advantages is our ability to turn immigrants into Americans, so foreign students and scientists actually want to come here, particularly if Trump isn’t President. Diplomacy? The world will be thoroughly relieved by Biden’s election. Most world leaders already know him. I don’t mean know about him, I mean know him personally. Infrastructure? Think FDR. And one thing the platform committee made very clear is that as new Federal ventures start, they unionize, which puts more money in the hands of workers. Health care? We are not seeing a national health program, at least not yet, though the system will be in better shape than it is now, and Medicare/Medicaid will negotiate drug prices, which should have happened years ago.
Redistribution of wealth? With this level of unemployment and general financial hardship, the government has to step in, and this is not a government that will ignore the poor. We will out of necessity see some redistribution. While a lot of Republicans (and possibly some Democrats) think of it in fiscal terms as strictly an enormous expense, that’s not what it is at all. It’s a jump start. Now we get to a point I made in my very first blog post ten years ago and one Hell of a lot of times since. Money doesn’t trickle down, it trickles up. (Even though I came up with that, Will Rogers came up with it first, in the 1930’s.) Getting more money into poor and middle class hands will make the rich richer. Even before COVID, the poorest 40% of America’s population collectively had less than 1/3% of America’s wealth. If they get more money, they buy more. That increases business profits, business purchasing from other businesses, and business hiring. New hires are two important things: Consumers and Taxpayers. And, if they were unemployed, that changes some of their roles from taking money out of the Federal Government to putting it in. As new consumers, they buy more, increasing business profits, business purchasing from other businesses, and business hiring, creating more consumers and more taxpayers. When you get millions of new and wealthier taxpayers into the system, you grow yourself out of deficits.
A related point: A lot of people look at government spending like a total waste, like all that money ends up in a hole in the ground. Functionally, the closest we come to that is giving tax breaks to the wealthy because so much of that money doesn’t get spent and doesn’t stimulate the economy. But if that’s not what government is doing, where does that money end up?
Back in the private sector. Think of anything built for the government or ordered by the government. Who builds? Ordered from whom? Where do government employees spend their salaries? Most of them straight from the private sector. If you’re military and buy from the PX, where does the PX buy from? Even in the case of foreign aid, it’s generally not given in cash, it’s given in goods. American goods. Who gets the jobs from foreign aid spending? Who gets the sales? It isn’t the net loss it looks like.
We learned something else from COVID, something that has economic ramifications: It’s dangerous to depend on China for everything including face masks. Expect some manufacturing to come home. If it doesn’t come home, some will be moved to Mexico. The advantage to having it in Mexico is that Mexico buys a whole lot of American goods, while China does not.
China is another topic. If you listen to predictions, China eventually becomes the big world power as America declines, but the result of this multifaceted crisis is not continued American decline at all, it’s American resurgence. And what is China doing?
Alienating everyone in sight. This may be deliberate to distract the Chinese population from economic issues, but how universally China is doing this is startling. They’re bullying everyone they can in the South China Sea, where Donald Trump is doing one of the only things right he’s done in office. (The other is not being afraid of tariffs, even though he was awfully clumsy about applying them and didn’t really understand them.) They’re threatening Taiwan. They’re having border clashes with India. They’re damming the Mekong River, cutting off a critical water resource to a lot of Southeast Asia. And they’re clamping down on Hong Kong, causing a lot of companies to make departure plans. As this continues, who do you think the world is going to turn to?
If you ask most people, they’d probably tell you that in ten years we’ll look more like a Third World country. In actuality, we’re more likely to look like 1950’s America, only inclusive. Climate change could be a much bigger problem by then, except that we’ll have been actually working on that for a while and have mobilized resources to deal with it rather than being in nationally enforced denial. I can’t call that one, but we will have been moving in the right direction.
Maybe I’m being unreasonably optimistic, but I don’t think so. The dominoes as I see them are about to start falling in our direction.
Make America Great Again? Actually, yes, but for real.
07/11/2020 @ 5:22 pm
“Make America Great Again?”
“When was America ever great for everybody?”
—-Al Sharpton
Let’s try, making America great for the first time….
07/11/2020 @ 11:01 pm
America certainly wasn’t universally great in the 1950’s. It was, however, ahead of the world in so many ways. It was The world power economically, militarily, industrially, scientifically, educationally, possibly even artistically. We’re still a big deal but we’re nothing like we were in those respects. Not that I regard that as the good old days because there were too many respects in which we weren’t great. We made huge gains in equality after the 1950’s but racially a whole lot of that stalled out. Now we’re on the verge of making all these gains, including equality, at the same time.
