What's the story?

America: What Went Wrong

Trump has a compelling and partially true story for what has gone wrong:

Crazy leftists let in too many immigrants who stole your jobs and went on crime sprees. They made bad trade deals that devastated factory towns. And when you, the forgotten Americans, complained, they called you racists who should sit through their DEI trainings.

Trump’s narrative resonates on multiple levels: People who are slipping financially or living in ailing communities are relieved to have their precarity acknowledged. They’re gratified to be given someone to blame. And, if they’ve ever felt the sting of accusations of bigotry, Trump’s pushback can feel cathartic.

Establishment liberals have their own stories:

Everything was great until Trump came along and ruined everything. (If you disagree, you’re a fascist).

Better living through technocracy. Leave it to the experts. (If you doubt the experts, you’re an anti-science jackass).

The problem with liberals’ stories is that they don’t ring true for many if not most people. Heading into the 2024 election, only a quarter of Americans thought the economy was in good shape, and that number hasn’t budged.

As for the public’s faith in institutional authority, it’s on the decline when it comes to universities and public health. Even where trust remains high, that doesn’t necessarily mean people want policy to be the exclusive province of experts. People want to have a say and resent being told they’re too ignorant to be worthy of consideration.

We need to tell a story that is true and feels true to the majority of Americans. It’s no easy task. It’s easy for Trump because he oversimplifies, lies shamelessly, and stokes biases that are routinely inflamed by right-wing meda. For anyone else, it’s challenging to distill our dehumanizing techno-oligcarchy into a succint and straightforward manifesto, harder still without a media empire that will echo it (not that that’s the media’s job but…just sayin’, I don’t expect MSNBC to be exposing any truths that go deeper than partisan hackery anytime soon).

Our story needs to clearly spell out what’s gone wrong and why and give some idea of how to turn this sinking ship around before it hits any more iceburgs. It should tell it like it is, without overstatement, statistics, abstractions (eg. democracy, capitalism, oligarchy), dogma, moralistic hand-wringing, complaints about disinformation, or overtones of victimization or self-righteousness. Tell people what they already sense is true, connect the dots into a coherent explanation, and match the median level of emotional intensity. Too little and we sound flaccid. Too much and we sound like deranged zealouts.

Ours is the story of how greed and corruption have been become the driving force of American politics and how both parties have allowed the pursuit of profit to degrade all the things that used to make America great. Our public schools and highways and factories and the well-paid union workers who build them used to be the envy of the world. Little by little, corrupt politicians have let the banks, corporations and billionaires rig the economy for their own benefit. They’ve let Big Tech companies collect our data, hook our kids on screens and turn our jobs over to AI robots. They’ve let union-busting companies shrink organized labor down to a shell of what it once was and let ag giants bring family farmers to their knees.

There used to be a contract in this country: You worked hard and played by the rules and you got to live a decent life, pay the bills, and put a little aside for the future. But companies are routinely breaking that contract. We work harder and harder for less and less, and the companies rake in bigger and bigger profits. If you own a small business, no matter how hard you work to keep it afloat, the Amazons and Walmarts can easily undercut you.

We scramble for health care in a system gone helter skelter. Sheer unaffordability aside, good luck finding a specialist, getting your prescription filled or negotiating a payment plan without running through a gauntlet of dehumanizing robocalls.

The rich get tax cuts and the poor get Medicaid cuts. Big Ag gets big subsidies and family farmers get deeper into debt. Americans are getting poorer and sicker and lonelier and more stressed out and suspicious and pissed off. We’re told that our problems are either of our own making (because we’re lazy or stupid or rural) or the fault of immigrants. Next time you hear someone say that, ask them how much money they’ve got in the bank and where it came from…the people in Congress and on TV are living in a country club fantasy world awash in money that magically compounds into more money. They have no idea what it’s like for people who work regular jobs for a living and are more than happy to watch us fight each other for scraps instead of coming together to kick them to the curb.

Things are bad, but we can turn the page on these problems. It starts with taking on the billionaires. They act like they own this country and, the truth is, they kind of do. And that’s why we’ve got to put people in charge who will rein them in, stop them from price gouging and exporting our jobs, make them pay their fair share in taxes, and use that money to bring our bridges and hospitals and power grids and farms into the 21^st century. If AI is going to be used, it should be the people who decide when, where and how, and the displaced workers should be taken care of with the profits generated by all that wonderful AI super-productivity we keep hearing about.

If we do all that, there’s gonna be more than enough jobs to go around and we might even find ourselves welcoming immigrants back to do some of those jobs. Immigrants didn’t steal our jobs and our pensions; greedy corporations threw our jobs away or turned them into low-paid part-time gigs.

To put that all more succinctly:

Out-of-control greed is eating away at the American way of life, and the powers that be are letting it happen. We deserve a decent living that pays the bills. We deserve a reasonably comfortable retirement. We deserve to interact with human beings instead of robots. We deserve a government that keeps up our roads and schools and parks for the good of everyone. That’s how we make America great again. Government should serve the people, not the billionaires.

Okay, I gave it my best shot but this is a collective project and, as a college-educated politico, I’m not ideally suited for this. We need to be making true, sincere, and plainspoken statements about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. I urge everyone who is themselves or hangs out with people who are not professional members of the political class to be working on this.