Our Last Chance

This is our last chance. This election, in 55 days. It will determine not just our future, but whether we have one. At the moment, our nation is visibly suffering the most precipitous decline of any great power in human history. We are on track to shorten the time scale of ancient Rome’s fall by a factor of ten. And there appears to be no bottom.

The causes of our decline are easy to see. In order of importance, they are: (1) internal division, deliberately fostered and magnified as a political ploy; (2) incompetent, unserious and self-obsessed leadership; and (3) an obsession with personal wealth without regard to how it’s made or what it’s used for. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Division. Our national motto “E pluribus unum” appears on every dollar bill. It’s Latin for “From many, one.” Originally, it referred to the union of our original Thirteen Colonies into one United States. But today it has a much deeper meaning.

Except for our Native Americans, every single US citizen or resident came, or has ancestors who came, from elsewhere. And if you believe the “land bridge” theory of Native Americans’ origin, there is no exception: this point is universally true.

So what does this mean? We are a nation of movers and seekers. We all come from people with the initiative, daring, courage and persistence to build a new life in a new place, under new rules. Our forbears founded that nation on principles of equality and tolerance (though we needed our still most brutal and deadly war to extend those principles to Black slaves).

Our current leader now wants to slam the door shut. He seeks support for slamming it by insulting and demonizing all the prior immigrants, especially those just getting established. He lies about our neighbors, calling them mostly violent criminals when only a tiny percentage are (and often NOT the ones he deports). He even makes the ridiculous charge that some ate eating pets.

In so many ways, he pushes us to hate our neighbors. Is that what Jesus advised?

Every day, with insults and lies, he tears at the fabric of our society and undermines our national origin, in the process flouting the teachings of every organized religion. And he also contradicts the teachings of modern science: that all our human DNA is 99.9% identical.

If he were just one man, that would be bad enough. But he’s backed up by a dedicated media universe that, for various self-seeking reasons, amplifies his hate and defamation incessantly and nationwide. Every day, it spreads lies and hate over the Internet, on cable and streaming TV, and into the cockpits of moving cars and trucks through radio. A more effective system to propagate the anti-Christ would be hard to conceive.

2. Incompetence and self-obsession. Our presidents have been an odd bunch. In a nation (once) founded on equal opportunity and competence, they have come from impressively diverse backgrounds.

Our military-general presidents helped expand our territory and our principles while authoring our “Indian” genocide (Jackson), winning our Civil War (Grant), and winning the most horrible war in human history (Eisenhower). Our civilian reformers suppressed our first wave of oligarchs and passed the antitrust laws (Teddy), recovered from the Great Depression and established a baseline for social support, including Social Security (FDR), and strengthened that social support while unfortunately waging our most misguided and catastrophically losing war (LBJ).

But up to now, we have never had a president so obsessed with own image, his personal wealth and his family. The only one who comes even close was Harding, with his infamous “Teapot Dome” self-dealing scandal.

What’s worse, we’ve never had a president so self-evidently lacking in basic reasoning power, or (with the possible exception of Biden in his last year in office) so obviously suffering from senile dementia. And we have never, ever had another president who threatened lawsuits against his college and independent testing companies to keep them from disclosing his college grades or test scores.

Trump’s modus operandi is now clear from endless repetition. He creates an “Executive Order” to do or forbid something. He sits at his desk, signs it for the TV cameras with his spiky signature, and explains in a few shaky sentences (often profane or insulting) what it’s supposed to do. Then he uses his presumed executive power to implement it, without regard to whether it complies with the Constitution or our laws. He leaves all those “details” to his feckless subordinates, the opposition, his lawyers and the courts.

Does this dismal picture in any way resemble the functioning of a constitutional democracy?

This is as close to one-man rule as we have ever come. And it happens nearly every single day, if not every week. In the process, Trump relies on his son-in-law and cronies, who have never been elected or duly lawfully appointed to public office, as emissaries for missions as important as avoiding nuclear war with Russia, settling our improvident and so-far losing war with Iran, and stabilizing our relationship with a rogue and lawless Israel.

This kingly approach to governing our supposed democracy would be bad enough if it were competent and produced results. But it is not and does not. Why? Because the people who carry out his orders were chosen for all the wrong reasons: abject loyalty, sycophancy and good looks. Our Secdef Hegseth is the worst offender: a mere major in a job for four-star generals (e.g., Powell and Austin) in which a misguided civilian (MacNamara) brought us our most catastrophically losing war ever (Vietnam).

3. Personal wealth obsession. There is nothing wrong with wealth per se. Great-power status usually comes with wealth because a great economy both requires and produces wealth. It takes wealth to keep the people satisfied, maintain a strong military and project international influence.

But it matters how wealth is made. In the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, most of our wealth (apart from oil) came from scientific and engineering innovation. Among other things, we Americans either invented or co-invented all of the following: the electric light, sound recording (the “Victrola” or record player), the telephone, television, digital computers, airplanes, high-altitude (pressurized) flight, lunar landers, CAT scans, MRI machines, statin drugs and several modern antibiotics.

