“Pigs at the Trough”

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Back in the mid-seventies, I had a law professor named Arthur Miller (no, not the playwright who married Marilyn Monroe; a different guy). He taught a dry subject, civil procedure, but he did it with skill and gusto. He had a knack for using just the right words and phrases.

Every once in a while, Professor Miller would speak of “pigs at the trough.” He didn’t use the phrase often. But when he did, it evoked general laughter.

The laughter reflected sudden, shocked recognition of conduct that had no possible explanation but extreme greed and selfishness. Nearly all of the 150-some students in the class shared it, seeing right through the conduct under discussion.

That was a more innocent time. It was years before Ronald Reagan, under the banner of “It’s your money,” delegitimized virtually every expenditure of tax revenues for a public purpose, including low-cost higher education. It was years before Reagan described the very government he was supposed to be running as “not the solution . . . [but] the problem.” It was over a decade before that “principle”, if you can call it that, became Republicans’ distinctive bit of dogma.

The intervening years have transformed our society, and not for the better. Few law students would laugh easily at Professor Miller’s phrase today because it describes too many of us. The laughter would be guilty, self-conscious and constrained. But before we get to that depressing reality, let’s analyze just how breathtaking the intervening transformation has been.

I started writing about incompetence in America over fifteen years ago, comparing our collective reaction to 9/11 with our response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor almost 60 years before. Not only did we start two totally gratuitous and unnecessary wars—which became military stalemates, and which are still ongoing after having become the two longest wars in our history—to do what President Obama later did with two helicopters and a team of Navy Seals. We also prosecuted those needless wars with spectacular incompetence, under the so-called “leadership” of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

A few years later, we let a whole city drown, in Hurricane Katrina, despite decades of experts’ increasingly strident and futile warnings. Our media, obsessed with profits, began taking entertainment and gossip for news. A basketball coach (yes, really!) became CEO of WorldCom, a meteorically rising telecommunications firm that crashed in flames due to fraud, and Rick Wagoner, a finance guy, drove our chief car company, GM, so far into the ground that our “problem” government had to bail it out to the tune of $11.2 billion after the Crash of 2008.

Then there was the Crash 2008 itself. It was yet another example of breathtaking incompetence, on the part of both the bankers who caused it and the federal agencies that failed to do their jobs and regulate them.

Even just after the Crash, it was self-evident that the United States that had beat the Great Depression and helped beat back the Nazis’ and Imperial Japanese aggression was no longer the same competent “can do” nation that had invented the Marshall Plan, the UN, the GATT, the WTO, Moon landings and the Internet. Today our video media have forsaken news for entertainment and profit almost entirely. They now broadcast live the president’s hours-long daily rants, whose only “news” is gaffes, spectacular mistakes and retractions. (Has anyone thought to compare our supreme leader’s hours-long rants to those of Fidel Castro at the height of his power?)

Our response to today’s pandemic is just part of the trend. Our vaunted CDC and FDA refused to authorize external active-virus testing, forcing our state and local health authorities to beg for tests from China and Europe even months later. Then, for antibody testing, the CDC and FDA opened the floodgates to some ninety sources, without any verification whatsoever. Many of them supplied inaccurate or even fraudulent tests. We also neglected to replenish our “strategic” stockpile of masks after the last pandemic and left it partially filled with equipment that had long expired. What kind of competent leaders do this?

It’s tempting to blame it all on Trump, who seems to combine all the vices of Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Commodus in one person. But the trend long predated him. He’s more a symptom than the cause—perhaps the death rattle of our society’s once-vaunted competence.

So what happened? Did we have a society-wide, decades-long attack of stupid?

Not exactly. Our system of higher education is still the envy of our species, although China and Europe are hot on our heels. In the interim we invented (or co-invented) personal computers, CAT scans, MRI imaging, the Internet, smart phones, gene sequencing, gene splicing and gene editing (CRISPR/Cas9). We still know how to develop incredibly useful stuff and give it to the world, even (like the Internet) for free.

To get a handle on what ails us, a good place to start is a recent New Yorker piece on the pandemic and our globalized financial system. It’s one of the most maddening and depressing stories I’ve read in years. It begins with the tale of a young Australian who made billions playing Wall Street’s financial casinos. He’s now riding out the pandemic on a huge private ranch back in his native Australia, threatening (we hope in jest!) to kill the few other people in his remote valley if need be to survive.

It would be hard to imagine a better illustration of the deep pathology of, and cynicism among, our current global oligarchy and its many “nouveau riche” than this one man and his history.

No doubt he’s a smart, clever “quant.” In my day, he might have been my fellow student in a postgraduate class in physics. Like most of us in that class, he might have dreamed of using science to make the world safe for democracy, to provide limitless carbon-free energy, or to better diagnose illness with those selfsame CAT scanners and MRI machines. Now he’s an uber-selfish recluse who made a quick killing in our financial casinos and has no higher goal than to save himself and (if possible) even increase his easy-gotten gains.

