Let's Reason

The United States has no formal religion.  It has no religious test for public office holders or an oath to divine authority.  And its Constitution (the First Amendment in particular) prohibits the state from favoring any church establishment.  If, however, you came from abroad, unfamiliar with this country, you would have to be excused for mistaking America as a country engulfed in symbols and practices more commonly associated with states steeped in religion.

When you convert your foreign currency into dollars you will see the phrase “In God We Trust” emblazoned on its currency.  If you attend a public event, you will hear people pledging allegiance to a country “under God,” and if you witness the oath to public office you will hear it end with the words “So help me God.”  None of these religious manifestations existed at the creation of the United States consistent with the letter and intent of the constitution to keep matters of faith and state separate.  Had we lived back then, we would have noticed a lot of religious fervor and widespread practicing of religious duties among those early Americans, but no overt signs the state and its civil servants were out to promote any religious creed.   

The fact that in this and other ways the US has moved away from its founding agnosticism is the second paradox about religion in today’s America.  In this, as in other respects explored in the previous blogpost, America differs from the countries its first colonists sailed away from to escape religious persecution and wars centuries ago.  What we are observing is that the separation of church and state is more and more interpreted by religious zealots as a way to keep the state out of religion, conveniently ignoring that the reverse is also part of this constitutional arrangement.  The more intense forays of religion in the “public square” are all the more interesting when we consider that the fraction of Americans affiliated with religious establishments, including Christian churches, has been shrinking.

Contrary to the complaints of religious activists that religious liberties are under attack, religious freedoms are very well protected and well-coordinated litigation and political pressure have actually blurred the lines of separation between church and state.  No longer religious establishments are excluded from the allocation of public funds, even if they can be used to support direct religious activities (that’s exactly the case with the Paycheck Protection Program of the Covid-19 relief law).  Service to customers can be denied on the ground of freedom of expression and religion.  Health insurance coverage for contraceptives can also be denied to employees for religious reasons.  Government funds cannot be used for abortion, despite its legality.  At the behest of religious organizations, Republican administrations routinely deny aid to foreign agencies engaging in reproductive and abortion-related services to poor people.  The Trump administration went even further with its “Conscience Rule” that would have allowed medical professionals to deny care on the ground of religious or moral beliefs.

In general, we observe that religious activism has a two-progue objective.  One is to strengthen the influence, if not the grip, of religious interests on judicial and government authorities.  The other is to shape the moral landscape of Americans in ways that conform to certain Christian beliefs.  Actually, the first objective is motivated by the second, which is also the one that should have us all worry because of its political and constitutional consequences.  A little history here is instructive.

For its first three centuries, operating within the Roman Imperium, Christianity grew on the strength of its moral and spiritual message with no state support.  Once, however, it was declared the official religion by Emperor Theodosius the Great at the end of the fourth century, Christian leaders sought to erase any religious competition.  By wining over or waging war on pagan rulers, Christianity succeeded in becoming the official religion through-out Europe.  This method of expansion to new people under the aegis of the state continued in the centuries of explorations and colonialism.  Evangelizing to others has been a time-honored mission of Christian churches. 

But capturing the state and using it as a tool to force on others the morals of any faith can undermine the principle of religious tolerance and eventually even the principle of democratic life.  No other block of American Christians has done this with greater determination than Evangelical Christians.  Despite his serious moral flaws, denigration of women and people with disabilities, and his harsh policies in treating immigrants and Muslims, Evangelicals, and especially white evangelicals, embraced Donald Trump as their champion and even savior in an almost messianic way.  In their desire to continue with a political regime that promised to advance their moral and religious agenda they reached the point to forswear their allegiance to the democratic governance of the country by becoming perpetrators of the ‘Stolen Election’ lie. 

What is more worrisome, however, is the willingness of politicians and even of a whole party, i.e., the Republican Party, to reciprocate the embracing gestures of the Evangelicals.  Today, Evangelicals comprise the single largest religious block of the Republican Party.  A 2019 survey revealed that 78% of Evangelicals are registered Republicans compared to 56% in 2000.  This strong party loyalty of Evangelicals is explained by the entreaties they see coming from Republican politicians.  Besides Trump who assured them that “God is on our side,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had declared himself as a “Christian Leader” on the homepage of the department’s website.  Other Republicans tooting their loyalty to Evangelical priorities are Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, all of them with presidential aspirations.

This party symbiosis with a single religious block is entirely new, at least in its intensity, in the recent history of American politics.  It is more reminiscent of those past alliances of political, government and religious leaders that led to intolerance, strife and violation of the political and civil rights of opponents.   The politicization of religion, if it continues, it will gravely challenge the future of the American Republic as a multicultural, multi-faith, and open polity.  The end result will no longer resemble anything the Founding Fathers had in mind.

These trends, I believe, should have all democratic-minded Americans worried, irrespective of religious or secular beliefs.  White Christian nationalism taking root in American politics is not just a paradox in a country in which the things that are Caesar’s ought to be separate from the things that are God’s.  It is rather outright dangerous, and, yes, un-American.

One of Thomas Jefferson’s most prescient arguments for the separation of church and state was that left alone to fend for themselves religious establishments would gather strength from the solidarity and dedication of their members instead of growing complacent under the aegis of the state.  By arguing for separation of church and state, Jefferson (and his fellow Virginian James Madison) also hoped to distance the state from religious rivalries. 

More than two centuries later, Jefferson’s argument appears to have been fully validated.  The US has strong and thriving religious establishments of all creeds and religion is more prevalent in American society than in almost any other advanced industrialized country.  On the other hand, the expectation that separation would keep the state out of the encroachment of religion has hardly survived the test of time.  (About this in my next post.)

Let’s start with religious adherence.  According to a 2018 survey, 41% of American Christians attended church services at least once a week, far ahead of their coreligionists in Western Europe.  A Pew Research Center survey also revealed that religion was more important in the lives of Americans than in the lives of Western Europeans.  When examined within the United States, these religious indicators are stronger in conservative than liberal states.  So, the question arises as to whether the more intensive religious commitment of Americans is matched with an equally strong performance in various social indicators that reflect the influence of moral and hence religious precepts.

