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96thdayofrage · 6 years ago

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Here’s a little secret. It’s going to sound obvious and trite, but I don’t think it is. You be the judge, by the end of this essay. Liberalism and conservatism won’t get to social democracy, but America’s — and the world’s — choice is social democracy or collapse. Sounds absurdly, almost childishly tautological, doesn’t it? And yet one of the most fundamental myths that many of us believe is that “progress” comes from pitting “liberalism” against “conservatism”, over and over again, forever, like beating a head against two brick walls. Somehow, these two poles, in opposition, we’re told, lead societies forwards— only no one really examines how, or why, or even if. We just believe it. But is it really true?

What’s going wrong with the world is in a way very simple to understand. Huge surpluses have piled up at the top of the global economy. So vast that there is nothing left to do with them except pile them up offshore, hide them like buried treasure. These fortunes have been earned, mostly, by doing nothing of benefit to societies, people, and the planet whatseover — merely exploiting all three ruinously. Without a way for those surpluses piled up at the top to find themselves back in the hands of the average person, discontent, rage, and fury will continue to grow, as people lose hope, faith, and belief in their systems, societies, and futures. Those sentiments and passions will fold back upon themselves, becoming extremism, fanaticism, fascism. That way lies a new dark age.

All this is precisely what happened in the 1930s — the only thing that has really changed is that nations aren’t indebted to each other, so much as average people are indebted to a class of hidden, shadowy ultra-rich, who have come to own the critical systems and structures in entire economies. That imbalance produces just the same social tensions, though, as during the 1930s — fury, panic, a sense that people are just barely hanging on, redirected at the easiest targets, the powerless, who are then scapegoated, hunted, and demonized.

Hence, the world needs more social democracy, and it needs it now. Societies like America that don’t have it, which have never had it, need to develop it in spades. Societies like Europe that do have it need badly to strengthen and recommit to it, maybe even to rediscover its values and principles, which is what I’d say the Gilets Jaunes protests are really about.

Now. The question is this. If the world needs more social democracy, then can liberalism and conservatism get it there? It’s pretty easy to answer this question, and I’d bet you already know the answer, even if part of you fights against knowing it, so let’s think about it anyways.

Which country never joined the global movement towards social democracy, that roared across rich countries after the last world war? America, of course. America’s politics, uniquely, remained stuck, split, in a weird, binary way, between “liberals” and “conservatives” — mostly because America was clinging on to old notions of supremacy, still institutionalized in segregation, which ruled out any kind of social democracy absolutely.

So what did decades of binary liberalism versus conservatism accomplish for America? Did the dialectic lead to progress? Not at all. It led to stagnation. The answer to what did liberalism and conservatism achieve for America is: precisely nothing. Less than nothing, in fact, one could argue. This is the point at which Americans will cry, “there goes Umair! Being hyperbolic again!!” Ah, but am I? What does the evidence say? The average American’s life isn’t more prosperous today than yesterday — it’s less so. Life expectancy is falling. His income is less than his grandfather’s. He’s broke, though he works longer hours, at a less stable job. Suicides are soaring — and maybe he himself is giving up on life. Who could blame him? He faces bizarre, weird, and gruesome problems, like his kids being shot at school, and having to beg strangers for money for healthcare online. He spends sleepless night wondering he ended up impoverished, despite playing by the rules — maybe not quite understanding that the rules were designed to exploit him.

Decades of liberalism versus conservatism didn’t lead America forward — they turned it into a surreal, bizarre dystopia. The empirical reality of American living standards is this: they haven’t risen during our adult lifetimes. They’ve imploded, to the point that Americans live lives of indignity, shame, fear, and rage. That’s vivid evidence that liberalism versus conservatism accomplished precisely nothing for Americans. (Nothing positive, that is. They accomplished plenty of wasteful, stupid things. Fake wars. Tax cuts for the rich. Weird “market-based” healthcare systems that worked for no one. Bailing out banks. And so forth. They accomplished a lot — for capitalists. By siphoning off everyone else’s money, power, and possibility.)

Why didn’t liberalism and conservatism lead to progress? Well, because in America, they converged to two flavours of largely the same thing — “neoliberalism” and “neoconservatism.” Neoconservatism was a little more trigger happy, always ready to start a war, and neoliberalism was a little more utopian, but their foundational precepts didn’t end up being very different. Wealth would trickle down. Trade should be free, but movement shouldn’t. A person’s worth was how much money they made. And, most crucially of all, given these first three — society must never, ever invest in itself.

