Allister Heath
The president’s speech struck the right notes, but I still can’t help fearing for the United States’s future
Our fate is inseparable from America’s: if the republic falls, if individual liberty, constitutional democracy, free markets and equality before the law fail, so does the whole of the West. The United States may never have lived up to its ideals, but it remains a beacon among nations, a beautiful idea, a country with a unique, liberating mission.
In stark contrast to his predecessor’s inauguration four years ago, Joe Biden’s speech was befitting of the office he has inherited: this was indeed “democracy’s day”, with all of the proper iconography, and his message of healing and renewal exactly what the world was hoping for. As he put it: “Politics doesn’t have to be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path.”
Much will now improve. His administration will respect democratic, civil and constitutional norms; global affairs will no longer be randomly upended by a stream of half-baked, fanciful Twitter egotism. The rupture with despicable neo-fascists will be total, and presidential pronouncements no longer designed to shock and provoke enemies while achieving little else. The fight against Covid will be conducted more professionally.
Yet America’s challenges are profound and existential, and long predate Trump’s sinister demagoguery. Despite its military superiority and its scientific, technological and corporate triumphs, the country has been in relative, and sometimes absolute, cultural, social, political and economic decline for at least two decades. George W Bush messed up, Barack Obama achieved little to nothing and Trump left in disgrace. I hate to be pessimistic so early in his presidency, but it is hard to see how Biden will be able to truly move the dial.
He is right that a central problem is that America has become poisonously divided into two warring camps as part of the “uncivil war” described in his speech, but a truce will prove almost impossible to negotiate.
In the Sixties, all classes shared similar values when it came to religiosity, the family and patriotism. The rich didn’t form their own caste, and could easily relate to the rest of the country. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans was minimal. Today’s America is unrecognisable. The highest earners, mostly Ivy League and similar graduates, marry others like themselves, spend a fortune on their children’s education, live in urban areas or wealthy enclaves and worship at the church of woke. The poorest no longer marry, drop out of school, earn less and increasingly depend on opioids and videogames. Cultural inequalities have reached extreme levels.
The old, quintessentially American “yeoman middle class” of blue- and white-collar property owners and believers in the American dream is being hollowed out, as Joel Kotkin warns in The Coming of Neo-feudalism. Surging property and healthcare costs have squeezed living standards. As a recent article in The Atlantic put it, in the Nineties The Simpsons felt realistic; today, their quality of life is beyond the reach of much of Middle America.
Power and influence have shifted not just to a new oligarchy, led by the Silicon Valley barons, but also to a credentialed clerisy of tech workers, academics, lawyers and creative types. In the past, Left-wingers used to want to help the poor; today, the younger woke vanguards are more interested in shaming working-class voters who disagree with them. The same is true of the more extreme environmental activists, hence a class war based on education and values.
Tragically, the rise of critical race theory means that the ideas of Martin Luther King, one of the greatest Americans of all time, are now losing popularity. Instead of seeking a colour-blind society where race no longer matters, the woke ideology prefers to accentuate differences.
It is no wonder the political system looks broken. Both sides view the other as morally flawed, contemptible and illegitimate, a perception that Trump deliberately stoked but one that Biden will find it hard to reverse. Younger voters tell pollsters they don’t trust in democracy as much; they are much more likely to embrace socialism and even communism. Woke ideology’s inherent illiberalism, its central belief that anybody who doesn’t agree is suffering from “false consciousness”, is itself profoundly totalitarian and driving a tragic loss of faith in American institutions from the Left.
The ever-increasing power of the juristocracy, promoted by Left and Right, is an inherent flaw in the US system. Another is the Faustian pact under which a small cadre of corporate interests are allowed to exercise undue, illiberal and anti-free market influence on rule-making through lobbying and political activity, in return for billions of dollars of “protection money” for Washington. Most politicians benefit; a tiny group of established, corporate insiders stand to gain; but taxpayers and genuine entrepreneurs lose out. It’s a warped system, but won’t go away under Biden, who now also has to cope with an explosion of crime in the biggest cities.
The next great challenge is that the frontier spirit is in decline: America is becoming staler, less innovative, less willing to take risks and reinvent itself. Around a fifth of Americans moved home every year in the Fifties and Sixties, a proportion that was fleetingly reached once again at the height of Reaganomics; yet mobility has been in decline since, and by 2018-19 fell below 10 per cent for the first time since 1947.
Paradoxically, despite the staggering success of Californian tech firms, the start-up culture is dying, and moving out of the US. Fewer Americans work for younger companies, and more and more work in larger firms. The share of companies running for at least 11 years has shot up. The answer is not higher taxes or more regulations, yet that is exactly what Biden’s team is proposing. Capitalism needs to be rebooted, not throttled further, and economic and productivity growth bolstered, and yet the new administration is promising policies that will reduce incentives while fuelling the asset and debt bubble.
I hope I’m wrong and that Biden can somehow deliver a series of miracles. His speech struck all of the right notes, but words alone cannot heal the fissures at the heart of the republic. A new, more civilised era for Washington, but I continue to fear for America’s future.