There is a man I work with named “Dave”. Dave has a substantial tan. Dave is from Jamaica. Did I mention that he has a tan? … a tan so substantial that it would take me several months in the tropical sun to approach it?
Jamaican Dave was driving away from the workplace one warm evening in September, 2016 and queried out of his car window as he slowly passed, “Hey, are we going to make America great again?”
In a second my face contorted into a reflexive grimace and I returned in exasperation, “Jackass!” (In the context of the brief exchange, he surely knew that I was not talking about him, but about the “great” political agenda, and particularly its author.)
Dave’s complexion belied his politics. Dave told me later that he wholly supported the 2016 Republican nominee for president, someone who I knew – and assumed he knew – had made several statements that were viewed as racist and who had the opprobrious support of the Ku Klux Klan. And in a still later conversation, this one probably in October, guessing that his understanding of history and politics was peculiarly wanting, I asked Dave when he believed slavery had come to an end in the United States. He replied that it was “in the 1960s.” I informed him that he was a whole century off.
Dave, who had been in the United Sates for decades and was not a citizen but a permanent resident, said he strongly believed the Democrats were enemies of black liberation and justice. Putting bits of information together, I came to the startling conclusion that this guy’s understanding of the world was an understanding of political circumstances of one hundred and one hundred and fifty years past. Startling! The man was fifty-six years old, and not noticeably mentally handicapped. Even Rip Van Winkle had been slumbering for only twenty years. This middle aged Caribbean had been slumbering with eyes wide open for a whole century. I asked him when in the past century he thought African Americans began to vote in the majority for the Democratic candidate for president. He had nothing between his ears to help him guess.
There is always an ignorance quotient in politics, a difficult-to-quantify influence of nescience and misinformation on the outcome of elections and referenda. Put to the people a half century ago, it is certain that most American voters on a marijuana referendum, for example, would vote against legalization, or even the allowance of medical uses. And among that majority, there would always be a substantial number who believed marijuana was extremely addictive and the drug itself (not an outgrowth of its illegal status) was known to cause “madness”, criminality and vice.
In our own time, it is remarkable how the ignorance of the voter works in favor of a political aspirant ready to exploit it for his or her own benefit. In the second presidential debate (of three) in 2016, the Republican repeatedly mentioned the national debt of over $19 trillion, blaming it on the Obama administration, of course, and by extension, on “Democrats”. Americans who were at least a little receptive to that Republican candidate were allowed in those moments to believe what they wanted, and they were abetted by – of all unlikely things – the Democrat herself. She did not, in her opportunity to respond, disabuse the viewers, and show them both that she knew the issue very well, and that it was the Republicans that had been mostly responsible for the substantial growth in the debt over the last forty years. She was known to be very smart and well-informed. So, how likely is it that she just did not know the facts regarding the national debt during the last one hundred years of American history?
Here are some facts verifiable from the Internet-available records of the Office of Management and Budget, an agency of the United States federal government: In modern history (the last hundred years), there have been four periods of striking increases in the nation’s accumulated debt, the “national debt:” 1) the First World War, 2) the Second World War, 3) the Reagan-Bush years, spanning 1981 to 1993, and 4) the George W. Bush years (2001 to 2009). The first two periods are understandable. No sane and evenhanded person will argue that the nation must not deficit spend in time of dire emergency such as World War Two. But how to explain the other two periods? The fact is that these presidential administrations – all three Republican – believed in a sort of ‘trickle down economics.’ That is, they believed that lower taxes generally would result in more money in private hands that would produce a more robust economy. But their actions resulted in a the largest gains going to the richest people; those who least needed it and were likely just to put the money away as additional savings were the ones who most benefitted.
The national debt roughly doubled during the Republican-led years 1981 to 1993. The ensuing years saw a balancing of the deficits, and by 2000, the budget was completely balanced. Those were Bill Clinton years, and these fiscal policies were of course his.
Then came George W. Bush. When Bush came into office in 2001, he came in promising to undo the Clinton-era tax structure that increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans. He promised this even though there was no plan to offset the imbalance this policy would bring about.
All was fulfilled. Bush kept his campaign promise, and the debt grew from $5.5 trillion to $11 trillion, moving from zero deficit per year to over one trillion dollars in his last year in office.
Democrat Barack Obama inherited trillion-dollar deficits and had reduced them from over one trillion dollars to less than half that by 2016. If post World War Two historical facts show that Democratic administrations reduce deficits and Republican administrations have increased them, why do so many millions of Americans believe otherwise?
There are three principle reasons for this. Firstly, Republicans know that government programs and ‘entitlements’ have grown substantially, and these benefits (unemployment insurance, WIC, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) are much more initiated and supported by Democrats.
Secondly, Democrats are generally more inclined to support raising taxes to pay for public and “social welfare” programs, and this leads to the conclusion that Democrats are the “tax and spend” party.
Lastly, there is the simple want that this debt fallacy be true. If somebody has considerable wealth and income and resents being taxed substantially as a person with substantial money and income, he or she may become resentful of public programs that benefit the poorest and most disenfranchised Americans. They feel as though they are being robbed by the do-gooders. This arrives not as an intellectual awareness, but a point of resentment. And the cognizance is of the tax policy, not of the larger picture of debt. If one then wants to believe – because it is convenient to believe thusly – that one is being taxed to enlarge government, that must be because the government is growing, and growing in rapaciousness. And isn’t growth associated also with incurring more substantial debt? With getting too big for your britches? One simply makes the causal correlation in one’s head, and there is no one there to disabuse him or her, and it becomes accepted as something known.