Hence, this fatal convergence of “neos”, of liberalism and conservatism to the same lowest-common-denominator, produced modern American dystopia: a rich society of impoverished people, a powerful one of powerless people, a generally decent one somehow ruled by bigots, fools, and ignoramuses. It’s a place in which people are quite literally left to fend for themselves, as best they can, with zero support, investment, care, or consideration. In fact, Americans are taught from the day they are born that caring for their neighbours, society, planet, or even themselves, is something to be scorned: a moral weakness, a social shame, a cultural crime, and an intellectual mistake.

Yet despite all that, many — maybe most — Americans are emerging social democrats. They might not know it — but when 70% of them want public healthcare and debt-free education and safety nets and so forth, that is precisely what they are. They don’t know it, at least many of them, because American pundits and intellectuals act like it’s still 1962, and act as if social democracy never happened, still pitting “socialism” against “capitalism” in a Cold War that no one really won — unless the wrecked state of America today means “winning” to you. So Americans are emerging social democrats despite the tremendous stigma, misinformation, and baffling stupidity that’s become commonplace in America’s public sphere — which is a good thing.

The problem is that while many Americans are emerging social democrats, nobody, really, represents them. The GOP obviously doesn’t — it represents the poor deluded fool who wants to rewind to 1862, more or less. But neither do the Democrats. They are still focused on the same old half-baked, ill-thought-out “compromises” of neoliberalism. For Democrats, markets still trump public goods, social investment, and national institutions, every single time.

But that is precisely why liberalism and conservatism can’t get you to social democracy. Neither one has any interest whatsoever in rewriting a social contract that isn’t severely compromised. Both quite happily put profit before people, capital over society, money over meaning, accumulation before justice, speculation before investment, concentration before distribution, and the same old hierarchies above genuine equality. But what we’ve seen in America is the ruinous consequences of these beliefs — they are mistakes, which lead nowhere but downwards and backwards. Yet how can two ideologies which believe in all the same mistakes at root make any progress?

Let me put that more bluntly. Liberalism can free you — and conservatism can protect you — if you’re a rich white dude, sure. But what if you’re a poor white dude — or an even poorer brown woman? What good are “self-reliance” and “personal responsibility” to you? What if you’re a family who’s a member of the people formerly known as the middle class — does being able to buy little a Johnny a cheap Chinese-made toy, aka “free trade”, make you any better off when you can’t give him decent healthcare or an education? If you’re any of these people — which is to say, 90% of society, at this point — then you need investment in you, by everyone else, and everyone else needs just the same thing. You need healthcare, education, retirement, a decent job, savings, a sense that your life matters, that you belong, and so forth — but you can never have any of those unless everyone agrees to provide them to everyone else. The other 10% — the capitalists, the dynasties, predators, and so forth — aren’t ever going to give them to you, except at the cost of everything you will ever make, money, time, ideas, imagination, life savings. That is precisely the trap the average American is in today — why he is broke, going nowhere, stuck, and losing hope.

Do you see my point yet? Let me make it clearer. The fundamental beliefs of liberalism and conservatism, their mistaken and impoverished priorities and notions, mostly boil down to the same thing, in slightly different ways. Only the strong should survive, eliminate the weak — everyone will be better off! Exploitation will lead to prosperity for all! (Hence, time and again, soon enough degenerate into outright violence.) If one person in a society has lots of money — then we can call the whole thing a success!!

LOL. These are not just strange and foolish beliefs, my friends — they are also obviously false ones. Nobody much was made better off by enacting them. America is vivid proof of the failure of both liberalism and conservatism, and the unworkable compromises they forge. Both are now badly obsolete — maybe they worked in feudal, agrarian, or industrial societies, to better the relative lot of some, at the price of others, through things like slavery, segregation, and today’s predatory capitalism, but that work having been done, they will not work any longer in this century.

At this point, a better, fairer, wiser social contract is precisely what the world needs, or else. Or else what? Or else climate meltdown, inequality, extremism, fascism, and various flavors of collapse and implosion do. To make that point clear, let’s look at America again.

