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Chapter 1: The Protected and the Unprotected
Is the world's greatest democracy and economy broken? Not compared to the Civil War years, or to the early 1930s. And not if one considers the miracles happening every day in America's laboratories, on the campuses of its world-class colleges and universities, in offices and lofts full of developers creating software for robots or for medical diagnostics, in concert halls and on Broadway stages, or at joyous ceremonies swearing in proud new citizens. And certainly not if the opportunities available today to woman, non-whites, and other minorities are compared to what they faced as recently as a few decades ago.
Yet measures of public engagement, satisfaction, and confidence—voter turnout, knowledge of public policy issues, faith that the next generation will have it better than the current one, and respect for basic institutions, especially the government—are far below the levels of a half century ago, and in many cases have reached historic lows. So deep is the estrangement that 46.1 percent of American voters were so disgusted with the status quo that in 2016 they chose to put Donald Trump in the White House.
It is difficult to argue that the cynicism is misplaced. From the relatively small things—that Americans are now navigating through an average of 657 water main breaks a day, for example—to the core strengths that once propelled America, it is clear that the country has gone into a tailspin since the post-war era, when John F. Kennedy's New Frontier was about seizing the future, not trying to survive the present.
The celebrated American economic mobility engine is sputtering. A child's chance of earning more than his or her parents has dropped from 90 percent to 50 percent in the last fifty years. The American middle class, once the inspiration of the world, is no longer the world's richest.
Income inequality has snowballed. Adjusted for inflation, middle-class wages have been nearly frozen for the last four decades, and discretionary income has declined if escalating out-of-pocket health care costs and insurance premiums are counted. Yet earnings by the top one percent have tripled. The recovery from the crash of 2008—which saw banks and bankers bailed out while millions lost their homes, savings, and jobs—was reserved almost exclusively for the top one percent. Their incomes in the three years following the crash went up by nearly a third, while the bottom 99 percent saw an uptick of less than half of one percent. Only a democracy and an economy that has discarded its basic mission of holding the community together, or failed at it, would produce those results.
Most Americans with average incomes have been left largely to fend for themselves, often at jobs where automation, outsourcing, the near-vanishing of union protection, and the boss's obsession with squeezing out every penny of short-term profit have eroded any sense of security. Self-inflicted deaths—from opioid and other drug abuse, alcoholism, and suicide—are at record highs, so much so that the country's average life expectancy has been falling despite medical advances. Household debt by 2017 had grown higher than the peak reached in 2007 before the crash, with student and automobile loans having edged toward mortgages as the top claims on family paychecks.
The world's richest country continues to have the highest poverty rate among the thirty-five nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), except for Mexico. (It is tied in second to last place with Israel, Chile, and Turkey.) Nearly one in five of America's children live in households that their government classifies as "food-insecure," meaning they are without "access to enough food for an active, healthy life."
Beyond that, few of the basic services seem to work as they should. America's airports are an embarrassment, and a modern air traffic control system is twenty-five years behind schedule. The power grid, roads, and rails are crumbling, pushing the United States far down international rankings for infrastructure quality. Despite spending more on health care and K-12 education per capita than any other developed country, health care outcomes and student achievement also rank in the middle or worse internationally. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and lowest life expectancy of its peer countries, and among the thirty-five OECD countries American children rank thirtieth in math proficiency and nineteenth in science.
American politicians talk about "American exceptionalism" so habitually that it should have its own key on their speechwriters' laptops. Is this the exceptionalism they have in mind?
The operative word to describe the performance of our lawmakers in Washington D.C., responsible for guiding what is supposed to be the world's greatest democracy, is pathetic. Congress has not passed a comprehensive budget since 1994. Like slacker schoolchildren unable to produce a book report on time, the country's elected leaders have fallen back instead on an endless string of last-minute deadline extensions and piecemeal appropriations. Legislation to deal with big, long-term challenges, like climate change, the mounting national debt, or job displacement, is a pipe dream. It is as if the great breakthroughs of the past, marked by bipartisan signing ceremonies in the White House—the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, Social Security, interstate highways, the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, civil rights legislation, the EPA—are part of some other country's history.
There are more than twenty registered lobbyists for every member of Congress. Most are deployed to block anything that would tax, regulate, or otherwise threaten a deep-pocketed client. Money has come to dominate everything so completely that those we send to Washington to represent us have been reduced to begging on the phone for campaign cash four or five hours a day and spending their evenings taking checks at fund-raisers organized by those swarming lobbyists. A gerrymandering process has rigged easy wins for most of them, as long as they fend off primary challengers in their own party—which assures that they will gravitate toward the polarizing, special interest positions of their donors and their party's base, while racking up mounting deficits to pay for goods and services that cost more than budgeted, rarely work as promised, and are never delivered on time.
