I’ve returned to the muses at Keyes Toyota to address the problem. After coffee and half a chocolate donut, I’m ready to begin. Here's an outline of what most people who follow the news know or suspect:
1. The American two-party system, a marvel of flexibility since the Civil War, became dysfunctional in recent decades. The pace of social change was too rapid for the parties, so that today they cannot address concerns arising from cutting-edge technologies, like those leading the revolutions in Artificial Intelligence, automation, the Internet, surveillance and bio-engineering, while race and gender issues are addressed only as polemics.
A note on race: The primary achievement of post-war American government has been to resist or dismantle overtly racist policy. Government legislation and funding have done almost nothing to help people understand their own feelings about race, and what to do about those feelings. That is because all the intelligent, potentially helpful discussion is below public radar, in living rooms or in academia, such as the perspectives on race from UCLA anthropologist Jarred Diamond, whose ideas would be a great starting point for rational discussion. As things are, what we call "politics" does not utilize the vocabulary or the basic knowledge, or indeed the goodwill, needed to address race.
2. Over the last decade, for fear that the American electorate would realize that neither party is addressing its needs, Democratic and Republican strategy has been to distract attention from the problem by starting fires. The GOP, aided by the media, whipped up the righteous Tea Party, and the Dems basked in the holy light of opposition. Neither party had to maintain or understand anything beyond this manufactured culture war.
4. The upshot of the culture war is that we have no useful vocabulary or perspective for rational public discourse, leaving us wide-open for manipulation. The news media works with the parties to promote the appearance of non-culpability for the situation. News stories are formulated to present a world of hopeless disagreement, though much of the disagreement is by design, not accident. Reporting the confusion enhances the confusion.
The lack of honest media reporting is evident in the rarity of stories on the coming near-universal unemployment that will be caused by automation. Almost all standard news stories serve as distractions from this mostly unreported one. That includes news about our simmering wars. There's no North Korean or ISIS threat that is anything as dangerous as the threat to civilization from unemployment, which should be covered prominently in every news outlet every day, as one of the basic existential problems of humanity.
The lack of honest media reporting is evident in the rarity of stories on the coming near-universal unemployment that will be caused by automation. Almost all standard news stories serve as distractions from this mostly unreported one. That includes news about our simmering wars. There's no North Korean or ISIS threat that is anything as dangerous as the threat to civilization from unemployment, which should be covered prominently in every news outlet every day, as one of the basic existential problems of humanity.
5. Donald Trump capitalized on the parties' dysfunction by launching a populist campaign for president. Using hate speech that had previously been expressed in code, he convinced Tea Party voters that he was real, and he convinced many people who were sick of distant and self-satisfied upholders of the liberal order that it would be worth it to piss them off, even at the price of chaos and destruction.
6. Chaos and destruction is what we're getting. Trump, from one point of view, represents a raiding party of venture capitalists looking to make gigantic killings off privatizing vulnerable sectors of America- as Vladimir Putin's associates did in Russia. America, as the subject of a globalization shake-down, is being devalued in the process.
That is the part many people know or suspect at this point. What those of us on the outside do not know is whether Trump will win, or (since he's already winning) to what extent he will continue to win, and if he doesn't entirely win, how much of the United States will he be able to devalue and sell before he is stopped?
Consider the U.S. Postal Service. Trump complains that it loses money, which begs the question: Why does the Postal Service need to make money? That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to offer a secure communication system that binds the nation together. Snailmail is slow, you say? That's a small price to pay for the last refuge of private communication in America. If you seal a document in a stamped envelope and put it in a mailbox, no power anywhere in the world can see that document without a court order, other than the person to whom it is addressed. That is not the case with anything sent via the Internet or phone. Today, the Fourth Amendment's due process right to privacy of communication applies only to the U.S. mail.
Will Trump last long enough to privatize the Postal Service, Social Security and Medicare, monetize the national parks, strangle public education and propel America and the world into cycles of war that preempt all rational discussion about anything?
We don't know. It does not seem that the FBI will be able to stop him [Postscript, 3/27: That's been confirmed], and the Democrats are not unified for impeachment. Maybe Trump will get everything he wants, even a second term.
Or maybe there will be a revolt from Trump's own ranks- the billionaires. The only hope I'm seeing is a new party supported by billionaires from outside the President's circle and influence. Knowledgeable, visionary billionaires, please step forward! Let's get this party started!
