The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (34 page)

My view is that a broad-based national party that stood for effective governance, the end of the corporatocracy, and investments in America’s future could command the vital center of politics, a kind of radical centrism.
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Perhaps an ARC—Alliance for the Radical Center—Party could test the waters in 2012. The party would be centrist because America’s centrist values, which balance individualism and social responsibility, offer a basis for a new prosperity. It would be radical in that it would signal a decisive break with the recent past. The costs of launching a third party would be small, and the potential benefits could be enormous if it accomplished nothing more than awakening public awareness and putting pressure on the two corrupted major parties to clean up their acts.

A more fundamental set of constitutional reforms would usefully shift America’s majoritarian constitutional system toward more parliamentarism, perhaps aiming toward a French-style mixed presidential-parliamentary system. Constitutional change is inherently slow and hazardous, the ultimate Pandora’s box of politics. We can’t yet know whether fundamental constitutional change will be needed to rescue American democracy. But if it is, we should aim for the benefits of parliamentary systems: a coherent government that combines the executive and legislative branches under a prime minister; a longer-term perspective of four to six years rather than our current two-year cycle; and more proportional representation, to give more weight and voting power to the poor
and minorities so that their concerns, too, will be addressed—and redressed.

Saving Government Before It’s Too Late

The bad old joke complains about the lousy restaurant where the food is terrible—and the portions are too small. Arguing for a larger role of government feels about the same. Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it. On the one hand, we need a more active role of government to address fundamental collective challenges such as infrastructure, clean energy, public education, health care, and poverty. On the other hand, the government is so dysfunctional that our tendency is to want to cut rather than expand its role. This chapter, I hope, has suggested some ways to overcome this impasse. We need more government, but also a much more competent and honest government. Economic reform and political reform must go hand in hand. Without the one there cannot be the other.

The best hope is to take big money out of big politics and to reform the public administration so that it can handle social problems of greater complexity and a longer time horizon. At a technical level, there are clear steps that can be adopted to achieve such aims. Many of these suggestions are already the law of the land in other, better-managed countries. Yet our public management problems did not emerge by accident; they reflect, in most cases, the influences of vested interests, which have all too often steered government processes toward narrow private advantage.

Who will provide the political base for cleaning up the U.S. government? All Americans should look toward the group with the biggest stake: young Americans. From the campuses to the workforce, today’s Millennials, aged eighteen to twenty-nine in 2010, are already showing a distinctive generational character. They are
more open, more diverse, more wired, more networked, better educated, and more committed to making government work than the generations before them. One is tempted to call the current crisis the unintended and unwelcomed bequest of the baby boomers—my generation—to America’s young. America, I predict, will change more due to its youth than to their parents. How that can happen is the story of the next and final chapter.

CHAPTER 13.
The Millennial Renewal

Economic crises open the door to deep political change. The future is up for grabs. Yet the dangers also multiply. There are, after all, many more possible wrong turns than right ones. The most common outcome is that the government continues to lose competence, direction, and financial capacity. The hardest change to pull off is constructive change in the middle of a crisis. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed about the French Revolution, “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.”
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America’s deepening crisis has not yet led to any significant reforms or change in the manner of governance. If anything, the vested interests have held their ground. The Obama administration has been a government of continuity rather than change, as Wall Street, the lobbyists, and the military have remained at the center of American power and policy. This stasis has discredited government still further. American white, middle-aged conservatives are enraged at their loss of wealth and security and have lashed out at the government for adding to their debts but not to their relief. The Tea Party movement has resulted and has dominated the media coverage. The poor, meanwhile, have hunkered down, withdrawing from hope and activism as they scramble to survive and make ends
meet. The young have been biding their time, trying to stay afloat in the face of high unemployment and little income.

This holding pattern cannot continue. It is like a cartoon character that runs off a cliff, looks down, yet remains suspended in midair. We know something is about to happen, but what?

There are three main tendencies at play and of course huge imponderables. The first tendency is inertia. The vested interests still have the money and the power but have lost their legitimacy and the public trust. Big banks, big insurance companies, and big arms manufacturers are close to Congress and the White House and have successfully resisted any serious intrusions into their prerogatives. The second tendency is backlash. The Tea Party is a concoction of the anger of middle-aged, middle-class white Americans who sense that their cohort is slipping from economic security and social dominance. They are furious, of course, and are easily manipulated by the status quo interests. That’s an old story. Time is against them.

The third tendency, the one with the long-term play, is generational change. Opinion surveys show that something truly new is in the works. The Millennials are different from their predecessors. If the boomers are the children of TV, the Millennials are the children of the Internet. The boomers sat for hours each day transfixed by the tube; the Millennials multitask for hours each day, networking with Facebook friends, catching snippets of news, watching videos, and surfing the Net. In the meantime, they are facing unique and difficult job prospects. But there is more. The Millennials are ethnically diverse, socially liberal, better educated (though struggling to meet tuition to complete four years of college), and more trusting of government. Obama was their hope and has been their first political disappointment.

