WAS: What Adults are Saying About a 100-year replay
It feels like Robber Barons again rule. Where does that lead?
In terms of wealth distribution, business elites controlling Washington and absolute disdain for heavy thinking guiding aligned behavior, you can surely tell we are on the eve of ‘25—1925 that is. The American experience today has never been more different among the “haves” and “have nots.” The data indicators are overwhelming and the rhythm of daily life shows it. Never in post-war America have so many been both so well-off and simultaneously, so many economically distressed.
One hundred years ago this truism also reigned but in a context that was different. Then the US had yet to risen to super-power status. After a middling effort in World War I America turned to a time that was marked by much of what happens today. The Presidency of Warren Harding had recently ended, long-considered the most corrupt until the world met a man named Nixon, and thereafter, the mother of all political corruption in Donald Trump. Similar to the ravages of COVID-19, the country was exiting the horrible scourge of the “Spanish Flu” of the late ‘teens. New information technology in the form of radio was, just like social media today, rapidly altering daily life while slow-footed government regulators dallied (or swilled the fruits of their buy-off). Moneyed elites ran things while grappling with the then new concepts of a personal income tax and electing (not appointing) US senators. The flow of immigrants through New York’s Ellis Island was heavy with immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as Lady Liberty shone her beacon.
Culturally found the rapidly growing and influential world of cinema, the American invention of Jazz going mainstream (similar to how Rap is now doing), the 20th century’s first installment of “free love” and all of it celebrated in innumerable speakeasies made necessary during the height of Prohibition. It was a wild time and what it would bring was either poorly understood or not considered by elites while most others scurried to simply survive daily life. This chagrined tale of then and what it begat, sadly, may be just as applicable today.
What followed was an economic collapse largely fueled by a culture staying out way past closing time while forgetting work was in the morning. The Great Depression ravaged America and many parts of the world. Every Baby Boomer now alive was raised or influenced by elders teaching some of the hard lessons learned through the consecutive struggles of the 1930s and WWII. Surviving that unfurled a post war America culture and standard of living that was unparalleled for decades and benefited first, and most significantly, those voracious Boomers. Since its zenith in the 1970s, however, that standard of living has been in decline to where it has now created a class distinction that looks much like the 1920s America—you know before the place was ready for Roone Arledge and prime-time.
What’s worse, shills for the surviving business and moneyed classes are constantly at work trying to convince others that things really aren’t “that bad.” To buy that, one has to take leave of their senses or ignore towering evidence including the following:
After possessing a debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio around 40% for almost the entirety of the 20th century (temporarily punctured by WWII), in the first quarter of the 21st century this has tripled! First in the wake of 9/11 the 50% threshold was crossed and then the 2008 financial crisis (largely created by Wall Street) moved our debt to nearly equal the assets of production. Today, in the wake of COVID 19 its even higher at about 120%—down nominally from 2021 peak. Meanwhile, what did America get in return for this debt load other than a business class that rules everything—including our ballot boxes?
In recent decades pre-Affordable Care Act (ACA) those under 65 and their families incessantly worried about health care insurance, access and cost. Since ACA those worries abated momentarily and now have returned ferociously as the world’s only for profit healthcare system remains focused first on “shareholder value.” Meanwhile as those clubby folk play, healthcare debt (not high-life consumption) has risen to be the number one fuel of personal bankruptcies. Of all things, Americans are now indebted to the hospital which of course is indebted to the insurers which of course is indebted to those value seeking shareholders. What makes this even more mind bending is that over half of all American health-care expenditures are made by the Federal government!
In that the world long-pegging its currencies to the US dollar is not enough for American capitalists, the nascent cryptocurrency industry emerged so that folks might make more money or launder all the previous piles of cash. It might prove to also be a handy tool to avoid the taxman! So a new industry that produces no element of value, nor even any worthwhile aesthetic, emerges while tremendously hogging increasingly scarce energy and land resources.
American rates of literacy and education achievement have been declining precipitously for decades—long before the added challenge brought by COVID. This despite over 80 years of unparalleled investments in public education and building a university system (both public and private) that is the envy of the world. Worse, for many, it is both culturally and politically chic to flaunt one’s own ignorance as though the “compone” country memes from the old Hee Haw show were real—which now it seems—they are.
So if you stack the 1920s on the left and the 2020s on the right what’s so different? Eight hour work day? Hardly. Child labor laws? Well maybe the laws, but not their obeyance. A county guided by science and reason? Puhleez. America’s class pyramid is again extreme (after having been flattened some in 1960s and 70s) and headed for another Gilded Age. Non-monetary elements of the culture have diminished greatly not only making daily survival a chore, but one of the few games in town that captures our attention. Expertise and knowledge are derided and an earnest professional class has awakened to a chilling reality that America’s use for it has grown short.
There may be in all of this even more chilling historical parallels about cultures that followed this path as a preamble to international irrelevancy. One might even think that all of this is a by-product of systemic political trends. Its true, certain ballot outcomes can worsen or lighten this very uncomfortable period in America. But it increasingly seems the ballot box is no longer sturdy enough to propel the type of change needed.
If so, then what moves America to hurl itself into the void of deep-space ignorance and discomfort? Since when was it decided a good political and cultural parlor game is to inflict real, tangible hurt on one another? Since when did so many Americans become so feckless, so absent of maintaining their own agency, so willing to acquiesce to grubby money interests? Its astonishing that none of this has moved a significant number to even more significant action.