Make America Great Again

I love my country.

I also firmly believe that President Trump should be impeached and removed from office.

^That sentence^ just made several folks roll their eyes, some of whom have already closed the page, while others hang on just to argue that my first and second sentences are contradictory.

That’s frustrating.

After all, my belief is not predicated on policies and politics, but on the preservation of our nation’s core principles. How dare you dismiss an opinion just because it doesn’t align with yours? The fact that this happens at all seems a bellwether of our nation’s decline…

Wait…

I do it too.

So I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I really like — even love, in some cases — many people on the other side of the aisle who completely disagree with me about Trump and most anything else politically charged. We get along well in person, so why the disconnect?

I’ve thought about this a lot, and the answer finally came after asking a question at the heart of the slogan itself:

When one seeks to ‘Make America Great Again,’ what, exactly, might he be seeking?

America remains the world’s dominant economic and military superpower. It has a GDP that is almost double that of the next country on the list. It is a land of remarkable diversity and principle, home to one of the most fiercely independent citizen populations of any country, and a refuge for millions seeking to escape tyranny and persecution. America is, by most standards, pretty great.

But in the eyes of many Americans, the country in which they were raised is becoming unfamiliar and no longer rife with the opportunities that once defined their futures.

For example, it is no longer possible for a man to follow his father and grandfather into a manufacturing job, or to join the union and start on the union ladder of wages.

Marriage is no longer the only socially acceptable way to form intimate partnerships, or to rear children.

People have moved away from the security of their traditional religions and the churches of their parents and grandparents, and toward churches that emphasize seeking an identity.

Hell, the notion of identity itself has become the realm of individual subjectivity rather than communal or scientific definition.

Each of these changes — a few among many — have left people with less structure when they come to choose their careers, their religion, and the nature of their family lives. What was once a steady diet is now an a la carte buffet. When our choices succeed they are liberating and rewarding, but when they fail, the individual can only hold himself or herself responsible for bad decisions.

This may sound like common sense accountability — but it’s not that simple.

Individual accountability is important, but what if that which we perceive as an individual’s failure to meet expectations is actually the failure of the structure used to define those expectations in the first place? In this sense, America’s lack of greatness does not result from a bad president or policy decisions. Instead, a bad president and bad policies result from the structural failure of what made America great in the first place.

Here me out…

As human beings, the structure supporting our lives is inextricably connected to our economy. The cooperation required by a migratory existence required defined roles in the hunting and gathering of food. Early human settlements followed suit — farms emerged where the land was good, and little shops where the soil thinned — and about these places grew communities. The producer of food requires the fixer of plows, and so on.

Work within this highly local model went well beyond wages and profit — if such outputs were even considered. Work was, and is, essential to one’s dignity and self-fulfillment. Each role in this form of economy imparts a sense of purpose, empowerment, and identity. The impact of one’s work allowed workers to bond with their community and contribute to social harmony and cohesion — outcomes that were seen and felt directly by coworkers and the community alike.

Existence within the bounds of one’s immediate locale also produced realistic goals, given that a man’s ambition was tuned to the success of his local economy — aspirations to be the best hunter or grow the best food evolved to aspirations to run a local business or seek a local position of pride. An individual’s achievements were the foundation for the structure of his community, and his contribution to that community was a sign of his success. In other words, local hierarchies are achievable hierarchies, not to mention hierarchies that organically hold people accountable given that your neighbors are your customers and stakeholders.

All of this may appear quaint to the modern eye, but for millions of Americans, the frustrations they are experiencing in their own lives connects directly to our rapid departure from a local economy to a global economy. And this departure goes well beyond money — it has fundamentally changed how humans define success, and therefore view and interact with the world.

It is the decay of this ancient relationship between work and people; people and their communities that is rotting America from within. And the decay of the community is inextricably connected to the decay of purpose, and the result of a philosophy aggrandized by a modern economic system that defines work as merely the exchange of money for labor. In other words, supply and demand has reduced work to the commodification of human beings.