To answer this question, I checked various international statistics of recent years.  UN data show the US with 20.8 abortions per 1000 women, higher than in the more secular countries of Western Europe.  Do more religious states have lower abortion ratios (abortions per pregnancies) in the US?  The answer is yes.  Is this though due to religious attitudes or stricter restrictions in these states?  The evidence I found suggests that abortions do not bear significant relationship to religious creed in the US, whereas an international study revealed that abortion rates are lower in countries with more liberal policies toward abortion.                     

What about divorces and out-of-wedlock births?  In both, the US ranks ahead of almost all Western European countries.  Within the US, divorces and out-of-wedlock births are in general higher in the South, South-West and the Mid-West than in the more liberal states of the North East and West coast.

Next, I looked at suicide and drug death rates.  U.N. statistics show the US is ahead of Western European countries in both causes of death.  With 314.5 drug deaths per 1 million, the US is far ahead of second-place Sweden with 81 drug deaths.  CDC (Center for Disease and Control) data show that both suicides and drug deaths are higher on average in the South, the Mid-West and the Rocky Mountain states.  New York ranks 23^rd with fewer drug deaths than 21-place Florida.  West Virginia is number one in that sad statistic.

Poverty and incarceration are two social ills which are closely related.  The 2019 survey of OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) places the US number 35 out of 37 developed countries in overall as well as child poverty rate (that is, 34 countries scored better).  The US is also the world leader in incarcerations with a rate of 665 per 100,000 persons.  Poverty rates are higher in Southern and South-Western states and incarceration rates are higher in Mid-Western and Southern states, regions ranking higher than the national average in religious adherence.

These results point to a paradox about religion in America.  Despite greater religiosity and closer affiliation with religious establishments, Americans do not seem to perform better than countries known for their secular culture and politics.  More tellingly, even within America, states known for their religiosity do not seem to perform better than more liberal states.

What do these findings tell us?  Do they mean that stronger religious attitudes lead to worse moral behavior?  Can we argue that Americans are more morally challenged than the more secular societies of Western Europe? 

First let’s put to rest one claim often heard from religious people.  Namely, that religious affiliation leads to a more moral life.  This has been an old canard against atheists, agnostics and secularists, in general, without though any factual basis.  For example, in a speech given at the University of Notre Dame, William Barr, the former Attorney General of the US denounced secularists for “moral chaos and immense sufferings, wreckage and misery” in the US.  The above findings instead show that many of the serious ills of American society originate in states with greater adherence to religion.  This association has been already established in the past.

But equally unfounded would be the claim that religious people are less morally inclined than others.  What if behind the association of moral outcomes and religiosity are other factors that explain this correlation.  Such, well-established, factors are less education, poorer economic and job conditions, and inadequate public services.  The statistics I looked at are better in Western Europe to no small degree due to wider and stronger safety nets that result in less poverty and social alienation.  These conditions then have a mitigating effect on poverty, crime, and suicides.  Better drug rehabilitation programs also result in lower incarceration rates and drug deaths.

In the US, some of the worst statistics are reported in more religious states which also happen to have significant pockets of lower educational attainment, weaker economic conditions, lower quality jobs and insufficient public services.  Many of these are the states where the “deaths of despair” have surged in the last 25 years (as explained in an earlier post).

What are then the really important conclusions we can draw from this analysis?  First, the virtue wars between religious and secular people are entirely futile and counterproductive.  Second, the road toward better societies is through public policies that produce better educated citizens with more opportunities for economic advancement and greater support from the state in coping with the vicissitudes of personal life.  

While America was gripped by the double anxiety of a raging pandemic and the desperate and unlawful attempts of an outvoted president and his die-hard and misinformed supporters to cling on to power, the world also witnessed another sobering event, the Brexit.  Great Britain at long last was leaving the European Union, making the British channel again more than a mere geographical divide.

I call Brexit a sobering event because to me it is one more reminder of how difficult it is for humanity to build inclusive and enduring bonds and stay together.  The tendency toward fragmentation reminds me of the biblical story of the tower of Babel.  Men and women worked together to built it.  But then as they were coming close to their goal, God decided to give them different languages.  Cooperation became impossible and the project collapsed.  Humankind would splinter into different factions, each going its own way.  The fact that God’s will was the culprit of this fragmentation does not make it any less unfortunate and over time destructive.

In today’s world, the role of a religious God is played by a host of humans playing god, equally determined not to let humankind come together.  These human gods take the form of ambitious politicians or selfish business people.  Fragmentation, that is, the “Us” versus “Them” divide becomes to some the road to power and treasure.  Such gods wrought Brexit by telling an anxious working class of Britons lies and half truths about Brussels bureaucrats, hostile immigrants and the promise of renewed glory for Old Albion.

The move to an untethered Great Britain harkens back to the idea of nation-state.  The idea that a country with greater national, religious, and cultural cohesion is a more effective administrative unit.  But the record is mixed.  The Greek city-states thrived as independent entities while external threats were effectively managed.  But disunited they eventually fell to the armies of Macedon.   The disparate Hellenistic kingdoms became renowned cultural centers, but they, in turn, succumbed to the power of Rome.  The Roman Empire, first based in Rome and then in Constantinople, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire and the Soviet Union all ruled over dozens of people with different ethnicities, languages and creeds. 

All these (and other empires) were militarily strong, kept land roads and sea lanes free, and protected their peoples from foreign enemies.  They did unify large parts of humanity but under autocratic rule that did not always respect the rights of different ethnic and religious groups.  When dogmatic religious or political ideologies prevailed, these empires would also squelch cultural, intellectual, and artistic creativity.  When years ago, I read Jacob Burckhardt’s history of Renaissance in Italy, I could not help but realize how Renaissance blossomed out of the independent city-states of Venice, Florence, Padua and Genoa which let the arts and letters thrive by fending off Rome’s Papal power.  Soon after that, the creative explosion of Renaissance emerged not in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire but in independent and more democratic Holland.  A century later the political, social and commercial preconditions that led to the rise of free markets and capitalism first took hold in England, not the rigid multi-ethnic monarchies of continental Europe.

