Letter 2 America for November 8, 2013

Dear America,

The current election cycle has turned on one issue: the ACA (the Affordable Care Act).  In fact, the obsession with "Obamacare" is so complete that one never hears the reasons for it anymore.  Initially, there were arguments about big government and states' rights, but those philosophical bases for objection to the law have withered and died as fodder for the discourse on the issue of universal health insurance.  People favor or oppose Obamacare based on party affiliation, and perhaps something a little less venerable...or maybe even despicable: dislike of the eponymous president.  But that issue is about to get resolved in the form of success or failure of the law because votes will be either won or lost based on how well the ACA does what it was created for, and there is nothing that Republicans or Democrats can do about it.  As a flash point, universal health insurance is a thing of the past when it comes to electoral politics.  There will still be some gum flapping, but it will not capture public attention, and in the end, it will still be just more hot air.  But every election has a theme, and while the next one--the mid-terms in 2014--may still be liberally laced with talk about Obamacare, it will also portend the central theme of the election after that...the next presidential election in 2016.  In that election, the issue will be the growing gap not just between the rich and the poor, but between the rich and all of the rest of us.  The next election will be about reversing what will then be the thirty-five year old trend that is the true legacy of the conservatives' patron saint, Ronald Reagan.

What supply-side economics has done to us is profound.  Our economy has become the engine of a kind of social Darwinism that pervades everything we do as a nation.  The Calvinistic preoccupation with the question of who deserves what is the real product of Reagan-omics.  We are a nation that is driven by wealth rather than social awareness today, and the consequence is that we are a far less worthy people.  We have become a modern feudal system in which plutocrats have taken the place of aristocrats, but just as surely dole out the product of our labors as they see fit regardless of merit.  The next election will be about accretion of large caches of money by people other than those who do the work in our country.  It will be about a financial system that used to be the medium through which business was done, but is now a business unto itself, serving no purpose except to concentrate wealth in the hands of the few by siphoning it off the process of finance, which was intended to facilitate commerce rather than to take its place as a means of generating prosperity.  The United States today is a small tail wagging an enormous dog, and with every year that passes...every year in which the working people of our country make no economic progress in relative terms while the corporate oligarchy gets ever richer and moves ever more wealth out of our country never to be seen again...the electorate becomes more aware of the fact that something is wrong.

The specific topics will be things like the Dodd-Frank Act, which is a pale imitation of Glass-Steagall, but just as the ACA is better than nothing though it is not as good as a single-payer system, Dodd-Frank will have to do for now.  It provides for consumer protection from predatory lending and if it is ever fully implemented will prevent financiers from making money gambling on things like derivatives based on mortgages and oil futures.  In the presidential debate to come, the issue will be framed that directly and simply, as the liberal candidate demands of the conservative that he justify his opposition to Dodd-Frank in support of the privileged few who, in the final analysis, never did anything for any of us.  The issue of taxes will once again be on the agenda, and higher taxes on the top 1% in particular will be demanded by the liberal establishment and the Democratic Party, leaving the conservatives and the Republicans that 1% to support them...that 1% and their money.  There will be subterfuge as they try to vilify what Mitt Romney called the 47%, but the 47% vote and that is likely to be a losing strategy...again.  There will be moral diversions like abortion and gay rights, but again, the majority does not subscribe to the views of the basic conservative constituency.  Trying to tell the majority that they are sinners is another losing strategy, and in the end, it is just a diversion anyway.  The political battle will be joined by two enormous forces: those of the privileged and those of the working people of the United States.  The election in 2016 won't be won on party affiliation.  It will be won on the next president's fealty to the kind of Americans who waged a revolution so that they could be independent in thought and religion and egalitarian in their politics.  And oddly enough, that is probably what will make the next election close.  The Republicans will nominate someone who they think can win...probably someone like Chris Christy, or even Rand Paul.  And the Democrats?  Well, the only bet in town is Hillary Clinton, who is probably the richest of the three.  Still, the people who go to work every day will see something in each of them; in Christy's "everyman," candid style; in Paul's restrained libertarianism, misguided as it often is when he says things like the government is overreaching when it bans incandescent, low efficiency light bulbs because that he should have the right to use whatever light bulbs he wants, even though we are struggling to produce enough electricity to keep insufficiency of energy availability from bringing us to our knees.  And Clinton will not look like the new-era patrician that she and her husband have become because she is liberal in her politics...and at her core, which entails a kind of populism that has resonated with the American people at least since FDR.   The race will be close, but the winner will be the one who can convince the American people that he or she will do something about the rich...who are eating us all.  And in the final analysis, who could ask for anything more.

Your friend,

Mike