American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

This book was recommended by my friend from law school, Will, who has shared my own journey away from fundamentalism and from the Republican Party. 

 

And man, was this book depressing. And that’s despite the fact it was written before Trump came to power, and the Republican party went all-in on voter suppression and overturning elections. 

 The basic idea of the book should not even be controversial. The authors lay out the seemingly obvious truth that much of the rise in standards of living, in health, in safety, in middle class income, in science - indeed, pretty nearly everything that my parents’ generation benefited from throughout their lifetimes - was created by good government. 

 

Why did we go from an unsafe food supply to one where we can assume our food is (usually) safe? That would the the USDA. Why is old age no longer characterized by either crushing poverty or utter dependence on others? That would be Social Security. Why has college education become far more likely? That would be state universities. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the bottom line is that standards of living and life expectancy itself rose dramatically as the result of the New Deal and similar policies from the 1930s through the 1970s, before the ultrawealty convinced enough Americans that government was the problem, and started a great dismantling of our country’s social and physical infrastructure. 

 

My frustration on this point is compounded by the fact that I literally cannot discuss any of this with my parents (or indeed most of my extended family, or the friends I have from my church days) because they are so disconnected from a common means of assessing reality that we have no common ground. 

 

It could be a whole blog post in itself, but here is how it goes. Them: “Things were so much better when I was a kid.” Me: “Well, in some ways yes. You had free college tuition, a living wage without college, affordable health care, roads that were repaired, affordable housing, and so on. And then you voted for Ronald Reagan and other anti-government sorts and took it away from my kids.” Them: “It must be because we made God mad by not persecuting the gays enough. Oh, and all those immigrants. They are the problem.” Me: {facepalm}

 

It’s like they are wedded to a belief that, rather than outcomes being connected directly to policies, they are some sort of voodoo, that placating a mysterious deity with cultural preferences is what drives prosperity and wellbeing. The mass transfer of wealth to the obscenely rich over the last 40 years couldn’t possibly be because we enacted policies that did exactly that (and were intended to do that.) It must be instead that God dislikes us because our culture isn’t exactly the same as in the past. 

 

I admit some puzzlement at exactly how so many otherwise intelligent people could be persuaded to believe that up is down, right is wrong, and that somehow the obscenely rich have everyone’s best interest in mind, so give them more and more money and power. History does not support that thesis. And for that matter, neither does the Bible. But Ayn Rand has become the new prophet of the Right Wing, and particularly white evangelicals. 

 

Before I get into quotes, I should introduce what the authors call the “mixed economy.” This could also be called Social Democracy, or some other term, but in any case, what it means is that the economy is a mix of public and private sector, with government taking a strong role in correcting the inequalities of capitalism, filling needs that the market either cannot or will not fill, regulating externalities, and preventing rent seeking. Again, this should not be controversial! We can literally see it played out on the world stage. Raymond Aron was right: a healthy society has a combination of public and private, of reward for enterprise and redistribution of excessive gains, a mix of freedom and responsibility to others. 

 

So, let’s start with the opening:

 

This book is about an uncomfortable truth: It takes government - a lot of government - for advanced societies to flourish. 

This truth is uncomfortable because Americans cherish freedom. Government is effective in part because it limits freedom - because, in the language of political philosophy, it exercises legitimate coercion. Government can tell people they must send their children to school rather than the fields, that they can’t dump toxins into the water or air, and that they must contribute to meet expenses that benefit the entire community. To be sure, government also secures our freedom. Without its ability to compel behavior, it would not just be powerless to protect our liberties; it would cease to be a vehicle for achieving many of our most important shared ends. But there’s no getting around it: Government works because it can force people to do things.

 

As the authors note throughout the book, our constitution itself was based on this fact. The prior articles of confederation failed to have sufficient power to accomplish anything, and left the country at the mercy of the rich and powerful interests at the expense of everyone else. Hence, our constitutional experiment was one of more powerful, not less powerful government. 