So, the lesson of history is that large state conglomerations project power and stability but often stifle individual rights, creativity and innovation. Nonetheless, this is not an argument one can raise in defense of Brexit.  Great Britain is not escaping an autocratic empire.  It leaves a union of democratic states each with enough autonomy to foster creativity and innovation, and all dedicated to civil and individual rights.  The European Union is the first experiment in history where independent democratic countries decided to cede some of their sovereign power in the interest of pan-European peace and a common future.  If the concept of the nation-state after the Westphalia Treaty of 1648 was the right solution to bring an end to the religious wars of Europe, equally consequential was the Treaty of Rome in 1957 that established the European Economic Community as the solution to putting an end to disastrous intra-European national conflicts.  It is against this bigger purpose any cost and friction of a unified Europe must be stacked against.

It is, therefore, from this big-purpose project Great Britain is walking away.  And what an irony this is!  The same Great Britain that had no qualms about ruling over half the world in the name of the Crown, it is now the country that balks at a European order in which it had an equal voice, a voice it deprived of its imperial subjects.

Around the time Great Britain was embarking on its empire-building project, here in America, a newly independent country was embarking on a novel experiment of forming a multi-ethnic democratic state within its borders.  Unlike the British project of joining foreign people from all corners of the globe under British rule, the American experiment was to become the home of people from around the globe governed by a constitution of the people.

As it happens with all undemocratic empires, in time, the people that made up the British Empire split off in order to pursue their own national destinies and Great Britain itself retreated to its geographical and national borders.  That’s a devolution not open to America.  Here we are destined to live together – multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-creed.  We have no internal borders behind which we can retreat and live in racial, ethnic and religious purity. 

That’s why the trends of racial friction and the rise of religious and white nationalism we have seen in recent years should be sobering to all Americans.  The American like the European Union project is to teach people the possibilities of “We” in contrast to the fear of “Others.” 

So, to me Brexit means walking away from building a “We” world just like the splintering of Americans by race, creed, or any other divisive idea is walking away from the original American project of building One out of Many.

When Twitter permanently cancelled President Trump’s account and Facebook suspended it indefinitely, many Americans, most of them liberals, gave their resounding approval.  These drastic actions came, of course, after a long stream of lies and disinformation the incumbent president launched against the integrity of the presidential election outcome and his reprehensible and inflammatory speech exhorting his supporters to march on to the Capitol and take back “their country” with the shameful and insurrectional actions that followed.

Silencing someone, like Donald Trump, who has masterfully used social media to coral millions of his followers into a parallel universe of concocted facts ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to voter fraud surely has a salutary effect on all those who stand for science, facts, civil rights and democratic norms.  But before we celebrate Messrs. Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) and Jack Dorsey (of Twitter) as noble defenders of American democracy, we need to connect all the dots and see where their actions can take a democratic and pluralistic society.

Both Zuckerberg and Dorsey delivered a punch of extraordinary force because they have an immense control on the market for information exchange.  So, let’s first disassociate the market as a mechanism for exchange from its users.  Markets are often denounced by the left as tyrannical and extolled by the right as liberating.  Both sides are barking up the wrong tree.  Focusing on the market is most often a convenient way to take our eyes away from its users, the true suspects of any good or bad thing markets bring to human societies.  Those who are truly responsible for the beneficial or harmful consequences of markets are their users, individuals, enterprises, and state authorities. 

There is the misconception that, if left free, markets are innately capable of sorting out and facilitating the exchanges people (the consumers) like to have.   But the reality is that unregulated markets do not necessarily lead to free exercise of individual choices.  Even in the absence of a state monopoly, a market can be cornered by one or a few private entities.  Facebook, Twitter as well as Google, Apple and Amazon which have denied services to Parler (another social media firm) are practically the owners of the information market.  Donald Trump is a victim of their huge market power.  Other times, individuals are locked out of a market for political, religious or pure discrimination reasons (see below).

Because so much of one’s life is affected by the opportunities to use markets to satisfy material needs and wants as well as for self-expression, the right to participate in markets should be considered an individual right.  Of course, like other rights, market rights are subject to limitations when this is necessary for the common good.  The internet and social media, in particular, have made the navigation of market rights and the common good extremely challenging.  Disinformation and incitement can mislead people to take actions harmful to themselves and others or drive people to violent acts.  It is this concern that led Facebook and Twitter to exclude Donald Trump and thousands of conspiracy theorists from their platforms.  But this reaction raises legitimate questions about the enforcement of market rights.

Over a year ago, I wrote about the case of the Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.  Similarly, the firm Hobby Lobby refused coverage of contraceptives to its female employees as a matter of religious freedom.  In these cases, either a certain class of customers or employees were excluded from a particular market but the Supreme Court found the exclusions consonant with the First Amendment.  I then raised the question as to what would happen if a market was controlled by a single or a few players, all imposing the same exclusions.  How would the individual right to a market be protected in the absence of market alternatives or poor substitutes of these markets?

Well, this conjecture seems to have been realized in the case of Donald Trump.  And this poses a problem for conservatives and liberals.  Conservatives cannot celebrate the right of the baker and Hobby Lobby while they condemn Trump’s expulsion from the social media of his choice.  And liberals cannot rejoice at Trump’s rejection but deny the baker and Hobby Lobby the same right of refusal in their respective markets for cakes and workers.

And just because I like to provide historical perspectives, let’s not forget that prior to the repeal of segregation practices in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Black Americans were excluded from markets that were reserved for white clienteles.  Very recently, Newsday, a local newspaper in Long Island, had an extensive expose on how real estate brokers had systematically tried to keep Black home buyers away from predominantly white neighborhoods.  All these cases suggest that even a country with a professed adherence to free markets has and continues to engage in the practice of market exclusions for reasons rooted in political, religious, or racial ideologies.

