Over the past 40 years, the United States has unwound from its former rigor. Facade has overtaken content, speculation has overtaken development. The middle class is sliding toward dissolution. The wealthy have become an isolated plutocracy. If it weren’t for the fact that this is America, I’d say we were pretty thoroughly cooked.
The past 40 years have been a time of vaulting libertarianism; we need a communitarian corrective, which seems quite impossible at this moment.
There was some hope, a few months ago, that we might actually get a budget this year. Both houses of Congress passed a version; it was time to hammer out the final deal. But the Republicans, following a strategy of nonsense posing as substance and nihilism posing as principle, have blocked any sort of negotiations. They have focused instead on nonscandals. What is not being discussed in Washington?
There is no discussion of the overwhelming power and moral hazard of the five largest banks, which hold assets equal to 56% of the total U.S. economy and remain too big to fail. There is no discussion of the destructive growth of the financial sector, which is siphoning off our smartest young college graduates to create ever-more-complicated (and less substantive) investment schemes, like the collateralized debt obligations that crashed the market in 2008. There is little discussion of the decline of the middle class beyond the cliché-slinging of both sides. But where do we find the work to replace the factory jobs that sustained a prosperous middle class prior to the unwinding.
There are those, like the German historian Oswald Spengler, who believe that civilizations decay and die, that democracy ultimately lapses into plutocracy. They certainly seem to have momentum on their side these days. We have been a nation of Henry Fords and Wright brothers. Our best hope is that, beneath the dissolution, we still are.
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