Fixing America

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

“If we don’t fix this, we will forever be broken.” — Sara Sidner, CNN Journalist, Washington Week Extra, May 28, 2021 [Set timer at 6:18]

America is broken. Tens of millions of us believe that the best-attended and cleanest election in our history was stolen. Millions more believe in paranoid conspiracy fantasies made up out of whole cloth by anonymous story-tellers on the Internet. We are more divided among ourselves than at any time since our Civil War.

Our nation’s dirty little secret is that it has been broken since its Founding. There have always been deep and searing contradictions between our ideals and our practices, our declared principles and our lived reality. Now, for the second time since our Civil War, the pieces are starting to come apart. Why now?

Once our drive for territorial expansion on a seemingly unlimited “new” continent submerged the deep contradictions of our Founding. In the twentieth century, our drive for continued technological and commercial expansion seems to have served the same purpose. Our ideals and myths, rather than our actual practices, captured our own people’s imagination and the world’s.

Yet today, in the twenty-first century, our expansive drive is slowing down. It’s facing the formidable obstacles of an overpopulated planet, oil and gas running out, drought and other climate changes that strongly impact most of our land mass, and the strongest international competition in our history—from China. The brain-drain that fed our pre-eminence for so long is starting to reverse, as highly educated people relocate to China and to Europe, where the Large Hadron Collider sits and the social safety net for the middle class is much stronger.

As we Americans face these challenges, our long-unresolved fundamental contradictions are starting to drag us down. They are corrupting our once-legendary sense of justice, efficiency, effectiveness and self-worth. They are tarnishing our once-strong attraction for our own citizens, foreigners and immigrants alike. The vultures of contradiction between our expressed values—our “exceptionalism”—and our reality are coming home to roost.

Chief among those contradictions is our treatment of Black people. Thomas Jefferson was himself a lifelong slaveholder. He incongruously wrote that “all Men are created equal.” Yet our original Constitution not only validated slavery; it counted each Black slave as three-fifths of a human being. In its infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), our Supreme Court declared the following as a fundamental principle, eighty years after our Independence: that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

We Americans fought our bloodiest and most costly war to rid ourselves of slavery. It was our only war fought nearly entirely on our own territory. Our Fifteenth Amendment, one of the three that our Civil War made possible, also abolished discrimination in voting based on “previous condition of servitude.”

Yet the dominant culture that slavery spawned has persisted for twelve generations of the descendants of slaves, and counting. Throughout all that dismal post-Civil-War history, to the present day, making it hard for Black people to vote has been a key part of that cultural persistence.

The stated justification for slavery was an invented “inferiority” of the darker races. But the real reason was always much simpler and more practical. When our Founders forged a new nation out of what seemed to them a wilderness, there were no steam engines, let alone internal combustion engines. There was no electricity. The now-quaint wooden windmills that had helped move water in Holland had not become common on our undeveloped continent. So almost everything physical that got done in early America got done with the muscle power of men or beasts.

Beasts were and are stronger, but they are less intelligent and adaptable. And so slavery, as a primary social institution, jumped from ancient Rome to what became the United States.

The US was the first nation in human history to be consciously Founded on lofty abstract principles, rather than on the social evolution of one or more particular ethnic groups. Its principles included democracy, equality, and a healthy aversion to monarchy and aristocracy. Yet slavery, which contradicted all three, was the driving economic force of Europeans’ foothold on this strange, new continent and their westward expansion over it. Northern businessmen, too, participated in slavery by financing it, building and selling the ships that ran slaves, providing machinery for slave industries, and shipping and trading the products of slave labor, including tobacco and cotton.

It was Black slaves’ grinding labor, day upon day, that gave our key Founders the leisure to think their great thoughts and to build the nation they incongruously styled a “democracy.” Thomas Jefferson was the author of our Declaration of Independence, and James Madison was the so-called “Father of our Constitution.” Both were Southern slaveholders. Not surprisingly, their successors in Southern states have been assiduous, and mostly successful, in maintaining the undemocratically disproportionate share of national political power that these men had achieved in our Founding documents.

