This is a response to this article by my Facebook friend, Adam Michael Luebke, who is, like many Americans, upset by the lack of response to the Wall Street crisis that erupted in 2008. Adam had been attacked as a ‘no-solutions’ guy by none other than Roseanne Barr. Adam’s solution had been to “take back” America by “taking to the streets.” While this is a time-honored tradition in America, I don’t think that his solution takes into account the new historical circumstances that have gotten us into this situation (neither, for that matter, does the solution of his antagonist, Rosanne Barr). So I wrote this comment on his page, and I posted it here, as well, for my audience to enjoy.
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I have been thinking that the Occupy Wall Streeters are risking the pool of money that supports the system they are trying to save, since the 1% pay 40% of the taxes in this country. I told one of my friends my fear that unless we get buy-in from those who have money they will simply take their money and leave, as they have already done with jobs in a post-Cold War world in which (for the first time in history) we live in a world in which producers of value have choices of where they want to do business. He said (and I quote) “Let ‘em go.”
I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution, as it would destroy the longed-for solution. In order to avoid that, you have to take their money before casting them on the sands. That would require an executive order, since you and I both know that the Congress will pass a Constitutional amendment that would make it okay (and I hope, my friend Adam, that you wouldn’t want that).
The globalization of the American economic model makes a huge difference in our approach to our once local problems.
First, in a global economy in which everyone wants what we have, countries will increasingly realize that it is the principle of unlimited freedom to experiment that has made this country produce the telephone, the automobile, jazz, the television, the transistor, the rocket ship, and the personal computer. These inventions have made fortunes for those who were the first to market, and it has been the historical role of government to put the brakes on corporations by standing in the way of untrammeled greed. But they have tilted our economy away from our egalitarian ideals, held by the Founding Fathers on both sides of the aisle (Jefferson and Hamilton both held to egalitarian ideals) and towards the inequitable distribution of incomes. The Occupy Wall Street movement is geared towards rectifying such imbalances based in our more egalitarian nature.
That sense of balance has been maintained in the 20th century (before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) by government, who stood for equity in a world governed by selfish greed AND we were one of the few countries in the world who took seriously freedom to the extent that we enshrined it into the Constitution in the First Amendment. It was this freedom to innovate that has propelled America to the top of the societal heap, as people were content to develop useless things like Pet Rocks to sell to other people (or suckers, as we called them when I was a kid).
But at the same time, it’s important to remember that most producers fail (99%?), but a very few produce outsized incomes (like Steve Jobs’) on the basis of their unique insight into how the world actually works, as opposed to how the majority of people think it works. Rather than inventing another outsized innovation ourselves, the rest of us then invest in their companies, so all boats rise, although at different rates.
This is how America spreads its wealth to the innovators and not to the permanent political class, as happened in the Soviet Union. This is the subject of the chapter “Reykavík” in my work of Poker Tales
This is also a huge difference that made us unique during the American century, when IN THEORY most countries were following a more democratic model of communist distribution (including my childhood hero, Jean Paul Sartre). We were developing not just a different system, but a more efficient system of distributing resources that did not get clogged up in government but circulated more freely. The byproduct of the American form of organization was the creation of unequal wealth for individuals but also of the wealth that has driven even Communist China to imitate our path to riches and to abandon their communist colleagues, the Soviets, who had seemed to all but a few to be winning right up to the moment when they capitulated.
This was, of course, another instance of the few triumphing over the many that made America great in the first place. I realize that this will make me appear as an apologist for American exceptionalism in Adam’s eyes, but I’m not advocating any such position. The world has changed, and changed drastically, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China is taking our jobs away, because they are not bound by the rules of what Jameson
Both parties in the current debate are looking at the world through Cold War eyes. The conservatives are looking through the lens of having been excluded from the debate in which the baby boomer were claiming they represented everyone in the world (or at least those who mattered; this ended up giving us a culture of “beautiful people by the end of the 70s), while the conservatives have now been given a voice by Rush Limbaugh, who continues to be mocked by the old-line media. This continues the Cold War process by continuing with its old-line models long after the Cold War has ended.
The same is true of the Left, which has looked backwards to the turn of the 20th century for a Progressive model that had guided America through the Cold War. In their quest, academics (the branch of the left that I am most familiar with) have embraced a French-style deconstruction that levels out inequalities as the result of a limited scientific mind that people with “higher” consciousness (you know, the ones who do not suffer like Liu Shaoqi from false consciousness). His makes the academic left so sure that they are smarter than the idiot right that they can easily give up looking at the world for the way it actually works because they know how it works. Their only goal is to make it conform to their preconceptions. This forces the left into an “us” or “them” position that I outline in another blog post (but let’s be honest, who’d want to?).
In Teddy Roosevelt’s day, that was a great model, but history moves forward and often in unforeseen directions (again, see my post on Steve Jobs). We do not now live in the world of Teddy Roosevelt, and so the key to the future is not to take pride in our a priori belief in our knowledge of the historical past that has brought us to this moment, as both Limbaugh and Obama do, but to study the present for clues to where the market is headed and then place your bets and hope and pray that you had enough information to make the correct choice. There are no absolutely correct choices in the American cultural model, only better and worse choices. Adverting to France won’t change that, either. It will just make you an inflexible member of a society in which prizes go to the nimble.
So nothing changes in the world in which deconstructionists tell us that there is no ontology to our rhetoric and by this we can create any life we want for ourselves (and which I, as a writer who does not have to toe the party line like those samizdat authors in the Soviet Union had to, appreciate). This should tell the deconstructionists that there is something wrong with their system of belief (but once again, they baffle me and continue to launch attacks at their enemies from a firm ground that they would deny to anyone else; what is the nature of this ground, I continue to ask, except that nothing has ground, in which case why do we need to be attacking others who have as much right to their opinions as anyone else (that is, none at all)?).
In the world we live in today, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and a host of other nations are competing with us for a share of pie that for all but the last decade of the 20th century we had to ourselves. That fact has put the two strains of American culture, which sat side by side throughout our history, into higher relief: capitalist inequality by which our nation got to be the richest nation in the world which other cultures still follow and our Constitution’s guarantee of liberty got to be the model for the United Nations Charter in spite of us being mocked every year, month, and day of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The change in our position from laughingstock to the leader of the free world has meant that our culture, which not only we in America but the French have had serious reservations about following ever since its founding, will be followed, while the French, masters of Europe from the Age of Charlemagne has fallen by the wayside (the exact date was June 22, 1940 when Paris officially fell to the Nazis). Rather than going back to France for old ideas, the Chinese will suffer the same fate as we in America have, as well as gaining the same rewards. We as progressive Americans need to rethink the American social compact on its own terms to take into account global competition that has opened up such a breach in our culture that had remained in an uneasy compact government and capitalism for most of our history.
Without such an insight into our true place in the world (unmediated by French and German thought) I truly fear that America could lose our richest people to an-as-yet-not-present nation that has the wherewithal to invite our most innovative (and so wealthiest) citizens with the prospect of unlimited freedom, low taxes and easy corporate culture that does not make war on its most successful members.
But so far, all I see in Occupy Wall Street is anger, albeit entirely justified anger, without a plan of action. That doesn’t mean I don’t support them; nor does it mean that they won’t get a plan of action. But it does mean that without a plan of action, their project will fail, as it has taken hold of only one of the two pillars (equality) that have made American society the envy of the world, while leaving those (capitalists) with the most liquid assets free to seek a rent-free life where they can be included in the conversation about their fate.