America is a dysfunctional state, not a failed one. ‘Failed’ is past tense, and while the framework of our government was stretched almost to the breaking point by Trump’s attempt to transform us into his personal fiefdom, we survived and the experiment continues.
But if you are the doctor and America is the patient, why not put a name on your diagnosis and tell us the hard truth? We didn’t need to invest 50% of GDP into social welfare and infrastructure when we were a vast, sparsely populated rural nation. FDR and the New Deal made an evolutionary break from frontier America that could have solidified into a modern, functional state had he capped the accumulation of personal wealth.
He failed to do that, and along came the Koch brothers and friends, armed with a neo-libertarian philosophy to justify their utterly insatiable greed — a philosophy that William F. Buckley described as “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.” Basically, it boils down to destroying any type of governance that could stand in the way of the fossil fuels industry and the expansion of the Koch estate. Or as Charles Koch himself put it, in 1978, “Our movement must destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.”
If that requires undermining public trust in science as well as government, well, so be it. If it means the loss of substantial amounts of the planet’s habitable land, who cares … the Kochs and their plutocratic friends will still have the means to live comfortably. Their “movement” has been actively trying to destroy the “statist paradigm” for fifty years and has come damned close to succeeding.
Their goal is to largely replace the public sector with an unregulated market that would allow them to do — and take — whatever they will. So far, they have completely co-opted one of our two major political parties and convinced about 35% of the electorate that having a government that helps us is a grave sin that makes us weaker … and that the real threat to America lies in allowing transgendered persons to use public bathroom facilities. Really … global temperatures are rising right along with sea levels, but the thought of men in dresses haunting bathrooms is what keeps millions of Americans up at night.
So call a spade a spade. Our problem isn’t the vainglorious fool living at Mar-a-lago, nor is it the mob of sycophants that took over the party of Lincoln. The real enemy of the people isn’t the media … it is a secretive cabal of about 500 fabulously wealthy people who buy into Kochism in a very big way and who are carrying on the movement.
And that is what we have to confront if we are going to prevent this dysfunctional state from becoming a truly failed one.
