Make America Great Again?

What does that mean? What should it mean?

I see the hats, and I see the tee-shirts. I see the eager faces, mostly white, not young — ‘make America Great Again”, the logos read as the people gather, COVID defiant, at Trump rallies.   I hear Paul Simon’s lines echoing in my head, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?  Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” 

There should be tee-shirts that say ‘I want the 1950s back’.  These Trumpers sense that America is in decline,  — ‘the shining beacon on the hill, the last best hope of earth’ —  is in disarray, in serious trouble.  They are not wrong, but do they understand why?

What would make America great again? Would it be to make America white again? That’s not going to happen. Donald could stop all immigration tomorrow, causing California farmers to have conniptions in the process, and it wouldn’t make any difference. America’s demographic destiny is already determined. 

The US will become ‘minority white’ in 2045, Census projects

Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous

Is it let’s get tougher on crime? The United States already incarcerates more people than any other nation in the developed world. It is busy privatizing its prisons, filling them with non-violent offenders who shouldn’t be there, and creating an underground American Gulag with corporate connivance. The United States has 760 residents in prison per 100,000 population; Japan has 63.

US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag

Is it bring good jobs back? Well, unfortunately, they are not all hiding in Mexico, China, and Vietnam, waiting for Trump to mount a rescue operation complete with Navy Seals. Most of them went to the friendly automated plant next door, and the truly massive job displacement courtesy of AI and sophisticated robotics is right around the corner. Trump has no plan for this, doesn’t even seem to understand what’s coming.

ChrisDictum posts on the The Future of Work and Universal Basic Income

What about reviving America’s entrepreneurial spirit? In 2018, the US. created 100,000 fewer businesses than it did 12 years earlier. Corporate concentration in the financial sector is part of the reason (fewer local banks to lend out seed capital.) Another big reason for business creation decline is the fear of losing employer-paid health care — take an entrepreneurial risk, maybe, can’t pay for my kid’s diabetes treatment, nope, can’t risk that.

The biggest challenge to American greatness is how astonishingly little capital there is in the hands of more and more Americans as income inequality continues to grow worse. The net worth of the average American, if you remove home equity and the value of their car, is $4,000–$7,000. (63.7 percent of Americans owned their own home in 2016, down from 69 percent in 2004.) The median value of assets held by white households: $103,963. The median value of assets held by black households: $9,211 and the net worth of the median black household excluding home equity is $2,725. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang tells us that 46% of Americans couldn’t come up with $400 in an emergency. Does this seem like a fertile seedbed for the broad cultivation of risk-takers?  Don’t worry; entrepreneurship is alive and well in Silicon Valley, where it is busy perfecting the robotic transport technologies that are going to put just about every single American trucker out of work within fifteen years. Trump on this subject? The silence is deafening.

Make America Great Again!  Let’s start with making America fair again.  The Market can’t do it — productivity growth has become detached from an equitable distribution of income.  Government, national government, has to make sweeping changes. We should start with two broad measures, universal basic income and a system for the provision of healthcare that doesn’t come straight out of Alice Through The Looking Glass – almost certainly some variation of a single-payer system.

Productivity vs Wages

Heraclitus said 2600 years ago, no one can step in the same river twice. The fifties are gone forever, even the triumphs of the Reaganite eighties are vanishing fast in the rear-view mirror. The United States is heading in the wrong direction — more and more of its citizens struggling, the few becoming stupendously rich. Trump can’t fix things because he has no idea what is wrong. I am not sure Joe Biden does either, but some Democratic leaders do, the younger up and comers. (Never have I seen a country in more desperate need of a generational change in its political leadership.)

Donald Trump’s supporters just don’t get it. It’s as if a large number of Forest Gumps stumbled into the wrong movie — one that isn’t going to end well.  Those tee-shirt wearers and hat wavers are real people with real problems they did not create. My reaction to these spectacles is a mixture of sympathy and frustration. (Okay, anger creeps in too occasionally.) 

What concerns me most is that, even if a majority of Americans dump Donald Trump into the dustbin of history where he belongs, the problems he ignored will fester. The resentments that fueled his ascendency will continue to grow worse.  There is a lot of territory between New York and San Francisco, and it is full of angry people who will not let themselves be mowed down by driverless trucks without a fight. Trump is a buffoon, but there are people with his demagogic tendencies who aren’t — potential populist anti-liberals who are smarter, more charismatic, have much better hair. This is the nightmare that keeps me up at night.