Transitions

This is a long blog but hang in there with me. As Americans, we are scared, confused and conflicted on so many levels. There were issues that antedated this pandemic – climate change, income inequality and a rising plutocracy, a contracting middle class, worse challenges for those at the bottom of the economy, environmental degradation, rising student debt coupled with the dying gasps of the American dream/upward mobility, discrimination vs diversity, job displacement from a combination of globalization and AI-driven automation, housing affordability, immigration reform, political manipulation and severe red vs blue polarization. I am sure I missed a lot of salient issues. But whether you are a Trump populist or a social progressive, there seems to be a general “let’s really not talk about it” consensus that the American system of governance no longer works for the vast majority of Americans. Violent protests are now forcing the conversation, however.

What is intellectually fascinating yet terrifying is the radical rise of “self-help” justified violence and the threat of violence from those who believe that government no longer represents their interests. Whether they march with torches or are those carrying AR-15s to their state capitol buildings to demand that their representatives immediately lift all COVID-19 restrictions and totally reopen the economy, enabling individuals to move freely without masks or social distancing. Or African Americans protecting, believing that they live in a police state (where cops have free rein) that is incapable of protecting them and their rights, incapable of respecting them as citizens as worthy as white traditionalists. No system available anymore to offer them any hope justice and prevention. Voting didn’t work. Resort to the courts failed. Inner city schools got worse. A black president didn’t really change anything. No choices left?

Protests that have escalated to looting and burning down a police station in Minneapolis (pictured above) in response to yet another blue on black killing (George Floyd, noting that one of his arresting officers has been charged with third [??] degree murder). Anger. Helplessness. Frustration. Nowhere to turn. Nothing left to lose. No other recourse. Them vs us. Cities burning everywhere. Even in front of the White House. And there are agitators from out-of-state. Q-anon? White power? Militia? Is someone paying to provoke, then to justify? Paying troublemakers to make African Americans look bad to foment racial hatred? Is there any foreign money in the mix? What are the solutions?

Racism has never been more openly condoned, from the top. Evidence is mounting that a sizeable proportion of violent protestors against the Floyd murder are not local. Encouraged and recruited by distant extremists? People who actually believe in the potential of sparking a civil war. We have credible reports (including from former senior FBI officers) that these outside extreme aiders and abettors purportedly include right-wing militia like the Boogaloo Boys and other comparable groups as well as anarchists on the left. The Trump administration conveniently deleted mention of the right-wing groups, putting the entire blame on leftist extremists. What the Trump’s base wants to believe. As the nation burns, as the White House calls for an equally violent governmental response against the protestors, COVID-19 continues to infect. America is torn apart. Yet we have to deal with all of these issues at the same time.

The government could provide financial support for all Americans during this pandemic. But that is a very unpopular alternative among conservatives and the rather large segment of Americans who literally do not care if hundreds of thousands might die in a second or third CV-19 wave as long as they can make a living. Understandable, even if there is an irony in the potential greater economic loss from such second or third wave. They see 42 million unemployed Americans. Not sick people.

There are many Americans who live in communities barely impacted (so far) by the pandemic. They have not lost friends, relatives or fellow workers… so their natural response is “why do I have to give up my livelihood for a bunch of strangers living in those big cities I hate anyway?” Polarization amplified. Supported by the President of the United States every day. Disputed by the experienced medical (doctors, scientists and epidemiologists) every day. Rural communities are watching CV-19 entering their world now. Wisconsin, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, etc. all are hot spots.

When this pandemic is over, will blue citizens ever forgive the red citizens who did not care if they lived or died? Will red citizens ever forgive the blue citizens for the economic costs of the lockdowns? Will white versa black (and vice-versa) animosity subside? Can justice evolve?

We live in an era of Trump-inspired blame. There is no forgiveness and little acceptance of individual responsibility. Donald Trump even castigated former Republican President George W Bush’s message towards the reunification of America, getting us all on the same page. Blame was an easier path. “Divide and conquer” has been an essential and most effective part of Trump’s political rise. The Floyd protests, the denial of the dangers from COVID-19, represent potential for even greater polarization. Donald Trump seems to have jumped all over this growing schism. Has America, once defined as a land of opportunity, just become a land of selfish opportunists?

The United States is clearly failing, by our own standards. Even before the pandemic, as the wealth of the top 1% exploded, 70% of Americans had not seen an increase in real buying power in four decades. We stopped investing in ourselves – particularly in the real value of governmental investments in infrastructure, education, and research. Instead we chose to fight interminable and expensive wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq) while lowering taxes. Comparative global testing showed a plunge of American primary and secondary educational quality from first to nineteenth in math, science and reading comprehension, beginning with the Vietnam War era and steadily declining into the present. The pandemic could have brought us together to fight a common threat. Instead, it exacerbated an already intolerable great divide.

