There are lots of national issues that need addressing, many
of them urgently. But I got to thinking recently about priorities; what do I
think are the very top priority national issues? After some days of pondering
this, I have decided that the very top of the list, in my opinion, is dominated
by two issues, the economy and national unity.
The economy is obvious. Only a healthy economy can support
all the other important goals – social justice, climate change, better
education, better health care, etc, etc, etc. A strong economy provides the tax
base to support the things governments should do and the capital markets needed
to support private business, which in the end (though progressives often seem
blind to this) is the source of ALL the income in the nation. This issue has
been exacerbated by the COVID shutdown, with all the attendant layoffs and
business closings, and so is certainly at the top of the list right now.
The second issue, national unity, may not be so obvious. We
are a very large country, spanning an entire continent. By some reckonings we
are really 7 or 9 or 11 different nations, with different cultures, different
histories, different values and expectations, etc. Certainly it is obvious that
the urban coastal regions are sharply different than the rural mid-continent
regions. And one can see differences even in the different attitudes toward COVID
masks and stay-at-home orders between states.
The problem with any nation as large and diverse as ours is
holding it together. We already fought a bloody four-year civil war once to
hold the nation together, and the specter of dissolution always lurks at the
edges. What holds a diverse nation together is some common understanding among
all its inhabitants. That used to be patriotism, a common national pride in
being founded on exceptional principles, which, even if we didn’t always achieve
them, marked us as a people at least trying to live by high principles. But
patriotism has fallen out of favor, at least with large segments of the
population, and I don’t see any other unifying force emerging to takes its
place as the glue that holds us together as a nation. In fact the opposite
seems to be occurring. Political activists right and left are peddling divisive
“identity politics” narratives that seek to set us against one another rather
than to unify us.
It is even more complex than that. There has emerged a
wealthy elite class in America that holds only a tenuous allegiance to the
nation. These people think of themselves more as “citizens of the world”, a Davos
crowd often with multiple passports and homes spread across the globe. There aren’t
that many of them, and under normal circumstances it wouldn’t really matter
that much, but they also control the media and the transnational corporations and
much of the political machinery of the nation, so it does matter that they
really have such a weak allegiance to the nation.
I have no idea how to address either of these issues, and
clearly the Trump administration doesn’t either. Whether a Biden administration
has any better ideas is not yet clear, and won’t be until/unless they are in
power. Indeed, George Friedman in his most recent book predicts a “failed” presidency
in 2024 or 2028, “failed” in the sense of a president trying to apply the old
remedies to a new situation in which they don’t work (Herbert Hoover, with his failed
laissez faire approach to dealing
with the depression of the 1930s, was the last such “failed” presidency, in
Friedman’s argument). I wouldn’t count Trump’s presidency as the “failed”
presidency because, erratic and incompetent as he has been, he has actually followed
more or less the current Republican orthodoxy with some limited success. Trump’s
election is better seen, I think, as a message that all is not well in the country;
that a significant fraction of the nation feels the political system no longer represents
their interests, but instead has been captured by an urban elite that neither understand
s nor really cares much about their problems. It is always worrisome when the peasants
start shaking their pitchforks at the passing carriages of the nobility, and
that is, in my opinion, what Trump’s election really was.
Whether a Biden presidency would be the “failed” presidency
predicted by Friedman is not clear to me, because I really don’t yet know what
his approach to these two issues will be, and I even suspect he doesn’t know
yet.
Posts