I have enormous respect for Rev. Sharpton and think that the damage Tawana Brawley did to his reputation among Whites is tragic. Ever since then he’s been viewed by many if not most White people as self-aggrandizing, but that’s not at all who or what he is. I watched reactions when he went to talk at Ferguson, listening to people say that he was showing up for the spotlight when in actuality he was invited there. I hear “Why doesn’t he talk about Black on Black violence in Chicago?” The answer of course is that he does but they have no way of knowing that because they don’t pay attention to what he actually does, they just make assumptions based on something that was done to him decades ago. Every time I hear or read him say something else I respect him more. His is a voice that was discredited in ways that he absolutely didn’t deserve.
07/12/2020 @ 8:40 am
I am by nature a rather optimistic person, and I would love to embrace this optimism, but I am not persuaded. I see a couple of issues. First, some of the premises seem to be sihloed or encapsulated within a worldview. Consider this.
The American Civil War is considered by some historians to be a continuation of the Napoleonic wars. From the early 19th century, civilization had been struggling with itself to move beyond its old class structure to a modern individual liberty worldview that is our baseline. With that progression, who’s to say that the enslaved were not the “greatest generation”? How would, say, Christianity exist today as a liberation ideology without Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and Martin Luther King Jr? Statues of MLK stand in places as distant as Budapest Hungary. Was American slavery not the germ of that? Slavery was by no means desirable, but did it not create the antibody to a class system virus?
“…It did not happen in the 1800’s because the slavery issue came to a head in the Civil War before the right generations were in place…”
This view is based upon the assumption that the great generation of that era did not arise because Slavery and the war prevented it. I’d argue that the enslaved were the great generation, and conquered it by surviving it. Mississippi was the wealthiest state in the union in 1860. By 1865 it was the poorest. Wealth of a feudal, Napoleonic, caste system became individuals endowed with self determination and literally walked from medieval servitude into the early stage of individual value of their humanness. Granted, this process has not completed. Many Americans and people elsewhere became aware with the murder of George Floyd, but the people walking away from the plantation system were aware of it a century and a half ago. The fact that white people have discovered it does not mean it is just now being discovered. Columbus did not discover America. He merely translated its existence to Europe. If Strauss and Howe consider a great generation did not occur because white people did not accomplish the social justice task for the enslaved, it is analogous to saying that America did not exist until Columbus said that it did.
The idea of America peaked sometime in the mid to late 1970s. It was far from perfect then, but we are further away now. We are less perfect now than we were 3 years ago. Our response to Covid-19 is somewhat akin to the “state’s rights” concept of America where we came to our separate conclusions about what justice and public wealth are, and led to infamous historical abuses. The lack of national leadership has come in under the social responsibility required to pull ourselves out of the Great Depression, begin to integrate society, educate our youth, prepare for industrial growth, staff up for the space and technology race, defeat polio, etc. That America was a different type of America. America now is more like 50 separate colonies with different creeds. In Michigan, armed protesters marched on the capital because of quarantine measures. The notion of public health is lost on the public. People are thinking and choosing individually. People are hesitant about things like masks because they measure the risk to their own health. We will be going backwards as a nation until people view things like wearing a mask as protection of others primarily, and the overlap of responsible conduct is how we receive protection for ourselves. I do not think we are there yet.
07/12/2020 @ 10:18 am
Two things. The first regards the term Greatest Generation. As I tried to make clear, that is a term Strauss and Howe only used on the WWII generation. I’ll elaborate here: Strauss and Howe have names for the four types of generations, names which I have forgotten. They then name individual generations, like Boomers. FDR was part of a generation like ours, our type, but they weren’t called Boomers. The generation in the 1800’s that fits into the S&H (no green stamps) taxonomy that the Greatest Generation belongs to was skipped. The generation they call the Greatest Generation is not only White.
Of course we’re not there yet. I don’t claim that we are. In fact, I claim that we’re not. I claim specifically that we are at the most extreme point of the pendulum’s arc, the worst point. What I claim is that we are about to be moving with a whole lot of inertia in the right direction.
07/13/2020 @ 12:13 pm
I edited a word. I said like the 1950’s only tolerant. Tolerant was the wrong word. I changed it to Inclusive because that fits my meaning better.
01/12/2021 @ 9:01 am
At this point I don’t know what it’s going to take to come out the other side but I saw something this morning that I want to share:
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As the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase & Co. is stepping up to foster economic opportunity and inclusion for historically marginalized communities. “Systemic racism is a tragic part of America’s history,” writes Brian Lamb, global head of diversity and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. “It’s our responsibility to do something about it, given the role of banks in the financial health of the communities we serve.” Learn more about JPMorgan Chase’s $30 billion commitment to providing economic opportunities in underserved communities.
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Look at the number. There are lip service numbers, but thirty billion dollars doesn’t fall in that category. Not from one company.