Workers are seen as impersonal instruments to the extent that they can be eliminated on a whim and even replaced by inanimate objects. Such a reality destroys self-esteem, personal satisfaction, responsibility, and creativity. The exaltation of the machine reduces the status of human beings and limits their participation in the economy to the extremes of sacrificing every waking hour to chasing increasingly unattainable heights of success or falling victim to unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages, and a lack of job security and dignity.

This change naturally triggers a sentimental bias toward the past for many Americans to whom the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ represents a deep desire. And it may be true that America wont be on a path to being great again until we reconsider the structure upon which we are building rather than continue as we are by slapping a new coat of paint over the rot every election cycle. But where to start? What happened?

The French economist Frédéric Bastiat may have put it best:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Technology has enabled the perspective of the local community to be replaced with that of the entire planet. Globalization has been a boon for corporations, which have grown power at such a remarkable rate over the 20th Century that they were able to convince lawmakers to grant them citizenship. 7.5 billion customers makes for a different structure than a few thousand. Millionaires become billionaires; businesses become brands; workers separate from customers outside of surveys and revenue reports.

The media has followed suit with a communications revolution not seen since the inventions of radio and television to accommodate this new paradigm, and social media in particular has transformed the way we interact by replacing real communities with virtual tribes; face-to-face dialogue with information spread by algorithms designed to accommodate (and exploit) every individual’s bias with precision.

We now see the issues impacting the whole world every day, but lose sight of our immediate surroundings behind the glow of pixels and business opportunities with people we will never actually meet, never mind be held accountable to.

It is now possible to physically live next door to your neighbors and occupy entirely different realities.

Enter our political discourse.

As humans we deeply value camaraderie and acceptance by those with status in our communities — this does not change. So what happens when those communities are virtual and status is global?

We see this with the anti-vaccine movement and conspiracy theorists every day, where it no longer matters what is factually true, only what is tribally “correct.” Our political dialogue has devolved along these same lines. And when reality is replaced by the whims of tribal opinion, complexity and depth are replaced by threats and force. Reality itself is replaced with folklore, and the individual’s ability to think independently, find his bearings in the real world, and to identify falsehoods is severely wounded.

The notion of a localized existence — an economy comprised of stakeholders with whom you have an interpersonal connection and a status predicated on the success of those interactions has faded further and further away. As a result, the aspirations of people have shifted away from gaining the respect of their neighbors to achieving the respect granted only to celebrities or billionaire CEOs. The fulfilling life of a small business owner has been decimated by the presence of big business chains on every street corner, and the impactful work of a teacher or a local councilman is overshadowed within the minds of an entire generation trained to believe they can do anything.

But what happens when the point of comparison is Jeff Bezos instead of one’s father? When success is measured in billions rather than appreciation?

We’re watching it — one generation bitter and another ruined by the anxiety of their chase; the tragedy of their inevitable shortfall.

70,000 drug overdoses.

50,000 suicides.

These are the results of our departure from what it means to be human.

Those who seek to anesthetize themselves, to retreat into their screens or the temporary relief of drugs, are attempting to flee from pain, despair, and dislocation that results from this change. People seek in these surrogates the affirmation, warmth, and solidarity that should come from families, friends, and communities where they can find purpose and dignity — that should come from that structure which has rapidly disappeared from our lives.

An underlying fact remains about all of us — we cannot live well unless we attach ourselves to something greater than ourselves that will outlive us. In other words, life is only tolerable if one can see purpose in it — if it has a goal, and one that is worth pursuing.

America is slipping not because its citizens have softened or because one party or the other is seeking its destruction — America is slipping because it operates according to a system that rewards our egos and not our nature. The trouble is that the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end for himself — he is too small a thing. Not only is he confined in space, he is also narrowly limited in time. So when we are lost in a global community with no other objective than our egos, we cannot escape from the feeling that our efforts are destined to vanish into nothing. Caught in such a state, people lose the strength to act and struggle — to live — since nothing is to remain of the work we put in and the troubles we endure. When work and effort result in a transaction, not a purpose; a fleeting reward, not a meaningful identity, we find ourselves in a precarious situation.

We’ve screwed up.

