No matter what happens after the polls close tonight, we probably need to keep in mind the musical perspective of Kander and Ebb.
“Sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re sad,
But the world goes ‘round.
Sometimes you lose every nickel you had,
But the world goes ‘round.”
Can Trump win? You wouldn’t think so, but the Indians were up 3-1 and Brexit was a joke until it wasn’t. And even if Hillary succeeds does anyone believe the long knives aren’t already being sharpened? We’ve been promised endless investigations, impeachment, no more nominees to the Supreme Court approved if they are offered by a Democratic president, and a sitting Senator, Richard Burr, has even spoken with approval of assassination. Talk about sore losers.
The bitterness of the remaining establishment Republicans is the result of having allowed their party to be hijacked by Trump and the alt-right. The bitterness of the alt-right is being on the losing side of history. The bitterness of working class voters of both parties is having their plight appreciated by neither party. It makes for a poisonous atmosphere.
Politics has come to this dysfunctional place because neither party has been willing to level with the voters, possibly because both have lost touch with reality and have been living in their own Wonderland of talking points and spin.
For thirty years promises have been made and not kept. Scapegoats have been identified to blame for the fact that the middle class has been hollowed out and we have become a nation of haves and have not, educated elites with prospects and working class men and women who can no longer find work.
The truth of the matter may be found in a new book by Marc Levinson, “An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy.” I quote from an except published in the October 15 “Wall Street Journal.” Its analysis won’t be embraced by Fox News or MSNBC, nor by candidates of either party because it is not good news and it doesn’t fit into the mythology of either the right or left.
Levinson’s story concerns the years from 1948 to 1973, a period described with typical Gallic style as “les trente glorieuses,” and their less glorious aftermath. It was a golden age of booming prosperity when stars aligned to produce unprecedented productivity growth. The world’s economic growth rate averaged 4.9 percent until 1973, then fell back to 3.1 percent for the rest of the 20th century and has eroded further ever since to an anemic 2 percent or less today.
Politicians of every stripe argue that their nostrums will bring back the miracle, but the “deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy” of Thatcher and Reagan “proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them,” according to Levinson’s analysis.
His rational but unappealing conclusion is that the Golden Age of the postwar era was an aberration, a one-off event that resulted from pent up demand, the switch from a war footing to a consumer boom, an increase in education levels, a wave of innovation that spawned new productivity breakthroughs, and a large part of the globe that was not competing economically for ideological and structural reasons.
These factors can’t be commanded to repeat themselves and “we have precious little idea how to stimulate innovations.” In fact, what we are experiencing now is a gigantic worldwide reversion to the mean, the levels of growth and productivity gains that have been normal for most of human history. In other words, what voters of all stripes are so angry about is a return to ordinary economic performance.
“Voters who have been trained to expect that their leaders can deliver something more than ordinary are likely to find reality disappointing.” No kidding. We see it in the toxic campaign just ending, the unproductive divisiveness, scapegoating and finger-pointing of all sides.
We are all just going to have to get used to it and do what generations before us did. Do our best and take life as it comes, turn lemons into lemonade, but don’t count on champagne. As the Brits said in worse times than these, we need to try to keep calm and carry on.
“Somebody loses and somebody wins,
And one day its kicks, then it’s kicks in the shins,
But the planet spins, and the world goes ‘round.”
We must try to survive this return to ordinary times as a society that cares for the well-being of all its members. If we don’t, we risk sinking into “the war of all against all” that Hobbes decried, or allowing the brutal division of society into plutocrats at the top, forgotten men at the bottom, and no one in between. That rarely ends well.