America’s struggle to deal with its domestic clutter

It’s not easy to diagnose what drives a disease so deeply rooted in America that it sparked the Trump movement. Is it the continuing culture war that divides America by race, religion, and ideology? Is this a rise in wealth and power inequalities to unprecedented levels? Is it America’s declining global power, the rise of China and the repeated disasters of US-led wars of choice causing national anguish, despair and confusion?

All these factors are at work in America’s turbulent politics. Yet, in my view, the deepest crisis is political—the failure of America’s political institutions to “promote the general welfare,” as the US Constitution has promised. Over the past four decades, America’s politics has become an inside game in favor of the super-rich and the corporate lobby at the expense of the overwhelming majority of citizens.

Warren Buffett looked at the essence of the crisis in 2006. “The class is war, right,” he said, “but it is my class, the rich class, that is waging war, and we are winning.”

The main battlefield is in Washington, DC. Shock soldiers are the corporate lobbyists who swarm the US Congress, federal departments, and administrative agencies. The ammunition is billions of dollars spent annually on federal lobbying (estimated $3.5 billion in 2020) and campaign contributions (estimated $14.4 billion in 2020 federal elections). The pro-class campaigners are the corporate media, led by mega-billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

About 2,500 years ago, Aristotle famously observed that good government could turn into bad government through a faulty constitutional system. Republics, governed by the rule of law, may descend into the tyranny of populist mob rule, or aristocratic rule by a small and corrupt class, or individual, one-man rule. America faces such potential disasters unless the political system dissociates itself from the rampant corruption of corporate lobbying and campaign funding by the wealthy.

America’s class war on the poor is not new, but it was seriously started in the early 1970s and implemented with brutal efficiency over the past 40 years. For roughly three decades, from the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to the Kennedy-Johnson period of 1961–68 in the midst of the Great Depression, the US was generally on a development path similar to that of Western Europe, becoming a social democracy. went. Income inequality was narrowing, and more social groups, especially African-Americans and women, were joining the mainstream of economic and political life.

Then came the revenge of the rich. In 1971, Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, devised a strategy to reverse social democratic tendencies toward stronger environmental regulation, worker rights, and fair taxation. Big business will fight back. President Richard Nixon nominated Powell to the US Supreme Court in 1971, and he was sworn in early the next year, enabling him to implement his plan.

Under Powell’s behest, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for corporate money in politics. In Buckley v. Velio (1976), the court struck down federal limits on campaign spending by candidates and independent groups as a violation of free speech. In First National Bank of Boston v Belotti (1978), Powell wrote a majority opinion declaring that corporate spending for political advocacy was free speech that could not be subjected to spending limits. The Court’s attack on campaign finance limits culminated in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which essentially abolished all limits on corporate spending in federal politics.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he strengthened the Supreme Court’s attack on the general welfare by cutting taxes for the wealthy, attacking organized labor, and withdrawing environmental protection. That trajectory still hasn’t been reversed.

As a result, the US has separated from Europe in basic economic decency, well-being and environmental control. While Europe generally followed the path of social democracy and sustainable development, the US has been accused of political corruption, oligarchy, an ever-widening gap between rich and poor, a disdain for the environment, and refusal to limit Put it. Human induced climate change.

Some numbers tell the difference. Governments in the European Union generate revenues on average about 45% of GDP, while US government revenues account for only 31% of GDP. Thus European governments are able to pay for universal access to healthcare, higher education, family support and job training, while the US does not ensure the provision of these services. Europe tops the World Happiness Report ranking of life satisfaction, while the US is only 19th. In 2019, life expectancy in the EU was 81.1 years, while in the US was 78.8 years (which had a higher life expectancy than the EU in 1980). As of 2019, the share of the richest 1% of households in national income was about 11% in Western Europe, compared to 18.8% in the US. In 2019, the US emitted 16.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita, compared to 8.3 tonnes of CO2 per capita in the European Union.

In short, America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, with no political responsibility for climate damage on the rest of the world. The resulting social rifts have led to epidemics of hopeless deaths (including drug overdoses and suicide), declining life expectancy (even before Covid-19), and rising rates of depression, especially among young people. Politically, these discrepancies have headed in different directions—most ominously, for Trump, who offered fake populism and a cult of personality. Serving the rich while distracting the poor with xenophobia, culture wars, and the posture of a strongman may be the oldest trick in the democracy playbook, but it still plays out surprisingly well.

This is the situation Biden is trying to address, but his successes so far have been limited and fragile. The simple fact is that all congressional Republicans and a small but decisive group of Democrats (the most notorious Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Cinema of Arizona) are intent on preventing any meaningful increase in taxes on wealthy and American corporations, thereby it can be stopped. There is an urgent need to increase federal revenue to create a fair and green society. They are also preventing decisive action on climate change.

Thus, we are approaching the end of Biden’s first year, in which the wealthy are still in power, and in every direction with respect to proper taxation, increased social spending, protection of voting rights, and urgently needed environmental safeguards. with obstacles. Biden can still score some modest victories, and then build on them for years to come. This is what the people want. Roughly two-thirds of Americans favor higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Yet there is a real possibility that Biden’s setbacks in 2021 will help Republicans gain control of one or both houses of Congress in 2022. It would end legislative reforms until at least 2025, and could even predate Trump’s return to power. Amidst social disorder, violence, media campaigning and voter suppression in Republican-controlled states in the 2024 presidential election.

The international implications of the US turmoil are troubling. The US cannot lead global reforms unless it can also control itself coherently. Perhaps the only thing that unites Americans nowadays is an overwhelming sense of threats coming from abroad, primarily China. With the domestic turmoil in the US, politicians from both parties have intensified their anti-China rhetoric, as if a new Cold War might somehow quell US domestic anger. The only thing that will produce Washington’s bipartisan belligerence is, alas, more global tensions and new threats of conflict (over Taiwan, for example), not security or a real solution to any of our immediate global problems.

America has not come back, at least not now. It is still struggling to recover from decades of political corruption and social neglect. The outcome remains highly uncertain, and the outlook for years to come is fraught with risks for both the US and the world. ©2021/Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org)

Jeffrey D. Sachs is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.