Despair in America
Progressives fail to understand the causes of the problems they decry. As a result, the solutions they offer will not solve those problems. For example, the epidemic of gun violence in this country is not a function of assault rifles, many on the left seem to think. If you listen to people on the left complain about gun violence you would think that everyone is walking around with an AR-15. The overwhelming majority of gun homicides are committed using handguns, not assault rifles. If we banned assault rifles, as is the focus on the left, that would barely make a dent in the rates of gun violence in the US.
The overwhelming majority of murders are committed using handguns. The states with the highest murder rates, Mississippi and Lousianna, have the highest rates of residents living below the poverty line. This is not a coincidence. Poverty and crime are causally related. If we want to reduce gun violence in the US, we need to focus on its cause: poverty.
Most gun deaths are not homicides. About ¾ of gun deaths are suicides. Life expectancy in the US has gone down for the third year in a row. Prior to this new trend, we had a century of increasing life expectancy. The cause of this alarming decline are deaths of despair. These include suicide, drug overdoses and deaths related to alcoholism. According to the CDC, there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before. This is shocking, tragic and terrifying. These, too, are casualties of capitalism.
How ought we to measure and compare the success of nations? GDP? The best measure of the success of a country is arguably the happiness of its citizens. The World Happiness Report is the best available ranking of countries by happiness. The U.S. is ranked 19 in the most recent report. Canada is ranked 13. We have never cracked the top ten. Those rankings are reserved primarily for Scandinavian countries that provide more social welfare programs to their citizens. Radical capitalism is killing us.
A major source of anxiety on the left is the possibility of backsliding into authoritarianism. These fears are warranted. For the first time, the International think tank Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has rated the U.S. a democracy in decline. The popularity of Trump and the threat to democracy he poses are largely a function of swaths of white people in the south and midwest feeling left out of our economy and our culture. The fact that elitists among us denigrate them as ignorant, racist hicks and constantly use phrases like “white privilege” and “white fragility” doesn’t help. Many of them voted for Trump out of pure spite, as a big orange middle finger to us on the left. Perhaps it is time to change our attitude towards 70 million of our fellow Americans.
There is more to Trump’s appeal, of course, than schadenfrued. 12% of those who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary voted for Trump in the general election. About the same percentage of those who voted for Obama voted for Trump. How does one go from Bernie to Trump? On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a common thread between them.
But there is one thing they have in common that may explain this phenomenon. Both are populists, whereas Clinton is an institutionalist. Clinton barely visited Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and couldn’t convincingly pretend to care about their concerns. Trump appealed to the class conflicts and resentments of middle america. His pitch was, “You can’t vote for these people who look down on you and don’t care about you.” Trump managed to convince his base that he represents their interests. He sold them the dream of returning America to a time when their communities prospered. The factories that sustained those communities are gone and our economy left them behind.
The Biden administration has made investments in middle america through the historic Infrastructure bill and the forthcoming social spending bill. After catastrophic tornadoes swept through the midwest, Biden toured the damage in Kentucky, demonstrating compassion that his narcissistic predecessor was incapable of. But Biden can’t easily overcome the urban/rural clash of cultures polarizing America. His policies have to improve life in middle america and the left he represents has to stop denigrating the people who live there.
Biden’s social spending agenda is a good start towards healing the damage caused by radical capitalism, but it is not nearly enough. The effects of radical capitalism have taken decades to rot our country and a one time cash infusion will not suffice. But where will we get the money? As it is we are raising the debt ceiling and running a deficit.
The U.S. spends far more on defense than any other country on earth. In fact, we spend more than the next eleven countries combined! We spend more than three times what China spends. And the $768 billion defense bill that the Senate recently passed is a full $30 billion more than Trump requested for the military in his last budget. Biden’s social spending bill is a quarter of what we are spending on defense. If we simply spent twice what China spends, we would maintain our military advantage and provide the kinds of programs that happier European countries provide their citizens. We have prioritized the profits of the defense and private prison industries over the happiness of our citizens.
Finally, we cannot continue to call ourselves the land of the free when we incarcerate more people both per capita and overall than any other country on earth. The U.S. spends $81 billion on housing inmates per year and if we include the total costs of the justice system such as policing and courts, that figure rises to $180 billion. About half of all inmates are nonviolent offenders. If we reserved prison for violent offenders, this would theoretically free up at least $40 billion and as much as $90 billion. Think of the many ways this money could be better spent!
We will never heal the racial wounds in the U.S. so long as the racial wealth gap is so pronounced. The average white family has ten times the wealth of the average black family. But progressives misunderstand the causes of the racial wealth gap. They claim that it is the result of systemic racism, and the solution is to eradicate racism. But if we could somehow press a button and end racism in one fell swoop, the racial wealth gap would continue to exist and probably widen over time. The left’s obsession with antiracism is performative and ineffectual. It only serves to signal virtue and feed self-righteous indignation.
Slavery followed by a century of segregation and oppression could not but leave a legacy. It has been over 50 years since the Civil Rights Act but the effects of the injustices it addressed continue to compound. As MLK said, “it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race 300 years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up to his fellow runner.” We can’t expect that once we put African Americans on an equal legal footing that our communities would naturally reach parity. The disparity is even harder to overcome now than ever. Radical capitalism has meant that it has become harder to lift oneself out of poverty than it used to be. Minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Children of any race cannot expect to enjoy the same standard of living and opportunity as their parents.
The solution to this problem, too, is to invest in black communities. We must pass a reparations bill that functions like Biden’s spending agenda but that targets the African American community. Reparations in the form of preferential business, home and education loans, free childcare, healthcare, job placement and career counseling services and subsidized affordable housing in desirable neighborhoods should be the focus of our efforts. Too many of us stick a Black Lives Matter sign in their front yard and parrot the same talking points on social media without actually doing anything that would improve black lives. If we stopped incarcerating nonviolent offenders, and cut our defense budget by ⅓, we could redirect those resources to middle America and to urban america. Only by doing so will we see racial tension, despair, violence and disdain for democracy decrease in the U.S.