There are a couple of lessons in the above examples.  First, we have to recognize that markets can violate individual rights whether they are run by private or state interests.  Markets can be dominated by private interests and be as illiberal as markets dominated by state authorities.  The Chinese are already drawing an equivalence between their state control over information and that exercised by private entities in the US.  Second, individual rights are not necessarily protected when we allow unfettered market freedom.  The Trump administration, like previous Republican administrations, was particularly friendly to mergers and acquisitions.  (Democratic administrations, though to a lesser extent, can be also faulted in this regard.)  Now Republicans find that one of their own in addition to thousands of their supporters have fallen victims of the market power of a few mega-players. 

The expulsions from social media with all the ramifications on the right of people to exchange information is bound to force a reckoning and hopefully a public debate that should lead to a new legal and social contract for the regulation of information markets.  It is hard to expect or accept that a democratic society would grant the power of information gatekeeper to a few private entities, some of them dominated by a single or few owners.

January 6, 2021 will be a day of infamy in the annals of American democracy.  After four years of telling Americans not to believe in facts, not to trust anyone but him, and never accept electoral defeat as fair, Donald Trump unleashed his supporters so that they would march on to the Capitol, invade it and desecrate it in the name of fantastical, and yes, fascistic beliefs.

In such moments, emotions run high and the desire for immediate relief finds an easy outlet in naming Trump the villain and arguing that these events were to be expected given his behavior all along.  That he is the principal instigator is undeniable.  But there are millions of Americans that have been stuck to his egregious, untrue and cruel utterances.  Trump found fertile ground on which he sowed his seeds of hate and resentment of others, and he also found a constitutional order and electoral process that were ripe for abuse.   It is timely, therefore, to reflect on the fragility of American democracy and what it means for its future.

The foremost challenge to the application of democracy (the rule of people or demos) is who is accepted and trusted as member of the demos.  From the emergence of democracy in the Greek city-state, admission to the demos was restricted and incomplete.  This democratic deficit continued in the Roman Republic and later in the modern reappearance of democratic institutions in England and continental Europe.  So, the first point I wish to make is that America, as a multiracial and multi-ethnic country, has experienced severe political convulsion each time its demos expanded due to immigration or voting rights laws. 

To understand the last four years and the insurrection episode of this week, we need to understand the history of American democracy in its true record and not its idealized narrative.  It is a history of tortuous and painful expansion of its demos.  A history with periods during which the dominant fraction of its demos has been unwilling to trust the other side with a role in the public affairs of the Republic.  This became very clear in this last presidential election.

The American democracy was launched with representational deficits of its own, since neither slaves or women were admitted to the American demos.  The first crisis of democratic governance came after a civil war that abolished slavery and freedmen were granted voting rights.  The transition to this, more inclusive, demos came, however, to an effective end in the South with the collapse of the Reconstruction effort in the 1880s.  What followed was a long period of vote suppression and compromised citizenship rights for Black Americans.  Fear of sharing political rights with less desirable migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe also triggered the immigration law of 1924.

The next political realignment and backlash to a renewed affirmation of voting rights came with the adoption of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.  Southerners punished the Democratic party for sponsoring these Acts and turned to the Republicans.  It is not a secret the notorious Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon was based on racial fearmongering.  Its most outspoken early champion was George Wallace, Alabama Governor and presidential candidate.  The 1965 immigration law that opened up immigration to Latin American and Third World countries would further strain nativist attitudes regarding the composition of demos which would flare up many years later.  Systematic efforts to suppress the vote of undesirable voter blocks are the manifestation of the systemic resentment toward an expanded demos.

By the time Donald Trump appeared in the political stage, covert and overt resentment to the gains of minorities of color and immigrants was already at play.  Trump’s opening gesture to white conservatives was the denunciation of Latino immigrants as criminals and free riders of welfare benefits, soon followed by bans on the immigration of Muslims.  (However, whites from Norway were very welcome.)  Economic and social backsliding may be the visible catalysts of white alignment with Trump, but resistance to sharing political rights and control with people deemed inadmissible to the pro-white American demos are better suspects.  The specter of an impending minority status for whites versus all other demographic groups together does not provide relief to the existential anxiety of white nationalist voters either. 

The second weak point of American democracy is its constitutional order and the electoral process.  The Framers of the Constitution lived in an era that was steep in Greek and Roman classicism and the admiration of virtue in public life.*  Their idea of a politician was that of a person of honor who placed the public good ahead of his/her own.  Since however, the Framers were not hopeless idealists, they inserted a heavy battery of checks and balances, lest a branch of the government, most crucially the President, developed authoritarian urges.  This constitutional order presupposes, however, that public figures have the integrity and the courage to exercise the checks and balances granted to their office.  What if, though, these guardrails collapse under the weight of intimidation and abuse of authority as practiced by a President like Donald Trump. 

The presidential electoral process also involves multi-stage checks and balances.  Between the point the people vote and the winning candidate assumes the presidency, the process provides a role to many actors and confirmation rituals: election boards to validate the election results: state legislatures to certify the electoral votes; and Congress to certify each state’s certification under the watchful eye of the Vice-President.

Along this road to final conclusion of the electoral process, there are ample opportunities for law suits and court rulings, election board challenges, state legislature shenanigans, and finally congressional malfeasance.  Under the right combination of majorities (think of a Republican majority in the present House) Congress can void the electoral votes, and choose its own candidate even if he/she lost the election.  Whether or not most of these challenges and irregularities are subject to the review of superior courts, the fact remains that a determined and malevolent presidential candidate has the opportunity to mount one challenge after another until the final decision has been sullied enough to cast doubt on the electoral outcome.  And that’s exactly what Donald Trump and his enablers did.  

The Trump presidency has exposed the weaknesses of the American democracy in more and scarier ways than any other before.  Apart from reinforcing the integrity of the electoral process, not an easy project in itself, the most consequential need for all of us is to master the public virtue the Framers expected in order to restore commitment and trust in the idea of an inclusive demos, free of fear and resentment of the other.