Lest you think this man is unique, the rest of the fulsome article identifies several others and describes their similar financial shenanigans. Then, to confirm the depths of our national pathology, pick up a recent New York Times, business section. Read how the big restaurant chains, which are now gobbling up the pandemic bailouts meant for small businesses, spent the decade since the Crash paying their shareholders off with stock buybacks, instead of preparing for a rainy day. Read how the finance guys (they are nearly all guys) are now using the pandemic as an excuse to recover billions in unequal tax breaks that had been restricted for good reason after the Crash. Then hear or read how Mitch McConnell, the single legislator most responsible for broadening and deepening the trough and inviting more pigs in, “shed his first wife and announced to friends . . . a plan, . . . to find a rich wife.”

Just in case you haven’t yet gotten the point, pick up a report on the appalling scarcity of testing for Covid-19, after over two months, which contains this gem:

“It has proved hard to increase production of reagents [for testing] partly because of federal regulations intended to ensure safety and partly because manufacturers, who usually produce them in small batches, have been reluctant to invest in new capacity without assurance that the surge in demand will be sustained.”

In other words, we don’t have enough raw materials to do the testing that is vital both to “bending the curve“ of sickness, misery and death and to opening up our depression-bound economy because the pigs at the trough haven’t been guaranteed enough slops. Has anyone ever heard of the Defense Production Act, which would, if we had a normal president, let him commandeer the needed production facilities and get them rolling on three shifts a day?

An ancient Greek playwright inventing fiction to illustrate how a universal failure of “virtue” can lead to society-wide collapse would have had trouble even imagining all this. But it’s our inescapable fate. It’s our modern reality.

We still have no lack of brains and ingenuity. We’ve just built a society in which most of our best and our brightest dream of becoming successful pigs at the trough via the shortest route possible. Most of the time, that route involves utterly nonproductive financial speculation, in Wall Street’s ever-open casinos. Both the legal rules we set and our social structure encourage this breathtaking misallocation of “human capital.”

The irony is that most of our Founders were also wealthy men of their time. Many had lives of leisure made possible by their slaves. But, at the same time, they were self-conscious social engineers. They used their careful study of history and law (there wasn’t much real science back then), which their slavery-enhanced leisure made possible, to design a supposedly corruption-proof society, with a balance of powers and checks and balances.

Today their project appears to have failed. The most obvious reason is the compromise they made with an agrarian, aristocratic, slave-holding South, which now gives us minoritarian government with McConnell mostly in charge. The less obvious reason is that we, as a people, have lost sight of the lofty goals our Founders set, while many of the smartest and even the hardest-working of us just seek their own places at the trough.

Don’t look for a national epiphany in the pandemic. The New Yorker article will quickly disabuse you of that, as will the many companies (some ninety in all!) now selling jury-rigged and even consciously fraudulent antibody tests. As for our “elite,” most have retreated to their summer or other second homes, while the 0.1% repair to their yachts or huge, inaccessible ranches, leaving the rest of us to face the pandemic with a broken and nearly broke government.

It will take far more than a 2% death rate to shoo the pigs away from the trough. We will have to convert our oligarchs, many of whom are smart, hard-working and capable, into belated social benefactors like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. At very least, we will have to create a critical mass of oligarchs with goals beyond the trough in mind. Some models might include the late Steve Jobs, with his dream of easy-to-use computer devices for Everyman, Jeff Bezos, with his relentless focus on a better customer experience, or Elon Musk, with his obsession with carbon-neutral cars and trucks and his dream of a partial, permanent exodus from our warming planet before we completely destroy it.

The problem is not the capacity of our collective brains or our educational system, which is declining only slowly, under the relentless pressure of economic inequality. It’s a systemic moral failure—the transformation of a culture of highly evolved empathetic apes into a nation of pigs at the trough.

Religion once provided some moral guidance, despite its incessant intolerance and brutal wars of conquest. But now it no longer helps. People are leaving organized religion in droves. The exodus is not without reason: much of religion now teaches intolerance, dogmatism, and war, or excuses pedophilia, rather than effectively propagating the empathy, selflessness and cooperation that are our species’ chief evolutionary advantages, and that once were foundations of every religion.

David Brooks seeks redemption in small, self-governing communities. That’s an easy but inadequate fix. We evolved in clans of about thirty or fewer individuals. So generosity in and cooperation with like-sized neighborhoods come easy to us. As a result, we have many heartwarming stories of empathy and helping hands at the local level. The trick is maintaining that same useful moral tone in today’s huge nation-states of hundreds of millions of individuals, let alone an increasingly interdependent globe with seven billion inhabitants. That’s what we may have to do not just to defeat this pandemic, but to address the far more dangerous threats of global warming and nuclear proliferation.

Stalin once said that a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are but a statistic. Many revile him for that statement, taking it as a presumed moral or political teaching. But what if it’s just a statement of fact? What if it accurately captures the inability of most of us to expand empathy and cooperation to the gigantic scale on which our global society now operates?

There are exceptions, of course. Lincoln, FDR, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela managed to make empathetic leaps from community to nation and beyond. Enlightened oligarchs like John D. Rockefeller, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros did so, too, but only after eating their fill at the trough.