 

And, contrary to popular Right-Wing beliefs, government and the private sector are not locked in a zero-sum conflict. As the book lays out in the first half, strong and effective government is actually hugely beneficial to the private sector. It is the government infrastructure that has enable our prosperity. But my parents’ generation seems to have forgotten that. 

 

We suffer, in short, from a kind of mass historical forgetting, a distinctively “American Amnesia.” At a time when we face serious challenges that can be addressed only through a stronger, more effective government - a strained middle class, a weakened system for generating life-improving innovation, a dangerously warming planet - we ignore what both our history and basic economic theory suggest: We need a constructive and mutually beneficial tension between markets and government rather than the jealous rivalry that so many misperceive - and in that misperception, help foster. Above all, we need a government strong and capable enough to rise above narrow private interests and carry out long-term courses of action on behalf of broader concerns. 

 

That last point is key. Right now, we suffer from short-sighted decision making that benefits a narrow private interest above the long-term wellbeing of everyone else. And hey, that patron saint of the Right, Adam Smith (who few right wingers have ever read, I suspect) identified the problem:

 

Adam Smith wrote enthusiastically about the “invisible hand” of market allocation. Yet he also identified many cases where rational actors pursuing their own self-interest produced bad outcomes: underinvestment in education, financial instability, insufficient infrastructure, unchecked monopolies.

 

Any of those sound familiar? The authors go on to list the key areas where government is necessary - indeed indispensable. 

1. Provide key collective goods that markets won’t (education, infrastructure, courts, basic scientific research)

2. Reduce negative spillover costs that parties to market exchanges don’t bear fully, such as pollution

3. Encourage positive spillover benefits that parties don’t take fully into account, such as valuable shared knowledge

4. Regulate the market to protect consumers and investors - both from corporate predation (collusion, fraud, harm) and from individuals’ own myopic behavior (smoking, failure to save, underestimating economic risks)

5. Provide or require certain insurance protections, notably, against the costs of health care and inadequate retirement income

6. Soften the business cycle and reduce the risk of financial crises

 

Again, I have to ask, why is any of this controversial? Likewise, why is the idea that government has to change in response to changing circumstances controversial? There is nothing inherently immutable about human institutions. We create them, we can and should change them as necessary.

 

The mixed economy is a social institution, a human solution to human problems. Private capitalism and public coercion each predated modern prosperity. Governments were involved in the market long before the mixed economy. What made the difference was the marriage of large-scale profit-seeking activity, active democratic governance, and a deepened understanding of how markets work (and where they work poorly). As in any marriage, the exact terms of the relationship changed over time. In an evolving world, social institutions need to adapt if they are to continue to serve their basic functions. Money, for example, is still doing what it has always done: provide a common metric, store value, and facilitate exchange. But it’s now paper or plastic rather than metal, and more likely to pass from computer to computer than hand to hand. Similarly, the mixed economy is defined not by the specific forms it has taken but by the specific functions it has served: to overcome failures of the market and to translate economic growth into broad advances in human well-being - from better health and education to greater knowledge and opportunity. 

 

The authors go on to point out that in many measurable ways, the United States has fallen behind the rest of the first world. Where we once used to lead, we are now coming in last or near last. (Education, inequality, social mobility, longevity, and so many more.) And even our rankings are deceptive.

 

Worse, our relatively poor performance often understates how far we have fallen. In some cases, the best aspects of our performance reflect the lingering impact of past investments no longer being made - in basic scientific research, for example, or modern infrastructure. In others, measures of “average” performance provide a false reassurance because they reflect extremely strong outcomes among older Americans, based on the efforts of a generation or two ago. When we focus on the young, however, we see a bleaker picture of a nation failing to ensure what was once assumed: that each generation would do better than the last. 

 

The authors also spend time at length looking at why this happened. In part, of course, it was the concerted efforts of the obscenely rich, unhappy with being forced to contribute to society. But also, one particular political party has abdicated completely the responsibility to seek the common good. One could draw a contrast between Mitt Romney, who infamously described nearly half of Americans as being on the public dole (that means YOU, seniors!) and his father George, back when Republicans were in favor of the mixed economy. 

