The People of the World Want to Be Left in Peace and May Keep Going to War to Get It

It’s clear that the citizens of the world want what most of us want, in the deepest and most honorable parts of our war-weary souls…a little peace and security, a quiet Sunday buying ice cream for the kids. I know that’s a lot to ask. I understand that rolling the dice with other people’s lives is heady stuff for leaders and it’s a trip to play the big game.

We-the-people are tired of the big game

The big game is too expensive, and we can’t house our homeless.

The big game is everyone snapping to attention when the president walks into a room, and the rooms we walk into back home are likely to have a 30-year-old university educated son living in them, who can’t find a job.

The big game has an election coming up between a nut-cake and an old pro of a politician, while we ordinary folk look at each other and wonder how it came to pass that this is the best we can offer in a world gone to hell.

It’s not ‘pitchforks and barricades’ yet, but it’s terrifyingly close

Has anyone really thought through the reason we elected Donald Trump and why, if he isn’t in jail or prevented from taking office by a Supreme Court decision, he’s quite likely to be re-elected? I’ll give you my take on it, because I don’t see a lot of hands being raised.

We’re scared, we Americans, because we used to understand our country and no longer do. Dad once went to work and came home in time for dinner with the family. He wasn’t rich, and didn’t need to be, but he was doing better than his own father, Mom didn’t need to work to hold things together, and his kids would for sure go to college because they could afford it. Doctor Fox, the family doctor for all these years, lived down the block, in a slightly fancier house perhaps, but he always dropped by when the need arose.

America had just fought and won two World Wars within thirty years and ‘Never Again’ wasn’t just a motto for Jews, it lived in everyone’s heart

But it wasn’t enough, even though now we wish to god we had it back.

Just as WWII was the first air-war, the post-war period was the first experiment in something called an international consumer economy. A badly damaged world out there in smoke and ruins, and it hungered for peace and prosperity. It didn’t get much peace, settling instead for prosperity on a uniquely American formula: let the poor of the world produce and the rich of the world sell the goods of that sweaty, dirty production business.

It was a lovely arrangement for American business, as we just happened to be the only rich of the world left standing. One thing wealth has always recognized is the opportunity to become wealthier.

Except, of course, for the unintended consequences

A strange thing happened on the way to that American opportunity: production (as promised) was shipped off to Asia, which happened to have the lowest cost workers. Not lowest cost by five or ten percent, but lowest by 95% and very skilled, once trained. Dad might lose his well-paid job, Mom might have to go to work to make ends meet, and the kids might not get to college after all, but the profits flowing to the wealthy were extraordinary. Millionaires might have been pretty special a decade ago, but now we were polishing up our first billionaire class.

Another and perhaps more crippling consequence was that big business (those who set the retail price for all that low-cost production) found that Congress was more than amenable to any coinage that might cross their eager little palms. It passed laws that allowed unlimited  political campaign contributions and any ‘left-over’ funds might (quite legally) slip into a Senator’s or Representative’s private pocket.

The best government money could buy now grew from infancy to old age with a silver spoon in its mouth.

Long story short, the demise of the middle class was underway

And this, dear friends, began some 70 years ago.

Democrats and Republicans sailed through these decades as co-conspirators in the planned obsolescence of an American middle class. We are all consumers now, addicted to the least expensive product Amazon offers, from toasters to clothing. And, like all those who are addicts, we take our pleasure where we can and spend Sunday morning coming down.

We’re frightened, many of us living from paycheck to paycheck, wondering how it all went from a single-worker family with a boat in the driveway to working a no-contract Deliveroo bicycle delivery. Those kids we expected to have their first home by now are back living with their parents into their thirties. Those of us employed, worry that artificial intelligence may take the last of our own jobs.

That’s just over 800 words that explain why America may opt for a dictator for president in 2024 and never really realize how fascism came to pass in the wealthiest nation in the world.