The Devolution of the United States

My first president was FDR – my last will probably be Trump. Yes, I am that old.

There are so few Americans left alive who remember how it used to be. Only the very early Boomers really lived the life that used to be called the American Dream. They came of age during such a flowering of society that had never been seen in all of human history. Decades of relative peace, economic growth, advances in science and medicine, and a political environment that brought people together in a common cause – being Americans in America.

From Government for the People to Government for the Wealthy

Noblesse oblige: the idea that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person who holds such a status to fulfill social responsibilities – it’s not just about being noble and the entitlements, its about responsibilities as well. Those who benefit most from society are obligated to give back to it

In the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, the government was seen as the benevolent savior of the people. FDR had shepherded the recovery and the war effort and helped the country to get back on its feet. The presidents who followed, Truman and Eisenhower, were seen as solid stewards of the office and honorable men who, independent of personal politics, the citizens trusted.

Government policy helped to grow the middle class. The GI bill allowed millions of families to buy their first house. The expansion of labor unions increased family incomes. A family of four could afford a house, car, vacations, and still put aside money for retirement with enough left over to support the next generation.

Democrats, whose power base was mostly in the south, and Republicans, from their base in New England, worked together for the benefits of the people. The concept of noblesse oblige: the obligation of honorable, generous, and responsible behavior associated with high rank or birth, was widely recognized and advanced by both New England Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Democrats like John Kennedy. Those who had benefited from being an American were seen to be obligated to give back to society and lift up those who were less fortunate. They were expected to be grateful for the privilege of being an American and to act out of beneficence towards both other citizens and the country.

The change began with Johnson. Although his Great Society programs echoed FDR’s New Deal, his support for the war in Vietnam, and his willingness to keep sending young Americans to die in the jungles of South-Asia, were more than the country could tolerate. The wheels really fell off with Nixon and Watergate. The population discovered that they had twice elected a crook – the last time by a landslide. They also realized that the opposition, the Democratic Party, could not be trusted to put up a candidate that voters could see as a suitable president.

Gerald Ford, with what has to be the most damaging decision in American political history, demonstrated, with the pardon of Nixon, that the rule of law was flexible. Carter proved that a peanut farmer did not have the experience necessary to be president.

By the time Reagan became president, the rupture between Americans and their government was widening. He drove three knives into the relationship. First, by declaring government was not the solution to our problems, it was the source of our problems. And second, by turning the presidency into a movie presence that voters watched. Participatory democracy was not high on the list of GOP intentions. In fact, party leaders opposed what they called the excess of democracy – majority rule. They believed that the poor should not be allowed to elect candidates who would pass laws that benefited them while the rich were asked to fund them. The last knife was the conversion of the government to the service of the rich. The Reagan tax cuts ballooned the deficit and channeled billions into the coffers of the wealthy.

What was hidden was Reagan’s agenda, which was designed to make the rich richer at the expense of the middle class. Tax cuts, increased targeted government spending, and deregulation paved the way for a new form of capitalism – raptor capitalism. With Reagan, the relationship shifted from one with the voters to one with the wealthy and powerful.

None of the presidents since Reagan have done much to shift government allegiance back to the voters. Every campaign sold the proposition, but none really meant it. Then Bill Clinton, candidate from the party of the working class, showed voters that the Democrat’s agenda had shifted focus. He paid verbal homage to what was left of the FDR coalition while accelerating the drift of white working-class voters to the GOP. With actions like the repeal of Glass Steagall, support for NAFTA, and a global focus that left voters feeling second class, Clinton refocused the party away from the working class and towards the globalists.

Americans began to feel not only disconnected, but ignored by their government. Citizens United and the massive flows of money into politics convinced them that they were right. Ordinary Americans became second class citizens in their own country. More money meant a bigger megaphone, the ability to fund candidates, to overpower others with negative ads, and to channel government resources to the benefit of the wealthy.

Presidents since Clinton have operated under the severe constraints of Citizens United. Major donors had to be paid off for their support. Programs that might benefit the poor but cost the rich were systematically neutered. Other programs, like the ACA, were passed under the contention that they would benefit ordinary Americans, but were carefully crafted to benefit special interests. More people were covered by a healthcare system that became markedly more predatory.

Today Americans have an angry relationship with the federal government. One that reeks of disappointment and rising rage. They see a system that is rigged against them by the wealthy and politically powerful. The American Dream, which animated voters for centuries, is now a fading mirage as the middle class has been dissolved and more than 60% of American families are now living paycheck-to-paycheck. Income and wealth inequality skyrocketed. Rights were taken away, restricted or modified to favor the rich and powerful. Americans were recast as consumers and an audience to a reality TV show that they have no control over. Is it any wonder that they twice elected a reality show host that is a convicted felon and who has been found liable as a sex predator? Government is merely entertainment to them – and bad entertainment, at that.