The result of relying on liberalism and conservatism as the sole engines of forward motion that progress in America is stuck, stalled, that America is in stalemate. But stalemate means collapse, because societies need ongoing tending and cultivation, just like a garden. Yet maybe no further progress is possible at all, without a genuinely social democratic movement. And whether or not the Democratic Socialists are such a thing still remains to be seen — because they seem to be focused more on pie-in-the-sky ideas than simply proposing an American NHS, BBC, or retirement system, imitating what works, improving upon it. That’s OK — they’re young, and they haven’t studied the world enough yet. Time will tell if that familiar American arrogance comes to be their undoing, too.

The lesson is very simple. Liberalism versus conservatism ends in collapse, via stalemate, not progress. It’s one of the most fundamental myths that we believe, perhaps, is that progress is only ever the result of these ideologies “compromising”, or “battling”, or “debating.” But it’s not true. Liberalism and conversatism do indeed compromise — in fatally impoverished ways. By making it impossible for people to make shared investments, for societies to measure anything other than money, by assigning life, work, being, no inherent worth, purpose, or meaning, they reduce and abstract away what matters, and privilege and protect exploitation — of people, of democracy, of nature, of the future, of life — and in that way, settlements between them are compromised things to begin with. Both are altogether too comfortable with, reliant on, exploitation to be engines of prosperity in a century where abundance can no longer come so easily from exploitation. All that is what the American example proves, in no uncertain terms.

The greatest discovery of the 20th century was social democracy. Prosperity with a minimum of exploitation, of violence, of domination. All those things are human moments, chances, possibilities, that can be put to better, wiser, truer use. It is just that simple. That insight, that breakthrough, is what made decades of peace, progress, and stability possible, and led to the highest living standards in human history. Yet it’s equally great lesson, which we are still struggling to learn, wasn’t that the future is made by pitting liberalism against conservatism. It was that the future is made by transcending both, and building societies that can invest in themselves, in order to overcome and undo the old ways of violence, dominance, and control, with true freedom, equality, and worth.

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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It’s Juneteenth — the date celebrating the beginning of the end of American slavery. It’s good that there’s a widespread mass movement now to honor this date — at long, long last.

I think that if we really want to honor this date, it will mean changing how we understand America — its history, right up to now.

The story that we tell about America is wrong — yet American wealth came from ingenuity and innovation, not slavery and subjugation, and so slavery inflicted no long-lasting scars on America as a whole, just on black Americans, whom it mentally and physically wounded.That story is wrong, absolutely and flatly wrong, and being wrong, it has trapped America in a vicious cycle of ignorance. A truer reckoning goes like this.

Slavery made America rich. By about 1850 or so. And then it made it poor. By about 2010 or so.

That is because America became rich in all the wrong ways. Rich in money, to be sure — for a time — but also rich in inequality, greed, brutality, selfishness, and ignorance. And so, in the end — which is today — slavery made everyone poorer. Ultimately, white Americans, whose living standards imploded, when the middle class began to become a minority about a decade ago, became enraged, disappointed, embittered. Where were the better lives they had been promised?

That declining white America turned for salvation to a freakish demagogue who promised to “make them great again.” Did he? Of course not. He did the opposite. Today, 120,000 have died, with many more to come — and unemployment has hit 50 million. It’s not just the pandemic — America was on its way to becoming a poor country, for all, save the 1%. And today, it is.

I’ll explain all that in a moment — don’t worry. First.

America’s greatest economist and philosopher both predicted all this long ago: that hate would destroy prosperity for both victim and oppressor, making them both poor in the end, living in the ruins of a crumbled democracy. Who was he? I’ll come to that. The first thing to be said to anyone who really wants to understand American history is: he was empirically and factually proven right.

Slavery and hate made even whites poor, in the end. How did that come to be?

American economists — most of whom are white men — ignore it, but there’s one date that stands out in American history, like a blinking red alarm signal. 1971. That is when incomes began to stagnate — even for middle class white Americans. They have not recovered to this day.

Americans have faced over fifty years of economic stagnation. That’s more than the Soviet Union. It’s left them poor. Yes, really, poor. The average American now dies in debt. To an economist like me, there’s no more alarming figure. That means the average person will never effectively own, save, or earn anything. Not a penny. Americans are paupers now, even white ones. What happened? Why didn’t all those centuries of slavery and decades of segregation make them rich?

1971 is also the date of another titanic event in American history. The end of segregation.

Is it just one of the greatest coincidences in economist history that incomes began to flatline in America at the precise moment segregation ended? You’d have to be very, very naive to think so, or not want to think about racism at all, like American economists.

