8 Compare the following two statements: “Immigrants! They are all criminals!” “Democrats are the problem. They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.” The first was slipped into American social media feeds in 2016 by Russian agents, trying to tamper with our elections. The second was tweeted in 2018 by President Trump, trying to animate his base.
9 Someone else leaned over and whispered, “It was the school people.”
10 In his remarkable recent book There Will Be No Miracles Here, Casey Gerald describes his childhood in the South Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, a place “where boys had nothing but the pride of a few blocks they had inherited—blocks that, absent any other cause to believe in, were worth dying for, I suppose.”
FOUR FREEDOMS
The path ahead.
To achieve perspective, an artist puts a dot on a sheet of paper—it’s called the vanishing point. With this single act an entire composition comes into focus: angles, sizes, depth, proportions. This trick is an essential tool for comprehending—and conveying—reality.
When we think about our society, similar methods can be used to gain perspective. If only we used them. Imagine, for instance, that we face momentous decisions about the future. What if instead of making those decisions as partisans, we made them from the perspective of parents and grandparents? Or, to frame it another way: what if we asked ourselves what the impact of our decisions would be not in a year or two but in a decade or two? What if we took our own personal benefit out of the calculation and asked: what are the benefits we desire but might not live to see?
And as we think about such questions, what if we took a philosopher’s famous thought experiment and applied it to our society? Imagine, the experiment goes, that you are about to be reborn into the society you currently inhabit. You have no choice in the outcome. Parents, race, gender, health, geography, income, schools: it’s all up for grabs. Where you end up is a throw of the dice. As you think about that possibility, are you filled with confidence? Do you believe you’ll get a fair shake, an open path to progress, or a helping hand when you need it? Would you confidently entrust your children to this possibility, no matter where they landed? If you entertain any worries at all, as I certainly would, then your worry is something profound. Your worry is a measure of how far our society lies from justice.
There is ample cause for worry. As Americans we may disagree about how to address certain problems, but the problems themselves are matters of fact. They are not open to dispute. In terms of income and wealth, inequality is growing. Social mobility has sputtered to a standstill. Proper health care is beyond the reach of tens of millions. So is a good education. So is a life lived in safety. So is the sense that you have a say in your own destiny, because your voice is heard in the councils where decisions are made. But we are stuck. We are stuck because we are too often fighting yesterday’s battles instead of seeking to anticipate, as our founders did, how we might change things for the better in the future.
This isn’t a matter of liberals versus conservatives. To one degree or another, all of us are conservative. If being conservative means wanting to protect our nation’s principles and ideals, I am a conservative. If being conservative means wanting to preserve a culture of tolerance, justice, and equality, I am a conservative. If being conservative means respecting the cultural and natural heritage of America, I am a conservative. But while we protect and preserve the best of what makes us who we are, we must adapt to meet the future. We do not live in a stagnant world. We are living in revolutionary times. The twenty-first century will be as different from the twentieth as the twentieth century was from the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Fortunes are being made—and economies and society upended—because of technologies that did not exist five years or five months ago. The national government, for its part, is desperately out of sync. To give but one example: the government has cut taxes, but the underlying tax code has not been revised since 1986. What are the chances that this creaky instrument, patched and rumbling, is still helping to drive job and wage growth three decades later? And yet today, the inheritors of the Tea Party banner, including President Trump, resist all change. Indeed, they want to go back, to a past that never existed or to one that has no relation to the era in which we live.
We have been here before. I think of the America of my parents’ generation: in the grip of economic despair, Jim Crow racism, fervent isolationism, and a populist anger that took ugly forms. In 1941, as America was just emerging from under the weight of the Great Depression and the world plunged ever more deeply into global war, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave what has come to be called his Four Freedoms speech, crystallizing American ideals before the eyes of the world. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. These, Roosevelt maintained, were the irreducible building blocks of a more just society and a more just global order.
If we are again at one of history’s turning points, as I believe we are, then we have a choice to make.
One road leads to the depths of the American past. In times of uncertainty, it has always been tempting for some to try to capitalize on our darkest fears. Anytime Americans have become anxious or worried, there have been those who saw advantage in fanning the flames. Theirs are not among the names inscribed on history’s honor roll. Yet sowing division can be all too easy.
It is precisely at moments of crisis when the confidence of a people is at the lowest ebb. These are the moments when we are most tempted to abandon our democratic traditions. They are also the moments when confidence in oneself and confidence in one another are needed most. This is especially true in a republic, where only the citizens can answer the fire bells in the night. If we are to remain a republic, no one alone can fix it.