 

Romney maintained that “dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”

 

As the book later points out, this shift in the GOP strategy toward obstructionism began with Newt Gingrich and has reached its apotheosis with Mitch McConnell. 

 

The authors spend a good bit of the first chapter looking at how the United States has gone backwards when it comes to opportunity over the last 40 years (essentially from Reagan on.) Our educational gap between rich and poor has grown substantially, both in funding and outcomes. This in turn has cost our economy. A better educated population pays off in higher growth, better tax revenue, less need for social assistance (and mass incarceration.) Our refusal to invest in education - particularly for low income children - is dragging our economy substantially. Short-sighted tax savings lead to long-term failure. 

 

Oh, and about income. While the US is the court-richest country by average income and wealth, that is misleading. If you look at median income and wealth, we are nineteenth: next to last. And behind such notable “heavyweights” as Taiwan and Spain. Seriously, the middle class is doing better in Spain than here. On the other hand, our billionaires are doing great. So there’s that. 

 

The next chapter takes a look at other measures of well being. After all, money isn’t everything (although it affects everything.) The authors look at the history of life expectancy, and note that until about 150 years ago, our lifespans were essentially the same as hunter-gatherers. It wasn’t until quite recently that things changed. And a lot of that had to do with government. 

 

What happened to create such a momentous, positive, and still-progressing transformation? As Henderson’s 1912 observation suggests, the main answer is not advanced medical care. Nor, as we shall see, is increased national income the major story. What happened around the turn of the last century was neither a revolution in medical treatment nor a natural dividend of growth. It was the emergence of effective government action to improve the health of citizens. Funded by growing income, spurred by pressures from reformist social groups, and informed by a new awareness of the benefits of public health (and, eventually, new science that explained where disease came from), public authorities stepped into use government’s distinctive powers to push back the specter of premature death that had plagued humanity for millennia. 

 

I’ll summarize what happened. First, the government took action to get the shit out of our water. This isn’t something the private sector did. Sorry. Governments created the infrastructure for clean water, for sewers, for sanitation, for preventing people (and especially corporations) from polluting the waterways. 

 

Next up: milk. We tend to think that reform came after germ theory, but that is actually backwards. The reforms that made milk and food safer came first, and these helped germ theory gain acceptance. The facts fit the theory. And milk was made safer, not by the private sector, but by government regulation, inspection, and enforcement. 

 

And after that, the drugs we take for granted were overwhelmingly funded by government. We tend to forget that, but Covid has been a reminder. The individual drug companies that created the vaccines didn’t work in a vacuum. They were funded by governments around the world, and also knew that they would have a guaranteed demand for their product. Government did that, not just the private sector. This is a great example of both working together for the common good. 

 

Chapter three should be required reading for everyone in my opinion, but particularly right wingers. Repeat after me: MARKETS CANNOT AND WILL NOT DO EVERYTHING, AND THEY ALSO TEND TO CAUSE GREAT HARM IF UNREGULATED. 

 

That feels better, even though I know people like my parents have no willingness to learn that lesson. 

 

The truth is, markets are not divine, do not function as a form of god, and cannot safely be left unregulated. And, we need public goods to go along with markets. 

 

Somehow, we have lost the idea of public goods in our society. So much of what we use and benefit from on a daily basis are indeed public good. I traveled to my office today on public roads. My electricity, water, and gas were largely put in place through government design, even if I write my check to a private utility monopoly. A highly regulated monopoly. I know I can drive here fairly safely because of government traffic lights, government laws about driving, and insurance requirements. I am using the internet (created by the US government) to do my work and even create this blog post. My truck is a safe vehicle because of government regulations, and it pollutes far less than the car I rode in as a kid because of regulations. The deeper I look at anything I use and enjoy, the more likely I am to find a public good at its roots. 

 

Public goods of this kind are prevalent in modern life. The biggest, most obvious example is national security, which consumes one-fifth of federal spending. As a practical matter, protection from foreign attack is a service that must be provided to everyone within a country. A private firm could note sell that protection to paying customers because a customer’s neighbors would be able to “free ride.” No one will contribute unless required to, which is why in all modern states, national security is a central function of government. 