The reason that American incomes began to flatline as soon as segregation ended tells us something dramatic, dismal, and deep: America’s economy was based on bitter, brutal exploitation. Without a ready pool of cheap labour — segregated black people — to exploit, what did the American economy do? It began to exploit everyone. That is why incomes flatlined.

Corporations and banks and stock markets could no longer just depend on easy, perpetually rising profits on the backs of black and minority workers. What were they to do? Simple. They decided that everyone was now to be exploited, much the same way that black people and minorities were — only more politely, perhaps, with slightly less overt brutality.

So over the next three decades, even white middle class Americans lost all the following. Pensions. Retirement. Stable incomes. Good benefits. Vacations and leisure time. By about 2000, all those things were becoming a distant memory.

White America was baffled by this. Who was to blame? Fast forward to 2015, and a demagogue emerged — Trump — preaching the same old hate demagogues always do. Who was responsible for the economic woes of the “real” America, the middle class white? It was Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, and of course, black people. Everyone else. Everyone non-white, not “real”, not pure-blooded.

This was predictable to people like me, who understand how poverty made Weimar Germany become Nazi Germany. Poverty creates desperation, which inflames old racial and ethnic tensions. The weakest minority is scapegoated for the economic travails, the sudden poverty, of the majority. In Germany, it was Jews and Poles and others, in America…well, you know the score.

But why did even white Americans become poor? Because they were being exploited, brutally, by their systems — just like once only minorities had been. White Americans were learning what it meant to have to live like their hated minorities. No savings, no stable incomes, everything had on debt, at crippling interest rates.

To be sure, they didn’t suffer police brutality and violence. They didn’t shun each other. But growing poverty among even white Americans is very much the point.

Slavery and segregation hadn’t worked.

You see, the grand idea America had once had — once you go beyond the comfortable sentiments of the “land of the free” — went like this. They’ll do all the work, and we’ll take all the gains. The labour was to be done by black people, especially the hardest and most risky, and the winnings were to be taken by whites, whether in the North or South. That was America’s social contract, for generation upon generation. The central idea was: we will exploit each other, to get rich.

So what was to happen once segregation finally ended — but the central idea of exploitation leading to riches hadn’t changed? Then white America was about to learn the hard way, too, what it meant to be exploited. And it did — as all those things white America’s grandparents took for granted, like pensions, incomes, rising incomes, careers, simply disappeared for most of the middle class.

By 2020, the bitter conclusion is self-evident: slavery and segregation didn’t make Americans rich. It made them poor.

That is the story we have yet to tell as Americans. That is because our economists don’t tell it, because they’re mostly white men, and when you do hear it, it’s from minorities like me, or the great Cedric Robinson — and we are ignored, when we’re not being attacked, mocked, and hated. Don’t think that racism doesn’t exist within economics, too — and that it hasn’t blinded economics to how racism poisoned America, in a double irony.

Let me continue the story, though.

Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Europe was busy building the social contracts it’s now famous for — expansive healthcare, retirement, pensions, income, housing, and so on — public goods for all. All. And yes, despite Europe’s own problems with racism, even black people have all that in Europe.

But America built none of these things. It couldn’t. These things are public goods — which means they are for all. America was busy trying to preserve the legacy of slavery, and build a segregated society. But a segregated society cannot ever develop public goods.

So while Europe was investing and reinvesting every year in public goods, America wasn’t — it was malinvesting in things like police forces and armies and national guards. Do you see the stark difference?

That was an additional factor in how slavery destroyed America, in the end. It deprived even white people of having the kinds of public goods that modern-day Europeans take for granted. Why do even white Americans suffer “medical bankruptcy,” or work at Walmart into their 90s, or face hospital or college bills that cost more than a home?

They don’t have public goods. But they don’t have public goods because of racism, which is the legacy of slavery.

Now, the strangest wrinkle of all is this. White Americans chose not to have public goods. They chose to be exploited. Who voted against public healthcare time and again — right down to about three months ago, even on the left? White Americans!

White America chose it’s own ruin. It began with Reaganism, which was the counter-counter-revolution against segregation, and culminated in Trumpism. It chose over and over and over again to deny itself and its own families, kids, parents, things like retirement, healthcare, education, income, stability, and so forth.

Think about the bizarre, twisted irony of it, for a moment. Once they couldn’t exploit black people as slaves anymore, who did white Americans exploit? Themselves! Each other. LOL. They couldn’t imagine a society without exploitation, because that was all they’d had for centuries. And so they just turned on each other.

