DJAmerica’s a Failing State. Biden’s Real Challenge Starts There.
Tags: Biden, Politics, Challenge, Culture, America

DJAmerica’s a Failing State. Biden’s Real Challenge Starts There.

Image Credit: Paul Sancya

Here’s a striking headline. A majority of young Americans now live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression. That puts the magnitude and scale of Biden’s challenge in perspective. Let me put it concisely. Joe Biden’s challenge is not making America a failed state.

Right now, America is a failing state. Perhaps not a failed one, yet — Trump’s re-election would have clinched that. But is still a failing state, and that’s crucial to note. It is not anywhere remotely near a functioning, modern, civilised society. It is broken in profound ways — and while Biden getting re-elected is a step forward, it’s just that: the first step of a long journey, one that Biden has to lead America on.

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America is a failing state in nearly every way that a country can be one. Economically, socially, culturally, and politically. Those multiple forms of failure intersect, each reinforcing the others, producing a series of traps that it’s difficult for societies — even powerful and rich ones, like America — to free itself from. Let’s take each of those in turn to understand how great and grave Biden’s task really is, and some of the obstacles he’ll face.

When you go beneath the foolish tales pundits tell, America’s economic picture is somewhere between bleak and nightmarish. Yes, the “stock market’s booming!” It always is. So what? The reality is this. 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 75% struggle with basic bills, 70% can’t raise a tiny amount for an emergency. Why are those numbers so dire? Because about half of working Americans are now in “low-wage service jobs.” That’s a polite euphemism for: they’re glorified servants, drivers, cleaners, clerks, and so forth.

But can you have a modern, vibrant democracy made up of modern-day servants, menial workers, people who seem to be trapped in a new kind of debt servitude and serfdom?

As a result, America’s become a poor country. It’s not really a rich one, anymore, for the vast, vast majority of people. Americans are effectively poor people living in an impoverished country.

The average American now dies in $62,000 of debt. That’s a catastrophic number to an economist like me. It foretells not just economic ruin — but how economic ruin leads to political collapse and social implosion and cultural suicide. Why?

What can people that die in mass debt not do? They can’t afford to invest in society, in each other. They can barely keep the lights on and feed their families. They can barely fend for themselves. How can they support anyone else? Economists would say, formally, that “poverty shrinks the tax base.” What that means in plain English is that Americans are so broke they can’t afford to pay for things like healthcare, retirement, good education, childcare, and so forth, for all.

A society that’s grown as poor as America can’t afford to have many — if any — public goods. And yet public goods are what make a society a modern, functioning democracy, like Europe or Canada, with their expansive, generous social contracts.

That’s the second way that America’s a failing state — politically. Here, I don’t just mean the regressive attitudes of the white majority especially (I’ll come to those) — but a simpler fact. Americans politics is off the charts. What’s “radical left” in America, the simple idea that everyone should have healthcare and income and education, is centre right in most of the rest of the world.

That is one indication of how steep Joe Biden’s challenge is. American politics is so badly tilted right, it’s fallen off the scale. Biden can either accept this warped false centrism — or he can actually try to fix America. He can be Obama — or he can be FDR. He can talk the talk, or he can walk the walk.

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that Biden, being old, being a patriot, being a decent sort, decides that trying to fix America is the right thing to do, and false warped centrism be damned. What chance does he have? Let’s even assume that Mitch McConnell doesn’t try to stop him, as he obviously will — so we can really understand America’s plight.

America’s now a poor country, and the average person is badly broke, meaning they have nothing left over to invest right back in society. What does a lack of public investment do? Well, it tends to make a society regress. People revert to older forms of social order, since they can’t have modern ones, like healthcare and retirement for all. Nothing binds them together anymore — people aren’t using the same institutions and systems, because they don’t exist.

And so social bonds begin to fray as societies grow poorer. People grow suspicious, distrustful, hostile, aggressive, selfish, cruel. Norms of generosity and tolerance and expansiveness soon decay and degenerate into those of outright cruelty and brutality, because life has become a bitter, bruising battle for self-preservation. You’ve got to look out for number one — and everyone else is not your problem. As social bonds come undone, trust in a society collapses — that was the story of America from 1970 to 2000.

That’s my third way that America’s a failed state — socially. When trust collapses in a society, it usually reflects a social structure going badly wrong. A modern social structure looks like this: a bell curve, with a broad, stable middle, and a tiny number of poor and rich, neither too extreme. That’s Scandinavia and much of Europe and Canada even.

But America’s social structure imploded — and I mean that literally. It doesn’t have a bell curve anymore, it has an ominous and weird U-shape, the opposite. There is no more middle class, really. What there is is one giant underclass, who effectively are in lifelong debt to a tiny number of super-rich, who have a relatively small number of lieutenants.

Think of the distribution of wealth at a company like, say, Facebook or Google. There’s a tiny number of billionaires, CEOs, owners, etc. Then there’s a larger number of multi-millionaires — middle managers, VPs, and so forth. An even larger number of minor-league millionaires — coders and whatnot. And then a veritable army of underlings — the people with the horrific job of checking for violence and hate and child porn, the cleaners and drivers, the chefs and masseuses, and on and on and on. The underclasses at these companies is way, way, way bigger than the overclass, or even the overclass’s lieutenants and seconds-in-command.