 

It is beyond the scope of the book and this post to go into all the details of how knowledge itself is a public good, but it really is an important one, which is why education is such a crucial public good. But also, as the authors point out, knowledge is really hard to monetize, which is why a lot of basic (and crucial) research isn’t done by the private sector alone. The community will benefit, of course, but profits are hard to come by. 

 

Next up are externalities. The book has an excellent discussion about this topic, and I really wish more people understood this. The problem with “libertarianism” is that it essentially allows people to push off the negative externalities on everyone else, taking the profits while harming others. 

 

The second big case of [market] failure - and it is really big - involves markets that produce large effects on people who are neither buyers nor sellers. Economists call these external effects, well, “externalities.” In an unregulated market, a factory owner may spew toxins into the air or water with impunity. Neither he nor the buyer of his goods has a reason to take these external effects into account. Where externalities are present, market prices will not reflect the true social costs (or benefits) associated with the private transaction. 

 

Related to this problem is the question alluded to above: things change, so why shouldn’t government? As our world becomes more global, as businesses change from small farms and tiny shops to gigantic multilateral corporations, shouldn’t government become bigger to meet the challenge? 

 

The book cites Henry Adams (which makes me happy), the son and grandson of presidents. Adams notes that just during his lifetime, he had seen the invention of “steamships, railways, the telegraph, the photograph.” For Adams, this foretold our own future, when a lot of what exists in our world cannot be understood by most people. (Okay, YOU tell me how every circuit in my phone works…) These changed circumstances require different regulation and different governance. Sorry, “originalists,” the government of the 18th Century is insufficient to govern in the 21st. 

 

I really appreciated the “interlude” in the book where they explain both the difference between social programs and actual Socialism. No, they are not the same. And yes, the right wing conflates them as a way to scare people into opposing things they benefit from. 

 

And the book asks the obvious question: Why ARE all rich states welfare states to some degree? 

 

As part of that, the authors look at healthcare. I cannot believe I have to say this, but did you know that there has NEVER IN HISTORY been an entirely free market healthcare system that covered more than the ultra-rich? Nope. Never. Because the very idea of market forces in healthcare means that only those who can pay a lot, and preferably have few medical needs, would be covered. No insurance company is voluntarily going to accept a chronically ill person or someone just diagnosed with cancer, or even someone like me: fairly healthy, but with a family history of heart disease, high cholesterol, and a bit overweight. So, the authors state the obvious once again:

 

If there were no government “takeover” to encourage or require health coverage, few people would get insurance, because of asymmetric information. If there were no government “takeover” to push back against sellers, health prices would (and do) rise to unaffordable levels as consumers agreed to whatever procedures their providers recommended, while having little capacity to negotiate for a better deal. It’s no accident that the world’s highest-performing health systems all rely on government more than ours does. But even the US system is shot through with government and only works tolerably, if comparatively poorly, because it is. 

 

That’s right. The only reason we have a partially functional healthcare system is because of the government involvement. Without that, at minimum, half the population would lack meaningful access altogether. And yes, literally every first world country has better healthcare than we do. We are unique in having health costs as the leading cause of bankruptcy, unique in having a third-world-level maternal and infant mortality rate, unique in the roughly 100,000 annual deaths from treatable yet untreated disease, and unique in the gross disparity of care based on income. 

 

[Side note here: the reason we are willing to pay twice as much as the rest of the first world for inferior care is no mystery. It dates back the 1940s, when the AMA defeated universal healthcare because its all-white membership didn’t want to treat black people. The extra we pay for care in this country is the premium white people are willing to pay so that minorities get inferior care.]

 

So, back to the failures of markets. Again, Adam Smith called it. 

