Anti-establishment candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have dominated this year’s presidential race by criticizing both parties for misdiagnosing our nation’s problems and then lying about how they were going to solve them. Yet the critics are also peddling pie in the sky rather than giving voters a sobering dose of reality – and math.
In fact, we live at a time of massive transition, akin to the coming of the industrial revolution that created a new world but doomed an old one. Agribusiness replaced the family farm, huge corporations replaced the mom and pop enterprise, the countryside emptied out and urban centers exploded.
Over several generation the financial well-being of the average family improved dramatically, but there was much dislocation and suffering along the way. Not everyone was a winner in the process and with no social safety net those left behind experienced a ruinous fall.
A similar process is underway today as analog gives way to digital, big data analytics dictates decisions, biotech progresses, global connectedness increases. Many older institutions and their workers are collateral damage. And demographic changes mean that promises of Social Security and Medicare made to the huge, now-retiring baby boom generation will be hard for the smaller tax-paying cohort now stuck with the bill to actually pay it.
Yet candidates refuse to describe this reality and discuss possible fixes. The Paul Ryan wing with touching, child-like faith in benign free enterprise believes that, if social welfare programs are just privatized and taxes cut, the invisible hand fairies will take care of the oldsters and enrich the young.
Trump and the Democrats offer equally fanciful prescriptions to “Make America Great Again” or create “A Future to Believe In.” Every candidate in their own way seems to suggest we can have our cake and eat it too. Trump wants to cut taxes but not entitlements, a sure way to explode the deficit. His solution to that is to blithely suggest the United States default on its obligations, like Argentina.
Bernie wants to raise taxes and increase entitlements to everything from free college to universal health care. Not even Sweden is able to imagine that this sort of thing computes anymore. The slightly more rational Hillary in her need to compete with her rivals has begun making her own impossible promises.
What we have here is political malpractice, the kind of bait and switch that created the angry electorate that called forth the insurgent candidates in the first place. It is also a sign of political cowardice or cynicism when candidates who know better lie to the public to get elected.
At times of crisis in our country’s history the most esteemed of our leaders were occasionally willing to level with the American people. At the time of the Revolution, during the Civil War and during the Great Depression and World War II, the Founders, Lincoln and FDR didn’t soft-pedal the gravity of the situation. At their best they treated the people like adults by giving them a sober assessment of the prospects. By doing so they didn’t just allay their fears but enlisted their support in a shared endeavor.
Where is a leader willing to do likewise today with a clear-eyed description of the fix we’re in and a plausible solution? We need to be told that there is no painless way to weather the changes we are faced with, that everyone’s ox is going to get gored before we come out the other side, but that the alternative is fantasy or an ugly us-against-them scramble for advantage that will only make matters worse. I’d vote for that.
Instead, we get “don’t worry, be happy.” Or “USA, USA.” Or we get the witch hunt where lying politicians blame the billionaires, the banks, the Muslims, the Mexicans, women, liberals, conservatives, red states, blue states, religious fools, godless libertines, the young, the old, the rich, the poor, gays and lying politicians.