Today, descendants of slaves number a bit more than one-eighth of our population. Of course the relative density of their population varies from place to place. But if you lined up all Americans in a single, very long queue, every eighth one of us, on average, would bear the scars of slavery.

When ancient Roman generals wanted to curb an unruly tribe in their territories, they practiced the “discipline” of “decimation.” They would line up the citizens of a town or village, or the soldiers of a defeated army, and kill every tenth person, just to teach the survivors a lesson. What does it do to a so-called “democratic” society when it systematically oppresses one out of every eight, and has done so for its entire history? We Americans are in the process of finding out.

I don’t like the phrase “systemic racism.” It’s not entirely accurate. The adjective “systemic” is right on the money. For our entire history, systemic and systematic oppression of Black people has been a key part of our national culture, customs and law, as well as a driver of our national economic development. But the noun “racism” implies a touch of animus or purpose, even hate.

That’s not, I think, where we are today. Sure, we have open white supremacists, the Proud Boys, the Ku Klux Klan (which still exists) and a number of other openly racist groups. Then there are the many white people who think—for no particular reason except vast ignorance of history and current events—that Black people have long enjoyed equal treatment and, in modern times, even some undeserved preferences.

Yet groups holding these odd views seem to be a minority of us today, even all taken together. Certainly after the prolonged, videotaped police-murder of George Floyd, and the conviction of his murderer, most of us have some dim idea of how grossly stacked our social, legal and cultural deck is and has been against Black people.

So our main problem isn’t conscious hate or racism, although unconscious bias and stereotyping are endemic among us. It’s the system.

We have a national system that grew organically out of slavery, brutality, white terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan, the Night Riders, massive lynching, the destruction of whole Black communities (like the “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa), voter suppression, and discrimination in housing, education, location, banking, voting and employment, which persists today.

At its best our system has been characterized by neglect of Black people and their plight at every turn. From Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the failure to pass the second Freedman’s Act after the Civil War, through the end of Reconstruction and the recent ghastly Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder [search linked source for “second most”], to the demise of affirmative action in the present day, we have never made a serious, sustained effort, as a nation, to fix that rigged system. We have always tried bits and pieces and then backslid.

And what can we say about the victims? Sure, there were slave rebellions and militant movements like the Black Panthers in the sixties. When Black people have turned violent, they have met with overwhelming force from the majority, and often disproportionately violent reprisals. So our Black people, by and large, have put their faith in our expressed ideals and in the hope of making them real. They have been true, steadfast believers in democracy and justice despite all the evidence of deficiencies in their practice.

As I outlined in an earlier essay [search for first instance of “African-Americans”], I don’t know any large group that, as a whole, has put more faith and trust in our democratic ideals than our Black people. Maybe it’s all they had and all they’ve now got. But as a group, they’ve put as much trust in our Constitution and our egalitarian ideals as they’ve done in the Black Church that has sustained their hope through dismal days. In this sense, our Black people, as a group, may be the most intensely loyal Americans.

So we have this gigantic national problem. We treat one out of eight of us miserably, even though the mistreated may be the ones most persistently loyal to our ideals. We’ve done this throughout our entire history.

Whether or not really “racism” today, the problem is systemic, systematic and deeply entrenched in our customs, law and culture. Yet we, a people renowned for practical problem solving, have steadfastly neglected to solve this problem thoroughly and effectively. For almost two and a half centuries after the Civil War, we’ve failed to fix America.

Not only does this festering problem divide us and hold us back at home. It also impairs our allure abroad. How can we distinguish ourselves from the Chinese, who consciously and deliberately mistreat their Uighur and Tibetan minorities, with the goal of submerging them utterly, expunging their unique cultures, and assimilating them into the Han Chinese majority? How can we refute the Chinese claim that, on this vital question of human rights and equality, we Americans are hypocrites?