Is it actually possible that the party of greater federal support for minorities and work programs and employment training programs and unemployment insurance and national health care is also the party of (relatively greater) fiscal responsibility and a balanced federal budget?
Yes, it is. But who among us is inclined to think in purely rational ways like this?
But the curiosity is why Hillary Clinton did not approach this subject at all when the budget deficit and debt issue came up during the second debate in October. Perhaps she is the only one who can answer this question. And it is a matter of speculation whether such statements might have impacted the election of 2016. When we have an interest in corroborating our political beliefs, generally, no truth obstacle is allowed to stand in the way.
And when we’re cornered, when we are met with an unwelcome truth, there is the want to find an angle of misdirection, a sophistical argument to diminish an unsupportive, contrarian truth. We wiggle away from the irksome information as if it were a noisome effluvium offending us as we strode innocently down the sidewalk.
The ill-informed want and wish have a great effect on politics and history. In the precondition of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, there may have been Russian intellectuals who supported the communist revolution, but the want of the masses to believe there were no philosophically untenable policy arrangements that were necessary to the maintenance of a communist state was decisive. No poor Bolshevik wanted to rationally and impartially discuss the fact that Bolshevism could not succeed unless the whole nation functioned as a giant prison.
And with Brexit it was the same. The poor and uninformed British, who made the difference in the 52% to 48% vote, did not want to know all the things that the European Union meant to the world. They did not want to know all that was good and noble and hopeful about the Union. All they wanted was a corroboration of the notion that getting fuller control of their own immediate economic policy priorities might mean for them personally a more financially profitable life. And in the days after the fateful vote, Google, the world’s most used search engine, reports that the question “What is the European Union” showed a huge spike from servers located in the United Kingdom. This indicates that the poor and ill-informed did not really know what they were voting against; they just knew what the wanted to vote for: the idea of improvement by improvement in greater control, and improvement in greater control by removing onerous EU requirements and restrictions. They wanted to remove constrictions because it seemed, in a simplistic sense, prudent to do so. But it would’ve been better if they actually knew a lot of the complexities and rationales of the European Union.
In general, a drawing together of the sincerely democratic world is good for the progress of civilization. But, unlike the dollar and the job, civilization is merely conceptual, and it (quite unfortunately) does not weigh heavily in the mind of the poor and poorly educated person. And, inasmuch as civilization is just an idea, a fancy, and real dollars and pounds are sought eagerly – yes, as eagerly as a hungry dog desired fresh meat – civilization will be stymied and frustrated in bringing humankind forward.
In defense of the retarders of civilizational progress, let me offer a few words here. In democratic-capitalist societies, there has been a tug of war between the needs of the poor masses, and the “rights” of the enfranchisement-got prerogatives of elites. And, despite their general liberality in wanting and hoping for a generous treatment of the poorer classes by government and society, elites are tepid in their holistic approach to justice, and the continued allowance of millions of voices and minds to go unfulfilled almost entirely due to financial want has contributed greatly to the present geopolitical misfortunes. Elites have supported scholarships and foundations that offer college tuition to minorities, while at the same time, it is well known that millions of African-Americans will be completely unable to gain access to the halls of eminent First World education because their upbringing has not prepared their minds. And it is not just African-Americans who are disadvantaged! If one looks frankly at white West Virginians and Mississippians and at their culture, one cannot miss the fact that they too are often overlooked by a government that allows millions of children to grow up in environments of shocking disadvantage. Allowing this tragic reality to continue through decades and through generations has now led to the present “exits” to extremism and radical right successes.
Ironically, the Republican who has been elected as the next American president has no natural inclination to help the poorest communities climb to a more equitable status, as he himself is the silver spoon son of privilege and has no affection for the “losers” of the world; he has made clear that extant misfortune satisfies his definition of what it means to be a loser in stating that Arizona Senator John McCain is no hero because he was caught by the communists and was held as a prisoner and tortured for years. McCain’s misfortune defined him as a “loser” in the warped morality of the next Commander in Chief. “I like people that weren’t caught,” the candidate said, when asked about McCain’s status as a medal recipient and war hero. And thus, the peradventure of beginning one’s life in putrid rural Mississippi or squalid Appalachia suffices as a de facto condemnation – not of the circumstance, but of the individuals who putatively allowed themselves to be “caught” in it. And, mind you, to be born in it and fail to escape is to earn the label “loser”, no matter how hard one works or struggles to uphold the law and behave responsibly and kindly toward his neighbors and his community and nation, no matter how honorably he serves in the military, no matter how heroic and unselfish his actions anywhere. To end up back in the claws of poverty and misfortune after any sort of marvelously unselfish and courageous conduct is to fit the very definition “loser”.
In our efforts to make a better and more just world, we’ve bought into the idea of careful scholarly analysis. And in our analyzing efforts, we’ve had to distinguish one condition from another, one social group from another, one class from another. In doing this, we improve our methodology. However, what we come up with after this disaffected analysis, is a treating of the “group”, a theory bent on the proposition that the remedy is to be found in treating a minority that we see suffering so unjustifiably, so pointedly. And in our efforts, we’ve lamentably objectified the sufferers; we’ve treated them as statistics; we’ve categorized them and classed them as so many plants in a nursery.
Surely, justice requires more than that!
The political-ideological dichotomies are no longer that of rich and poor, white and nonwhite, the cities and the rural areas, elites and their less-fortunate countrymen, but of a more genuine and coherent approach to birth-wrought social injustice. Until we find a way to reach and affect the fortunes of the Appalachian infant and the infant of the slums of the inner cities, of every child and infant in our political sphere of influence, we will be unable to stem and reverse the present retardation of civilizational progress.