In less than two weeks, America will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  What better then than to invoke his summoning words as to what an all-inclusive America should look?  

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  I have a dream today!  …

America should let no one, not above all someone like Trump, to take this dream away.

* In his book First Principles, Thomas Ricks reports that the word virtue can be found several thousand times in the writers of the founding fathers, more even than the word freedom.

What do you call a year like 2020?  The year of the pandemic?  The year of grief and death? The year reason gave way to delusion?  The year American democracy almost died?  All we know for sure is this is the year humanity really wants to forget. 

My very first post of 2020 was about the first twenty years of the 21^st century and how for the first time in three centuries these years were free of wide-spread wars and human carnage.  Little did I know that an invisible thing of nature we call virus would spread out of China and torment, by sickness and death, the rest of the world.  But that was not the only scourge Americans had to endure.  Besides the coronavirus that chipped away on our health we had to confront another virus that chipped away on our faith in truth and trust and eventually in democracy.  It is hard to tell which virus was the most damaging. 

The study of history is informative not so much for satisfying our curiosity about events of the past, but rather because it teaches us how little human behavior has changed over time despite our advances in science and technology.  In 1347, Europe was hit by a plague that came to be know as Black Death.  It was responsible for depopulating Europe by up to 50%.  Like the coronavirus it had come from Asia.  In many ways, its victims experienced familiar emotions that we saw amongst us: grief, anger, denial and despair.  Instead of blaming China, Black Death era Europeans blamed and scapegoated, demons, witches, and a frequent target, the Jews.*  Instead of recommending bleach, hydroxychloroquine and ultraviolet light, the Black Death pandemic was exorcised with maniacal public dances, rubbing the body with chopped onions or dead snakes if available, self-flagellation, or taking arsenic and mercury. 

The similarities in reaction are stunning.  But how can we justify them in our contemporary world, which is light-years ahead in scientific, medical and technological knowledge?  What do we make of the denial in the face of so much evidence?  I have no other explanation but to admit that in super-tense situations emotions prove to be stronger than reason for too many people.  In the year 2020, large swaths of the population either refused or were unable to inform reason with knowledge and information from science to control their emotional instincts.  For many Americans, risk aversion and precautions were subordinated to the political ends of one person, Donald Trump, President of the US.

While the pandemic was raging through America, spreading sickness and death, another virus, political in nature, started to take hold.  Its symptoms were mistrust in the integrity of the upcoming presidential election and outright paranoid conspiracy theories of voter fraud.  Practices, like voting by mail, not challenged heretofore, including the recent primary elections, were now suspected as instruments of electoral malfeasance by American citizens and foreign operators, including a dead one! 

Between election day, November 3, and December 14, when the electors cast their votes, Americans lived through weeks of one challenge of the presidential vote after another; challenges that engulfed lower and supreme state courts, the Supreme Court of the USA itself, appeals to state legislature to dismiss the duly elected electors, even asking election officials to undo what had come out of the ballot box.  At first glance, these challenges could charitably count as gestures of bad faith.  But the ongoing and strenuous insistence to overturn the people’s verdict in the face of no supporting evidence and even after all legitimate means had been exhausted, has to be called by its true name: a wishful call for a coup d’ etat.  

It is tempting to draw a parallel between natural and political viruses.  A natural virus can infect healthy and unhealthy people, but it is most dangerous to those with underlying health conditions.  The same way, a political virus can infect anyone, but it mostly thrives in people with underlying conditions, like financial decline, diminished political power and social status, identity crisis, and fear of the “other.”  There are millions of Americans with these underlying conditions and there is much blame to go around.  But then there are the super-spreaders of division, conspiracies, and delusions that, like parasites, thrive on these underlying conditions.  As a result, many Americans, have resorted to the easy comfort of conspiracy theories and fantastical promises of a coming restoration to their rightful place. 

So, there we are at the end of this horrible year facing these two viruses.  Fortunately, we have the science to fight the one that came out of nature.  By now, vaccines are available and sooner or later the Covid-19 will no longer threaten our physical existence.  What, however, about the political virus?  How will America inoculate itself and rid of it?  What will take for this to happen?  There are always voices of optimism that put their faith in the better angels of America, or the eventual return of common sense, or the yearning for reconciliation.  But do we have a catalyst for any of these beneficent forces to come to our rescue? 

If there is a chance to restore the political health of America, responsible political and thought leaders have to step forward and restore reason and trust in the public square.  Paranoid, delusional and fraudulent ideas should not be given the oxygen to poison the body politic.  Failure in stemming the corrosive influence of the political virus will, in the end, turn out to be much more devastating than the coronavirus.

As I am headed toward the exit door of this year, I am happy to see that science triumphed, relieved that American democracy survived, and very aware that resilience and reason are worth keeping alive.     

* In the middle of the Black Death epidemic hysteria, Pope Clement VI, to his credit, tried, but to no avail, to tame the anti-Semitic sentiments by appealing to reason.

* The information about the Black Death came from the book Apollo’s Arow of Nicholas Christakis, a doctor and professor of social and natural science at Yale University.

Since their beginning, humans have moved about the globe.  “Out of Africa” is the phrase that epitomizes the origin and the outward movement of the final human species that survived, the homo sapiens.  Even after farming and agriculture were invented, thus bonding humans to the land, they kept moving to new places out of economic necessity and opportunity.  No matter, however, how strong our drive to move and relocate has been, just as strong is the desire to grow roots and thrive in a place we can call home.

Despite periodical waves of mass migration, for thousands of years most people spent their lives very close to home.  This was mostly due to the way most economies were organized.  Production was done in relatively small scale and thus it took small amounts of saving and, hence, capital to support it.  In other words, capital raising and capital use were mostly local. 