As if all this were not enough, we have another similar strike against us. We keep some eleven million Hispanic serfs among us as undocumented workers. They have no human rights in practice, whatever they may have on paper. Why? With a mere phone call to ICE, whether by an employer or a personal enemy, they can be “deported” to countries that they left decades ago, or in some cases have never known. Without some sort of legal status, even if only temporary, they cannot begin to organize to assert whatever human and labor rights they may have on paper. Their employers or their enemies can thwart their every effort simply by having their organizers and ringleaders deported.

So how do we fix this? The problem is not probable solutions: many sensible ones have been proposed.

We can give descendants of slaves reparations, to help bring many or most of them up to the standards of living and education they might have had had they and their ancestors not been subject to systematic oppression and discrimination for four centuries. We can break the filibuster and pass the For the People Act, to strengthen voting rights and reduce the influence of money and oligarchs in politics. We can re-institute affirmative action in education, housing and employment, in order to let the slow accretion of “normal” and equal treatment have its eventual effect. We can, as part of “infrastructure” building, pay special attention to the education, housing and employment of Black people and Hispanic serfs, and their community-building, in order to build the type of infrastructure that will let honest hard work earn its just rewards. We can do more of what President Biden appears to be doing—improving the prospects of victims of unfair treatment by policies favoring working and poor people generally, on the theory that a rising tide raises all boats.

Best of all, we could try all these things at once. Then, as time goes on, we could focus on the solutions that seem to be having the best effects. What we can’t do is continue to neglect the problems that, for centuries, have lain at the root of our national decline and are the sources of our deep divisions today. If left to ooze free, the poisonous soup from this centuries-old fount of oppression will ultimately destroy us.

I don’t mean to equate the oppression of Black people for four centuries and that of our eleven million Hispanic serfs, mostly in recent decades. The former is the central problem of our national history; the latter is more recent and far less severe. The Hispanic-serf problem is important mainly because it confirms a national trend away from democracy and toward ongoing exploitation of minorities. If continued, it could lead us toward a kind of twenty-first-century feudalism, socially reminiscent of the Middle Ages but with better living standards and technology of oppression.

While hardly easy to implement, the fixes we must try are conceptually obvious. If we want to have the kind of democratic, egalitarian society of which our Founders dreamed (but never came close to implementing), we must start to work systematically toward it. The first step is to chip away at our foundations of systemic unfairness and oppression.

All the things that make fixing America so hard in general—our malapportioned Senate, the Electoral College, the filibuster, gerrymandering, and voter suppression—are direct results of our slaveholder-Founders striving to preserve their oppressive but lucrative (for them) economic system. Maybe if we reduce the current systematic unfairness of our society and culture, our society will come to resemble the real democracy of which they hypocritically dreamed. Then maybe, from a more democratic base, we can begin to reform it more systematically.

What is crystal clear is that, if we don’t at least try hard, our democracy, our economic equality and our civil culture will continue to devolve. The gross, systematic inequality that now oppresses one out of eight of us was the ultimate source of our undemocratic governmental structure and of many of our discontents. If we don’t fix it, it will likely be our undoing.

One other thing is important to understand. As much as GOP demagogues try to make it seem so, this is not just a people problem. It’s not a matter of fault or blame. It’s not a question of who’s really a “racist.” Its not a matter of white people being accused of hating when they don’t. It’s not really about people who want to wish away four centuries of ongoing oppression being “canceled.”

It’s just a broken system. It’s a system badly designed at the outset and in some ways, such as the filibuster, getting worse with age. If we Americans are still doers and fixers, we can fix it.

To fix it, we must begin with the legacies and consequences of our original sin of slavery. Slavery and its long shadow are the ultimate reasons we have so much minority rule and so much division among us. To bring back majority rule and heal our deep divisions, we must enfranchise and uplift the people whose ancestors’ enslavement and whose ongoing oppression have made our nation a “democracy” like no other. Only with their help, their hope, their enthusiasm and their legendary patience can we demolish our historical contradictions and realize the promise of our Founders’ then-hypocritical but eternally compelling ideals.

