Despite, or maybe because of, its vast wealth, the United States has utterly failed to perform its most basic duty to protect all of its inhabitants. It is morally, if not criminally, negligent. Four decades of withdrawal from the principle of government-led social responsibility laid the foundation for the avoidable rapid spread of the SARS-CoV2 virus, chaos, and resultant economic catastrophe. More of us should have seen this coming. For decades, Democratic politicians hesitated to alienate donors or imagined middle-of-the-road voters, the mainstream media played the phony both-side-story game, and Republicans purposefully ignored all the warnings. They are responsible for the resultant death and suffering.
The Liar-in-Chief is running for re-election. Now what?
Trump’s willful ignorance, lying, incompetence, megalomania, amorality, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny (there are insufficient words) were all on full display long before he was elected president in 2016. Potential evil is now consequential. His congressionally and judicially enabled power and his failures are killing our family members, friends, and neighbors, and countless unknown fellow humans. But, don’t count on any of that to vanquish him or his congressional enablers in November. Continued Covid-19 deaths, necessary social distancing, and economic devastation could easily discourage the increased voter participation essential for defeat.
Greater voter participation requires a popular movement that demands action on several principles: We don’t have to live this way! We can ensure human rights and respect for one another. Human rights are not contingent. We are owed these rights by virtue of being human. Period.
Ideas, conscious or not, guide action. Two insidious notions of the last four decades, supported to a greater or lesser extent by Republicans and Democrats, led us to this moment:
- Lack of personal responsibility causes poverty and economic insecurity.
- We need to negotiate a balance between ensuring wealth accumulation for the few and the wellbeing of all.
We have lived and died with the decaying fruits of these ideas for generations. The failed response to the pandemic has accelerated the decomposition. The rot is not equally dispersed. Undernourished trees start out unhealthy. The fruits of inequity do not fall to the ground under the same tree.
Do some folks behave irresponsibly? Sure. However, the distribution of the attributes of a decent life–adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and leisure time– are parceled out not by responsible behavior but by relative wealth (often due to fortune of birth).
It does not have to be this way. However, nothing will change until the utter conquest of both Republicans and the ideas they represent.
Democrats–currently, the only viable alternative to empowered Republicans– need to do better to win. We need a new narrative: Personal responsibility means social responsibility. Our government must lead it. Otherwise, it suborns selfishness. The Covid-19 pandemic makes this clear. Ignoring social distancing to pursue personal goals or profit kills other people.
Joe Biden defeated Bernie Sanders in the primaries without an explicit new narrative. However, that is not necessarily predictive of November. Now that his nomination is all but assured, he is leaning toward that new narrative, but he needs to go further. Like Hillary Clinton before him, much of his attractiveness rests on not being Trump and his connection to Barack Obama, who remains popular. That is substantial, but not enough. After all, Obama, who inherited the 2008 Great Recession, was followed by Trump. His election was, at least in part, a result of the inability of multiple Democrat-led administrations to provide a viable answer to the disruptive precariousness of decades of deregulated rapacious winner-take-all capitalism championed by every Republican president since Ronald.
Democrats could have charted a dramatically different course. But they did not. Instead, they tried to temper it with a bit more humanity and empathy. However, that was insufficient because, in their moderation, they reinforced rather than challenged the core Republican idea that fundamental rights are contingent for some of us but automatic for the wealthy.
For example, in an economics speech at Knox College, President Barack Obama made a compelling case for redressing the grossly unfair inequity that has increasingly plagued the United States. However, he added a caveat:
Here in America, we’ve never guaranteed success — that’s not what we do. More than some other countries, we expect people to be self-reliant. Nobody is going to do something for you. We’ve tolerated a little more inequality for the sake of a more dynamic, more adaptable economy. That’s all for the good. But that idea has always been combined with a commitment to equality of opportunity to upward mobility — the idea that no matter how poor you started, if you’re willing to work hard and discipline yourself and defer gratification, you can make it, too. That’s the American idea.
The message from this leading twenty-first century Democrat was that inequality is a least in part a result of lack of self-discipline and the desire for instant gratification. He was talking about poor folks, not entitled lazy rich kids. In essence, his message was that economic wellbeing is not a right, but something to be earned. The underlying assumption was that success comes only as a result of climbing a fixed latter of benefits. That leaves rights subject to negotiated tradeoffs.
We have seen the result in health care with tradeoffs between insurance and drug company profit and full coverage for all that result in high deductibles, unaffordable co-payments, and employment contingent insecurity. We have seen it in the persistent dependence on funding schools through local property taxes that protect the advantages of the already privileged and short-change low wealth communities. We’ve seen it in the refusal to pass living wage laws to protect the profits of large low-wage corporations. We have seen it in timidity to restrict the fossil fuel industry rather than wage war on their release of greenhouse gases.
Rights tradeoffs have been the American idea at least since the 1980s. It was not always so. Responding to organized pressure from labor unions, socialists, and communists, President Roosevelt explicitly challenged the greed of the rich and championed human rights. Democrats won decades of loyalty from working people. Of course, Democrats did not defend or advocate for everyone nor sufficiently challenge prevalent racism. However, they laid the basis for a fundamental idea: Government responsibility to help people should be subservient to wealth assurance.
We need to end the era of extravagant full-course banquets for the few and days-old leftovers– only when they are conveniently available– for the rest of us.
For leading Democrats, the decades after the election of Ronald Reagan were the era of prevarication concerning government responsibility for all people. The 2020 election, amidst a health and economic disaster, is the time to reembrace the federal government’s obligation to ensure everyone’s wellbeing. That is how to win elections and reclaim our humanity.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education and social justice. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arthurcamins