For the vast majority of us, extrapolating empathy and real cooperation to a national or global scale may be a conceptual bridge too far. What we require, and what we self-evidently lack, is an individual sense of obligation and responsibility to our species as a whole.

The traditional means for recognizing and actualizing our global obligation and responsibility has been government. Weak as they have been at times, our obligation and responsibility will not return to life, at least in the United States, until we reject decisively the “government is the problem” nonsense that the GOP has been hawking for forty years.

If we just used the Defense Production Act in this emergency as the Congress that passed it intended, we would be at most a month or two away from resolving the critical shortage of both active-virus and antibody tests. We can’t come close to meeting that schedule now because we’re still waiting for the pigs to figure out whether and how cooperation in testing can put their snouts in the trough.

History does not augur well for the epiphany we need. In all of recorded human history, there has been only one other society with the economic dynamism and inventiveness of the United States, but which was also founded on the notion of free and independent citizens who are somehow endowed with real social and economic power. Ancient Rome at its height was the only other enduring society to use the word “citizen,” rather than “subject,” and to make the world around it respect that choice and all it implies.

When Rome fell, the result was a millennium of dogmatic religious authority amidst a mad and bloody free-for-all to build the next phalanx of empires. Until political correctness prevailed among historians, we used to call this period the “Dark Ages.” But whatever you call it, just about a millennium actually passed before the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment brought new ideas into play, including the rudiments of modern democracy, science and the scientific method.

Science is probably here to stay. It’s too useful in fighting wars and pandemics, in curing disease, and inventing useful gadgets for any emperor with more intelligence than Trump’s (a very low bar) to forsake. China’s Xi, for example, is jumping into science with both feet, in part because it’s so useful in surveilling, propagandizing and controlling his people.

But the very notion of a delicate balance between individual autonomy and societal cohesion has been a rarity in human history. To see how rare it is today, just recite the names of the increasingly authoritarian and intolerant leaders around the world: Abe, Bolsonaro, El-Sisi, Erdoğan, Kim (if still alive), Modi, Orban, Putin, bin Salman, Trump, and Xi.

Sparks of the Enlightenment remain in Europe, in England, France and (most of all) in Angela Merkel’s Germany. They flicker even in Ireland, Italy, Spain and Greece. There are dying sparks in Latin America. But the guttering flame here in the United States depends for life both on whether we will have an election in November and, if so, its outcome. If either fails, the trough for the pigs will grow much larger. It could become our global society’s dominant feature for as far as the eye can see.

Endnote: A Happier Ending? Buried in the back of this week’s New York Times Sunday Review is a must-read economic piece by economist Gene B. Sperling. It just might augur a happier future. Beginning with Dr. King’s core insight, Sperling describes our crying need for every worker to receive a living wage, health care, child care, leave for parenting, family care and bereavement, and working conditions conducive to good health. He also notes the nearly unanimous “no, never!” response of today’s Republican pols.

That party-wide negation is, of course, part of our national pigs-at-the-trough phenomenon. It rests on the assumption that giving workers at the bottom decent pay and benefits would somehow deprive the rest of us of our “due.” But is that really so?

Sperling reflects on a $20-per-hour wage ($40,000 per year) as a reasonable minimum for worker health and satisfaction. As I recently noted [search for “Bezos”], increasing Amazon warehouse workers’ pay from $15 to $20 per hour would raise the cost of an average Amazon box only 40 cents, if each worker packed an average of at least 100 boxes in a eight-hour day. (That would be 4.8 minutes per box, a steady but not impossible pace.) Does anyone seriously think that 40 cents more per package would kill Amazon’s business, or crush the satisfaction of its millions of customers, including me?

For far too long, the pigs at the trough have convinced us—without proof or evidence—that treating all of our workers decently would hurt the rest of us, leading to job losses or radically higher prices. Sperling debunks the job loss bit, writing (with his own linked sources), as follows:

“Conservatives, and some traditional economic analyses, claim that a living wage would lead to job loss, but that has been repeatedly contradicted by empirical evidence—including a recent analysis of 138 state minimum-wage increases.”

But maybe citations to expert studies are not enough for the doubters. Maybe economists need to calculate the average percentage of prices that low-pay labor accounts for in industries like restaurants, hotels, and hospitals. Suppose it’s 15%. Then raising wages by 50%, for example, from $15 per hour to $22.50, would raise prices, on average, by only 7.5%. That would hardly cause an economic apocalypse.

In the final analysis, the struggle to treat all workers fairly and humanely is not really about economic proof. It’s a matter of mindset. The pigs-at-the-trough mindset says: “It cannot be, ’cause it might hurt me!” The traditional American mindset says, “Let’s try it and see what happens; if it works, it would make a whole lot of mostly desperate fellow Americans much better off. Who knows? It might even save us from revolution, civil war, or dissolution!” The contrast between these two mindsets is why I have a really hard time thinking of modern Republicans as “conservatives.”

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