The United States Needs a New Story

This morning, as the Republicans are celebrating nationwide victories, taking control of the Senate and increasing their majority in the House, plus winning governor’s races in supposedly liberal states, I’m reminded of the widespread liberal delusion last year that the Republican Party was an almost-extinct dinosaur (see this blog post).

My impression is that the American people are deeply confused. They say they’re angry about a do-nothing Congress and then vote for the obstructionists. They say they hate government yet demand services when it’s in their interest—when a natural disaster hits a conservative part of the country there’s never a mention of refusing federal aid because it’s from that loathsome government.

The reason we’re confused is because we’ve lost any compelling story about who we are as a people. We used to have a thrilling story, one that made me proud to be an American when I was a child. We had thrown off a king and instituted a republic where we governed ourselves. We were the vanguard of human progress.

Of course there were plenty of issues with the original constitution: slavery and a limited electorate are the obvious examples. But as time went on and we continued on the path of democratization, we fixed those errors. We first expanded the electorate to all white men in the 1820s, ended slavery in 1865, women finally got the vote in 1920, and over the last fifty years we’ve been expanding civil rights.

But today we seem to be missing the awesomeness of what we have accomplished. We don’t understand the amazing advance in human social organization that democracy represents.  We are so spoiled by the relative ease of living and our deplorable lack of historical knowledge that we are unaware of not only the preciousness—and precariousness—of our democracy but the great struggles that were required to wrest control from tyrants. We take our democratic republic for granted. And that’s why we are in danger of losing it.

The U.S.: A Split-Personality Superpower

Mark Fiore is one of my favorite editorial cartoonists, creating short animated videos every week. This week's cartoon suggests the US is "a split-personality superpower, condemned to wander the earth for all eternity fighting our other selves."

A couple of Fiore’s examples: When ISIS overran the Iraqi military positions a month or so ago, the Iraq soldiers ran away and abandoned their equipment, including tanks. You can see the ISIS militants having some fun with their new toys in the VICE documentary on ISIS. Now when we bomb ISIS we're bombing our own military equipment.

In the last couple of weeks Egypt and the UAE have bombed Libya a few times, and even though they're our "allies" and their troops were trained by the U.S. and use our military equipment, they denied to the Obama Administration that they'd done it.

A lot of good money to be made by supplying the armies of the world with the tools of their trade...

The split personality metaphor works in another way: most Americans believe our country is a positive force for good in the world. We vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. We complain about having to be the world's policeman. Yet we're blind to the fact that we are the world's biggest exporter of weapons which means a substantial portion of our economy depends upon continuing war and violence in the world. The U.S. is badly in need of therapy to face some hard truths about its personality.

The U.S. is Not a Center-Right Nation

In the last few weeks we’ve heard reports in the media about budget proposals emerging from Congress. There’s the House Republican plan and the Senate Democratic plan. You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s it, because for some reason almost no one discusses the third congressional budget, that of the House Progressive Caucus. I only know because I regularly read Paul Krugman, who wrote a column about it last week.

Business Insider, a business-oriented website, commissioned a poll in February asking people to compare three different approaches to averting the sequester. These were basically versions of the three congressional budgets. The winner was the Progressive Caucus’s budget:

Surveys have found that asking people about just titles of plans or telling people who proposed policy changes the results, so the point of this poll was to see what people thought of the plans when they were fully explained, but also stripped of partisan labels…Surprisingly, the plan that polled the strongest was the House Progressive Caucus plan. More than half of respondents supported it compared to sequestration and just a fifth of respondents were opposed… Shockingly, 47 percent of Republicans preferred the House Progressive plan to the sequester. This means that Republicans supported the House Progressive plan just as much as they supported their own party's plan.

A “truism” about America is that we’re a center-right nation. That might have been true in the past (although I doubt it), but I think it is definitely not accurate now. Polls regularly show that Americans support socialist government programs—as long as you don’t use the word “socialist.” (Notice the beginning of the Business Insider quote: telling people who sponsored a plan biases their opinion.)

Global Gender Equality

When I visited my mother in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua in 2009, Pelican Eyes Resort was building a new pool near the house I was staying in. A female engineer was in charge of the construction, and I admired her clear sense of authority over the male workers. I spoke to her in my pidgin Spanish, telling her that I found it impressive that the men were so willing to work under a female engineer, and she seemed surprised. “You mean it’s not like this in the United States?” she asked. “Not in my experience,” I replied.

Since then I’ve wondered if I was exaggerating, but a new study by the World Economic Forum, the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, bears out that conversation. The report ranks 135 countries (which collectively contain over 90 percent of the world's population) based on 14 indicators used to measure the size of a nation's gender gap.

Nicaragua is 9^th on the list, while the United States is #22. Cuba beat the U.S. also, coming in at #19.

According to the Huffington Post the indicators can be grouped into four key areas:

1. Economic participation and opportunity, which includes female labor force participation, wage equality and the percentage of women in high-ranking jobs.
2. Educational attainment, which looks at female literacy and how frequently women are enrolled in higher education.
3. Health and survival, which is measured by comparing female and male life expectancy and mortality rates.
4. Political empowerment, which examines the number of women holding political office as well as the number of female heads of state over the last 50 years.

At the Huffington Post article there’s a graphic showing the top 25 and bottom 25 countries. Not surprisingly, most of the top countries are in northern Europe, while most of the bottom are in the Muslim Middle East.

Addendum: The day I posted this, I later went to film an event. I’m a professional videographer; I had my large hi-definition video camera on a tripod. At one point while I was waiting for the event to start I was standing near my camera talking with a man who was a part of the event. A second man came up to us and, looking straight at the first man, said, “That’s a bad place for your camera.” The first guy replied, “That’s not my camera,” and number two just started walking away, without giving me a glance. Clearly he assumed that no woman could be associated with that kind of camera. Believe me, I have seen this prejudice before.

I said, “That’s my camera, and that’s the only spot I can shoot from. And who are you?” He turned to me and apologized, saying he was doing the lighting for the event.

How telling of attitudes towards women in 2012 in the U.S.A.

Why is Standard and Poor's Being Taken Seriously?

Yesterday Standard & Poor's issued a warning to the United States that it might downgrade the rating of our country's bonds if our politicians can't come to an agreement on our budget problems. The major media reported this story without comment, as if there was no question about the standards and reliability of this credit rating agency.

What a short memory this country has, and it seems to be getting shorter every year. It was only two and a half years ago that the economy was falling off a cliff, and a major contributing factor to the crisis were the credit rating agencies, like Standard & Poor's, that had given AAA ratings to junk, including those mysterious collateralized debt obligations.

My first reaction was that this was a manipulation of our political process by a financial company. When I looked up S&P on Wikipedia, there is a claim that the company did exactly that in Ireland a couple of years ago:

In April 2009 Standard & Poor's called for "new faces" in the Irish Government, which was seen as interfering in the democratic process. In a subsequent statement they said they were "misunderstood".