 

Since the rise of modern capitalism, the power of large corporations has been a central challenge. As Adam Smith was keen to point out, the greatest threat to functioning markets is often those functioning in markets. Capitalists are not natural supporters of competition; indeed, they tend to see it as an inconvenience. As Smith observed, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Smith urged political leaders to look on the economic advice of merchants with great suspicion, especially when those merchants were making inordinate amounts of money. Large, sustained profits were not a sign of capitalism’s vitality, he argued; they were a warning that the forces of competition were being impeded. 

 

 So, if excessive and sustained profits are a sign of a dysfunctional economy, what does a good one look like? What are the factors that make an economy effective? The authors lay out ten principles that I find compelling, and are generally accepted by those who study politics and economy. These really shouldn’t be controversial either. I just cannot understand how so many in our country, particularly those of my parents’ generation (who benefited the most from them!) reject these basic truths. The authors list these factors:

1. Private property rights and legally secure contracts backed up by an independent legal system. (That’s my profession, by the way.) 

2. A well-functioning financial system, including a central bank to provide a common currency, manage the macroeconomy, and serve as a lender of last resort. (Failure of this led to the Great Depression, as well as the recession that harmed the prospects of most Millennials.) 

3. Internal markets linked by high-quality communications and transportation infrastructure. (But mention a higher gas tax to persons of my parents’ generation and…) 

4. Policies supporting and regulating external trade and financial flows.

5. Substantial public investment in R&D and education

6. Regulation of markets to protect against externalities, such as pollution, and help consumers make informed decisions.

7. Public provision of goods that won’t be provided at all or sufficiently if left to markets, such as public health.

8. Inclusion of all sectors of society in the economy, so that human capital isn’t wasted.

9. Reasonably independent and representative political institutions, so that elite capture and rent seeking aren’t rife.

10. Reasonably capable and autonomous public administration - including an effective tax system that citizens view as legitimate - so that items 1 through 9 can be carried out in relatively efficient and unbiased ways.

 

Again, this should not be controversial, yet most of these are strongly opposed by today’s GOP. 

 

I wish I could go through the whole history of the Robber Barons and the circumstances of the Gilded Age (so much like our own) that led to the necessity of major change and eventually the mixed economy. The historical sections of this book are fascinating and well written. 

 

I must, however, note this line, which people seem to have forgotten:

 

Courts, of course, provided little recourse, whether to victims of fraud, monopolies, accidents, or tainted food or medicine. Buying justice was simply a cost of business for the powerful interests doing harm. And so long as government sat on the sidelines, the harms just kept multiplying.

 

I have written in various contexts about the complex figure of Theodore Roosevelt. Clearly, his ideas on race (particularly as a younger man) and eugenics were foul, and he was flawed in many respects. But he also would have been disowned by today’s GOP as a flaming communist. He too was a proponent of strong government action to counterbalance corporate power. 

 

TR declared in 1910: “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.” 

 

I love the authors’ take on the Progressive Era as well. 

 

It was progressive because at crucial moments, nearly everyone in a position of high public leadership came to believe that the American social contract needed updating. It was long because challenging entrenched elites is so difficult, and only persistent agitation and huge disruptions to the American political order allowed the translation of these new beliefs into new governing arrangements.

 

We forget about the union strikes, the huge marches on D. C. by women and workers, and all of the other social unrest (and even violence) that eventually loosened the stranglehold of the Robber Barons on American government. And we forget just how long it took. I am reminded of this whenever some Bernie Bro makes the outlandish claim that if we had just elected Bernie, we would have made dramatic changes already. In addition to apparent ignorance of the role of Congress, this also ignores the fact that most positive change doesn’t come as the result of revolutions, but because of long, hard work. It takes continual and strong social pressure. And, in our own case, it will probably require that my parents’ generation pass on, as they continue to hang onto the levers of power with bleeding fingernails, even as they lose the respect of their children and especially their grandchildren. This is a long-term struggle, and may take the rest of my lifetime. But struggle we must. 

 

I’m going to give the authors major brownie points for devoting a bit of time to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the most admirable figures in the history of the court. He was the first Jewish justice, but was hated even more at the time because he opposed the power of business. But history has judged him differently. In retrospect, he and Woodrow Wilson, who appointed him, did a lot to change the conversation entirely. One Brandeis quote is probably sufficient to establish his credentials. 