The American Dream Dies

It is worth reviewing what that dream was. For the decades after World War II and until the turn of the century – six short decades – it flowered with the promise that every generation would be better off than the one before. That young people could get a good education without going into debt, they could marry and raise a family, buy a comfortable house, go on vacations, put enough aside for a comfortable retirement with enough left to leave some for their children and they could manage all that on one salary.

That dream is now dead and long buried. I chronicled its demise in Workism - The Postmodern Curse: The Arc of Generations (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3NDTDG5). Generation X found it a struggle to live the dream. The millennials saw it slipping away. For members of Generation Z, it has become a painful fantasy. Education reduces them to bondage, the job market is full of sterile jobs working for billionaires, marriage is an expense that many cannot afford, house ownership is being driven out of reach as Wall Street fund managers buy up existing stock and turn them into rentals, children are out of the question. And all this has happened within a few decades, leaving them to scream, what the hell happened to America? The reality is, this is what the country has become!

To highlight the drastic nature of the changes in American society over the last few decades, let’s look at two areas – schools and healthcare.

Schools Become Fortresses

Boomers went to schools that were open avenues for learning. There were no active shooter drills. No armed guards patrolling the halls. No metal detectors guarding the doors. And certainly, no banned books. But there were civics classes, science to learn, social studies – the core of what was called a liberal arts education. They were taught how to think, rather than what to think. The young knew in their hearts that society valued them as the great hope for the next generation. The idea that their safety would be subordinated to the rights of murderers to own guns, or the profits of a gun manufacturer, was alien to kids, teachers, and parents.

In schools, teachers taught, and the kids learned. The only time schools became a political issue was during funding discussions. Parents attended the obligatory parents/teacher meetings if there was some issue with their kid’s behavior or learning rate. But parents generally trusted the schools to teach reading, writing and arithmetic while they fulfilled their obligations as parents to teach kids right from wrong. Parents knew instinctively that their children would know more, and go farther, than they ever could. Schools were to prepare the next generation for a world that was rapidly changing. Education was the way forward and was seen as a solemn obligation of each generation to the next.

The idea that parents might know better how to teach than those educated in teaching was a complete non-starter. The idea that the role of schools was to reproduce the parents, rather than prepare the young for a changing world, was seen as idiocy. It would be like training horses to compete with automobiles and trucks. But that is what has happened. Schools in many communities are now seen as production lines designed to recreate the prior generation.

Consider the environment that Generation Z is experiencing. They go to schools that resemble fortresses, because politicians have determined that the interests of gun manufacturers and lobbyists are more important than their safety. They participate in active shooter drills, pass armed guards in the halls, know some who have lived through mass shootings, and of others that haven’t. Schools are no longer safe places to learn. Contrast that with the stories they hear about what schools used to be. There was a time when only the occasional prank broke the civility, nothing dangerous ever happened there. If they faced the death of a classmate, it was because of some unforeseen medical condition or an accident. Now, their schools are war zones, and they feel not just abandoned by society, but irrelevant to its intentions.

As increasing numbers of American families struggle just to make ends meet, they have little left to participate actively as citizens in a democracy. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to assuring that their kids get a good education. A system that was once the envy of the world is reduced to book banning, wrangling about the ten commandments, and working to dissolve the separation of church and state – none of which adequately prepares students for the rapidly changing and highly competitive world they were born into. The US now has an educational system that seems determined to prepare students for yesterday.

Healthcare Becomes Abusively Parasitical

Nowhere is the rising rage as intense as with the healthcare system in the United States. The United States is the only developed nation that has turned its healthcare industry into a for-profit business. It is the only country where citizens are forced to become victims in an effort to protect their own lives. This is raptor capitalism unrestrained.

The inequities and injustices of the American healthcare system have produced a rising rage. It’s not enough to say they are angry. That they are despondent. That they feel the system is rigged against them. That they feel their country and government is owned by a wealthy class that doesn’t give a damn about them. Those words don’t carry the meaning.

The United States is the only developed country that has a privatized healthcare system. It is the only country that regularly bankrupts its citizens over their healthcare needs. Americans pay up to fifteen times what other people pay for pharmaceuticals and that is government sanctioned – in fact, it is government guaranteed.

The statistics are mind-numbing. United Health Care – a truly ironic name for a company – apparently is the clear winner in one area. It denies thirty-two percent of insurance claims – beating the nearest competition, Medica, by five points. That means, if a family is paying premiums to this company and has a health issue, in roughly 33% of the time the claim will be denied. That is like saying that a third of the tomatoes you buy at the local market are likely to cause you diarrhea. Or that a third of your paychecks are likely to bounce.

The industry average for claim denial is about sixteen percent. Roughly half of that of United Health Care. Medica, Anthem, CareSource and Aetna are all at or above twenty percent. At the bottom is Kaiser Permanente with a denial rate of only seven percent.

