We're living in a transitional era on almost every level--economic, political, local, global, cultural, spiritual, and there are hundreds of analyses and critiques and programs for what must be done, but so long as no consensus emerges, a minority of economic elites with power is left unconstrained to game the system as they please.
Our fragmentation in the cultural sphere is a perfect set up for the wealthy minority because they don't have to do much to keep us divided and conquered. We're doing it to ourselves. We've bought into their self-justifying ideologies about taxes, deregulation, privatization, markets, and free trade because no consensus can be developed around a plausible, actionable alternative.
It's not that the gamers are in control. It's just that they recognize that the fewer the rules, the freer they are to maneuver to increase the odds that they'll stay winners. They don't care whether the rest of us lose or not; they only care about themselves, and they make decisions based on what it means to them to win in the short run. It's everybody for himself, and if others lose, well, that's the way it works in the jungle known as the "real world": some eat; others get eaten.
In the economic sphere we're clearly going through a drastic restructuring, and this is affecting people at the bottom and in the middle most dramatically. The primary element driving this change is surplus labor generated by technology and off-shoring. This works to the short-term advantage of the economic elites. They want it to be a buyers' market. It gives them more room to maneuver, and the result is the kind of corporate mentality you find at Wal-Mart--labor exploitation hiding behind a smiley face.
But there is a political dimension to all of this. We're not helpless in the face of these structural changes. I don't think government should try to prevent companies from doing what its managers feel is in their self interest, but I do think government can do some things to straighten the bargaining position of labor. And that's to put more people to work building national infrastructure. This was the basic principle behind the New Deal. And now rather than destroy the institutions that it established, as the Republicans are trying to do, we need to expand them.
If we can pour billions down the drain in Iraq, we can find the same amount to build public wealth in this country. The New Deal is about things like the TVA, but we've come to associate it mainly with welfare entitlements and safety nets. Government can put people to work doing things that benefit the common good. It's not about make work--moving a pile of dirt from one side of the road to the other. It's about building public national wealth.
I'll have more to say about this as we go along. My thinking here is influenced by a number of people, none of whom I feel totally comfortable with and I am not totally on board with their programs. Michael Lind is one of them. His book The Radical Center is in part the source of my self-description as a "radical centrist," but I think the way he defines the term is different from the way I do, and his policy proposals ofter strike me as a bit weird. But he's a guy worth reading, and his paean to the New Deal in Made in Texas and in some of the other things he's written have been important in my own thinking about what the GOP is doing to our political infrastructure. James Kroeger's piece on "Make the American People Richer" is also something worth reading, but not something I completely endorse. I think his ideas about building "public" national wealth are barking up the right tree, and are a direct challenge to all those who have made a religion of privatization.
But how will a consensus alternative to the jungle mentality emerge? In the long run the most important changes have to occur in the cultural sphere. Our thinking and values about economic and political organization have to be changed. We need to have a shift in the consensus that values more of a compromise between the common good and individual freedom. Right now things are tilted unhealthily toward the latter, and my fear is that like an alcoholic, we'll have to bottom out before there is any hope that we will find the will to redress the balance.
Two or three decades of slow national decline is not the kind of world I want my kid to have to live his life in. I'd rather he be a part of building something worthwhile. But it's up to our generation to lay the foundation.