The cacophony that pervades American discourse today, where
volume and pitch offend every meter of reasonableness, provides clear evidence
that the struggle for American identity is once again underway. Every eighty years or so America resets its
image; reboots its brand. It is never an
easy or comfortable process and this time is no different. Before I get into the current issues,
however, allow me to provide some historical perspective.
Upon reaching the shores of
Massachusetts Bay in the summer of 1630 on the ship
Arbella, John Winthrop, echoing Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew,
framed the requirements and expectations of his voyage-worn future colonists in
a sermon that resonated throughout American history.
His
Model
of Christian Charity articulated a sense of independence,
duty, and blessings to those who honored their covenant with God.
Winthrop claimed,
the Lord hath given us leave to draw
our own Articles’ and that ‘he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission
[and] will expect a strikt performance of the Articles’ that if neglected in
any way would cause ‘the Lord [to] surely breake out in wrath against us’ but
if we set the example of His Word, ‘hee shall make us a prayse and glory… for
we must Consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all
people are uppon us ...
Winthrop envisioned “Massachusetts
as the ideal place to build a Puritan utopia untainted by the corruptions of
the Church of England and distant from a suspect English monarch.”
It was up to the colonists to live up to the
standard of the “chosen people” living in the “chosen land”—a “City upon a
Hill.”
He defined the Puritan ethos of
the new American colonies: independence from the hierarchy of the Church of
England; a constant struggle with sin, salvation, and battles against evil; and
a high commitment to work and its just rewards with “attention fixed on God.”
In so doing, he also set theological covenant
as a standard of social order.
Winthrop
believed he could “transfer the principles of nationhood found in ancient
Israel to [his] Massachusetts Bay Company with no need for explanation.”
Over the last two hundred
thirty-eight years, this sense of American exceptionalism has proven to be the
most durable of all aspects of American identity.
Every president, regardless of political
affiliation or disposition, has embraced the idea of America’s special role in
the world.
Most American citizens,
albeit with different interpretations and varying degrees of fervor, similarly believe
in the ‘specialness’ of America. We should remind ourselves, however, that by
world historical standards a two hundred thirty-eight year-old country is just
a pup, at most a testy teen. And like an adolescent, our identity—what it means
to be an American—will evolve, subject to new interpretations of old values and
perhaps even new values, to craft a new image to be projected across the world.
Notwithstanding the somewhat clumsy
brilliance and beauty of America’s early years, we must be mindful that the great
powers that preceded America faced the reality of maturation and decline.
There is no reason to believe we won’t face
the same arc of maturation.
We might aim
to age gracefully, retaining our sense of exceptionalism—preferably as an
exemplar rather than missionary— but a graceful course is far from certain.
This process of American re-identification
is natural and recurring. It actually follows
a discernible pattern that includes a four-phase cycle comprised of periods of
objectivism, then radicalism, idealism, and finally crisis, each full cycle spanning
approximately eighty years. The first
cycle began after the Revolutionary War and founding of our country, then again
after the Civil War, and then again following the Great Depression and our entrance
into World War II. At the end of each
period of crisis a new American identity is negotiated that more or less
endures for the next eighty years. Following
the founding of our country, America embraced an identity as “the new world.” After the Civil War, America identity evolved
to “the land of opportunity.” Since the mid-1940s, when America last
re-identified itself as an emerging “world power,” our collective identity has
been focused on attaining superpower status.
Today, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and our
own (mis)adventures as a political superpower and overseer of the world’s
financial markets, we are faced with a diminished, if not severely compromised,
sense of American exceptionalism. In
effect, we are standing in the middle of another period of crisis and renegotiation
of identity, which is always contentious as evidenced by those at the extremes
making more noise than the vast majority who sit between them. Liberty,
capitalism, democracy, civil and human rights, all of which we believed, as
President Lincoln did, would collude to form a more perfect union—the “last
best hope of earth”—needs yet another makeover.
Our union today is hardly cohesive
and the invocation of hope seems an empty refrain. “Superpower” no longer rings
true when the institutions we have developed to serve our interests and project
power appear to be collapsing under the weight of hubris and avarice.