I was watching MSNBC the other morning – getting my daily dose of the morning blow. As usual, Scarbrough was claiming most of the mike time. The conversation turned to the killing of the CEO of United Health Care. What followed was a discussion that could only be had by a group of well-off white people whose seven figure salaries, seven or eight figure net worths, and celebrity status assures them that they will never be victimized by the idiocy that is the American healthcare system. Whatever reality they were inhabiting clearly had almost nothing in common with what ordinary American families are experiencing.

During the conversation, one of them argued that you could on the one hand feel that the system is unjust and does not serve the interests of its clients and on the other hand understand that violence is wrong. Of course, she was not about to address the central question. In the United States, how do you make the system more just for ordinary citizens? Of course, she offered no suggestions. To her, the question was irrelevant. After all, she had hers, and her contact with fellow citizens who had this problem was probably limited to the people who cleaned her house or tended her lawns.

What these purveyors of self-serving opinion could not come close to understanding is the rage, resentment, and despondency that increasing numbers of Americans are feeling about what has happened to their country and the future of their children. The smoked salmon, silk stocking purveyors of dung fertilized opinion have no interest in understanding something which directly threatens their highly paid and mostly irrelevant lives.

To be fair, there are working journalists – mostly in print and local reporters – that are working to understand and explain how screwed many Americans feel. But their efforts seem to be focused on trying to get these talking heads – charlatans of privilege – to understand. Ordinary Americans don’t need their help. They already know how bad things have become.

The United States is the only developed nation that has turned its healthcare industry into a for-profit business. It is the only country where citizens are forced to become victims in an effort to protect their own lives.

In America, the health insurance industry operates on two propositions. First, charge as much as you can for premiums. Increasing revenue drives share prices and, because of that, the wealth of the CEO and other senior executives. Second, deny as many claims as possible and increase the percentage of the premiums collected that are retained by the company.

Remember that most of these companies are for-profit. That means that, as raptor capitalist businesses, they are focused primarily on their share prices. The federal government has been kind enough to provide a way for them to avoid paying taxes on wealth increases – your government dollars at work. So, the compensation packages for senior executives contain lots of options and warrants. The higher the share price, the more those options and warrants are worth. The higher the premiums and claim denial rates go, the higher the stock price goes. It’s a simple formula. The more you bleed your customers and the less you provide to meet their needs, the higher your net worth will soar.

Health insurance companies are not alone in bleeding American citizens. A direct result of the Affordable Care Act was the flowering of Pharmacy Benefit Managers. They are highly profitable organizations that manage prescription drug benefits on behalf of health insurers, employers, Medicare Part D plans, and other payers. PBMs play a critical role in determining which drugs are covered by insurance plans, negotiating prices with drug manufacturers, and managing the costs of prescription medications.

PBMs negotiate lower processes, keep the rebates from drug manufacturers rather than passing them on to patients or health plans, base their profit margin on the retail price of the drug (the higher the price, the bigger the take), and drive up drug prices by favoring higher-rebate medications instead of the lowest-cost options. The result is that Americans massively overpay for life-saving drugs that the rest of the world gets for ten percent or less of the cost.

During FDR’s time, the government would have rushed to the rescue. Americans would be protected from this kind of predatory behavior. But not now. There are two bills pending in the Democratically controlled Senate that are sure to expire by the end of the term. They would substantially correct the situation. But, money being the mother’s milk of politics since Citizens United, they are certain not to be passed.

The healthcare system in the US is generating sub-standard results at massively higher costs. Americans are victimized by an industry that is more interested in profits than positive results. The rage against this structure is rising rapidly. Families are losing everything in battles that the health insurance companies are determined that they will never win. And all with the blessing of the government.

And There is More

These are only two of the many areas that chart the devolution of the United States. If evolution is the way forward and up, devolution is certainly the way back and down. My best guess is that the US is on a path to demonstrate the legitimacy of the fall of the Soviet Union – a country run by oligarchs for the benefit of the wealthy while proclaiming itself to be the Eden of the workers. Or perhaps, by eclipsing the income and wealth inequalities of the dark ages, proving that a society where the top one percent of a society controls nearly all wealth is untenable in the long run.

In such a society there are only two classes, the uber-wealthy and everybody else. With their ownership of the government and means of production, it is difficult to see how they will be dislodged and balance reestablished. One thing is certain, it is unlikely that they will give up such control without actual violence against them. Protected by the government, they are impregnable against all but direct, personal threats. It is a sobering thing to contemplate – that the survival of Madison’s Republic may depend on a second war of independence, this time against enemies domestic. That devolution may have to be reversed by revolution. That reclaiming the country means deposing the tyrants. But, that may be the only way to reestablish the dream of the Founders, and assure that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.

© Earl Smith