The Great Culling

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[For brief comment on the Biden-Sanders debate Sunday night, click here.]

We Baby Boomers—our generation born between 1946 and 1964—are probably the most self-indulgent and entitled generation of Americans ever. We could be the most self-indulgent and entitled generation in human history.

And why not? Our parents, the so-called “Greatest Generation,” had risen from farm, field and city to help fight and win the most terrible war in human history. Unlike most other combatants, they had returned to a homeland almost completely untouched. They went to work, creating the most prosperous consumer society ever. By the end of the sixties, almost every suburban family had a house, one or more cars, and annual vacations. The post-war American middle class was the largest, richest, happiest middle class in human history, by a country mile.

While all this prosperity was happening, science and education flourished. There was universal respect for science. By inventing nuclear weapons, physics had helped win the Big War and create a Pax Atomica among major powers, now in its 75th year. Medical science eradicated smallpox and most childhood diseases with vaccines; it even eliminated the more fearsome scourge of polio, while or before most Boomers were in their childhood’s vulnerable years.

So we Boomers have enjoyed lives at levels of prosperity and safety—from both major-power wars and disease—unprecedented in human history. We were the darlings of the Generation that had fought and risked everything to make our Good Life possible.

But there’s one big problem with the Good Life. It doesn’t last forever. Inevitably it makes its beneficiaries weak, lazy, selfish and stupid. Then the Good Life gets harder and comes to an end. That’s the message of Athens and Sparta, and that’s why we need constant immigration from countries riddled with hardship to keep up our game.

That process of moral and social degradation is of course happening now. Take higher education, for example. I got an A.B., M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California but emerged with no debt and money in the bank. My payments to the University for my undergraduate education were a mere $100 per semester “incidental fee.” Scholarships and fellowships paid for my books and living expenses. In contrast, today’s kids graduate from mediocre colleges with up to $100,000 in debt. The average is around $30,000, for undergraduate education alone.

The trend started with Reagan. While governor of California, he squeezed state financing for the once-nearly-free University. His apparent motives were lowering taxes and squelching what he saw as a nest of opposition to his right-wing ideology. The trend that he started in California then went national. We stopped funding our own kids’ higher education through taxes.

What kind of people burden their kids, as a whole class, with such economic millstones just as they are beginning their careers? In one generation, under a grade-B former actor’s influence, we went from a far-seeing society to a selfish and stupid one.

Believing it our right and duty to force our culture on the other 95% of humanity, we have fought three totally unnecessary wars in minor powers: Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. To fight these senseless wars after Vietnam, we have created a potentially militant class of soldier-serfs to replace citizens soldiers, just as ancient Rome exploited the Visigoths, who eventually sacked it. We developed transparently inadequate theories, like the Domino Theory in Vietnam, and “if we don’t fight them there, we’ll have to fight them here,” in order to justify these needless, endless wars and the sacrifice they required of a small class among us. (Most of the “elite” and their children managed to dodge the draft in Vietnam. After our transition to an “all-volunteer army,” the task of “defense” fell to people with few other options.)

As for science, what can I say? Ignorant anti-vaxxers, using their right to say anything, however ill-informed and misguided, are busy destroying the herd immunity that medical science and organized public health took decades to build. Measle—measles!—has again become a major threat to children in our cities. We have a president who doesn’t believe in climate science and managed to make four basic errors of fact in an eleven-minute speech about Covid-19.

It’s impossible to imagine our Greatest Generation accepting a leader anything like Trump. A gifted con-man, he knows nothing, respects nothing (but himself) and has the moral sense of a coyote. When you compare him to this nation’s pre-Baby-Boom leaders—FDR, Eisenhower, Marshall, Truman—the comparison makes you want to retch.

Of course there are reasons for Trump’s demagogic success. But they all relate to selfishness. When you have a society built entirely on self-interest and profit, which Reagan gave us with the slogan “It’s your money!", the smarter ones always make selfishness work better for them. The weaker, less informed and less resilient ones end up on the bottom of the heap.

That’s been the way things have worked for nearly all of human history. Our Founders thought they had engineered a society resistant to that basic fact of life. So far, they’ve been wrong. The next election will tell us whether we have any chance of restoring to basic functionality the Republic they thought they gave us.

So far, a class of business people who made profit our moral and national goal have become our oligarchs. They amassed immense wealth by selling our jobs, factories and technology abroad, to nations like China and Mexico, leaving our middle class behind, high and dry.

It’s not as if no one warned us. In 1992, Ross Perot, a corporate leader and budding oligarch himself, described the “sucking sound” to be made by the flood of jobs to Mexico that NAFTA would cause. (Bernie Sanders, among a very small number of senators, voted against NAFTA.) Perot’s third-party bid for the presidency ended the political career of George Herbert Walker Bush, got clueless “triangulator” Bill Clinton into office and put our national decline in high gear.

The most astounding thing is that once our middle classes were smart and practical people. They built, maintained and repaired the machines that made us an industrial powerhouse. They could see through con-men, charlatans and snake-oil salesmen a mile away.

Now they cheer a man who makes minor changes in NAFTA—the very same treaty that started their whole class’ precipitous decline—and declares a false new era. They applaud his doing nothing about our failing infrastructure, whose repair could give skilled workers millions of good, well-paid and non-outsourceable jobs, and instead enacting a $1.5 trillion tax cut that mostly benefits the rich and the oligarchs. They applaud him imposing tariffs on imports that make their lives worse. They allow him to distract them with hate for minorities and immigrants who helped build this country, too, many of whom are in worse shape than they are. They let their representatives excuse using the power of the presidency to extort a foreign power for personal benefit, without even a fair trial.