We are all in this together, Black, white, brown, yellow and red. We can fix our system and better resemble the shining city on a hill. Or, like ancient Rome, we can decay further into oligarchy and empire, adding force to China’s argument that no mighty and real democracy can last.

Permalink to this post

Too Many of Us

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

As if the pandemic were not enough, a new source of alarm is running through our American punditocracy. It’s called “population stagnation.”

That’s a demographer’s term. It means that we are not having enough babies to replenish our population, so our population growth is declining. The terms “we” and “our” bear watching here. The pronoun referents matter immensely, but we’ll get to them later.

What sparked the current spate of alarm was the most recent US decennial census. It shows the second-slowest US population growth on record, second only to the low growth rate during the Great Depression.

The phenomenon is not confined to us Americans. It’s a near-global trend, at least in the developed world. It’s advanced in Japan, but it affects Europe and most of the G-20. It’s even happening in China. The only parts of the world that are still growing significantly in population are in the global South: Africa, Latin America, and some parts of southern Asia.

The alarm comes almost entirely from economists focusing on national or regional economies. Developed economies, they say, wax less rich as fewer babies are born and the population gets older. The proportion of young folk in their prime working and child-rearing years declines. So old folks—many retired or infirm—become a larger part of the population. Thus, the reasoning goes, they will have to work longer before retirement, or their standard of living will decline. Some pundits even predict the decline of whole societies, including economic vibrancy and new ideas.

Not only are these predictions based largely on unfounded abstract speculation. They miss the big picture by a mile.

For at least half a century, the big picture of our entire human species has been that there are too many of “us” on our small, finite planet. And here the pronoun “us” is quite concrete: it means every one of the estimated 7.8 billion people on Earth. The fact that there were about a third as many of us when I was a child, a mere 63 years ago, shows just how fast our global human population is exploding.

How are there too many of us? Let me count the ways. First, we are polluting our planet by changing natural substances into pollutants that our planet cannot absorb. In the process, we are exhausting the natural substances that have driven our economic success and so our human population explosion.

Fossil fuels are the most glaring example. Not only is our burning them changing our climate so drastically as to approach—if not already to have passed—a tipping point. Fossil fuels are also very close to running out, leaving us with few energy alternatives and enormous stranded assets if all of us don’t, like Germany, begin energy transformation immediately.

A secondary effect of our use of fossil fuels is almost equally drastic. We have turned much of them into plastics, paints, insecticides, herbicides and other chemicals that don’t occur naturally and that Nature can’t digest. They are creating mammoth trash gyres in the middle of our oceans. They are poisoning our streams, rivers, lakes and seas. They are even polluting our own bodies with toxins and nanoparticles.

Detritus from our plastics and chemicals factories are found everywhere, including our rivers, lakes and deep seas. They are maiming and killing, en masse, the other species with which we share this planet. Yet we depend on those other species for food, clothing, science—the detailed study of our biosphere and our way of life—and our recreation, rest and spiritual renewal.

This last point is a grossly under-appreciated consequence of overpopulation. The great English naturalist David Attenborough has tried to warn us in his alarming late-life documentary film, “A Life on Our Planet.” In it, he documents the rapid disappearance of non-human species and wilderness—to the extent of a probable ongoing mass extinction caused by human activity.

Finally, there is the threat of disease. Biologists and ranchers alike know what happens when you concentrate animals too much, i.e., when they outgrow their habitat. Eventually they experience a population “crash,” whether due to inadequate food supplies, competition for food and territory, or disease spread by overcrowding.

Evolving new disease agents spread more quickly among concentrated populations. So the more densely packed we live, the more pandemics we can expect. And we have a risk factor that no other species on Earth possesses: our rapid and indoor-packed mode of air travel. As I’ve detailed in another essay, we can now travel a thousand times as fast as we could when the Black Plague ravaged the world. So air travel spread Covid-19 among us three orders of magnitude faster. The only thing that saved us was Covid’s relatively low death rate—a bit of plain, dumb luck.

