Dear John,
I’ve joked at times, “Who would have thought we would ever be nostalgic for the Seventies?” But in a way, it’s not a joke. Life was hardly perfect, and the culture was somewhat boring compared to the decade before. But there was still a thriving middle class in America. There was still a sense that people mattered more than things. And there was still a sense in most people’s lives — as well as in our national experience — that crisis was the exception and not the rule.
Now, it is no longer so. For too many people, and for society as a whole, it seems as though a state of crisis is the rule and not the exception. That is not something that will be fixed by incremental change. It is the product of a long slide toward the rise of a new American aristocracy, through a fifty trillion dollar transfer of wealth away from the bottom 90% of the American people. What has amounted to a systemic thievery from what used to be a thriving middle class - in the form of such things as gargantuan tax cuts for the very richest, the demonization of unions, exploitation of the average worker, corporate subsidies to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to those already making billions of dollars in profits - has caused untold damage to people’s lives in this country. America is filled with millions of working people trying their best to do the right thing and still struggling to get by. That is the rule and not the exception today. The United States has the highest poverty rate of any advanced democracy, while in policy after policy our leaders create ever greater economic opportunities for those who already have, and make it harder and harder for those just struggling to get by.
As one young woman put it to me, “There’s no wiggle room.” One bout of sickness, one missed rent check, one missed payment on a college loan or medical debt, and people know they’re a beat away from living in their car. How could a person in such a situation not be living with chronic anxiety? The political establishment that produced all that has a lot of nerve then calling it a mental health crisis. It is, at its deepest level, an economic justice crisis. As in, there is almost none.
Rather, we have the largest wealth inequality in almost a hundred years, where the three richest people in America have a greater combined wealth than 291 million others. In the words of the late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” We are functioning not as a democracy but as an oligarchy, with a small group of corporate executives and billionaires now calling the economic shots.
