The Biggest Political Question on Earth

For most of my life – from the televised McCarthy era communist witch hunts that cut into my morning cartoons when I was a little boy to the Reagan era “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech preceding the downfall of the greatest Communist nation in the world (Soviet Russia) – the two most unpatriotic words an American could utter with respect were “socialism” and “communism.” We fought the Vietnam War in large part to prevent the “domino theory”: the notion that any communist foothold in Southeast Asia would trigger regional falling dominos of communist governments. We overthrew governments with leftist leanings.

The Depression era New Deal programs were always treated with disdain by our most virulent anti-socialists, but by the time WWII ended, promoting socialism and communism in the United States were enough to get to get you fired, blacklisted, arrested or even executed. The ancient politicians that populate Washington today were raised with those admonitions and realities. Godless communism became the enemy of fundamentalist Christians, and socialism was simply opening the door to let communism take over. The clear enemy of communism was capitalism, so embracing capitalism generated not only political passions but deeply religious mandates in support.

To bolster that perception, the American capitalist machine manufactured arms and munitions that tilted WWII entirely in favor of the allies. Most don’t even realize that the socialist New Deal infrastructure efforts to drag us out of the depression actually created the over-capacity of electrical power (think of all the dams built that way) without which that massive wartime manufacturing effort would have been impossible. And post-WWII showed the unprecedented economic power of the American capitalist machine, evidence that our form of capitalist-free market-democracy was the right path. We even derided the efforts towards greater social safety nets, particularly the ideal of universal healthcare, that were become the norm in the rest of the developed world.

But that was before China, isolated, starving and poor, launched its post-1981 (Deng-era) “centralized governmental planning and direction” (called “communism with Chinese characteristics”) that spurred a bizarre mix of government and private enterprise which defines modern China. The developing world soon found a new model for economic success.

China was not a democracy, although in theory the Politburo was charged with acting on behalf of the people. Yet in the shortest time in history, this bizarre form of “communism” moved almost billion people from poverty into the middle class. It was a form of “managed capitalism” that simply scoffed at the notion of Adam Smith’s free market “invisible hand” (posited in the late 18th century) could work in a modern era. A political system that questioned the free market, that manipulated that market mercilessly, became wildly successful as a result. China is projected to pass the United States in sheer economic power by the middle of this century.

The worship of capitalism here in the United States was also born before the ascension of the “gig” economy or the rise of artificially-intelligent machines that rendered or threatened to render most blue collar jobs obsolete and even posed threats to some of the most sophisticated white collar professions as well, from accounting and investment advisors to lawyers and even surgeons. The writing was on the wall: those who owned and controlled the machines would use that power to displace workers and take over their earning capacity. The massive shift of income – distorting wealth in the United States to the breaking point – was the clearest evidence of that reality.

But diehard Christian fundamentalists, who have long embraced raw capitalism and free markets as if they were Biblical mandates, and many older politicians who were raised during the anti-socialist/communist era, believed that the path to America’s greatness, the counter to the rise of China’s godless “communist” model, was a return to those values. Changing with the realities of technology was not the correct approach, they posited. Fueling traditional capitalism, including a self-destructive tax reform act to encourage and empower the already-bloated wealthiest in the land, was the only answer. Bad news, guys. Simply put, “you’re wrong,” and many of you are unemployed or under-employed as a result… and will remain so unless you accept change.

Funny that the voice of the new socialist movement, Bernie Sanders, is 76-years-old. When I heard his use of that “socialist” word during the 2016 campaign, my head spun around. For most of America, that word still resonates with negativity, even though the march of artificial intelligence to replace a whole lot of jobs would inevitably lead us to a model that was deeply socialist… assuming the United States is even able to hold together as a single nation. The old folks, for whom “socialism” is the equivalent of the anti-Christ, are dying off. Those who will remain jobless under the sure-to-fail GOP-populist movement are going to be faced with some tough questions.

So the big question is how younger Americans (Z and Millennials), raised in an era of China’s success and long past the socialist/communist purges, feel about capitalism itself. They were, after all, the staunchest Bernie Sander’s supporters. The results have to send shivers of fear down the back of currently joyful MAGA conservatives.

“Last summer, two authors [Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk] asked Fast Company readers a simple question: ‘Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real problem?’… For millennials, the answer seems to be increasingly yes. ‘A lot of young people don’t believe in it anymore,’ Ana Garcia, a college junior, told the Wall Street Journal in a recent article on the topic. ‘We don’t trust capitalism because we don’t see ourselves getting ahead.’

“A 2016 poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that just 19% of Americans aged 18 to 29 identified themselves as capitalists; only 42% claimed they supported the economic system. Another Harvard poll, released on December 5, found that two-thirds of that same age group is fearful for the future of the country. Just 14% think we’re headed in the right direction…

“It’s also, according to the World Economic Forum, the first generation in modern memory to be on track to be worse off than their parents. The median earnings of millennials in 2013 were 43% lower than someone who was their age and working in 1995. Even though average wages have inched slowly upward in recent years after a long period of stagnation, they’re still 8% lower than they were before the 2008 recession. And average student debt, has, since 2008, climbed from around $24,000 to over $37,000…

“According to a 2016 Gallup poll, the popularity of capitalism and socialism is neck-and-neck among younger Americans, while older generations are still distrusting of socialism. Younger people are also the ones driving the surge of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed 15 winning candidates in the November election. And Americans aged 18 to 29, according to a recent WSJ poll, are more likely than any other age bracket to say that they believe the government should be doing more, not less, to help people in need.

“If anything, the Trump administration is only serving to galvanize millennials’ beliefs. The president himself is perhaps one of the most extreme products of capitalism, and his success signifies what many feel to be the irrationality of the system. And as the Republican Party inches closer to passing the tax bill that will increase inequality and strip students of their already-limited financial resources, while leaving even less to help people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, the call for a system that prioritizes humanity and equity over inflating the profits of a tiny fraction of the already well-off will only continue to grow.” FastCompany.com, December 8th.

Solid evidence of this mega-trend is reflected in a ruby red state, Alabama, which had not elected a Democrat to the Senate for a quarter of a century.  In the December 12th Senate special election to replace former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (who left to become Trump’s Attorney General), according to exit poll analysis reported in the December 13th Washington Post, over 60% of voters under age 44 supported a long-shot liberal Democrat, Doug Jones, against white supremacist/homophobe and accused sexual predator, Trump-supported GOP-candidate Roy Moore, who dominated the overall white vote (68%, with that 18-44 vote coming out of the remainder).

Is it mere coincidence that the above 60% number roughly mirrors the percentage of Millennials (59%) with at least some college education? Further, as that segment of the population most likely to be active evangelicals (older Americans) slowly die off, we are witnessing a slow contraction (according to a May 12, 2015 Pew survey, down about 3.4% from 2007 to 2014) of adherents to that politically fundamentalist view of Christianity.  Simply put, younger voters, even in the most conservative states, are not embracing the politics of their parents and grandparents.

Millennials and Z-generation are used to change; they feed on it. Trump populists hate change, and they believe powerfully that they can reverse it. Guess who’s being realistic! And trust me, this is a question being asked everywhere. Donald Trump has made the American capitalist-democracy model quite unattractive to most of the rest of the world.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if the United States manages somehow to hold together through this polarizing turmoil, the one true thing is that “future America” will look nothing like what Trump populists think.