The next time we may not be so lucky. The Black Plague is estimated to have wiped out about a third of Europe’s population. Imagine how a similarly deadly airborne viral plague might affect our global civilization, spread by modern air, sea and land travel. Imagine how our self-image as a species, our sense of personal security, and our civilization would change with a third of us dead or dying, and no one quite knowing who or where might be next. Could democracy, which is on the ropes even today, survive such an onslaught?

Despite our enormous self-conceit, we humans are not immune to the laws of biology. We are part of, and immersed in, the biosphere of our planet. If we ignore its laws, we can expect to suffer the same sort of drastic population decline, or even extinction, that so many other species have suffered, from the dinosaurs on.

So no, pundits and economists, peaceful population decline, let alone slower population growth, is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. In the long run it’s vital to human survival, as long as it happens gradually and in a controlled and expected manner.

The alternative is abrupt, unexpected and catastrophic decline, which we can neither manage nor control. The known causes could be war (including nuclear war), pandemics, famine, or displacements, famine, and/or war caused by climate change.

Accordingly, the most dangerous change in human governance over the last decade was not the election of Donald Trump, nor Xi Jinping’s making himself China’s latest emperor, nor Vladimir Putin’s anointing himself Russia’s latest tsar. It was Xi’s China abandoning its tough but necessary one-child policy, which had been primarily responsible for China’s meteoric economic rise in the first place.

Which brings us to our postponed question: the meaning of “we” and “us.” In a well-intentioned but grossly misguided op-ed piece, Farhad Manjoo used population stagnation as a reason for advocating increased immigration into the United States. His essay focused on the US, thus limiting the scope of “us” to Americans. But his introduction, like many other cursory reviews of population stagnation, paints the whole phenomenon with alarm, just as the most myopic economists do.

I hasten to add that I agree entirely with Manjoo’s conclusion. We do need more immigration into the United States—a point I have argued vehemently myself, for different reasons. But the reasons have nothing to do with population growth or decline. Immigration revitalizes and strengthens our American society by bringing good people—strong, resilient people, with the gumption to relocate despite the risks—to us from somewhere else. But it has no net immediate effect on global population.

In fact, in the intermediate and long term, immigration into America actually decreases global population growth. It’s well-known (and a cause of the phenomenon of population stagnation itself) that birth rates decline rapidly with increasing standards of living. So immigrants to America, who generally increase their standard of living significantly within a single generation after arriving, are likely to have fewer babies here than if they had remained in their relatively impoverished countries of origin. Thus, immigration to “us” likely restrains global population growth eventually.

But Manjoo’s reliance on population stagnation as a rationale for increasing US immigration is as bogus as economists’ insistence that our women (or maybe all women) should have more babies. The notion that an aging society inevitably declines absent population increase is simplistic, mechanistic and ultimately illogical. Here are four reasons why.

First, the quality of life matters more than its quantity. This is so even for life that you eat. That’s why fine diners and fine restaurants buy pasture-raised meat, rather than the products of antibiotic-overusing and superbug-producing factory farms. The same principle applies to “higher” forms of life like us. Who would want to live in a teeming ghetto or slum if he could live in a sparsely populated suburb or on a spacious, bucolic farm?

Maintaining the same or an increasing proportion of youth as human longevity increases requires a corresponding increase in total population. That’s just arithmetic. On a planet with limited resources—now declining due to exhaustion and climate change—increasing population means more people have to live with less, for example, in teeming slums or in a struggle for survival like that in parched Darfur or maimed Syria today.

Second, the notion (raised by Manjoo) that more people means more good ideas is contrary to history and common sense. Plato, Socrates and the ancient Greeks worked out the fundamentals of civic virtue, democracy and justice millennia ago in sparsely populated Greek city-states. We haven’t improved much on their ideas since—certainly not with our malapportioned American Senate or its filibuster.