Since the end of the Cold War, rather than
following the example of President George H.W. Bush by behaving with a sense of
restraint and humility, America’s leaders—political, business, religious, and academic
—have puffed out their chests and spewed their decrees with the bravado and rectitude
of a freshly saved sinner.
These
behaviors are markers of a period of high idealism that precede every crisis.
And, as if our own guile was insufficient,
now comes a tome of criticism aimed at a fundamental tenant of American
exceptionalism—capitalism—by the economist Thomas Piketty.
Not since 1959, when Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev flustered then Vice President Richard Nixon in what became known as
the “Kitchen Debates” have Americans had to bear such criticism about
capitalism.
However, unlike Krushchev,
Piketty’s study is well researched, well written, and delivered with a clear
expression of limits and, moreover, humility.
Piketty’s basic argument is that a
society’s adherence to the principles of capitalism—as the most efficient
system of allocating capital and distributing wealth—results, in the long run,
in a highly skewed distribution of wealth in favor of the very few that, among
other effects, compromises other liberal democratic values, including democracy
itself.
In short, capitalism threatens
democracy.
This is based on his finding
that the rate of return on capital is consistently higher than the rate of
return on labor, by about three percentage points.
Over decades, this condition (absent
significant policy interventions or war) moves more and more wealth into the
hands of fewer and fewer people.
Furthermore, he shows, that the impact this has had on the concentration
of wealth in the hands of the 1% is no more alarming than in the United States.
We need look no farther than
Washington, D.C. to see that the effects Piketty warns us about are blooming with
the ferocity of fertilized dandelions on the Washington Mall. Money has always held sway over politicians,
but now more than ever moneyed interests funded by those who enjoy higher
returns from capital have a vice-like grip on Congress. We no longer “get the
government we deserve” through our votes, we get the government people like the
Koch brothers have purchased. Across the
street from Congress, the Supreme Court is doing its bit too. It has decided, as Mitt Romney claimed on the
campaign stump in 2012, that corporations are citizens too. Citizens United v. the Federal Election
Commission (2010) and other decisions like the more recent Burwell v. Hobby
Lobby (2014) that support this notion of corporate personhood, and which I
expect may someday will be viewed as just as ridiculous as the holding of
“separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), provide a growing body of
evidence that suggests a slide from democracy to plutocracy—those with the gold
rule.
Plutocracy is not all bad if all
you want is a more functional government.
Fewer people with influence means more things are likely to get done,
but will they be things that benefit most Americans, or few?
Moreover, plutocracy threatens more than the
democracy it supplants, it threatens the very essence of individualism and
independence, which are at the core of another tenant of American identity:
liberty.
When those with the gold rule,
there are a whole list of other “INs” that are at risk: invention, ingenuity, inspiration,
initiative and innovation; inclusiveness, integration and integrity; and
perhaps most importantly, intelligence and intellect—our collective
brainpower.
Opportunity, like wealth,
becomes concentrated too.
As Piketty
points out, in the history of 19
th century France, the last time similar
levels of wealth concentration occurred, inheritance rather than merit defined
the path to wealth and opportunity.
Is
that where we want America to go?
Will
whom we marry matter more than an advanced degree?
Will the next iteration of American identity
be that of a wildly wealthy few and a mass of commoners for whom the American
dream is restricted to something to read about in the diaries of their grandparents
and great-grandparents?
Will privilege
trump merit?
Will democracies continue
to be replaced by authoritarian regimes across the world?
If egalitarianism in America
(heralded by Tocqueville in
Democracy in
America) is another durable thread of American identity, it is at best
frayed and in need of repair.
However,
such values like egalitarianism—broadly interpreted— may not have survived
America’s coming of age as a superpower.
Egalitarianism today may be limited to those strands that support civil
and human rights,
not economic
opportunity.
This issue is the anvil
against which America’s next identity—especially as it pertains to its economic
system—will be hewn.
Indeed,
pundit-economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz believe economic rights
are an issue of equality, rather than equity; of entitlement more than merit,
while others who follow the teachings of Ludvig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek
believe the Krugman/Stiglitz world is, to use Hayek’s phrase, the “road to
serfdom.”
