THE BIGGEST THREAT TO AMERICA IS US
Near the close of last Wednesday’s Democratic presidential debate, Chuck Todd asked the candidates what he called “a simple question.” In “one word,” he asked, who or what is the biggest geopolitical threat to America today?
Reflecting on that moment, I asked myself what I would say. It didn’t take long to decide. It’s not China or Russia or Iran. It’s us. Only we can take ourselves down.
Only we can ensure that the American dream — the core promise we’ve made to ourselves that each generation will do better than its parents — is not fulfilled, because we fail to adapt in this age of rapidly accelerating changes in technology, markets, climates, the workplace and education.
And that is nearly certain to happen if we don’t stop treating politics as entertainment, if we don’t get rid of a president who daily undermines truth and trust, if we don’t prevent the far left from pulling the Democrats over a cliff with reckless ideas like erasing the criminal distinction between those who enter America legally and those who don’t, and if we fail to forge what political analyst David Rothkopf described in a recent Daily Beast essay as “a new American majority.”
That’s a majority that can not only win the next election but can actually govern the morning after.
Sounds naive? No, here’s what’s naive. Thinking we’re going to be OK if we keep ignoring the big challenges barreling down on us, if we just keep taking turns having one party rule and the other obstruct — with the result that no big, long-term and well-thought-out adaptations get built. Here are just a few of the challenges coming head-on: First, if we have four more years of Trump, we’ll probably lose any chance of keeping the global average temperature from rising only 1.5 degrees Celsius instead of 2 degrees — which scientists believe is the difference between being able to manage the now unavoidable climate-related weather extremes and avoiding the unmanageable ones.
Second, as Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund, recently pointed out, there has been “little or no real income growth for most people for decades. … Prime-age workers in the bottom 60% have had no real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) income growth since 1980.” In that same time frame, the “incomes for the top 10% have doubled and those of the top 1% have tripled. The percentage of children who grow up to earn more than their parents has fallen from 90% in 1970 to 50% today. That’s for the population as a whole. For most of those in the lower 60%, the prospects are worse.”
Third, the next four years will redefine relations between the world’s two biggest economies — the U.S. and China. Either the U.S. will persuade China to abandon the abusive trade practices it adopted to go from poverty to middle income and from a technology consumer to a technology producer, or we’re headed for a world divided by a new digital Berlin Wall.
Fourth, technology is propelling social networks and cybertools deeper and deeper into our lives, our privacy and our politics so that many more people can erode truth and trust. But the gap between the speed at which these technologies are going deep and the ability of our analog politics to develop the rules, norms and laws to govern them is getting wider, not narrower.
Fifth, today’s workplace is distinguished by one overriding new reality, argues Heather McGowan, an expert on the future of work: “The pace of change is accelerating at the exact same time that people’s work lives are elongating.”
When the efficient steam engine was developed in the 1700s, McGowan explains, average life expectancy was 37 years and steam was the driving force in industry and business for around 100 years. When the combustion engine and electricity were harnessed in the mid-1800s, life expectancy was around 40 years and these technologies dominated the workplace for about another century.
So in both eras, notes McGowan, “you had multiple generations to absorb a single big change in the workplace.”
In today’s digital information age, “you have multiple changes in the nature of work within a generation,” McGowan says. This dramatically increases the need for lifelong learning.
In that kind of world the new social contract has to be that government makes sure that the safety nets and all the tools for lifelong learning are available to every American — but it’s on each citizen to use them.
Fortunately, the midterm elections showed us that there is a potential new American majority out there to be assembled to meet these challenges. After all, it was the independent voters, suburban women and moderate Republicans — who shifted their votes to Democrats, because they were appalled by Trump’s lying, racist-tinge nationalism and divisiveness — who enabled the Democrats to win back the House of Representatives. That same partnership could topple Trump.
If Democrats can choose a nominee who speaks to our impending challenges, but who doesn’t say irresponsible stuff about immigration or promise free stuff we can’t afford, who defines new ways to work with business and energize job-creators, who treats with dignity the frightened white working-class voters who abandoned them for Trump — and who understands that many, many Americans are worried that we’re on the verge of a political civil war and want someone to pull us together — I think he or she will find a new American majority waiting to be assembled and empowered.