That’s America’s social structure now, too. What once used to be a vibrant, health y — if largely white — middle class doesn’t really exist anymore. There’s just one giant, desperate underclass. Sure, some people make more than others. But nobody much can afford to pay the bills, which is why the average American now dies in mass debt, unlike almost anywhere else in the world.

Biden’s next challenge is doing something about all that. But how? How do you fix a society’s broken social structure? How do you create a healthy, thriving middle class — where there’s only a giant, desperate underclass? The truth is that nobody really knows. There are things he can try, like higher minimum wages, and so on. But the problem is much, much deeper than that. It is going to require control of the insane costs Americans pay, for things like healthcare and education, while there are lower incomes for the super wealthy, and higher ones for the average workaday person. And the truth is that nobody knows how to do that well — if an economist tells you they do, they’re lying. Biden’s team is going to have to get creative, be inventive, and more than a little radical, if it really wants America to be a working society again, a place with a bell curve of a social structure.

Why does that matter? Think about what happens to a society that’s stopped being a bell curve, which has become one giant underclass, like in America. That doesn’t just mean people are now poor — it also means that people don’t trust one another, either. It is an ominous warning for just this reason.

Collapses in trust culminate in goodwill ultimately becoming the opposite. Hatreds, especially old ones, resurface, with a vengeance. Society goes back to being divided along ancient lines of race and colour and so forth. People stick together for safety in the little tribes that existed long before modern democracy did, in little religious, ethnic, and nationalist bands. As hate resurfaces, minorities bear the brunt. They often become what they historically were: subhumans, demonised and scapegoated for all a society’s ills, which, in truth, they have nothing to do with.

That catastrophic loss of trust, trust becoming hate, goodwill becoming ill will is what ultimately led America to Trumpism.

That’s my fourth way that America’s a failed state — culturally. A majority of white Americans have never voted for a Democrat. Ever. Not Obama. Not even Biden, this time around. They flatly reject anything but the same old values — because that also means a majority of white voters have been, historically, against things like civil rights, desegregation, women’s rights, any kind of progress whatsoever.

Why is that? It’s because of America’s sordid history of slavery. But that history was never overcome because America never became rich enough for it to. As whites became downwardly mobile, they reverted to what they knew — historical values of hate, bigotry, and prejudice, at least in the majority. That again is a major lesson of history. As Weimar Germany grew poor, what happened? The average good German reverted right back to old, historical anti-semitism. The story is always the same: rising poverty, downward mobility, ignites the old spark of hate. There is a clear link between economics and culture — one that white American pundits and intellectuals, especially, don’t seem to want to admit.

Biden’s next challenge, and this may be his greatest one, is reforming America culturally. He is going to have to educate the great white American majority about what racism and bigotry really are, and how they are holding America back as a society. He is going to have to teach them that being so backwards has only cost them their own healthcare and retirement and childcare and so on. That nobody was responsible for their downward mobility and plummeting standards of living but themselves, because they kept on voting against being a modern society with public goods for all, and that is because racism never went away. Translation: he’s going to have to teach the average white American that it’s better to have healthcare and retirement even if it means Black people and Brown people have it too, than not to have it at all. He’s going to have to teach the average white American that it’s no good choosing to stay on top — if it means you destroy your own society, life, and future in the process.

Can he do that? I don’t know if anyone can teach white Americans much of anything. I’ve certainly failed at that, and Lord Almighty knows I’ve tried. White Americans are the world’s most stubbornly backwards social group, outside of maybe Iran and Saudi Arabia. There is literally nothing that it appears they won’t suffer, for the sake of racial supremacy — from growing poor themselves by denying everyone (which included them) the chance to live a decent life, too, to now mass death from Covid. Can anyone teach white America how backwards it is?

I don’t know. I have my doubts.

I have my doubts, in fact, how hard Biden will try at any of this. I think he’s a good guy. I think his heart is in the right place. But I also think he’s what he appears to be — an ageing neoliberal. I don’t think that he understand the linkages above, how the forms of failures above intersect. I don’t think he really understand that America’s a failing state. And I don’t think the Dems do, either. I think they are going to go out and hire a ton of the same old kind of people — whites with a certain pedigree, Ivy League educations, and whatnot, who subscribe to just the same old beliefs, which are too often code for the forces of failure that ripped America apart. Markets will fix everything! Individual responsibility! Free-dumb!!

These are not modern ideas, because they aren’t based on modern attitudes. Remember the story of Mead’s Femur? Civilization began, she said, in a healed femur. Because it meant someone had taken the time and effort to heal someone else. Think of all that entailed. Self-sacrifice, the lack of narcissism and egotism, the desire to nurture, togetherness. Cooperation, not just competition. Valuing another as a life with inherent and intrinsic worth.

Are Americans really capable of that? America’s white majority, to be precise? So far, the answer, throughout history, to this very day, has been: no. That is how America became a failing state — because its majority wanted it to be. That is how challenging Biden’s task really is: leading the majority of Americans be something they have never wanted to be, which is be a modern, civilized society, not a place legendary for cruelty, brutality, hate, ignorance, and violence, but one where people do that hard, difficult, beautiful work of lifting each other up, as they walk beside one another, and sometimes stumble.

Biden’s challenge is making America not be a failing state anymore. But does he get it? Will he try? You tell me, my friend.

Umair

November 2020