Of course, seldom do the extremes of any
range of argument—the polar endpoints—produce solutions with more benefit than (unintended)
costs.
Even Alan Greenspan, a staunch
protégé of Ayn Rand’s, realized (perhaps too late) that her argument of the
perfectly rational man as a virtuous economic actor was deeply flawed.
So, the question is, in this contentious
period of re-identification, can we retain the benefits of capitalism while
avoiding its apparent endgame of a very wealthy few?
Unfortunately, the answer is probably no.
Absent the destruction of capital
that we saw in World War I and II, which, as Piketty illustrates, flipped
diverging rates of return on capital and labor to converging rates, the only
way to stem the concentration of wealth and affect redistribution is through
various tax schemes, any and all of which are anathema to the Mises/Hayek
school and its many wealthy supporters.
Reading Piketty’s proposals of a global tax, or others who have put
forward similar tax schemes is like reading a new version of Alice in Wonderland, prompting the
query: did Piketty get into Lewis Carroll’s stash? However, things happen, like the collapse of
the Soviet Union, that still amaze people like me, so who knows?
The American values we have
historically held dear; that basket of values that includes ideas like liberty,
individualism, capitalism, merit, democracy, civil and human rights needs a new
handhold we can believe in—a new identity.
Coming of age is an inelegant and klutzy process, but to-date America
has handled it mostly well. We have
created more prosperity than any predecessor power in the history of the world. When called to defeat evil like Hitler’s Third
Reich, we put our blood and treasure on the line and, with great help from
allies and, in particular, Stalin’s Russia, we won. We have, for the most part, lived up to
Winthrop’s ideal of a “city upon a hill.”
Adulthood is, however, knocking at America’s door.
·
Will our leaders be wise and graceful, or continue
in the vain and bilious manner portrayed by too many today?
·
Will we be exemplars of self-restraint and
moderation, or zealous missionaries of consumptive duplicity?
·
Will we lock the gates to America, or continue
to embrace those who come from foreign lands?
·
Will we educate our children to know more than
us, or fail to enable their dreams?
·
Will we honor science and take reasonable measures
to affect climate change, or will we continue to chant “Drill, baby, drill!”?
·
Will we fight to engineer a system that protects
and rewards merit balanced by empathy, or will we accept the pernicious effects
of concentrated wealth and its natural progeny plutocracy?
·
Will we be welcomed in the capitols of the
world, or be regarded with contempt and trepidation?
·
Will we honor our American heritage and come
together to relight the city upon the hill, or continue to strut down a pathway
to irrelevance?
In sum, will America be rebranded
as ‘beneficent stewards’ of the future of the world, or will the nation of
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton become an isolated,
self-centered, and decaying archetype of entropy? These are the choices we face as we step
forward to rebrand America. Other great
powers in the history of the world faced the same dilemma; some succeeded, some
failed. There is no clear roadmap to
follow and nothing will be determined in the next election, or Supreme Court
decision, or annual statement of profit and loss. This is a result that will be determined by
the decisions and actions of individual Americans every day. Like water carving a new gorge in a mountain
of stone, it will be the collective will of the people, expressed in their
nearly imperceptible movements that will set the course of the next eighty-year
cycle. The loudest among us will not
prevail; it will be the actions—not words—of the vast majority of us who decide
how to behave as Americans each and every day.
Winthrop in Conrad
Cherry, ed., God's New Israel: Religious
Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1998), p. 40.
Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John
Winthrop (New York: Pearson Longman, 2006), p. ix.
This period of idealism is a dialectic synthesis of
objective method and ‘settled’ radical ideas/values from the preceding
period(s). Assertion of this synthesis is projected on an often-unwilling
populace, both domestic and foreign. Other common markers of periods of
idealism include hubris, certitude, grandeur, and consumption-based economies.
Conspicuous consumption. Get rich quick. Speculation. Deregulation. Class
inequalities. High religiosity. Periods
of idealism include 1835-60, 1915-29, and 1985-2007.
