Junctions of Dysfunction

 There’s no certain or complete explanation for the current social and political dysfunction in the United States. A full analysis would need to include psychology and whatever human nature might be, as well as strands of history going as far back as history goes. Any such speculations might be dangerous, and certainly inexact. 

 But human institutions arose to cope with various manifestations of psychology and historical tendencies, to establish some sort of common order and public good.  It occurs to me that people under the age of 50 or so wouldn’t remember that in the decades after World War II, the United States reached a sometimes uneasy but functioning consensus on organizing its institutions to foster a basically stable society and political order, while providing the tools for the society to improve.

 In confronting the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II, that consensus was forged, and it created the stability, growing prosperity and progress of the 1950s through the 1970s, regardless of which party had the White House or the majority in the houses of Congress.  (By consensus, I don’t mean the lack of spirited disagreement or even vicious conflict, or even consciously held convictions.  I mean a functional consensus, an acceptance of core institutions and roles of government to foster the common good.)

  Major political institutions operated by rules and tradition, with the respect and consent of the governed, even when some or many of whom were adamantly opposed to certain policies and leaders. The sanctity of the vote was never questioned.  

To this was added the new core of the postwar consensus, which held that the government, particularly the federal government, had the key responsibility to guard and improve those public elements that benefited everyone.  Just as FDR realized that new power generation in the South would benefit the entire region, Eisenhower saw that among those driving on a federal highway system would be patricians and paupers; that it would convey freight for everyone. 

 In order to pay for public projects, as well as the common defense etc., income taxes were graduated based on ability to pay, with higher brackets paying a higher percentage.  The top bracket during the Eisenhower years reached 90%.  

The government was seen as the arbiter that leveled the playing field, so that through regulations the costs of ensuring the health and safety of Americans would fall equally on all competitors.  Those institutions deemed vital to everyone in the society, like electric and gas companies, and some hospitals, were publicly or community owned, or highly regulated in exchange for virtual monopolies in a given place.  Everyone knew them as “public utilities.”

It wasn't perfect. McCarthyism and rigid conformity poisoned the 1950s, and institutions could not respond fast enough to challenges of the 1960s and 70s.  And though the era served a large proportion of white people, blacks and other races suffered institutional prejudice, and largely rural sections of the country didn't share in prosperity.  But progress was being made, slowly and painfully, and largely within established political and social institutions (which included expressions of dissent.) 

 With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, all of this began to change.  The Reagan administration began the series of deep cuts to the taxes paid by wealthy individuals and corporations, depleting government funds which impoverished programs and added to the federal deficit.  Over time, this was a prime factor in an income transfer from the middle class to the very few most wealthy.

 Other devastating Reagan era policies included de-regulation and privatization.  De-regulation hampered or ended government’s ability to monitor and control vital aspects of health and safety.  At the same time, government or public institutional functions were transferred to corporations, on the theory that services would somehow improve when hefty profits were added to claims on income. 

 Big changes take time to exhibit their full effects, but the world we’re living in is largely a result of these and similar changes, many of which have become the new orthodoxy, especially as fewer remember when they were not so.

 Apart from the near collapse of institutions that used to be considered essential for the public good, resulting in a general cynicism and sense of helplessness, the most conspicuous change is the extent of the gap between the few obscenely wealthy and everyone else.  It’s not just the proportion that’s the problem, but the lack of security of what must be close to a majority of Americans.  The usual example is that they are only a few inflated medical bills away from financial disaster.  This is a double failure—the income transfer, and the lack of public support for a general and essential good, medical care.  Though it may seem that anger is the chief motivation of frenzied politics, beneath that it is fear.

 Other factors play into this, such as the de-industrialization and resulting collapse of labor unions in the 1970s and 80s. But the social insecurity that is roiling politics, making them more extreme, can largely be traced to how the US responded: with Reaganomics.

 At the same time, de-regulation began to extend to political contributions, until the Supreme Court made them nearly boundless.  Money is a huge factor in making our politics crazy.  Money plus television and Internet celebrity multiplies the insanity. 

 Just as both parties participated in the postwar consensus, the responsibility for our current condition resides also in both Republicans and Democrats.  Republican policies laid the groundwork, and Republican politics are wounding and challenging institutions of our very republic.  But Democrats have largely failed to confront the basic problems.  Too many mollify wealthy interests for political gain.  And to date no major Democratic leader has plainly explained these problems, and proposed direct solutions as the core of an agenda.

 What we are in part witnessing is a series of challenges to core institutions, and the institutional responses.  These are dramatic, and involve individuals, from federal judges to county election clerks.  The outcomes of these battles themselves tell us whether our institutions will be able to respond to both the usual and the unique challenges the world—and the planet—present us.  For the sense of selfishness and cynicism legitimized by the end of this consensus has given us so-called public servants who openly act with no responsibility to the public good, but only to their careers and the ideologies they believe they can ride to power and wealth.

 The institutions of the world also face severe challenges, even apart from the greatest challenge of all, the climate distortion crisis.  Right now warfare in the Middle East is the latest.  I had the eerie experience of coincidentally reading an essay by Joseph Campbell just as the first Hamas attack became news, detailing the “war mythologies” of this region, copiously quoting both the Old Testament and the Koran on the divine instructions for waging war without limit, with no cruelty too great. 

 Campbell wrote this essay during the 1967 war, and commented:  “These, then, are the two war mythologies that are even today confronting each other in the highly contentious Near East and may yet explode our planet.”  But we are also witnessing the efforts of established and ad hoc international institutions to limit and end the violence, to maintain some sense of common humanity.  International institutions also arose as part of a post-war consensus, though they were never very strong.  They too are being challenged now.