That is the legacy of slavery and segregation, too: it corrodes the mind. It produced the American Idiot — the kind of person who denies themselves and their own kids healthcare and education, right to this day. The world wonders: what the? What kinds of fools want worse lives for themselves and their own? What on earth is wrong with Americans?

The answer is this. White Americans made a choice. An especially foolish and stupid and childish one. They decided it would be better to still be on top of a ruined society, than equals in a free, just, and prospering one. Hence, “I won’t pay for those dirty, filthy people’s healthcare — even if it means denying my kids their own!!”

It’s crucial to understand that White America got something out of this fools’ bargain, never to develop public goods: supremacy, superiority, primacy. It stayed on top of all the hierarchies of power, whether corporate, cultural, or political ones.

Yet it was exploited, too, now — denying itself healthcare, retirement, education, dignity, purpose, worth, value — and oddly, it was still the one doing the exploiting, too. That is why this mess is so hard to make sense of, by the way.

But choosing to stay on top of a collapsing mountain is just what it appears to be: foolish. Where will you end up? In the abyss that its slid into. White Americans chose to stay on top of a ruined society. And they did.

But that didn’t mean they ended up rich. They ended richer, sure. Black wealth is the same as it was during civil rights. But white incomes have barely risen, either. White people ended up slightly richer than black people — but they ended up poor in absolute terms. Living paycheck to paycheck, unable to pay the bills, dying in debt. It was a fools’ bargain for just this reason. Me choosing to spite you, denying you something we both need — just so that I end up richer than you? It’s foolish. Because I will end up poor, too. That’s what happened in America.

White Americans to this day have never chosen to have a society of true equality. They’ve chosen, over and over again, instead a society based on exploitation — that was the only way they could stay on top, even if, by the 1980s, it simply meant they had to exploit each other, too, not just black people anymore. But the price was that even they ended up poor, desperate, and destitute, also.

See how twisted all this is? How mind-bendingly foolish it is? Nobody should make such choices. Nobody won this fool’s game. Nobody could have. Where can a society based on exploitation ever go? Even if I’m on top today — who will ever rise higher? Nobody. The only way left is down.

To me, the true legacy of Juneteenth is all this. Of course, there is much more to it than that. Centuries of untold suffering. I think today we can scarcely imagine the horror of living in a slave state, where human beings are not treated as human at all, but violated as a way of life.

But I am an economist. And to me, the story is very much this.

The promise of slavery and segregation, brutal as it was, was this: it would make whites rich. But even that didn’t work out, we can see today. The final evidence of this part of the American experiment is before us now. It culminated in Trumpism, which was a reaction of hate and rage from a white middle and working class in free-fall.

And they destroyed American democracy in the process, too. First, in a stillbirth, where black people were “3/5ths human” — right down to today’s Trumpism, whose fascism echoes just that mindset. Slavery and segregation, too, destroyed American prosperity by making whites react and choose their own exploitation, once they no longer had black people to exploit — instead of, like Europe, ever building modern, civilized societies, by investing in public goods and systems for all.

Former slaves may have gained their emancipation when slavery ended, but America isn’t yet free from the poisonous aftermath of slavery. That freedom will take a reckoning which has yet to happen.

I told you that America’s greatest economist predicted all that.

He said it long ago. Who was he?

Go ahead and guess. Really. Close your eyes. Take three guesses.

It was MLK. How deep does racism go in America? Even today, he’s not recognized as the one man who understood, so long ago, the true economic, social, and political consequences of a society premised on the brutality of slavery. How it was destined to poison its prosperity, democracy, and equality, in lasting, terrible ways.

So you tell me. Have we learned as much as we must? Not to repeat history yet? I think the legacy of Juneteenth is so great that it means we must examine American history anew, and write a different story about it. No, slavery and segregation didn’t work. Not for anyone. Neither victim nor oppressor. All that brutality, violence, subjugation — it was for nothing. Today, even white Americans are free-falling into poverty.

Maybe, having read this, you are beginning to understand why my broken heart says that. America should teach history and futurity a lesson. Slavery is a road to nowhere. 1776 led to 2020. 1971 led to 2015. Slavery is America’s original sin, but not just a moral one. America ended up falling into poverty, ruin, disgrace, and authoritarianism precisely because a society built on exploitation then might just be doomed never to be able to find another way.

Umair June 2020

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