In this diary entitled,
The US is not a civilized country, the devotb noted our failings as a nation: non-universal health care, "legal" discrimination against minorities and the poor, crooked elections, unjustified wars, the rich-poor divide, and growing religious influence in government. I responded there by noting how much better off we are on almost all of those points than we were in 1954.
We have advanced in the past fifty years, of course, and I think we can advance in the next fifty years as well. Below the fold, I sketch out the Case for Hope and a vision of what the next fifty years could offer.
* Health Care.
We know there is a problem and that is the first step to solving one. Republican George W. Bush and his Republican Congress found it necessary to expand Medicare to include some prescription drug coverage. Medicare and Medicaid came under Nixon. If they did not do something, they feared, Democrats would swamp them. Americans don't like being in last place. Business leaders don't like cutting benefits for their employees. Politicians don't like reading about hard case stories in the papers.
Democrats have been far more strident on the issue. States like Vermont and Hawaii have already moved forward to increase coverage while the rest of the nation has lagged. Clinton, Gore, and Kerry all made health care an important priority in their campaigns. The European and Canadian examples are going to keep staring us in the face. Republicans are not going to rule every branch of government for 50 years. The public will eventually say that enough is enough, and when it happens, health care will be expanded.
We may not end up with a single payer national health care system, but fifty years from now, there will be a health care safety net in the United States that covers 98%-99% of the population, instead of 86% as it does today. It may come from an expanded Medicaid system. It may come from employer mandates to provide health care. It may come from some other direction that isn't even on the public radar today. But, it will come.
Drug costs will fade in importance as patents expire on more and more proven and effective drugs. Today, penicillin is cheap; even though in 1950s it was revolutionary. Drugs that first went on the market in 2030 will be available in cheaps generics by then. Big Pharma will seem about as threatening as Big Steel seems today. Cures for AIDS and most forms of cancer will relegate these diseases to the places TB and plague hold today -- not eradicated, but easily cured if diagnosed quickly. Widespread use of anti-heart disease regimes will not end these diseases but will produce a widespread reduction in their impact on society. "Tropical diseases" will cease to affect the middle class of the developing world as increased affluence funds new drugs to wipe out these mass agents of death. Universal access to drugs to prevent malaria and sleeping sickness will grow into the new universal health care debate. More effective birth control systems, which will become commonplace for most teenagers, will take the steam out of the abortion issue, even though it will not end the debate.
Better diagnostics and less invasive techniques for surgery will make surgery that does remain necessary less costly with shorter hospital stays. A significant share of current provider cost increases involve a movement to keep up with a dramatically improving quality of care. But, this won't last forever.
* Race and Immigration.
The concept of race is a moving target and it hasn't stopped moving. Fifty years from today, Hispanic or Asian will be no more meaingful socially than being Irish or German is today. It will have some residual meaning, but it will not be defining social factor that it is today. These are immigrant groups, and history has shown that a couple of generations later, immigrants aren't considered different any more. Half a century from now, I suspect that many immigrants will be coming from Africa and Indonesia, as pressure from Latin America, China and India declines with economic growth.
The black-white divide in the United States runs deeper (just compare intermarriage rates today to see that this is so), but this divide too will grow less intense in half a century. Most black senior citizens today were born into a world were discrimination was legal. Half a century from now, most black senior citizens will remember the affirmative action debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the anti-apartheid movement as the most significant racial issues of their childhoods. Only senior citizens will remember the days when black "firsts" (first General, first post-reconstruction Senator, first Secretary of State, first Supreme Court Justice) are dim memories. I suspect that we may have elected a black President by then. We will not have equality in fifty years. But, the glass ceiling won't be so thick either.
The debate over free trade in goods that has played out over the past few decades, will be replaced by a debate over free trade in services. The industrialized nations will impliment free immigration pacts, as the E.U. already has, and slowly the free immigration net will widen. Immigration laws will not be gone in 2054, but the debate over eliminating them will be a hot issue of the day.
* Electoral transparency.
