Even as the
Trump administration in its first thirty days self-destructs unassisted, a
recovery of footing can be expected from a party in control of Congress, thirty-two
state houses and 34 governorships and in a position to shape the Supreme
Court. The good news is that this Republican
supremacy will face the same turbid sea of quandaries their Democratic party rivals
famously failed to resolve. In the
Republican victory the seeds of their defeat are already growing; witness their
discovery that the Affordable Health Care Act—Obama Care—is turning out to be
very difficult to replace. Immediately, they’ve been faced with tumultuous town
meetings and something worse from a Republican perspective: given the enormous
inequality across the country it is impossible to deliver health care for all without
state and federal subsidies drawn either from cost reductions or tax revenues.
Of course who believes our new leaders want health care equity
for all? Many Republican states (and
maybe also some Democratic ones) will be thinking about reducing benefits to
lower income families by increasing deductibles; which will simply mean in the
preferred language of the new head of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, you
will have health care “access” when and if you can afford it. That’s why they’ll
call it win=win.
Both
parties face this impending catastrophic predicament as a huge and growing inequality
problem engulfs the country and the world. According to Oxfam the richest eight
men in the world have as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity. This road ahead for all of American politics
and both parties is full of deeply seated negatives involving the declining
standards of living for eighty percent of the population and pervasive racial
inequality.
Demos, a public policy organization advocating equality in
democratic practice, released a study lasrt week on “The Asset Value of
Whiteness” reporting that “according to
data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white household possessed
$13 in net wealth for every dollar held by the median black household in 2013.
That same year, median white households possessed $10 for each dollar held by
the median Latino household. “
Black adults with at least some college had $11,100 in wealth
at the median, Latino adults had $20,500 in wealth at the median….dwarfed by
the $79,600 in median wealth held by whites who attended at least some college.
These
mountainous inequities make the Trump era seem like a nasty blip compared with
the longstanding failure of American politics over centuries to do the right
thing. Neither the old parties: Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Bull Moose Progressives,
nor the new Democrats from Wilson to FDR to the Clintons changed this pattern. It amounts to a global ticking bomb feeding
new dictatorships from Turkey to Syria to African nations to ISIS and an age of
terrorism. Or, in this week’s (3/14/17) suggestion of Times columnist David Brooks,
it could mean rule by Kleptocracy.
The American
mind has always been on something else: getting ahead, getting a little better
off, if not more so—all the while embracing the permission our theology of
exceptionalism gives us.
It’s a lie,
one that gives sway to new generations of political liars.
Put another way, while
our demise may be imminent it is not inevitable. Thoughtful resistance to these negatives must
go to the heart of our American disease of “great” and we must teach each
other, learn together as a priority in neighborhood community action groups,
activist congregations and among marchers in the streets.
We are therefore
best advised to re-tool, make all our associations places of talk, study and
strategic action planning so that we give birth to a new story about ourselves
as advocates for our brother’s and sister’s welfare around the world. The
problem ultimately is not with Trump but with us.
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