All this changed with the advent of capitalism.  Mass production required significant investments in technology and, thus, capital.  Not all capital could be found locally.  The financial system had to grow to facilitate the movement of surplus capital to places where the returns were higher.  The growth of colonialism made capital mobility more intense because it was also very profitable.  Colonial countries, like Holland, England and France, used their surplus capital to fund investments in their colonies.  Utilizing strong protectionist measures, colonial powers made sure these overseas investments were highly profitable.  They also made sure that critical production technologies and facilities remained in the motherland.  This latter tactic was crucial for keeping their working population content.  As long there was enough demand for labor and handsome profits were repatriated to the motherland, everybody was happy.

And then all this changed again.  And it changed in our lifetime (as long as we were born in the 1980s).  First the UK and then the European Union joined the US in the liberalization of their financial systems and the movement of capital across the globe.  The dissolution of the Soviet Union and most importantly the opening of China to foreign investment and business created new profitable opportunities for capital to pursue.  In the ensuing decades it became possible for financial firms to amass capital from all corners of the world and redeploy it anywhere based on the promise of hefty returns.  Not only savings (surplus capital) were competed away to the most profitable uses but so were factories and labor.  As the new multinational economic order gathered steam, old industrial towns in the American Midwest, in England, France and elsewhere started to lose their factories, their economic vitality, and the institutions that made up their social fabric and identity. 

We still live in a world in which rootedness is location- and people-specific.  It gives us shared values, common culture and shared identity.  These are not easily transferable from one place to another.  And they take years to take roots in new locales.  So bringing rootedness into the picture makes us realize that the terms of mobility for capital and labor are not equal.  Labor mobility comes at a high price.  Its price is the diminished communities it leaves behind and the struggle to grow roots to the new places.  That’s why our desire to move with economic opportunities runs up against our desire for rootedness.

The mobility of capital clashes with rootedness in other ways as well.  Capital is owned by firms and investors.  Their interest is to get the highest returns in any place this is possible.  That’s not, however, what serves the interests of rootedness.  In an economic sense (as told by Giridharadas in Winners Take All) capital owners belong everywhere whereas working people belong somewhere.  Corporations claim they consider their local communities as one of their stakeholders.  But when investment in a community is to last as long as it secures acceptable returns, is the loyalty of capital to a community serious?  If the interests of capital owners do not necessarily align with the interests of local communities, who is there to mediate the friction?

Next consider the divide between rural populations (mostly farmers and blue color workers) and urban and suburban populations (mostly educated professionals).  The former, by the nature of their occupation or the limitations of their skills, are homebound and, hence, very much interested in the stability of their communities.  In the cities and suburbs, educated professionals and cadres of workers have greater opportunities to share in the bounties of the global economy.  No wonder, those who live in rural areas tend to be more nationalistic whereas city folk tend to be more cosmopolitan.  Again, we have a divide between those whose interests are somewhere and those whose interests can be everywhere.

All these thoughts suggest that despite the tacit and widespread approval of capitalism, even in communist countries like China and Vietnam, there are aspects of it, most notably unfettered capital mobility, that are not easily compatible with our human longing for rootedness. 

The mistake we often make in our evaluation and appreciation of a political, social or economic system is to judge it on the basis of some distinct advantage ignoring all the while its full implications as its various workings come into full gear.  This is the case with economic globalization.  It sounds great in textbooks and economic models that treat resources like capital and labor as if they were pieces on a chess board while failing to consider the reality of human nature and therefore the collateral costs.

This piece cannot end though without considering the salutary effects of globalization.  Thanks to it, billions of people in previously undeveloped countries have been lifted out of poverty and misery.  Nonetheless, the folks that have been displaced in the industrialized countries will continue to remind us that this human progress cannot be had at their cost; all the more, when the globalists are the last to pay a price.   Reconciling the interests of the people of everywhere with the interests of the people of somewhere should be high in the global agenda.    

* This piece on rootedness was inspired from reading a book review of The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties, by Paul Collier.

Earlier in the fall, I was asked to lead a discussion on the coronavirus pandemic among faculty associated with the Center of International Financial Services and Markets of the Zarb School of Business in my old academic home, Hofstra University.  Given the scope of the Center, I proposed to focus on questions with an international perspective.

Admittedly, the discussion was based more on information gleaned from news reports than on hard evidence.  But still the questions themselves were worth considering as a starting point.  The following were the questions we discussed.

Did the structure of health care systems (national vs. private) and health insurance (universal vs. optional) matter?  Broadly speaking, the answer appears to be no.  Countries with diverse systems in the delivery of health care and health insurance suffered devastating surges in coronavirus cases and deaths.  This was true for Europe with its emphasis on national health care and universal insurance as it was in the US where health care is mostly private and insurance, even after the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obama care), is not universal.  There was, however, one area where the structure of the health care system made a difference: in the production of more or less equitable outcomes.  The lack of universal health insurance and less emphasis on public health policies in the US have left significant numbers of Americans, especially minorities and poorer people, with severe co-morbidities that resulted in greater frequency of severe Covid-19 symptoms and deaths among these groups. 

Did a national vs. a regional response matter?  Most countries in Europe, Asia, as well as Canada adopted a national strategy in designing methods and tactics with respect to testing and tracing, wearing masks and practicing social distancing, and imposing restrictions, including lockdowns.  These countries managed to contain the first wave better than the case was in the US where president Trump left this task to the states.  When the second wave came, we again observed that countries following a national policy were more successful in reining the pandemic.  An area where the type of the policy, national vs. regional, mattered a lot was in regards to opening schools.  Although a difficult and challenging feat, countries with a national policy provided a more consistent and coordinated approach, most often favoring in-person classes, than countries with regional approaches, like the US.  Countries that opened their schools proved to have made a more judicious use of the evidence that the infection rate is extremely low among the young.  They also seemed to appreciate more the role of socialization in the cognitive and emotional growth of children.  A cacophony of special and political interest voices bungled this issue in the US.  As a result, the US may pay a significant deficit in this regard for many years to come. 