When we hold on to our values through tough times, we forge them anew, as Roosevelt did in his time, and burnish them for future generations. These values are made stronger and more useful to those who will face challenges in days far ahead. At times of deepest crisis in our past, we have ultimately overcome malign forces wishing to hoard the promise of democracy for themselves. When we succeed, we recast our freedoms for the trials of our own times, consistent with our ideals. Freedoms to be won not simply through government action but, more important, by what all of us do in our homes and our communities. We treasure the freedoms embodied in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. But, like Roosevelt, we must think more ambitiously. And as we do we should remember the lesson of that throw of the dice. What does a just society look like?
Freedom to rise. Upward mobility is an engine of prosperity and justice. Rigid, generational inequality is the enemy of both. For decades, consciously or not, America has moved in a direction that suppresses mobility and enhances inequality. Our policies need to value workers and working families—and they need to enable workers who wish to organize on their own behalf, not impede them. They need to treat immigrants with the respect all human beings deserve—and to recognize that newcomers to our shores are part of the future of our country. Mobility in our society is impossible without decent health care, which should be available to every American, and at costs comparable to those in other rich democracies. Tax policies should support working-class families—not poke a thumb in their eye while swelling the portfolios of those whose great-grandchildren couldn’t possibly spend the money they already have. For generations, Americans struck an implied deal with one another: if the system is fair and there’s a safety net for the most vulnerable among us, we’ll compete and take our chances. This deal has been the source of America’s political and economic resilience. We must restore it.
Freedom to learn. “Education” is a broad term. It includes the nation’s schools but it also includes the training and coursework that keep adults up to speed in a dynamic economy. And it includes promoting the knowledge and values that underlie civic life in a republic. Our public schools were once America’
s glory; today, too many short-change their students. By their very nature, traditional funding mechanisms—based heavily on local property taxes—harm schools in poor communities and bolster schools in rich ones. We must break that link—and we must find new ways to make higher education available to anyone who seeks it. That means supporting budgets and supporting students—not cutting financial aid and coddling predatory lenders. At the highest levels of public life, meanwhile, voices stir ignorance into voracious life by questioning the very idea of objectivity, of accepted facts, of truth itself. All Americans have a responsibility to call these people out. Without education—education that lasts a lifetime, education that extends to the way we advance our most cherished ideals—mobility and justice are beyond reach. The impulse to unceasing self-improvement is a profoundly American trait, inherent in the founders’ creed. We need to nurture it.
Freedom from violence. We’re all aware of the images, maybe even immune to them by now: the shootings, whether by criminals or those who are supposed to protect us, the widespread family trauma, the angry mobs, the acts of outright terrorism. A less visible violence affects our everyday lives. In many neighborhoods a walk to school is a journey undertaken in a shadow of menace. A quieter, more insidious violence flourishes in social media, feeding adolescent despair. The inner violence of addiction hits communities everywhere. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system is broken; our long history of unequal treatment of poor and minority criminal offenders has in recent times evolved into a system of mass incarceration unlike that of any other developed democracy. A network of dystopian privatized prisons spreads across the land to house people who in many cases should not be behind bars. Attitudes and opinions on every one of these issues have long since hardened. And every one of them needs to be reexamined—informed not by ideology but by pragmatism and the moral dictates of a just society.
Freedom to govern ourselves. Sovereign power belongs to all of the people, not just a vocal or wealthy few, or the most partisan. In recent decades the exercise of that power has been undermined in many ways. We need to confront voter suppression in all its forms, gerrymandering, the influx of dark money into politics, and the rules in Congress that reward partisanship. We need to resist a culture that sees reasonable disagreement as existential antagonism—a culture that not only erodes but disdains respect in the way citizens speak to and behave toward one another. The loss of faith in our governing institutions, and in one another, is a death spiral. We can counter it only by recapturing the idea of ourselves as citizens.
* * *
Citizens! How I wish we would start using that word again. The concept is old, and implies much more than rights. It comes with obligations. The founders set out to create a republic of a scope and scale never before attempted. They set out to create a republic that others expanded as the country grew. They believed in putting the common interest above personal or narrow interests. And, because of the work of subsequent Americans who did their patriotic duty, they succeeded in their ambitions to an extent they could never have fathomed. The United States today is the world’s oldest and greatest democracy. It has grown in prosperity and power even as it has matured in its understanding of the rights its founders first articulated, as subsequent generations of founders sharpened those rights and extended them to people long denied them.