This is not just a cohort of Americans that fails to see their own economic interest. It fails to see through the most flagrant con-man in American history, maybe since Caesar. It’s nothing like the millions of mid-Western farmers who chuckled at the snake-oil salesman and sent him on his way. It’s a cohort of Americans pampered beyond any class in human history that, on suddenly losing their pampering, became incapable of reacting with more than blind rage.

Covid-19 doesn’t recognize rage. It’s not even intelligent. It invades the respiratory system of anyone in reach, and it has a preference for the aged. It will be the scythe that cuts down the most pampered generation in human history, whose pampering has made them, as a class, extraordinarily self-indulgent and short-sighted.

Of course I’m ambivalent about the virus. I’m in the prime age cohort, too, and I don’t want to catch it, let alone die from it. But when I look at its steady advance from the perspective of intellectual distance, I can see a silver lining in its very dark cloud. By eliminating so many who have spent their lives so pampered that they can’t even see where their own true self-interest lies, let alone others’, it could leave us with a more resilient and cohesive society.

The era of selfishness as a guiding political principle has destroyed our fathers’ and grandfathers’ America. It began nearly forty years ago, in 1981, with Ronald Reagan declaring “It’s your money!,” thereby presumptively delegitimizing tax expenditures for any public purpose. It continued through his deliberate destruction of state funding for higher education in California, which spread nationwide. It perhaps reached its zenith when Rick Santelli, an obscure commodities trader, shouted from his trading floor: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.” That single scream of selfishness killed a housing rescue plan that could have saved many of us from unnecessary foreclosure after the Crash of 2008.

Maybe the pandemic can kill this mindless selfishness as the basis of government policy. Maybe it can restore the operations of government for the “general Welfare,” as our Constitution’s preamble prescribes. If so, it could be a blessing in disguise.

The Biden-Sanders Debate of March 15

The big takeaway from the debate was Biden’s commitment—repeated for emphasis and clarity—to pick a woman for his running mate. Here’s why it should be Elizabeth Warren:

Let’s face it. Democrats have mostly made their choice. They want a “moderate” to go up against Trump this fall. They want Joe Biden.

Joe, with all his decades of experience, will be in charge. He’d be calling the shots. Wouldn’t that be enough for the “moderates”?

But lots of Dems still want someone more progressive, like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders. Biden can secure their votes now by promising to pick her specifically as VP. If he does, he will win over most of the folks who might otherwise stay home on November 3 for lack of enthusiasm. (I hate to say it, but the “moderates” would have no place else to go, unless they prefer a right-wing dictator.)

Nothing Joe do could now would unite the party better: progressives and moderates, males and females.

Sure, he could pull a progressive bait-and-switch, and choose another moderate like Klobuchar or Harris. But that’s just what disappointed progressives have expected from the “Establishment” all along. Think that’ll bring them out to the polls this fall?

Warren is not just a brilliant financial strategist, who understands precisely how our bankers cheat consumers and brought our economy down. She’s also a great “attack dog.” Remember how she leveled Bloomberg? She could do even better with our Patron Saint of Sexual Harassment.

There’s no going back. Joe Biden is practically the Dems’ candidate right now. We are all counting on him, as is the nation and the world. He could show us how the Democratic candidate treats the smartest and most strategic woman ever to run for President, and grooms her for the Big Job. Wasn’t that what someone with supernatural political skill once did for him?

The rest of the debate can be summarized in just a few impressions:

How good it was to see two good, honest men, debating real issues, not lies and impressions, and obviously caring deeply about our country and our people. After watching the mess that Trump has made of his “look at me!” response to the pandemic, the Biden-Sanders debate was balm for the soul.

The two candidates devoted moments to praise and even genuine affection between them. Often they accepted each other’s ideas explicitly. We had gotten so inured to “leadership” in the form of “if I didn’t say it or do it, it doesn’t matter.” After three years of that, this, too, was balm for the soul. Seeing two good men with obvious love for our country and its people recognizing each other’s talents and accomplishments brought tears to my eyes.

Of course each promised to support and campaign for the other if he wins. The promises seemed genuine. The loser in the primaries must fulfill his promise enthusiastically in order to beat Trump’s lies and the Fox propaganda machine.

As for substance, the two men tried to make much of the differences between them. Sanders touted his Medicare for All and all-encompassing Green New Deal, which includes banning further fracking. Biden seemed to sign onto the fracking ban, but possibly not in all respects (maybe only on federal lands).

But the pandemic and its aftermath, which they discussed earlier in the debate, will likely occupy most of the next president’s early time. Things will change, and the urgency of the moment will shift priorities.

Yet the interchange between the two—mostly calm, civil, honest and substantive—made it possible to foresee the vile, incompetent blowhard in the White House being buried in a landslide this November. Biden’s pledge of a female running mate makes that all the more possible. How many women in our land can possibly respect or admire the abysmal excuse for a man and a leader in the White House now, or remotely imagine him as a spouse or a boss?

I remain convinced that Trump won in 2016 because many “swing” voters in key states simply didn’t like Hillary. They took a chance on Trump because they didn’t know him and believed some of his propaganda. But now, after three years, they know enough about him to retch each time they see his face on TV. (I know I do.)

So I think the coming general election will be in large part a character election—a point on which I’ll elaborate soon. With thousands of clips of Trump’s vile character available for attack ads, no one paying attention will be able to ignore it. We have to thank Jim Clyburn of South Carolina for reminding us all what a good man and an empathetic leader with lots of executive experience look like. Thanks, Jim.

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