Most crises trace back to identifiable decisions and actions. Even the lead-up to the two world wars could have been disrupted numerous times. The present historical moment, though, seems the result of a flood of delayed consequences building for centuries. The rate of societal change and scope of consequences—led by technology and demographics—have quickened far, far beyond the glacial pace at which over 99 percent of human history unfolded. A continuously accelerating roller coaster is bound to jump track.
Well, one might say, a lifetime is only ever a lifetime and what seems glacial to us might have been tumultuous for individuals living one thousand, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand years ago. True enough from the personal standpoint but the overview begs to differ. Hominids and humans used stone blades for hunting, fighting, and cutting for over two and a half million years. Widespread use of fired ceramics began less than 10,000 years ago, and the age of forged metals about 6,000. Steam engines were known to ancient civilizations but were not applied to industry until 400 years ago. Humans rode atop animals for millennia; motor vehicles have reigned for just over a century. The history of transistor-driven computers is measured in decades. Homo sapiens have been transforming the environment for a long, long time but nothing compares with the mass extinction perpetrated since the invention of firearms and highly organized slaughter of animals for feathers, food, fur, and “fun”. Atmospheric carbon due to industrial waste and forest clearing is at a three million year high: if the seas rise to the levels of that epoch, every coastal city on earth will be rendered uninhabitable. End of civilization.
That’s progress, I guess. The modern myth of progress is based on a minuscule sample of decades and generations. It is also based on criteria laughable today. The western world claimed to spread progress across the globe over the past 550 years. In the age of exploration (15th-17th centuries) gold, plague, slavery, and Christianity were this civilization’s top brands. Heathens had to be enslaved to be saved before they perished. Eventually commerce between Europe and the resource rich rest-of-the-world, driven by Europe’s growing manufacturing base, ushered in the modern age of European nation-based colonial empires. More recently, the U.S. has cited “free” markets and protection of property rights on behalf of corporate and elite interests to justify imposing unwanted regime change on dozens of nations. We call it “bringing democracy” even if we overthrow duly elected governments to do it. Through this centuries-old “march of progress” the constant has been the West’s reliance on non-matchable fire power, which we take as proof positive of our exceptionalism. Hence our arms race, too, has accelerated to warp-speed since World War II.
The American Dream, that potent children’s fable of unending uplift and political slogans, emerged during a hundred year window from the end of our Civil War to 1965. Immigration, industrialization, exploitation of the land’s vast natural resources, medical and scientific advances, and, eventually, enlightened social programs created a massive middle class able to indulge luxuries previously unimaginable to them. Even with all the internal contradictions—poverty and virtual wage slavery, labor battles, racism, sexism, a permanent under-class—millions of overseas and domestic emigrants escaped starvation, racism, oppression, impending holocaust, world wars, and other disasters. However messily the “dream” unfolded in the face of bitter and often violent resistance, the astounding material results were enough to convince America that the dream was knit into the very fabric of the nation.
The dream’s ultimate payoff came after World War II. The U.S. infrastructure, spared war’s ravages, made us an economic titan among nations, resplendent in victory over two brutal empires. Our industrial capacity was not only undamaged but had been ramped up to meet the war’s gigantic demands for ordnance. The Soviet Union was our great military rival but its czarist/Stalinist tradition of incompetent tyranny made its eventual bankruptcy inevitable. The U.S. was a global byword for wealth, strength, and democracy. Tragically, it took no time at all for the delusions of empire and world domination to send us down the tiresome imperial path blazed so many times before.
Yet at home overall prosperity and optimism inspired us to challenge long-standing injustices. The Civil Rights movement gained immense traction in the 1950s. Women and gays and Native Americans demanded more social visibility and empowerment. “The invisible poor” benefited from a spectrum of social programs. JFK’s Peace Corps was created as the vanguard of American efforts to shed its grace upon the world.
An old proverb suggests “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” but I think that’s too simplistic. Usually good intentions are paved over by the blow back of a powerful entrenched opposition and the innate inertia of the human animal. Prosperity may lull those dragons to sleep. Until…
American jobs began to vanish or suffer downgrades in salary and benefits. Despite Trump’s vile scapegoating of immigrants, it was American corporations that sold out America by fleeing overseas to cheap labor pools. The payoffs were not only higher profit margins per unit but soaring stock prices. Each share of stock trades at a multiple of the actual profit that underlies the stock’s value. Thus $20 saved on manufacturing a computer translates into 20 or 50 times that amount in terms of stock value. Those who sought to regulate this system of capital-monopolization were labeled Communists, Socialists, enemies of the sacred but illusory free market. Still, many voters, diverted by hot-button issues like abortion, immigration, and guns, kept voting for the very candidates controlled by the industries that savaged their communities.
As manufacturing jobs disappeared we were fed the fairy tale of the service economy. It did indeed create millions of jobs but has fallen prey to the same factors behind manufacturing’s decline: corporate flight, outsourcing, automation, slashed benefits, stagnant wage growth. And while automation does not necessarily produce mass unemployment because new jobs arise to support new modes of production, the tradeoff in numbers of jobs, benefits, and wages has pretty much demolished the certainties of the American dream. Thus, according to the Economic Policy Institute, “From 1973 to 2013, hourly compensation of a typical (production/non-supervisory) worker rose just 9 percent while productivity increased 74 percent. This breakdown of pay growth has been especially evident in the last decade, affecting both college- and non-college-educated workers as well as blue- and white-collar workers.” Meanwhile the top 1 percent’s wages grew at 138 percent while the bottom 90 percent grew at 15 percent, which is to say that in real terms the bottom 90 percent grew poorer as wealth polarization increased.
The resulting economic anxiety has played a major role in our elections, including 2024’s. Yet the reality is that until Trump and Musk’s policies wreaked havoc, our economy was relatively healthy compared to other industrial nations. It certainly contained dangerous fractures and required major reform. But it still had significant strengths as long as it wasn’t expected to generate unlimited growth and serve as a platform for American global economic domination. But the “power elite” (C. Wright Mills’s still-applicable term) of billionaires, energy companies, financial giants, military and defense interests, and right-wing ideology is not satisfied with an economy designed for long-term financial stability for the greatest number of people. Its goal is to monopolize wealth and the political power that goes with it.
This is not a doomsday screed. We have the resources and expertise to address environmental, economic, and national security issues effectively. However, it will require a major shift in our political world view and economic policies. Rolling back MAGA is only the first step. Instead of resignation or despair we can take a cold, clear measure of what it will take to rescue our future. Without a firm grasp on reality, we got no game. Or rather, we got game but it’s the wrong game at the wrong time and that’s a game nobody wins.
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