We can guess what the 2018 and 2020 elections are going to be about. Trump, and his obsessions. Dark people trying to infest America. Freeloading allies, or former allies. Unfair trade imbalances. Coal miners versus elites and the Dark State. Good guys and bad guys, us and them, winners and losers.
We also know what they ought to be about. Fixing what’s wrong with this country. Improving our education system and reforming immigration laws to produce and attract the workers we will need to compete in a global economy that we can’t wall ourselves off from.
Shoring up alliances that protect us from enemies, not going it alone. Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, again the better to compete. Protecting ourselves and our institutions against cyber war, cyber crime and intellectual property theft, another competitive issue.
It also ought to be obvious that we need to ameliorate the extreme imbalance between haves and have-nots. They undermine belief in our democracy, capitalist economy and a just society. That includes, but is not confined to, a tax system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich while piling debt ever higher which makes sensible investment in the future impossible.
And yes, saving the earth from a climate catastrophe that will make existing problems — economic and political conflicts, waves of migration — look trivial by comparison.
Much of the Trump agenda is designed to deny these problems exist, while his policies tend to make them worse. His tax cut didn’t just enrich shareholders at the expense of workers, but is adding megatons to a debt bomb waiting to explode. It was good for Trump’s family and his donors, but not for the country’s survival.
If he and his enablers got their news anywhere besides Fox, Breitbart and kindred fantasists, they would have been unable to ignore the alarms being sounded about these issues in studies like “An Extraordinary Time,” “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” “Tailspin,” “Squeezed,” and “The Birth of a New Aristocracy” in a recent issue of “The Atlantic.”
In it, Matthew Stewart shows that the top 0.1 percent of the people had 10 percent of the nation’s wealth in 1963, but by 2012 those 160,000 families accounted for 22 percent. His New Aristocracy is the next 9.9 percent who control 58% of the nation’s wealth. That leaves a scant 20% for the bottom 90 percent of the population.
The New Aristocrats are the professional and managerial class — bankers, doctors, lawyers, executives. And as they have consolidated wealth, they have also entrenched it. With rising inequality comes diminishing social mobility.
Stewart show how a slanted tax code, a weakened social safety net, and demographic sorting by Zip Code leads not just to access to better schools, healthcare, and opportunities for the haves but barriers to entry to wealth-producing profession for the have-nots.
The result is a top 10 percent ensconced in safe havens and the bottom 90 percent in a an economic trap. In Stephen Brill’s “Tailspin,” he defines these classes as the protected and the unprotected.
Trump was right, the fix is in. Yet his policies have only made it worse. Not everyone was conned. The counties that voted for Clinton in 2012 accounted for 64 percent of GDP, those who voted for Trump for 36 percent. But, if the New Aristocrats don’t want to live in Trump’s populist paradise, they need to encourage the Democrats to pursue policies that promote a better deal for the 80 percent.
Our future also depends not just on addressing inequality, but on thriving in an era of technical and scientific innovation. While Trump purges his government of science-based policy, China and other competitors are forging ahead.
The nascent field of quantum computing is expected to be world-changing. The United States is investing $300 million in its pursuit, but China has allocated $1.2 billion to wining the race. This is eerily reminiscent of the Space Race of the 1950s except we are playing the part of the lagging USSR.
China is also emulating our behavior after WWII when we made alliances and investments round the world. Now Trump is turning his back on that legacy while China is investing in its Belt and Road project — buying and modernizing ports around the world, investing in huge agriculture projects in Africa, connecting itself to markets in Europe and Asia with a network of high speed rail, the better to compete for markets.
A recent article about a European bioscientist who has been doing research in the United States is telling. His government supported grant money dried up and he sought backing elsewhere. It came from China where he has relocated his lab. Multiply that by ten, a hundred, a thousand and you have what used to be called a brain drain. In addition to quantum computing, China has prioritized huge investments in neuroscience, AI, genetics, cybersecurity, robotics, big data.
While Trump undermines our environmental protections with an EPA that has banned the use of the words “climate change,” our competitors are armoring themselves against rising seas, shifting crop habitats, invasive species, epidemic diseases and their carriers. It is easy, and necessary, to blame Trump for his misguided policies, but are any Republican candidates pushing back, and are any Democratic candidates doing more than blaming. Are they offering an alternative vision of the future.
When the Republicans have chosen to be the party of fiction, with their cries of fake news and fake science, it in the responsibility of the opposition to be the party of reality, to educate voters about the real issues we face, the stakes for our future and the measures the government needs to enact if we are to survive and prosper in the future. Where are the Non-Fiction candidates?