Did the individualistic vs. the socio-centric culture of a country mattered?  Asian countries with their greater emphasis on the interests of society vs. those of the individual were better able to mobilize their populations to abide by government guidelines.  Interestingly, if we look across countries with a common cultural background, in this case an Anglo-Saxon culture, we can see that the display of individualistic attitudes, which run strong in this culture, was not uniform.  In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the people displayed a greater compliance with state mandates than in the US and the UK.  Especially in the US, the zeal to exercise individual rights, often driven by political preferences, made the coordination of responses to the pandemic exceedingly challenging and in some states outright ineffectual with devastating results health-wise.

Did trust in the authorities matter?  Needless to say, that trust in the government and the medical and scientific community is extremely important for an effective response to any health crisis.  It was an unfortunate coincidence the pandemic hit the US during an election year.  The toxic political discourse coupled with the unusually low trust in government made the public’s cooperation with federal and state authorities extremely fraught.  On top of that, there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories that drove dangerous wedges in any attempt to coral public support for any policy response to the pandemic.  We don’t need to make any international comparison to conclude that mistrust played an enormous part in the health calamity experienced in the US.

An important point that emerged in the discussion was the role of policy and leadership.  Policy tools and effectiveness are, of course, impacted by culture, institutions, and availability of resources.  But coherence, steadiness, and execution can matter even more.  Countries, like China, South Korea, New Zealand and Germany to mention some, responded with well-thought out and well-executed policies.  Again, the US was a laggard in this respect.  Choice of policies also matters.  A case in point is the experience of the Nordic countries which share a lot in culture and institutions.  Norway, Denmark and Finland formulated and executed more aggressive policies.  Sweden opted for a weak policy stance and paid a heavier price.  Leadership has to do with the clarity and steadiness of message, resoluteness, and leading by example.  None of that happened in the US.  If anything, the US leadership provided fodder for counterproductive behavior that exacerbated the negative health outcomes.

How different countries responded to the pandemic had serious implications for the meaning of “failed state” and, hence the brand image of a country.  Small countries, like New Zealand, buttressed their image as competent and successful countries, whereas the US lost significant brand capital.  We can also say that soft power, like public trust and policy design and execution, proved to be superior to hard power measured by military and economic power.

Finally, if there is a common international theme in fighting the pandemic, it is, first, the compassion and sacrifice of the health care givers, and, second, the speed and ingenuity with which the scientific community across the globe responded to produce the vaccines needed to inoculate us against the coronavirus. 

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of the Center, the Zarb School of Business, or Hofstra University. 

It was less than a few weeks before the elections, and my wife and I were driving to a nearby town when a pickup truck came up next to our car.  We noticed it was emblazoned with pro-Trump banners.  But what we saw at the back of the truck when it pulled ahead of us was more telling.  In big letters the banner proclaimed “Make Liberals Cry Again.”  I turned to my wife and said “Perhaps, we are the reason Trump is so popular.”

In about two months, Donald Trump will no longer be president.  But those who voted for him, and more importantly, his loyal base will still be with us.  Although their candidate lost, I want to tell them that all Americans, conservatives and liberals, have reasons to cry, but not entirely for the reasons the banner intended. 

So, if Trump’s supporters want me to cry, although my candidate won, I will.  I will first cry for the moral bankruptcy of the Christian Right (mostly Evangelicals) that against all evidence chose to entrust its religious political agenda in the hands of a man whose personal behavior as a civilian and politician has little to do with Christian values.  If history books are any guide, it’s not the first time that religious zealots succumb to the rule “the purpose justifies the means” in order to advance their agenda.  Trump promised to deliver the Supreme Court and support the Christian Right’s agenda and to its members nothing else mattered.    

I will also cry, for the blue collar, working class, and rural Americans who have been abandoned by Democrats and Republicans.  The Democrats bought too much into the idea that opening markets and trade across the globe would be good for all workers.  They signed up to the global mobility of capital before they had a chance to build the safety net and skills upgrade needed to ease the new competition.  That was a policy failure.  The Republicans though deserve a lot more blame for deliberately distracting working class and rural Americans with the vision of an old America and moral and cultural wars while their world and social fabric around them were deteriorating into decaying towns, low paying jobs, work without fulfillment, and social isolation and degradation. 

The Republican establishment feigns surprise to Trump’s success, as if he is not the natural culmination of their Southern Strategy going back to their own Richard Nixon.  That was the strategy that played the race card to lure voters in Southern States away from their support of the Democratic party.  Instead of celebrating the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, Republicans used them against the Democrats.  Then they doubled down by turning the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, that legalized abortion, into another cudgel to wield against Democrats.  By the time Donald Trump appeared on the political stage, race, religion, and guns (let’s not forget them) had been already served in his political platter.  All he had to do was to add a few more scoops and then mix in anti-immigrant slurs and fearmongering.  

I will cry for the ideological blindness of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party that still preaches the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of regulation and full of individualistic behavior unconcerned of any negative social spillover consequences.  Don’t they see that millions of working-class Americans (including their white base) are rejecting this strain of capitalism?  These economically disadvantage Americans do not care about deficits and debt, nor do they care about the virtues of international trade.  What they care about is keeping their old jobs, the economic and social vitality of their towns; and access to good education and health care.

I will cry for the American plutocracy that is more interested in amassing personal wealth and competing in grandiose donations than accepting to share more fairly the gains of economic growth with all others for the well-being of the American society.  Why would a society need generosity out of concentrated wealth if it had the resources to take care of its needs?  If, for example, there was more support for living wages, easing the transition of workers to new jobs, promoting healthy habits and environmental safety and accepting labor unions as partners instead of strangling them out of existence.  Should there be support for these socially-minded policies, we would have less poverty and financial insecurity to worry about, healthier populace, better-trained workers and a greater consensus in the pursuit of meeting the interests of all stakeholders.  If corporation and the wealthy did not resist to pay their fair share of taxes that their peers of past generations paid, the government would have the resources to step in and take care of the detritus left by the creative destruction of capitalism.