For all the trepidation we have about abuse of electronic voting machines and voter databased today, half a century from now, these problems will have been overcome. In the long run, however, accuracy is bipartisan. You will be able to cast your vote anywhere in your home state (or perhaps even on a beach in half way across the world). Voter registration as we know it will not exist -- as anyone will be able to register to vote on election day -- if politicians don't make it happen the courts may mandate it. Electronic counts will be accurate and the failsafes absent today will exist then. Politicians will still lie, and mysterious money will still fund deceptive advertisements, but a less centralized post-internet media will be more aggressive in ferreting out those lies.
* Religious influence.
Today, Christians are blowing smoke when they claim to be a persecuted minority. But, small gains in their public presence (over stiff legal restraint even in our current conservative Supreme Court), aren't going to defeat the long term trends. Britain saw church participation among non-immigrants drop by an order of magnitude in a generation. So did France, Sweden and Italy. The United States isn't there yet, but for every jammed exurban megachurch in the United States, there are half a dozen older churches with empty pews. Civic participation in churches is on a long term decline. Many churches are operating on auto-pilot. About 95% of people claim to believe in God, but only 45% do anything about it on a weekly basis.
We are a nation of Christmas and Easter, Santa Clause and Easter Bunny Christians, and those people are increasingly alienated from what Christianity has been in the United States in the past fifty years.
In 2054, current Western world trends will continue and they will be a bona fide minority, although they will be no more persecuted then than they are now. The religious center-left will have drifted into various humanistic and cultural Christian modes and the stigma associated with being atheist will have faded away. The Christians that remain (many of whom will be African immigrants) will be even more conservative than the typical Christians of this decade, and Islam, another significant religious minority, will begin to be as notable in everyday American life as it already is in Germany, France and the Netherlands.
* The Death Penalty and Criminal Justice.
The death penalty will not be gone in 2054, but it will be attunated. The Courts and legislatures will forbid the execution of minors. Every capital defendant will receive quality representation. "Death qualification" of jurors will be forbidden. The death penalty will be reserved for serial killers, contract killers, terrorists, kidnappers and the like, with the kind of murders that happen in routine burglaries and domestic violence incidents relegated to long prison terms. Procedural twists and turns will prevent most people on death row today from being executed. Juries are already returning markedly less death penalties without any changes in the law. The more different a state like Texas gets from what is going on in the rest of the nation, and the rest of the nation is growing more reluctant to use the death penalty, even though more states have it on the books, the more the U.S. Supreme Court will come down hard on it.
Other changes are coming too. New York reduced its draconian Rockefeller Drug laws this year. California came very close to ending its three strikes and your out law at the ballot box this year and is likely to enact compromise modifications of those in this legislative session. The U.S. Supreme Court, the conservative one in place now, is on the verge of invalidating the U.S. Sentencing guidelines, and the replacement will probably be less harsh. Politicians paying the bills for larger prisons are starting to doubt the drug war. Many Western States have passed Medical Marijuana laws. The FDA is approving trials for medical ecstacy and LSD. The propoganda machine can't fight a war on drugs and a war on terrorism at the same time. The drug war is being displaced and good sense is filling the gap.
* The Environment.
After seeing more species devistated by our presence, we will get a grip on the devistation we create. Outside nations which are today totally undeveloped, green house gas emissions will be brought under control. The 20th century age of oil will end, just as the 19th century age of coal and steam did before it. Hybrid drive cars will be the old technology, and most cars will be straight electric. More travel will be by train. Electric power to drive the cars will come increasingly from renewable sources and nuclear power. Pollutants like sulfur and mercury will have been all but eliminated. Buildings will be far better insulated and use electric heat with solar boosted water heating. Drinking water will be incrementally less polluted. The distinctions between organic and conventional farming will begin to vanish as pesticides go out of favor. Some of these changes will be driven by rising oil prices. Others by increased health concerns as the other health threats are conquered.
Of course, there will be other big changes. But, as dark as it seems now, the future will brighten eventually. We're just on a bump in the road at the momement.
