We are in an age of accelerations![i] Things are moving so fast that we can’t keep up with them, learn to accommodate them, or figure out what to do with them. Rapid change bounces off the sideboards like a missed slap shot waiting for someone to send it into the net, to make something of it. The last fifteen years have seen more change and the fastest change since Gutenberg designed his quick printer. Technology changes faster than we do.
Change is the wild card in any age or era; some move at the pace of a large glacier while others move like burbling Class VI rapids. Good thinkers, good chroniclers of our age, and muses alike are falling over each other trying to explain what is happening to us in the present.
A quick glance espies the trends created by full speed change: our politics is askew, grasping power more important than governing, educational systems designed for an agrarian society, those who should unite us divide us, we distrust of those with whom we disagree and anyone who isn’t like us; and that’s just for starters.
People traditionally lived where they were born. Even today, 11 percent of Americans have never left the state of their birth, 54% have never been in more than 10 States and 40% have never left the country.[ii] How can people have a national view or world view if they have experienced neither?
Modern technology is changing the very nature of work and jobs. Incentives to move to urban areas, particularly on the coasts, where the new job companies are searching for applicants grows daily. This leaves the middle of the country and small population segments with little to offer in the way of economic security. Those lacking high-level skills won’t find opportunities to propel themselves to the middle-class. The low-skill jobs that provided middle-class lifestyles diminish in front of our eyes. The slow pace of change of the past isn’t prologue for this new era.
Population shifts upend political systems. Equal representation is altered if not diminished and power struggles for control rise to new levels. LA County, for example, is larger in square miles than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Its population is larger than all but ten states. The US Senate is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, yet the Democrats represent 43.5 million more people than the Republican senators.[iii]
I’m OK with each state getting two senators, but it means that if either party wants to control the national agenda it must win at the state level. Democrats aren’t good at doing that. The Republicans hold trifectas in 21 states: they control the governorship, the statehouse, and the state senate. They determine the design of the voting districts, they control who goes to Congress. They pick the voters versus the other way around.
Population shift alters the way we see and feel about others. David Brooks reminds us that the categories we create to help us make sense of things, essentialism, can become a belief that people really are the way we think about them, that the boundaries between groups are clear and hard. He would tell you “America is awash in essentialism.”[iv] It’s a myth to think that there is more that unites us than divides us. Maybe once!
A recent University of Virginia Center for Politics poll a country so divided that we can, without hyperbole, question how long we will be the united states that people fought and died for.[v] The poll questioned thousands of people who voted in the 2020 election, about half and half Trump or Biden voters. The results are worth listing, considering, and worrying about. These are the stark reality of today’s America.
·
80%
of Biden and Trump voters agree that elected officials of the other party
“present a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
·
70%
of both sets of voters believe some extreme media voices on the other side
should be censored
·
More
than 78% of Biden and Trump voters believe that Americans who strongly support
the opposite party also threaten the American way of life
·
60%
of Biden and about 80% of Trump voters believe things like “true citizens”
should help “eliminate the evil that poisons our country from within.”
·
About
45% of both groups say the country would be better off if the president could
take needed action without the constraints of Congress and the courts
These aren’t American values, but these divisions hit us daily in newspapers, on paper, on-air, streaming, or on social media. Congress can’t even agree to pay its bills. People uneducated in the immunology sciences feel embolden to eschew proven public health practices and ignore the science for minimizing and gaining control over a monster killing virus. People gang up on school boards and city leaders demanding the overthrow of mask mandates because it infringes on their “rights,” to do what they want and to hell with the effects on people around them. Their distrust levels are so high that they have forgotten how to behave as a united people.
Facts no longer matter. Emotion has a stronger hold. Too many, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, hold to a belief that the 2020 election was fraudulent. State legislative bodies fund incompetent fly-by-night organizations to find nonexistent stolen ballots, pass laws that will give them the power to override voter choices, oust election officials with whom they disagree, all of which reduces trust in election outcomes. It is a wave passing over the country, happening now. It is not the American ethos.
It isn’t just one party doing harm to the nation. When voters think we need censorship, institutional trust has waned. When voters think the president should not be constrained by other branches of government the ideals of the Founders have slipped and Nationalism has taken root.
The ideals of a participative democracy require discussions about policy, compromise on policy, and implementing what is best for the nation, not the party. Democracy requires trust that the other’s ideas are an alternative to one’s own, not an attempt to take down the country. Opposing views and loyal opposition are the essences of a democratic republic. A winner-take-all view doesn’t meet the ideals of the Founders.
The speed of change in all facets of our lives engenders fear, scapegoating, a me-first view of the nation and the world. People who don’t have the new-job skills feel left out, those who can’t move to areas of high employment feel abandoned, people who don’t see a better life for their children despair. Then they all cling to any intoxicating personality who promises to make their lives better, who challenges revered institutions, and who blames the rest of the world for their woe. Facts don’t matter much when life isn’t delivering the promise.
Our inability to keep up with the sea change washing over us in too many areas raises questions about the long-held beliefs about our country and ourselves. It changes our behavior as well.
We have seen change before and we have weathered it. But this seems different. This is a time when the very notion of our democratic republic is in question and at stake. Can we reclaim our commitment to being a united people, to be our brother’s keeper, to the idea that the people rule and not the government? Can we survive as a free country and not go into the abyss like so many others who gave up their democracy?
What must we change to be once more that shining city on the hill?
[i] Thank You For Being Late – Thomas L Friedman – Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,2016
[ii] Lea Lane – Forbes – May 2, 2019
[iii] Ian Millhiser – Vox – 11/20/2020
[iv] David Brooks – Here’s the Mind-set That’s Tearing Us Apart – New York Times – October 7, 2021
[v] Tim Robinson – UVA Today – September 30, 2021