 

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have weath concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” 

 

Brandeis also noted - correctly - that corporations are artificial creations. They only exist because of the law, and thus, the law has every right and duty to regulate them. Eventually, Brandeis won the day, and the New Deal was allowed to proceed. As I said, he’s one of my legal heroes. 

 

I should also mention the discussion of how allowing women and minorities access to the economy led to huge gains. This is one of my biggest disagreements with both the fundamentalism of my youth and the beliefs of today’s GOP, which is actively seeking to put women and non-whites “back in their place.” All of us lose when we relegate whole segments of our society to menial tasks, to exclusion from full participation in society. 

 

We now look back on the 1960s and early 1970s as a turbulent period of redistribution: of rights, of income, of national priorities. But as with the entry of blacks into college basketball, the era also marked a long-overdue recognition of the huge social costs that had been ignored or denied. Failure to grant equal rights to racial minorities and to women was not only horribly wrong but also spectacularly inefficient. Failure to give all Americans the opportunity to attend college or a shot at a middle-class live was not only unfair, it also made our nation as a whole poorer. 

 

And, despite our progress, this remains a significant problem here in the US. As the authors point out near the end of the book, we are still paying the costs of our prejudice. 

 

Moreover, despite the enormous progress toward racial and gender equality, our economy still underperforms because of unequal opportunities - at enormous cost. 

 

As a pair of studies cited by the authors suggest, our gender inequality likely costs us the equivalent of one-fifth of our economy over a ten-year period, and our racial inequality (primarily education) costs us 3-5% of GDP every year. This is literally the equivalent of a self-inflicted recession. The price of our bigotry is stunning. 

 

The book takes a bit of a darker turn when it examines the pushback against the mixed economy. Unsurprisingly, it is the obscenely wealthy who took the lead. And literally nothing has changed since then. Business organizations attacked the New Deal as “facist, socialist, and un-American, and compared FDR to Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” Hey, sound familiar? Every single time I try to discuss this with a right winger, it goes there. I want my kids to have free state college tuition like my parents had? “Socialism! Next up, the gulags!” 

 

And, unfortunately, this tactic has been quite successful. It was fascinating to see the difference between Nixon’s plan for a guaranteed minimum income (did you know about that?) and the far more modest proposals by presidents Obama and Biden that are now tarred as extreme communist plots. 

 

These days, GOP politicians complain about Social Security (a wildly popular and successful program), and seem hell-bent on returning us to the 1800s. As one billionaire (Jeff Greene, who got rich betting against sub-prime mortgages - not exactly a socially beneficial way to get rich) openly said, “America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted…” Meaning, of course, not that he should lose his private jet or multiple nannies for his children. Ordinary Americans should give up the idea of being able to afford healthcare, housing, and education, and stop insisting on a living wage. 

 

I’m not sure I can even bring myself to write about the ways the Koch brothers have their fingers in all of this, dating back nearly to my birth. Perhaps this line will explain enough. 

 

No doubt the Koch brothers’ stance was also consistent with the interests of Koch Industries, a company knee-deep in oil. The economic rents that flow to corporations from the absence of regulation are especially great for companies, such as Koch Industries, that engage in the business of extracting, processing, and transporting commodities. If your business model generates huge negative externalities, libertarian governance is profitable.

 

With this concerted effort, the Republican Party has been gradually pushed further and further and further to the extreme right. (In fact, even the Democratic Party is pretty far to the right of Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon. Let that sink in.) 

 

One particularly telling episode is the saga of health care reform. Once, Republican policy makers viewed proposals that used government in a constructive role as valuable. Good case in point is the Clinton healthcare plan. I am old enough to remember when the GOP proposed an alternative to that plan - backed by the Heritage Foundation no less. (I am not making this up.) One version of that plan was adopted in Massachusetts as what we might call “RomneyCare.” Another eventually became the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare.”) Which, of course, Republicans supported, right, because it was their plan. What’s that you say? Literally every Republican opposed it, and spent the next 15 years trying to repeal, even shutting down government in their attempt? Yes, things have changed. (And also, I left the GOP as a result of that. I couldn’t understand how kicking people off of healthcare was either moral OR good economic policy.) 

