On Making the United States a Country Worth Having

 

On Making the United States a Country Worth Having

February 22, 2015

There is no doubt about it. The United States of America today is not a country worth having. That truth may be tragic, but it is still true. Here’s why. Our country is still rotten to the core with racism. It’s more institutional racism than personal racism, but that makes it more difficult to deal with not less. We claim to be a democracy, but money controls our politics, people don’t. Our tax structure strongly favors the wealthy and burdens the rest of us. We are the only supposedly developed country that does not have universal, tax supported health care. We spend an obscene amount of money on our military, a military we would not need if it were really there “to defend our democracy,” as nationalist ideologues claim, and not to project American power around the world. There is still prejudice against women in essentially every area of life. We are one of the few supposedly developed nations that has never had a woman as head of state or head of government. Our system of public education is a colossal failure. One of its most important failures is its failure to teach American civics. The result is that people don’t understand our constitution or the system of government it creates. We have done nowhere near enough to deal with the climate crisis. The country has once again elected the American fascist Donald Trump president and given him a compliant congress that bends the knee to him at every turn, all of which is an embarrassment at best and a total disaster at worst. Under Trump, our friends don’t respect us, nor do our adversaries; and they certainly don’t fear us. Donald Trump has put our republican form of government at risk by attempting to create an authoritarian presidency that he thinks somehow he can occupy for life. Trump and his acolytes in the executive branch of the federal government and in congress don’t understand the US Constitution. More importantly, they don’t give a damn about it. They do not believe in democracy. The believe in authoritarian if not totalitarian rule by themselves, and they even think that Trump can somehow avoid the Constitution’s limitation of a president to two four year terms. The list of American failings could, I suppose, could go on and on; but the point is made. The United States of America is not a country worth having.

Do we care? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I do. I like to think that millions of other Americans do too. So we have to ask: What are we going to do about it? On one level, I don’t know. I hear people talking about protecting the self and preserving personal integrity. Those are of course worthwhile and valuable things. I fear, however, that they do little or nothing actually to stop the Trump movement and protect American democracy. We must do more, a lot more.

But to do more, we have to have an overarching vision. We have to know what sort of America we are trying to create that will make our country one worth having. So we must begin the necessary process by asking: What is a country worth having? I’ll start that analysis by quoting a famous phrase attributed, perhaps not entirely correctly, to Calvin Cooledge: “The business of America is business.” We need to modify this obviously true statement only by saying: The business of American is business and the wealthy. It seems to me that a country the business of which is business and the wealthy is not worth having. Why? Because the foundational value in human life is the individual person. All individual people. Any human institution that is worth having has as its foundational purpose benefitting people. All people. A nation that is worth having is one that functions for the benefit of its people. Not its businesses. Not its wealthy and powerful people. The people. All of the people. Though we claim to be a democracy; though we claim to be the land of the free, that is not what we are. Money controls our economy. People don’t. Money controls our politics. People don’t. Our work in the world isn’t to benefit people. It is to protect our oligarchs’ ability to make even more money, money they certainly don’t need and that they take from the rest of us.

And to make America a country worth having, we need to overcome a lie the Republican Party has been telling Americans at least since the presidency of Reagan, who promoted what was called “trickle down economics.” His vice president George H. W. Bush once correctly called trickle down economics “voodoo economics,” then sold out to Reagan when Reagan made him vice president, but never mind. The advocates of trickle down economics were fond of saying that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” The theory was that if you structured the country’s taxes and other policies to benefit the wealthy, every one would benefit. Trickle down economics is a lie. It is a lie that has functioned at least since Reagan to make very wealthy Americans even more wealthy. It has functioned to create the largest wealth gap between the wealthy and ordinary Americans in American history. America will never be a country worth having as long as trickle down economics, also called supply side economics, control our economic and taxation policies. No. To make America a nation worth having, we must create an America whose institutions, all of them, work for the benefit of the people. All of the people, including especially poor and otherwise marginalized people.

The only kind of societal and political structure humans have ever created that does that is democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is a system of national organization in which taxation and other policies work for the benefit of all of the people not only for the wealthy. It is democratic. That is, it exists because the people create it through democratic practices and policies. It may in a sense be revolutionary. It certainly would be in the United States. It is not, however, imposed on a nation or a people by force. We see it most perfectly practiced in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. It is practiced if perhaps a bit less perfectly in much of western Europe.

It is characterized by various things. Taxes are high. They are particularly high on wealth. They are high because the government provides numerous services that the American government does not supply or supplies only in meager form. The government provides free health care. The government provides free public education. The government provides various safety nets for people who cannot provide for themselves. The government creates and provides an adequate system of public transportation. The government funds a military, but it is a military nowhere nearly as large as a percentage of the GNP as America’s is. The economies of the social democratic countries are basically capitalist. Property is privately owned. The country’s industries are privately owned, or at least most of them are; but democratic socialism is about people not about property.

Social Democracy is not particularly socialist in the old Marxist sense. It may have roots in Marxist socialism, but it is no longer Marxist in any meaningful sense. Social democratic political parties have evolved into parties committed to democracy. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD) is a good example. The SPD began as a Marxist party. Just after World War I, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg wanted to bring about a violent socialist revolution more or less like the one Lenin had pulled off in Russia. The SPD, however, soon evolved into a peaceful, only marginally Marxist party committed to democracy and the rule of law. It has been one of the two major political parties in Germany since the end of World War II.