Our acceptance of a system that wages war on the communal and the sacred, on those forces that allow us to connect and transcend our temporal condition to bond with others, may be our greatest sin. And we do so against our own best interests because we have been convinced by well-marketed dreams that it’s all on us to become great — that there is more opportunity with scale; more profit when humans are a commodity rather than a community.

America felt different when working full-time meant an income large enough to support a family. It felt different when a single-income household allowed for one parent to stay home with children, and when a career meant a pension, insurance, and work schedules that permit free time and vacations to build strong families.

This is why so many Americans desperately want to Make America Great Again.

The trouble is that we can’t do it as individuals.

It wasn’t the individual who made what so many Americans desire possible, but a community of folks who identified their shared interests, the power of their union, and who worked together toward a better future. We’ve sacrificed that sound structure of shared weight and replaced it with a bunch of individuals trying to support too much on their own — and for whom? Shareholders?

It’s natural for us to viscerally reject this system and that makes us vulnerable.

Enter Donald J. Trump.

We’ve hired the ultimate individual to fix a problem that can only be solved by unity.

President Trump divides us. There is less accountability when we’re at each other’s throats rather than united, and he knows this. We are currently witnessing the exploitation of this vulnerable moment in our history and the fear it causes. And while we argue, the President and many of those among him are profiting off the presidency itself. Perhaps it’s no surprise that an entire party now blatantly obstructs justice, and lies to the American public. Trump himself has lied nearly 14,000 times since taking office — the most recent example being his claims and promotion of yesterday’s IG Report as the bombshell that would exonerate him and expose the “deep state,” but instead found no evidence of F.B.I. political bias, no conspiracies or links to dossiers, and no coup attempt. These are not partisan talking points — they are easily provable facts that will be skewed and buried amidst the noise of the next “bombshell” or “conspiracy” according to the corrupt framework outlined above.

If America’s true slogans — United We Stand; e pluribus unum — still mean anything, then we must stand together and reject those who manipulate our fears to benefit from our division.

It would be nothing short of a revolution to shift our economy away from the complex and intertwined global behemoth it has become, and it would take extreme willpower for Americans to turn away from our screens and the slow dopamine drip of social media and back to our neighbors and communities. But we can start by remembering our original slogans, and reinforcing our principles as a nation.

Our founders knew that the only way to guarantee the preservation of those principles in our government structure is through the checks and balances afforded by separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. Washington himself wrote that America “can never be in danger of degenerating into a monarchy, an Oligarchy, an Aristocracy, so long as there shall remain any virtue in the body of the People.”

The body of the People, represented by our legislative branch, has long ceased to hold the executive branch accountable, but it now has become so corrupted as to encourage outright lies and enable the obstruction of justice for the sake of personal profit and retention of power. Our Congress only gets away with this because we enable it.

The media is complicit in this enablement. We are so overwhelmed by the noise that we finally just pick a team, toss on a jersey and treat our participation in the very system corrupting our existence as if it were a football game.

This degradation of America has happened over the course of a century, and that process was among our founders greatest fears — liberty is most frequently lost by what James Madison called, “gradual and silent encroachments of those in power.” But that gradual encroachment does not necessarily take the form of a conspiracy, nor is it spearheaded by villains or even bad people. This is what makes the acknowledgement of our own decay challenging. Sometimes it is the most well-intentioned among us simply responding to that which gets rewarded that leads to the small changes that accumulate into major disruption. America is bleeding from a thousand paper cuts, and instead of embarking on the hard task of healing a million wounds, we’ve handed the man in power a machete and asked him to make it quick.

We sit at a critical inflection point. How we react as a citizen body may determine our ability to preserve the very notion of accountability within our structure of government and perhaps even help us level set and truly begin the hard work it will take to make America great again.

So I get the slogan.

I also get why people looked to Trump — something has to change.

I also get why Trump will not be convicted by the Senate. And it isn’t because he’s innocent.

There’s lack of integrity in our political system, and a loss of humanity in our economy. Our inability to diagnose ourselves is leading to our demise, and changing that is up to us.

Whether there remains any virtue in the body of the People, we’ll see. I personally view the election of a president who thinks about the country first, rather than himself, as a start. But even this will do us no good until we remember that America is a community of individuals with a shared future, and not simply individuals going it alone.

AN

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