And I will cry for the educated and professional elites, conservative and liberal, that often seem to have less in common with their fellow Americans in the fly-over country than with their peers of the global elite.  The sea of red dots we see in the voting landscape of America outside the urban and suburban areas is where the other America lives.  It is the country of rodeos and agricultural fairs.  It is the land of country music and square dance, and the country of Friday night high-school football games.  It is the land that feeds us and gives its sons and daughters to defend us.  It is the country of rural and working-class people who do not think a college degree is needed for a better life as long as American capital keeps investing in people and not just profits.   

Finally, I will cry for the fact that white America has yet to come to grips with what the legacy of slavery and the ongoing under the radar discrimination has done and is doing to the lives and opportunities of our fellow black Americans.  Coming from another land, it took me years to educate myself about the racial past and contemporary reality impacting minorities of color in America.  If we can understand how the lack of opportunities, adequate services and of a safety net can bring personal plight and social disintegration to working-class whites in the American heartland, and how unfair it would be to make their condition the core of prejudice and stereotyping, then we should have no difficulty to understand how unfair it is to do the same to any other group of people, no matter what their race or background.

And now I ‘ll wait for you, Trump voter, to tell me what you would cry for.

In the last post, I gave a historical overview of America’s path from the self-centered sentiment of the Gilded Age to the egalitarian and socio-centric sentiment and activism of the Progressive Era all the way to the 1970s and then the slide to a “me-first” attitude under the wave of individualism that has prevailed in the last 40 years.

Striking the right balance between the interests of the individual and those of the community has always been one of the greatest challenges of human societies.  Individualism ensures basic personal freedoms that enable each person to pursue self-actualization and preserve self-dignity.  Dedication to a communitarian ideal ensures the preservation of the social norms and institutions that enable individuals to thrive within a system of shared values, reciprocity and pooled resources.  It is ultimately about the balance between rights and responsibilities.

When the French diplomat Alexis Tocqueville traveled through America in the first half of the 19^th century, he noticed that Americans exercised rugged and resourceful individualism that, at the same time, was mindful of what was good for their communities.  He called that ethos “individualism rightly understood.”  After the excesses of the Gilded Age had shuttered this compact, the Progressive Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.”  But “We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

Today, we are hardly entitled to argue that we live up to Tocqueville’s description of Americans or Teddy Roosevelt’s admonition.  The living example of our failure to understand individualism the right way is the reckless refusal of large segments of Americans to take precautions (like wearing masks and socially distancing themselves) in the midst of a pandemic that rages uncontrollably because, to a great extent, of this attitude.  And we fail to see that the inordinate accumulation of wealth persists while millions of Americans go by with high rates of morbidity, subpar health insurance and care, uneven educational attainment, unfulfilling jobs, and the scourges of homelessness, drugs, opioids, and suicides.  

So how did we arrive at this disconnect between the interests of the individual and the interests of the community.  I would point my finger to a two-faced suspect.  The exultation of individual achievement along with a gradually diminishing awareness about the importance of the community and society at large.

Common-knowledge examples will suffice to make the point of our society’s excessive attribution of success to individual achievement instead of to collective effort.  CEOs are upheld as singularly responsible for their corporation’s success as if all others do not matter.  And yet, we often observe that corporate success and CEO compensation (a metric of their value) do not coincide.  Famous actors and actresses are lavished super-generous contracts as if all that matters is their performance and not that of the ensemble.  Individual players in soccer, football, baseball, basketball are remunerated at stratospheric salaries without necessarily leading their teams to championships.  All these examples are indicative of a cultural attitude that awards a premium to individual effort and performance but ignores the collective body.  

Once this attitude has taken hold, we are not far from the point that each one of us starts to believe in our unique value supported by personal talents and meritorious effort, beholden to no one else’s help or to a stroke of luck.  As Ayn Rand’s Atlas, we “shrug off the feckless takers,” in this case, society’s weaker members, those undeserving “takers.”

What we ignore is that without successful clans, tribes, villages, societies we would not be here today.  The truth is that our distant ancestors, those, often disrespected, hunter-gatherers are the unsung heroes of the human species.  We exist because of their wisdom to develop group survival attitudes.  They came to understand that without pooling and sharing their limited resources, and especially food, they had very little chance of surviving.  They realized that one individual’s fitness to survive their very harsh and hostile environment depended on the fitness of everyone else in the group.  Better to have more good hunters than fewer.  Better, therefore, to share food with others and nurture all around strength than hog all of one’s kill.

Thankfully, our distant ancestors responded to our specie’s strong pro-sociality instinct that fosters cooperation.   Research has shown that our species’ success does not lie in our raw intellect or reasoning powers but in our capacity to learn from one another and then spread our knowledge to others as well as to future generations.  Therefore, affording every member of a society the opportunities and means to remain engaged in the common effort gives a society the advantage to improve holistically and advance to the benefit of everyone.  Societies with high degrees of inter-connectedness and cooperation based on trust and mutual reciprocity create a larger social capital and produce a greater social premium shared by all.

If social capital and social premium are recognized as beneficial to all, the individual as well as the community, then it is not difficult to make the leap from a culture of I to a culture of We.  But this is not going to be easy.  There are political, corporate and individual interests that see no benefit in this cultural transition.  Beyond being merely reluctant, these forces are outright hostile to the idea of sharing control, status and wealth in order to support the investments and communitarian effort needed to serve the common good.  To overcome their entrenched power, we need a grass roots political movement reminiscent of the one that gave us the Progressive Era 120 years ago.    

Despite all the mischaracterizations and disinformation, there is today a Progressive movement that offers hope.  It centers around the issues of fighting climate change and environmental decay, and reversing inequalities in economic rewards, health conditions and health care, educational attainment, and the enjoyment of full citizens’ rights independent of race, ethnic background, sex, and gender choices.  The challenge for this movement is to translate its concerns into a political message that convinces a decisive majority of citizens that we must again make American individualism to be rightly understood and become the driving force for the renewal of social trust and the recapture of the social premium we all deserve.