There is so much more to be done. Each of us, with individual talent and spirit and hard work, is called upon to be a founder. Each of us—in obligation to others—is called upon to rebuild the republic. What if each of us were to answer that call?
THE AMERICAN DREAM
Our predicament—a capsule summary in eight charts.
In 1831 the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville started out on the famous journey through the United States that resulted in his book Democracy in America, an indispensable source of description and analysis. At one point he writes: “Amongst the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions.” The situation was a far cry from the one that existed in much of Europe, where the chasm between impoverished masses and a gilded upper class was vast and seemingly unbridgeable.
Exactly a century later, the American writer and historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “American dream,” which he defined as “not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
What follows is a short sequence of eight charts that you might want to discuss with your neighbors and your representatives in Congress.
1. Fewer Have More
Nearly two centuries after Tocqueville and nearly a century after Adams, the American dream is faring poorly. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the share of income claimed by the top 10 percent of all earners held fairly steady at around 35 percent. But beginning in the Reagan era, the share has gone up and up—to about 50 percent. The situation has only grown worse in recent years.
2. Winners and Losers
We can break the numbers down further, each one showing a “quintile” of American households—that is, a 20 percent slice. During the past fifty years, income growth for the bottom four quintiles has been pretty much flat whereas income growth for the top quintile has accelerated.
3. Opposite Directions
Looking at it another way, you can see the fortunes of the top 1 percent of households and the bottom 50 percent crossing paths in the mid-1990s. The United States had been heading in that direction for years, and since the moment of intersection the divergence has continued to widen.
4. Not Far from the Tree
One key element of the American dream has been the hope—and the expectation—that each generation will do better than the previous one did: “I just want my kids to have a better life.” The possibility has been diminishing, especially in the last forty years. If you were an American born in 1940, you had about a 90 percent chance of earning more than your parents did, regardless of where on the income ladder your family stood. If you were born in 1980—which means that you have entered your prime earning years—your chances are only about 50 percent.
5. A Parent’s Paycheck—and Yours
Economists use the technical term “intergenerational income elasticity” to describe how much a child’s income varies from a parent’s. Greater variance means more room for the next generation to move up or down. The authors of the study from which the next chart comes put their sobering conclusion in the dry language of economics: “The conditional expectation of a child’s rank given his parents’ rank is almost perfectly linear.” What they mean is that in America today the best predictor of a child’s income is that of his or her parents.
6. Game Changer—for a Few
The same holds true for college attendance. An individual’s access to higher education has historically been one of the most significant determinants of future economic well-being in America—and it still is. Children from families in the bottom half of American earners who attain four-year college degrees are likely to reach much higher levels of income than their parents did (or than their peers who don’t go to college will reach). College propels upward mobility. But who gets to college in the first place? As the next chart demonstrates, your chances depend on the family income you’re born into—less income, less opportunity.
7. Getting It Wrong
For perspective, it’s often useful to step back and look at America in the context of other nations. The graph here correlates two factors: the degree of income inequality in a country and the degree of intergenerational mobility in a country. The farther to the right a country appears on the horizontal axis, the more inequality it has. The higher it appears on the vertical axis, the less intergenerational mobility it has. Compared with those of the U
nited States, the circumstances of Canada, Japan, and Spain seem enviable. One conclusion: if you want a formula for rising inequality and falling mobility, America seems to have found it.
8. Lost Opportunity
A different kind of perspective is provided by this chart, which correlates deficit spending and the unemployment rate. For the most part, the two numbers rise and fall together, as they should; historically, the federal government spends more in times of economic distress, then tightens up when conditions improve. That is, until now. Thanks in large measure to tax cuts for the wealthy, the federal deficit is soaring at a time when the economy is stable and unemployment is as low as it has ever been.
Not only does this diminish our capacity to respond to crises in the future, it also represents a huge opportunity cost: as much as $2 trillion poured into the sand at a time when our society urgently needs investment in education, infrastructure, housing, health care, and nutrition.
FOR FURTHER READING
Some books that have helped me along.
“What are you reading these days?” It is a question that quietly waits in line at my town hall meetings, usually making an appearance toward the end. It is one of my favorites, because it kindles a warm and open-ended dialogue with the questioner. And it’s a reminder of the humbler ties that hold us together as a republic. We are a nation of readers, and readers invariably end up comparing notes with one another—whether the conversation is about books, about essays, about speeches, or about diaries and letters.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 27