But can you think of any major innovation, of the same or similar order of importance, that we’ve invented in the last decade? The only ones I can think of are in the field of medicine: mRNA vaccines, GLP-1 receptor agonists (fat-inhibiting drugs) and the Moderna anti-melanoma-mestastasis vaccine that just had a successful clinical trial. I can’t think of anything else in a general field of science or engineering (again, apart from biology and medicine) with anywhere near the commercial and economic potential of any invention in the preceding paragraph.

Why is this? There are two reasons. First, the price of higher education has risen to the point of: (1) making it difficult to survive and raise a family on a career in science or engineering; and (2) forcing most college grads to limit their career choices to law, medicine, business and finance in order to have a comfortable life.

In contrast, my college education at the University of California, Berkeley (then and now the nation’s premiere public university) required no tuition at all (for California residents), only an “incidental fee” of $100 per semester. So it cost me $800, apart from room and board, for an excellent, four-year education. With the help of scholarships and fellowships, l later graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at San Diego with no debt and money in the bank. Try that today, and unless your family is wealthy you will end up mired in debt.

The second reason for our precipitous decline in STEM (outside of biology and medicine) is more subtle and more irreversible. The last two generations have seen an explosion of business schools as an alternative to traditional post-graduate education. We now have between 1,600 and 2,000 of them in our country.

What do business schools teach? First, they teach the gospel of profit, contradicting the dictates of virtually every organized religion. Second, they ignore and supplant virtually every traditional field of science and engineering except stuff like spreadsheeting and computer science. Finally, and more fundamentally, they distract students from the basics of human knowledge into ways of getting rich. The excesses of corporate acquisitions, our stampede-like overinvestment in AI, and the depredations of private equity upon nursing homes, rural hospitals, and now children’s sports are all direct consequences of this shift from discovering new learning and making new stuff to making money by any clever gimmick that seems promising.

4. What’s the cure? As this discussion shows, Trump’s presidency and our current precipitous decline are just symptoms of a much larger, longer-lasting, more serious disease. They’re products of a generations-long national decline.

It all began with Ronald Reagan. With his inimitable Irish charm and undeniable oratorical skill, he taught us that greed is good (“It’s your money!”) and that government (the means by which we coexist and form a workable, rational society) is not just invariably incompetent, but bad. And it was Ronald Reagan and his party who made that a self-fulfilling prophecy by marginalizing government, and then appointing and electing incompetent and hostile people to staff it whenever they could.

Trump is just a product of this trend, which has been going on now for at least two generations. We’re not going to turn it around overnight. It’s going to take at least a full generation, and the burden is going to fall hardest on the generation just coming of age now. That means everyone of college age now, whether or not still being educated.

Fortunately, the cure is simple, at least in principle. For two generations, one party has inveighed against, campaigned against, and worked against government in all its forms. It has never concealed its desire to replace government with private power and private capital, even yearning to “drown [government] in a bathtub.”

And with the aid of those myriad B-schools and a like-minded media universe, the party has succeeded in making private capital the overwhelmingly dominant force in our nation. This is the force responsible for the plastic spoons in our brains, for the near-insolvency of Medicare and Medicaid, for runaway global warming, for the epidemic of salty, fatty, artificial foods that are causing maladies unknown to the primitive world, for making our latest war with a third-world supply of drones, and for fomenting hatreds among different people wherever possible.

If you don’t like this trend (and you shouldn’t!), your solution is simple. Register to vote if you aren’t already registered. Vote in every election, especially in the upcoming midterm election, where the typical 40% turnout of eligible voters will enhance your relative power. And for every single partisan position on your ballot, vote for the Democrat and against the Republican.

Don’t worry about details. Don’t miss the big picture. The GOP has given us the worst, most vile and incompetent president in our history. It has supported him consistently and reflexively through countless counterproductive and costly moves, just because he’s for private capital and against effective government.

Republicans will continue to do this until our democracy has become an oligarchy of wealth. Then they will line up behind the wealthiest oligarch (a future Elon Musk) and genuflect.

Don’t listen to the quibbles about Crockett, El-Sayed, Mamdani or Jayapal, even if they make some mistakes and say some improvident things. For two reasons, they deserve your vote notwithstanding. First and foremost, they are Democrats and will support rational government against unrestrained private wealth.

Second, because they are members of minority groups, they will encourage members of the same groups not to despair, but to work with others to save our government and our democracy. From our Civil War, through the flight of European nuclear physicists from Nazism, to the more recent diasporas of Vietnamese, Hong-Kong-ers, Afghanis, Jamaicans and Haitians, we have built our nation on the strong backs of good people seeking better lives under better government. To ignore them when they try to improve our nation by doing the hard work of politics and government would be to forsake our national heritage.

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. There is no room for quibbling or nuance. If we do not save our government from the likes of Elon Musk, the oligarchs, the tech bros and their capo Trump, our democracy and our Constitution will become historical relics. Two years from now will be far too late.