Emerging victorious from WWII one word was on the tongue of America’s political and business leaders…Markets! The blood and nerves of American boys had created a tabula rasa, ready to be chisled for the trouble. The world was our oyster and we were ready to shuck. After a decade of hard times and a conflict we didn’t start but sure finished, America was not inclined to have a cocktail and butter a roll; we wanted the buffet. The Marshall Plan was the door charge of our all-you-can-eat, and man did the Greatest Generation get its money’s worth. Twenty years of global preeminence. A feast of emerging markets, all in need of goods seamlessly evolved from wartime production facilities, pristine and undamaged by foreign armaments. A generation of victors enjoying the spoils their selflessness earned them – producing, transporting, marketing and servicing goods purchased for asking price.
And just when their children, having been reared with a mother at home and everything Madison Avenue decided they required, were ready to gorge at the same trough… things started to go bad. Why? How did Don Draper become Lee Iococca? How did Jeb Smith become Richard Gephardt? And most importantly, how did we allow it all to happen in real time while lifting nary a collective finger to right the ship?
When this chapter of American history is written, regardless its outcome, nobody will be able to say it snuck up on us. For fifty years we watched the world become what the plans we laid out for it envisioned. Technological and economic development, from the beginning seen as absolute goods, saviors for the Old World and uncivilized alike, the twin engines for all of global aspiration, advanced faster than our ability to even understand their impact, let alone manage it.
Technological and economic development…fueling each other’s spread, like parallel rivers moving toward a junction, relentless and inevitable. Leading to a place nobody could say, the journey consuming all attention. A tsunami of change, creating new status quos whose only common characteristic would be none’s ability to last. Ways of life, far and wide, created by the same forces that would eventually uproot the foundations they laid. Like a sand castle painstakingly built on a summer afternoon, only to be the victim of a new tide’s arrival. Did it really have to be that way? Were we necessarily holding on to the tiger’s tale for dear life? Or did conscious decisions at critical forks in the road turn heaven to hell, prosperity to decline?
Centuries ago a prescient Rousseau was explicit that “our ills are our own making.” He advised “adhering to the simple, uniform and solitary way of living prescribed to us by nature.” Of course nobody listened and here we are, on the precipice of authoritarian disfunction, brought to us by the victims of progress. The back of the line, late to the buffet, offered limp broccoli and dried pot roast, oven roasted potatoes chafed at the edges. The dregs, who the GOP decided to use for its ends, only to be beaten up by cynical bigots, steeped on Limbaugh and Levin, collecting disability at 40. A bloc of voters with little patience for the truth.
Michael Moore, in the trailer of his latest documentary of Trump’s rise, calls him a “human Molotov cocktail” thrown by those who have had their lives bulldozed by the vagaries of the global interdependence our leaders knew from the start Breton Woods would lead to. We created a dynamic world economy based on trade patterns beholden to technological and economic progress. Initial success was assured, and future prosperity required only adjusting to the events we were presumably ahead of.
Steel workers’ sons would be trained to lead the world in robotics as our comparative advantage in steel production was gradually ceded to Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) in Asia, like South Korea or Singapore. The children of southern textile workers would benefit from the sweat of their parents and, aided by owners of aging clothing plants, reinvesting in the community to, say, produce advanced electronics instead of shoes, while Malaysia became the maker of attire imported and priced to move for US consumers. And all the while the US export locomotive would continue to roll. New generations, new opportunities. College wouldn’t be an end all; workers could be trained to adjust. That was the theory anyway.
However, like so many other avenues we crossed along the way, our political and business sheperds took the shortcut, and lied away the consequences. Turns out buying off Congressman and Senators was easier and, at least in the short term cheaper. Rather than adjusting, with all of the time and capital – good faith – simply erect the myth of unfair foreign trade and our god given right to keep industries we originally planned to outgrow. Keep making textiles into the 80s by negotiating “multi-fiber agreements” with countries despite their clear comparative advantage. Whine that other countries are dumping steel because they can bring it to market cheaper by paying non-union labor less. Convince workers who need little convincing that their job at the plant should always be there, even though trending economic forces portend just the opposite.
It’s how you disillusion large swaths of America; how you turn them into victims of broken promises, and render them useless but for their vote. A permanent grievance class bent on blaming everyone else but themselves for failed lives and dreamless futures. A big lie that never had to be, but seems inevitable in retrospect.
Trump’s election is the calamity we saw coming from a mile away, shocking as it seemed. He is the result of an entire class of radicalized malcontents, unconcerned with blowing up what they are certain betrayed them. He reflects a group fully ready to stumble into repression’s abyss because freedom never did them any favors. They are right as rain the system failed them; what got old a long time ago are their claims they never knew what hit them and couldn’t do anything about it. Now they stand for nothing and refuse to tolerate any alternative. BC