I suppose we must say more about the extent to which the social democratic parties of Europe are Marxist. Few Americans actually understand Marxism, and the terms Marxist, communist, and socialist have become words among us that conservative political and economic forces use to scare people into supporting policies that are actually harmful not beneficial for them. As I have said, the roots of social democracy are Marxist. That does not mean today that the social democratic parties of western Europe are in any meaningful sense Marxist. They take from Marxism only the notion that a nation’s institutions should function for the benefit of the people, perhaps especially the working people, rather than for the benefit of the capitalists, especially the wealthy capitalists. “Social democracy” should not be a scary phrase. Today it is not, and perhaps especially in America would not be, particularly Marxist. It certainly has, and in America would have, nothing in common with Soviet Communism. It is not totalitarian. It is not authoritarian. It is democratic and has no desire to be anything else.

The United States of America is, obviously, a very long way from being a social democratic country. We have a small socialist movement. Senator Bernie Sanders (D. Vermont) is it most prominent representative. The United States is a more or less advanced capitalist nation. Its public institutions have a veneer of democracy on them. It has elections that most Americans think, largely wrongly, are fair. (They aren’t fair because they are controlled by money not by the people and not because they are otherwise “rigged.”) The US Constitution creates and, supposedly, guarantees a broad range of civil rights and freedoms. Yet big money controls most of our public media and thus controls a lot of what Americans take to be true. Fox News, a propaganda channel the expounds lie after lie and is in no meaningful sense a news channel, is, after all, the largest cable news network we have; so the point is made. America’s social safety nets for the poor and the weak are simply pathetic. They do some good but not nearly enough. The amount of money we spend on the military keeps us from creating a national, tax supported, health care system. Our military is bloated beyond any semblance of reason. Racism and other indefensible prejudices continue to make the American claim of personal equality and equal rights a sham.

So what are we to do? To make this country one worth having we must make it more social democratic. Social democracy must be our goal. The social democratic systems of the Scandinavian countries must be our model. Yes, the United States is much larger and demographically more diverse than those countries are, and we must take our size and demographic diversity into consideration. That does not mean that we cannot create an American version of European social democracy. If our country is ever to be worth having, we simply must do it.

OK. But how? The United States of America is at its core a conservative nation. Even those who pass among us as liberals are conservative by the standards of most countries. Our Democratic Party, our supposedly liberal one, would be a conservative party in most of the world. Creating any version of social democracy here will be a daunting task to say the least. The conservative and reactionary powers that control our public discourse have gotten Americans so used to unjust systems and so afraid of just ones that creating any version of social democracy may appear to be impossible. So be it. We must try anyway.

The place where we must start is the Democratic Party. That party isn’t liberal in any very meaningful sense, and it certainly isn’t social democratic. Democrats are, however, who pass among us as liberals. They are the only place we can start. We must start by creating a massive public backlash against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Doing that may be possible. Donald Trump is already under water in his popularity and approval ratings, and he’s only been in office for a month. He is taking dynamite to the federal government, slashing federal programs with no consideration of the good they do. He is an egomaniacal monomaniac who cares nothing about anyone but himself and people like his unelected co-president Elon Musk who give him large amounts of money. He is trying to turn our more or less democratic national government into his own personal authoritarian regime. Perhaps he will alienate enough Americans that they will turn against him. If enough Americans don’t turn against him, our democracy is dead. So we can only hope and pray that enough will. We probably won’t know the extent to which the Americans who elected Trump have turned against him until the 2026 off year elections or the 2028 presidential election, assuming that those elections even take place, certainly something Trump will prevent if he can.

It is no doubt unfortunate, but the Democrats are our only hope. Yet to be a true hope for rescuing America from its current sorry state, they must become something they today are not. They must become social democratic. Bernie Sanders has tried to make them more social democratic but without much success so far. The one thing that might wake the Democrats up to becoming who they need to be is a massive public reaction against Trump. Trump represents everything that is bad about this country. As I’ve heard said, people voted for him because he gives them permission to be their worst selves. If the over the top radicalism of Trump’s presidency (much of which traces back at least as far as Reagan’s “the government isn’t the solution, the government is the problem”) appalls enough Americans, we may have hope of a national rebirth that will make this country worth having.

What would an America worth having look like? It would, first of all, not be controlled by big money interests the way it is today. It would have a radically reformed tax structure, one, actually, that we’ve had before. We could go a long way toward revitalizing this country by reenacting tax rates like those we had in the 1950s under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. We would tax excessive wealth at a very high rate. We would get money out of politics. We would overturn the Citizens United case that says money has a constitutional right to talk. By doing those things, and by slashing our defense budget, we could afford to do the things we need to do to become a worthwhile nation, and big money couldn’t stop us. We could provide universal, free health care. We could provide free public education at least through four years of college. We could solve our horrific homelessness problem. We could protect the environment. We could improve both wages and working conditions for working people, the ones who really make our economy function. We could institute programs to eradicate systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and other unjust and destructive prejudices. We could, in other words, make this a country worth having and worth living in.

Will it happen? Frankly, I doubt it. American conservatism is so deeply engrained in our culture that the steps necessary to transform this country into something better than it is would meet with massive resistance. The entrenched money interests that control our country today would throw massive amounts of resources into efforts to stop that transformation. I know for certain that I will not live to see it happen, if it ever does. All I can do is hope, pray, and write pieces like this one that few people if anyone will read. That’s just how it is. So be it. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.