 

So sure, the obscenely rich opposed the mixed economy. But why did rank and file Republican voters shift that direction? Why would they undermine their own futures, to say nothing of that of their children and grandchildren? The answer became clear to me in the Trump Era. 

 

It’s fucking racism.

 

Straight up. The authors put it more mildly, but it amounts to the same thing. White voters (particularly in the South, and particularly Evangelicals) changed their view of government after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Once the government had to benefit minorities and not just whites, the discussion changed. 

 

Nonetheless, the case is strong that race is a major ingredient in the GOP’s antigovernment cocktail. Careful analyses by political scientists show that the link between racial conservatism and attachment to the GOP is substantial and perhaps growing. Racial resentment seems to play a significant role, for example, in white evaluations of the Affordable Care Act, reinforced by the identification of the law with a black president. Not only is the racial divide on health care far greater today than it was under President Clinton; whites are more hostile to the same proposal when it is attributed to Obama rather than to Clinton. Other studies suggest that white concerns about increasing racial diversity contribute to conservative opposition to social programs, as well as a broader us-versus-them mentality. For some who respond to the GOP’s increasingly strident rhetoric, “makers” and “takers” have different skin colors. 

 

Hell. Yes. 

 

And it has been listening - really listening - to my extended family (and unfortunately, especially my parents) that really brought that reality home to me. The unrepentant racism is so strong. 

 

I’m going to mention the most chilling part about the book next. Published in 2016, it predates the GOP attempt to overturn an election, and the blitz of voter restrictions calculated to prevent another Trump loss. The GOP has no incentive to moderate its stances - or even support policies that benefit a majority of voters. Its money comes from the obscenely rich, and it doesn’t need to win over voters. 

 

And this puzzling reality brings us to the final big reason why Republican politicians feel limited pressure to moderate and back the mixed economy: Republicans have developed a powerful formula for retaining political strength without winning over voters to their policy positions.

 

The end of that road is despotism, followed inevitably by revolution. It is simply not sustainable for a minority to endlessly exploit and plunder the majority. Either our country pulls back from the abyss, or we go down that road and kill the golden goose. Ultimately, it is relatively easy for totalitarian sorts to persecute a small minority. (See Nazi Germany, or the US treatment of Japanese Americans) It is a lot harder to exploit a sizeable minority over the long term without significant social unrest. (That whole thing called the American Civil War.) It is far more difficult for a minority to control the majority, to go against the will of the majority, particularly in the long term. Once the population stops buying into the system, it tends to fall. (See revolutions from the French to the fall of Communism, and a lot more before and after.) Ironically, the obscenely rich who drove this war on government and the mixed economy have the most to lose if it falls. 

 

This book is filled with history throughout, including some episodes I wasn’t that familiar with. One of these is the story of the original Robber Barons. Yep, the OGs. These were barons in the literal sense, who built castles along the Rhine River back in the 13th Century, so they could extort tolls from shipping. This so disrupted trade that merchants started using overland routes, despite the expense and inefficiency. The barons got rich off of rent seeking, and the whole country suffered. How did the citizens of what is now Germany respond? Government. And it took five centuries of ineffective private sector attempts before they finally realized that what was needed wasn’t creative merchants, but soldiers to force the barons out. In the meantime, Germany permanently lost the opportunity of becoming an industrial and trade power on the level of England, with its free internal movement of goods (and government protected merchant marine.) 

 

For our modern-day robber barons, a similar response is needed: strong government action to force them to disgorge their rents. 