Among the greatest thinkers in human history were Isaac Newton (who co-invented the calculus and with it modern astronomy), Adam Smith (who invented analytical economics and market theory), and Charles Darwin (who explained evolution by natural selection and thus founded modern biology). All came from the “upper classes” in Britain, with spacious homes or noble estates. In fact, Newton escaped the Plague in London by moving to his family’s country estate. Has any thinker of comparable stature ever come from a teeming city? Even Albert Einstein fled Nazifying Germany to come to America, where he had more Lebensraum, both in thinking and in living.

Third, increasing population density leads to increasing distraction, interruption and delusion—hardly recipes for deep, clear or original thinking. Our Internet—the most powerful means of human communication ever invented—allows 2.85 billion people, at least in theory, to talk among themselves, individually or in arbitrary groups. (Facebook alone has that many regular users.)

What’s been the result? Donald Trump was President, a near-majority of Americans accepted his “Big Lie” of a stolen election, innumerable Americans have accepted bizarre and irrational conspiracy theories, and the moron-dictator (aka President) of the world’s most populous Latin nation speculated on air that a Covid vaccine might turn its recipients into crocodiles.

Perhaps Manjoo is right that a bigger population produces more ideas. He never wrote (although he implied) that they would be good ideas. Valuing quantity over quality is no better for ideas than for life itself.

Finally, consider the labor-balance theory of aging. It holds that you need more youth to support the aged. But it ignores the impacts of automation, increasing productivity, and existing wealth.

In our mid-seventies, my wife and I bought an automated vacuum cleaner to do our floors. Computers, cell-phones and the Internet keep us in better touch with our doctors, pharmacists, other health-care providers and ever-improving medical science than we could have done (or did) at any time during the last century. Increasing wealth, increasing retirement security and better social organization allow us, despite our declining physical condition, to live lives of comfort and ease that would have been impossible, even for the rich, only half a century ago. We don’t need or have servants or personal nurses, although occasionally we employ contractors, including some to clean our home. And as we age, we use fewer resources, eat less food and get much of our entertainment (and much our social contact) electronically.

At the end of the day, the notion that every aged person requires the support of so many young people is nineteenth-century thinking. It’s why my great-grandparents—but not subsequent generations—had five or more siblings.

Today that sort of family is rare in America, apart from the Amy Coney Barretts among us. Better and more productive agriculture, modern medical and other science, more equitable distribution of wealth, better social organization and a better social safety net for workers and retirees have rendered large families economically unnecessary, if not obsolete.

That’s why birth rates have been falling, worldwide, along with social and economic development. At least in developed nations, a stable or declining population is living richer and better lives than before under conditions of modern social, technological and economic development.

The goal of economic and social policy ought to be to continue that trend. Ultimately, we ought to want our species to be fewer in number, each enjoying a better, richer, safer, healthier and more interesting life. Ultimately, we ought to want to avoid the stress and calamity, in every species biologists have studied, that come with overpopulation and exhaustion and pollution of habitat. (I leave aside for now the notion of emigration to other planets. If our species survives, that eventually may happen. But mass migration to Mars or another planet is highly unlikely to come quickly enough to serve as a relief valve for overpopulation on Earth, let alone to retard global warming.)

The biblical command to “go forth and multiply” was appropriate two millennia ago, when the world was young and we humans were few. Today, it’s an invitation to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, plague and death. We are the only species on Earth equipped with the brainpower and foresight to avoid those Horsemen, by the simple expedient of consciously controlling our population to match the availability of space and resources (including other species) on our small planet.

Dismal scientists, pols and pundits who advocate doing the opposite—merely for short-term, localized, abstractly hypothesized advantage—ought to be ashamed of themselves, both as scientists and as human beings. Malthus still stalks us all, and quantitative economics confirms how right, if a bit premature, his fundamental vision was. The last thing our species needs is a nationalistic race to see which tribe can grow the fastest.

Permalink to this post