The imponderables are enormous. The U.S. crisis has a complex global context. The emerging economies are not waiting for the United States to sort itself out. Global competition is intensifying. Our major firms are footloose. If they don’t make profits in the United States, they look abroad to much faster-growing markets.
Nor is the ecological crisis waiting for the United States to act. Climate change, complete with intense storms, famines, floods, and other disasters, continues to intensify. And political instability is rife, especially in the regions that are suffering from a combination of poverty, population growth, and severe environmental stress. In that category we should include Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and the countries of the Sahel. The U.S. military is involved in all of them, but with no benefit, since the underlying causes of the crises have no military solution.

Nobody can predict political outcomes in circumstances like these. Life is full of surprises, both positive and disastrous. The years 1989–1991 fit into the spectacularly positive column. A social disaster, the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet communism, which had been born in the chaos of World War I seventy-five years earlier, quietly gave way to peaceful political change. A great leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, presided over the change of order, and one of the greatest triumphs of modern politics resulted: a mostly peaceful dismantling of an empire. Ironically, very few Americans have an appreciation of what actually transpired, and, as is so often the case, claim credit when the credit is due to others.

Yet equally disastrous accidents happen as well. Any sane, responsible citizen of the world should ponder the dates 1914, 1917, and 1933. The first marked the onset of World War I, not the war to end all wars as was advertised at the time, but the war to rip Europe asunder, with a wound so deep it has taken till now to heal, and the healing is still not completed. The second was the moment Russian chaos was manipulated by Vladimir Lenin to launch the ruinous experiment with Soviet socialism. The third, in the depths of the Great Depression, was the unexpected and wholly accidental rise to power of Adolf Hitler.
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The economic crisis of 1933 meant that anything could happen, and the very worst did. The world was bled as never before and perhaps never again, since a similar total war could end the world itself.

These are morbid thoughts, but they are my darker forebodings
prompted by the current political drift in the United States. Most of the time, drift leads only to more drift. Time is lost, but without calamity. Yet once in a while, political drift ends up in disaster. When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people.

The propositions that I’ve laid out in this book are politically feasible. They start with the individual: to pull back from hypercommercialism, unplug from the noisy media a bit, and learn more about and reflect on the current economic situation. A mindful economy calls on each of us with an above-average income to understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay. Much of affluent households’ consumption can be trimmed without disaster and quite probably with some gain in equanimity and satisfaction. The affluent probably incur as much buyer’s remorse as they do lasting pleasure from their luxury purchases.

It is, in my view, the Millennials, aged eighteen to twenty-nine in the year 2010, who more than any other group will shape the future of America in the next twenty-five years. They embody the future with all its complexity and transformation. Though 80 percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five are white non-Hispanic, only 61 percent of the Millennials are white non-Hispanic. (The data here and that follow are from a recent Pew Research Center study.)
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Around 19 percent are Hispanic, another 13 percent are African American, and 6 percent are of other ethnicities, including Asian and Native American. Still younger cohorts, those between ages zero and fourteen, are even more racially diverse, with only 55 percent white non-Hispanic, 23 percent Hispanic, and 15 percent African American.
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The Millennials are politically progressive, believing in a larger role for the government. Sixty-seven percent support a “bigger government providing more services,” compared with only 31 percent
of those over sixty-five. This is the result not only of their ethnic profile but of their age, optimism, and generational outlook. White non-Hispanic Millennials, as well as Hispanic and African American Millennials, are more progressive than their older counterparts. They will also resist the deficit-increasing implications of further tax cuts on the rich. It is today’s generation, after all, that will be paying the bills left behind by the boomers.

The Millennials, of course, have a longer time horizon than other adults in the society, so it is not surprising that they are activists regarding long-term investments such as clean energy and infrastructure. Far more than older adults, they recognize the science of climate change, and far more than the older cohorts, they support action. They will be the main beneficiaries of a modernized infrastructure or the main victims of continued decay. Of course, in a truly mindful economy, the parents of Millennials (like me) will care deeply about the world we are bequeathing to our children and their children.

The greatest challenge in American society has always been the reality of diversity. It divided the country from the start, led to a bloody civil war, created an apartheid society for a hundred years afterward, and unleashed the most dramatic social change from below of the twentieth century during the civil rights era. The shock waves of the civil rights era have reverberated ever since. It is therefore of historic importance that Millennials show every sign of greater tolerance than their predecessors. This seems to be true regarding every hot-button issue of religion, sex, and race. The Millennials are less religious and less often affiliated with a specific denomination; they are less evangelical in outlook; and they are less likely to attend weekly services. They overwhelmingly accept homosexuality (63 percent say that homosexuality “should be accepted by society,” as opposed to 35 percent of those over sixty-five). They believe by a narrow majority that abortion should be legal in all or most cases (52 percent compared with 37 percent of those over sixty-five). Their favorable attitudes toward interracial relations and intermarriage befit
a generation that was born and raised well after the achievements of the civil rights era.

The Millennials, as a result, are less likely to be divided or even torn asunder by the culture wars of the boomer generation. They will live naturally with diversity. They will accept a more activist government. They will be more attuned to environmental needs. All this points in the direction of the mindful economy, if the healing strengths of the Millennial generation’s tolerance and optimism are mobilized for collective political action.