Will there be a lingering post-pandemic hatred, amplifying severe and perhaps irreconcilable red-blue polarization? Can racism finally be extinguished or at least diminished? An equally devastating polarization of the rich vs everyone else? We are living off of investments from past generations. And those prior values are finally facing the depreciation and erosion from decades or inattention, a lack reinvesting in ourselves. Massive costs of natural disasters (drought, fires, floods and invasive migrating diseases and species, increase storm severity, etc.) have recently exploded from climate change. Massive political realignment as the United States has extracted itself from a century of rising global influence has eroded our trading power.

The Civil War was fought over rural vs urban priorities. Slavery was seen as an agricultural necessity to the south, which did not have big urban centers, and as repugnant inhumanity to northern states. The vestiges of slavery still linger under an underclass treatment of African Americans that just never seems to dissipate well over a century and a half after the North won that war and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (banning slavery). Injustice-riot-lull-injustice. Barriers to escaping urban poverty stiffening. African Americans are facing some of the harshest conditions in decades, and with racism being legitimized, either we are sliding backwards or just seeing what has always set just beneath the surface for a very long time.

Are there simply too many continuing “irreconcilable differences” for the United States to come together again to function as a viable democracy? Will the youngest voters, those who must live with that list of issues noted above, get so angry at their “elders” that they simply shove us out of the way and unite the United States their way? Or will we try and limp along with incompatibility, Congressional gridlock, seething resentment… and attempt to return to the same-old/same-old? It didn’t work then… and it probably cannot work in the future.

Do such deep-seated irreconcilable differences suggest that, in a land with well over 300 million civilian firearms (including over 15 million semiautomatic AR-15s), the schism will be decided by another civil war? And if the country elects to break apart, voluntarily or otherwise, what might that look like? What will the currency be? Will there still be “property rights”? Will rent still be payable, pension funds released, Social Security continued, and mortgages have legal validity? What happens to our armed forces? Nuclear weapons? What happens to the federal deficit? What will the redefined borders look like? Two nations? Several? Two “blocs,” each a combination looking like the European Union? Which laws will apply? Who will enforce them? What happens to the federal judicial system? Prisons? Who gets to determine and collect taxes? The new jurisdictions would each have to create their own constitutions and bodies of laws. What happens to judicial precedents? Would there need to be treaties and protected borders determining the new boundaries? Could people travel freely across those boundaries?

Complicated, but during the transition, if that’s where we are headed, the legal systems and assumptions we have made will need to be redefined to have any continuing validity. When Germany lost WWI, a lot of private property was simply confiscated by the victors. There were no rules, laws lapsed. Could that happen here? Total chaos? Armed groups protecting turf, expanding turf. Gangs, militia, no rules, no laws? Property “rights”?

Although there was a nascent vision of private property within the Soviet Union in its final years, systems of property ownership lacked the infrastructure found in Western states. For many, ownership or even occupancy of homes and business venues was not recorded anywhere. No place to verify real estate transfers, no way to legitimize who owned what for so many. Soldiers were prone to simply seizing military weapons and selling them to the highest bidder. Highly placed former Soviet bureaucrats, particularly from the KGB and senior military officers, simply took over major factories, oil fields and processing facilities, shipping, and just kept them. And lots of folks just kept rental or governmental residential units and declared themselves “owners,” unable to produce proof ownership… because there was none. Still people bought and sold what they did not own; it just didn’t matter.

“When the Soviet Union dissolved in late December 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin moved decisively to reaffirm his commitment to private land ownership, which had already been legalized during the Soviet period. In late December 1991, Yeltsin issued government resolutions and presidential decrees ordering large farms to reorganize and distribute land shares to all farm members and allocate actual land plots to those who wanted to leave the parent farm. He also restated the right to private ownership of land and encouraged the rise of a new class of private farmers based on private ownership of land. Despite these steps, during the 1990s the issue of private land ownership and the right to buy and sell land were heavily contested and were key aspects of the policy conflict between reformers and conservatives.” Land Tenure, Soviet and Post-Soviet, Encyclopedia.com, April 30th. But the land really belonged to those who just took it.

What I find puzzling is the lack of concern here in the U.S., the raw selfishness and assumption that “my way is the only way” that underlies the fracturing of America today. We don’t look for commonality, for areas where we can compromise; these factions look for blame and the ability to impose precisely what that faction wants on everyone else. How is this even good for those who embrace recalcitrance, emboldened by conspiracy theories and mythology? Has the violent civil war already begun?

What I do not see in so many is the remotest appreciation of what continuing that intransigence, increasing every day, inevitably leads to. George Santayana reminded us that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. Are we better off just breaking apart? Some say Abraham Lincoln is to blame for not letting the South simply secede. Really? Individuals, preaching violence and demanding “my way or the highway” as core political values, may be unaware of the possible drastic consequences. Or are they? Including untold death and destruction as each side attempts to impose its will on the other. Though the numbers are not precise, our own Civil War killed an estimated 640-700,000 people. How many American hardliners (in any faction) really understand that it really can happen here… again? And that they just might be on the losing side? Maybe too many know… and want that result anyway. Now?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and until those hardliners (from all sides), who are unwilling to compromise, relent to find unity, we may just continue marching towards our own inevitable destruction.