MARCH 3, 2020 – The system is broken.
Too much treasure and bandwidth are allocated to campaigns to nominate, then elect a president. As I’ve shouted here before, if we didn’t know better—and I’m thinking we don’t—we’d believe our representative democracy is a quadrennial election for an absolute, four-year dictator who wields a magic wand/club. Then there’s the equally ridiculous notion that performance in a series of All-Star Wrestling matches is a good way to gauge a candidate’s qualifications for a game of grandmaster, five-dimensional chess. These long-standing features of our political culture reflect our infatuation with entertainment and bright, shiny objects. In short, our predicament—our impatience, polarization, dumbed down approach to politics, attraction to simplistic solutions for complex problems—is (are) attributable to our “cotton candy culture.”
Our culture, in turn, is the ultimate product of “consumption capitalism,” an endless whirlwind of marketing, advertising, and consumption. Not only has “consumption capitalism” robbed us of critical thinking. It’s overwhelmed our political processes—first, political campaigns, then lobbying to sway the winners of those campaigns.
But if you think “socialism” is the answer, think again.
In the first place, thanks to politically motivated marketing and advertising, “socialism” is now devoid of true meaning. Economists used to define it as a system in which government controls the means of production. Rightwing propagandists today have re-defined “socialism” as “government interference” (i.e. “government regulation”). In the process, they overlook such long-standing, critical government operations as Medicare, Social Security, or the Interstate Highway System (a quasi-socialist enterprise; government-financed and operated but constructed and repaired largely by private concerns paid by the government). (As to “interference” vs. “regulation,” it’s all in the eye of the beholder: a factory owner might call prohibition of arsenic dumping, unwanted interference, while the general public (liberals . . . and conservatives?) might call it necessary regulation. In neither instance, however, does the government own or operate the factory.)
“Socialist Bernie” and his followers, on the other hand, think “socialism” is a system that flushes student debt down the toilet. That’s not “socialism.” It’s “sewage” in need of proper treatment before it gets into the public water supply. Although Bernie has identified a serious problem, his “socialist” solution doesn’t correct the cause of the problem: the unsustainable cost of higher education with increasingly lower outcomes.
Debt-burdened students cheer Bernie’s brand of “socialism.” But while in school, they learned little about economics; even less about the structure of government and our democratic institutions. Moreover, being children of a “cotton candy culture,” they were snookered into an “education” that neither educated nor prepared them for a radically changing economy. They were taken in by five-star, campus meal plans, cushy dorms, and state-of-the-art workout centers—the main attractions, I remember, of our family’s “college tours” already 15 years ago—and curricula largely detached from analytical thinking and an economy undergoing radical transformation.
The solution? Hard, long-haul, data-driven, analysis-fueled, roll-up-your-sleeves reforms. Broccoli, not cotton candy.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