 

In fact, there is a whole chapter on rent seeking, which is a neglected topic in our public discourse. Whenever there are high profits being made, you know that the winners are getting rents, not the actual value of their goods or services. The book identifies three main industries that are currently thriving on rent seeking. Those three are finance (so incredibly obvious - most of it exists to exploit the system, and raise the cost of borrowing), healthcare (particularly pharmaceuticals, but also insurers and specialists), and energy (fossil fuels). The reason these three are able to maintain their rents is that they spend vast sums to essentially buy politicians. (See: Manchin, Joe, for just one example.) 

 

The best evidence for rampant rents on Wall Street might be the investment strategies of major financial firms. Not their investments in the economy, but their investments in the political system. Whenever we see industries or firms spending enormous sums to sway government, we should suspect strongly not only that rent seeking is taking place but also that its rewards exceed - and likely vastly exceed - the investment. After all, we typically assume that corporations are rational investors when it comes to economics. Why should we think differently when it comes to politics? To find the barons, look for the castles. 

 

Unfortunately, rent seeking seems to have led to partisan capture of the GOP by these interests. I can’t even get into all the depressing stuff in the chapter on what the Republican Party has become. I will just note that the use of “Calvinball” to describe GOP tactics is spot on. From the filibuster to the packing of the Supreme Court, the only rule that the GOP follows is “we always win, and change the rules to make that happen.” 

 

The authors quote Thomas Mann (not that one) and Norman Ornstein regarding the current state of the GOP. 

 

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

 

I completely agree. And the frustration of Millennials and Gen Z (my kids) is the result. While they are trying to solve problems like climate change, growing inequality, and continued racism in our society, their grandparents are trying to blow up democracy so they don’t have to come into the 21st Century. 

 

Also on point here is the problems that traditional media seem to have with trying too hard to be “balanced,” to the exclusion of seeking actual truth. As the authors put it, “When rent seekers and credentialed experts disagree, it is the experts whose views should be granted the greater legitimacy.” 

 

The book ends on a mildly optimistic note, while noting the challenges (particularly if the GOP succeeds in making elections irrelevant) in making positive change. I believe the authors are correct that there is no magic bullet, no person or idea that will fix everything. Building a better society is hard, hard work. It takes time and effort. And, as the authors note, “The problems are too complex, too interdependent, and too entrenched to make any single ‘solution’ plausible.” Sorry, Bernie Bros, while your guy has some good ideas, he is not the messiah come to save us all, if only people would see it. This is going to take long, hard work by many people on many fronts at the same time. Again, history is enlightening. 

 

A history of American political reform follows this pattern. There was no single master innovation in the long Progressive Era, or in the postwar efforts that further developed the mixed economy. There was no single breakthrough in the struggle for expanded opportunity in the 1960s, or in the expansion of protections for our environment in the 1970s. Trial and error, small and large victories that enabled subsequent advances - that’s how progress happened, and that’s how it will happen today. 

 

And it wasn’t just the progressive era. Between the American Revolution (the stage for which was set decades prior), it took over a dozen years before our constitutional form of government was established. At every single juncture in human history, the building of society has always taken time, and while the big revolutions get the press, the real work that improved lives happened before and especially afterward, even though the names of those who built are often unremembered. Their motivations, however, are timeless. To quote James Madison again:

 

“In the extended Republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of the majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than justice or the common good.” 

 

We are a diverse society - increasingly so - and that means that our visions of justice and the common good are also increasingly diverse. This has made certain kinds of white people (and to a degree males) uncomfortable, as they are used to the idea of the common good meaning in practice “good for white males,” but ultimately, the demographics are changing, and something will give. We who share the vision of a better, more just and equitable, society, have our work cut out for us, but the task is as noble as anything else we can do. 

 

***

 

The words of the prophet Amos:

 

They hate him who reproves in the gate,

    and they abhor him who speaks the truth.

Therefore because you trample on the poor

    and you exact taxes of grain from him,

you have built houses of hewn stone,

    but you shall not dwell in them;

you have planted pleasant vineyards,

    but you shall not drink their wine.

 For I know how many are your transgressions

    and how great are your sins—

you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,

    and turn aside the needy in the gate.

I hate, I despise your feasts,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them;

and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,

    I will not look upon them.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters,

    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.