Newly-elected
Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the
Washington Post that savaged Donald Trump’s character and leadership.
Romney’s attack and Trump’s response Wednesday morning on Twitter are
the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the two men.
It’s even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the
Republican nomination in 2020. We’ll see.
But for now, Romney’s
piece is fascinating on its own terms. It’s well-worth reading. It’s a
window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.
Romney’s
main complaint in the piece is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and
divisive leader. That’s true, of course. But beneath the personal
slights, Romney has a policy critique of Trump. He seems genuinely angry
that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian civil war.
Romney doesn’t explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He
doesn’t appear to consider that a relevant question. More policing in
the Middle East is always better. We know that. Virtually everyone in
Washington agrees.
That’s not surprising. Romney spent the bulk of
his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but
invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an
existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing
employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes
leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became
fantastically rich doing this.
Meanwhile, a remarkable number of
the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity
model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run
the country.
Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a
finance-based economy and an internationalist foreign policy as the
“mainstream Republican” view. And he’s right about that. For
generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world
safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign
wars. Modern Democrats generally support those goals enthusiastically.
There
are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just
in America. In countries around the world — France, Brazil, Sweden, the
Philippines, Germany, and many others — voters are suddenly backing
candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a decade
ago. These are not isolated events. What you’re watching is entire
populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.
Something
like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald
Trump rode a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House.
Does he understand the political revolution that he harnessed? Can he
reverse the economic and cultural trends that are destroying America?
Those are open questions.
But they’re less relevant than we think.
At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone,
too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then?
How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions
that matter.
The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal
for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is
that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more
Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us
happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff.
And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the
country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in
GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more
elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of
ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control.
Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are
the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders
should want for us, and would want if they cared.
But our leaders
don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation
to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers.
They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it
shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to
understand our problems.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell
us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters.
Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture,
meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.
Members
of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the
Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible
and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They
don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets
function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal
lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s
ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two
totally separate categories.
Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite
perspective, and yet reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real
problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is
collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the
libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also
consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by
market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it.
Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides miss
the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.
Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families
make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two. It used to
be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now overwhelming.
How do we know? Consider the inner cities.
Thirty years ago,
conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and many other places and were
horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but
disappeared in poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were born
out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and
disorder became universal.
What caused this nightmare? Liberals
didn’t even want to acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from
the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a
ready explanation for inner-city dysfunction and it made sense: big
government. Decades of badly-designed social programs had driven fathers
from the home and created what conservatives called a “culture of
poverty” that trapped people in generational decline.
There was
truth in this. But it wasn’t the whole story. How do we know? Because
virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely
different population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like
Detroit.
This is striking because rural Americans wouldn’t seem to
have much in common with anyone from the inner city. These groups have
different cultures, different traditions and political beliefs. Usually
they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives,
mostly.
Yet, the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar
to anyone who visited downtown Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of
wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic.
Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You’d think
our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly
they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import
foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are
slipping behind.
But Republicans now represent rural voters. They
ought to be interested. Here’s a big part of the answer: male wages
declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared
over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were
the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In
many places, women suddenly made more than men.
Now, before you
applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study
after study has shown that when men make less than women, women
generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry
them, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in
marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar
disasters that inevitably follow -- more drug and alcohol abuse, higher
incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.
This
isn’t speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s
social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all.
That’s why they get married before they have kids. That model works. But
increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can
afford.
And yet, and here’s the bewildering and infuriating part,
those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all
the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the
people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight
malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit?
That’s crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties
ignore the crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like
it’s still 1961, and the biggest problem American families face is that
sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment
bankers or Facebook executives.
For our ruling class, more
investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s more
virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to
raise your own kids.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire
book about this. Sandberg explained that our first duty is to
shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandberg
herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this
has made her rich.
We are ruled by mercenaries who
feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day
traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no
skin in this game, and it shows.
What’s
remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn’t question why
Sandberg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at the pure
absurdity of it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandberg as the leader
of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean In." As if
putting a corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage.
Republicans should say so.
They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial
system. Not all commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people
money they can’t possibly repay? Or charge them interest that
impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect 400
percent annual interest.
We’re OK with that? We
shouldn’t be. Libertarians tell us that’s how markets work -- consenting
adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK.
But it’s also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose
the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city
or on Wall Street.
And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, as our
leaders should, if it would break your heart to see them high all the
time. Which they are. A huge number of our kids, especially our boys,
are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new
technology has made it odorless. But it’s everywhere.
And
that’s not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich
from marijuana, marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry
politicians have legalized or decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the
House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana industry. His fellow
Republicans seem fine with that. “Oh, but it’s better for you than
alcohol,” they tell us.
Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the
point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who’s been smoking weed. The
life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want
that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it
on us? You know the reason. Because they don’t care about us.
When
you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our
leaders don’t even try. They hand out jobs and contracts and
scholarships and slots at prestigious universities based purely on how
we look. There’s nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes
close.
Under our current system, an American who works for a
salary pays about twice the tax rate as someone who’s living off
inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what
we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our
rich people do.
In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22
million dollars in investment income. He paid an effective federal tax
rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the
federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Mitt Romney supports
the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating.
Our
leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax
code is based on the principles of the free market. Please. It’s based
on laws that the Congress passed, laws that companies lobbied for in
order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for those
people. They did increase their economic advantage. But for everyone
else, it came at a big cost. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you
favor one child over another, your kids don’t hate you. They hate each
other.
That happens in countries, too. It’s happening in
ours, probably by design. Divided countries are easier to rule. And
nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting
special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are getting
special treatment. Republicans should oppose that with everything they
have.
What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent
country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate
the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement. A
country you might recognize when you’re old.
A country that
listens to young people who don’t live in Brooklyn. A country where you
can make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where
Lewiston, Maine seems almost as important as the west side of Los
Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting outside and
picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects
itself. And above all, a country where normal people with an average
education who grew up in no place special can get married, and have
happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that actually
cares about families, the building block of everything.
What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For
now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at
this point.
But first, Republican leaders will have to
acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism
is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to
worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of
human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any
economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A
system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
Internalizing all this will not be easy for Republican leaders. They’ll
have to unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate
propaganda. They’ll likely lose donors in the process. They’ll be
criticized. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market
fundamentalism a form of socialism.
That’s a lie.
Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working
desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get,
and very soon unless a group of responsible people in our political
system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal
people.
If you want to put America first, you’ve got to put its families first.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on January 2, 2019.
