Sharing America

It’s always inspiring to know, or nowadays mainly remember, the “Greatest Generation”, those who served in the military during WWII or waited at home, full of hope for their sailor’s or soldier’s return.  Talking with them revealed the many bonds they shared, not the least of which was their common readiness to serve their country in dangerous places everywhere.  New York City punks and Alabama rednecks and African-American homeboys had grown together into Americans.  Of course, there had been the “first generation”, those who served in the same way at Valley Forge and Saratoga and Yorktown, and the generations that served in 1812 and the Civil War and WWI and all the troubled times in between.  From the Sons of Liberty who responded to Paul Revere to the men and women of today’s armed forces, the unity of the United States has been shaped by shared service.  Stirring people together in the great “melting pot” to form a nation includes those common experiences that unite people who would otherwise be alien to each other.  Apart from military service, these shared American experiences have also included things like the upcoming Independence Day, railroads and highways that link us all, arguments about horse races and baseball teams, popular tunes, and, yes, what we read.  They contribute to everything from a unified patriotism to civility in the streets.

Unity was relatively easy for Sam Adams, the Boston merchant, and Tom Jefferson, the Virginia farmer/lawyer.  They read the same authors and were soaked in the same “literary canon”, the collection of writings familiar to all.  As a consequence, when either spoke of liberty or the common welfare, the other understood what was meant.  It contributed to responsible politics.  While the Constitution was drafted, flamboyant orators like Patrick Henry and Tom Paine and yes, even Tom Jefferson, were politely shooed away in favor of cooler heads like Madison and Franklin.  Even in 1858, when Lincoln said “a house divided against itself cannot stand”, most of his audience could immediately put their finger on the passage he was quoting.  It is much harder these days when we’re constantly bombarded by thousands of messages from newspapers, social media, books, the internet, wildly in conflict, coming from people talking past each other, separated by a common language without common referents. Speakers are often using word meanings from cultures so different that a translator would be appropriate.  Internet comments on practically any news item are more a trading of shallow insults than a sharing of understandings.  When controversies erupt like the current wikileaks and Snowden issues, or the Zimmerman trial, or gay marriage, or voting rights, or internet freedom, or whatever, Silicon Valley and the Midwest can disagree violently without either realizing they are not really talking about the same things.  When talking about liberty or equality or discrimination or justice or respect, they don’t understand how what they’re saying to others will be understood.  The common experiencing of McGuffey’s Reader is no more.

The controversies, the congressional impasses, the displays of violent incivility, are all signals of a growing lack of mutual understanding prompted by our diversity and polyglot cultures.  We need to consciously seek ways to strengthen both our unities and our understanding of our differences.  The redevelopment of a core curriculum of foundation documents in our schools would help.  Just the controversies that would occur over defining such a curriculum would be enlightening.  So would Michael Gerson’s proposal to reinstitute a program of a required two years of national service, military or civilian, for young people, male and female, coming   out of high school.  I cringe when I say that because I have six grandchildren who would be subject to that.  But the draft, when we had it, was the greatest mixer in our American melting pot; it helped us understand and respect each other.  We need an updated version of it back.  They can teach, like AmeriCorps, or build parks, like the CCC, or staff homeless shelters, or do military service.  The important thing is just to learn to be together carrying out shared responsibilities and learning to cope with each other’s differences.  We need to talk to each other, respectfully and with understanding.  We need to share America again.

Operating Without a Heart

“A man’s not a man if he hasn’t got a heart.”  That was one of several memorable lines spoken at the public hearing that my wife and I attended last night.  I usually don’t write about local issues, preferring to think about more national or global ones in this space.   But we are dealing here in Frederick County with an issue that is a microcosm of a major issue facing the country.  The hearing we attended was over the proposed sale of a nursing home complex owned by the county for the long term care of poor elderly people in ill health.  The nursing home is the only such county-owned facility in the state; in that sense, it is unique.  The county has officially supported this facility and its predecessors for about 140 years.  The land for the facility was donated to the county in the 1870s for use in the care of the poor and elderly.  Its continuing maintenance is part of the deep ethical values of the county.  Even though the county is in a typically conservative semi-rural area, support for the facility has been reaffirmed by countless Boards of Commissioners over the years.  People protesting the proposed sale ranged from indigent patients at the facility to prominent bankers, lawyers, doctors and other members of the local establishment.  Of over 400 people at the meeting, only about 10 supported the sale.  Now a recently elected deeply conservative majority of the Board of Commissioners is proposing to divest the county of the responsibility, mostly, it appears on the ideological grounds that health care provision is not a business the county should be in.  No consideration was stated of fitting the proposed sale within a larger plan for meeting the needs of the poor and elderly.  At the end of the meeting, the Commission majority voted to proceed with the sale, despite the wide-scale protest, though there will inevitably be a variety of legal objections to be dealt with, including the obvious one that the sale conflicts with the stated purpose of the original property donation.

One of the protests made at the meeting, by as I recall a banker, was that the county is not a for-profit corporation, but an organization of the many to improve the lives of all, sometimes by the care for the needs of the few.  It was an eloquent statement of the larger issue.  As I’ve mentioned before, the nation is entering a silent crisis period when the baby-boomer generation is starting to grow old and retire without adequate financial resources.  The corporate pension structure has been so altered over the last 30 years, from fixed-benefit arrangements to IRA plus Social Security, that large numbers of those now approaching retirement age will find themselves at or near the poverty level. Studies show that average IRA levels plus Social Security are far from enough to guarantee a comfortable retirement. The average retirement account of those approaching retirement is about $100,000, producing a sustainable income of about $5000 per year.  We may see a return to the times before 1950 when the majority of those over 65 lived in poverty.  In the face of this, corporations are using the recession and the advent of more efficient computer and robotics technology to “down size” older employees.  There is a silent “downsizing” of an entire generation going on, as older employees are let go in favor of younger, less expensive workers and are finding new jobs impossible to obtain.  Retirement is often not by choice, and not at a time of the employee’s choosing.  To the corporation, the problems, health and otherwise, of retired employees are externalities to be ignored or minimized.  If government treats them the same way, they fall between the cracks.

Allowing large portions of the largest generation in the country’s history, all of them, by the way, voters, to fall between the cracks is bound to produce social turmoil.  But beyond that, it is a failure of social conscience and of thoughtful planning for the future.  The passionate defense last night by rich and poor alike of the nursing facility exemplified America’s social conscience at its best.  It is now up to government to live up to the ethical standard of its citizenry.  That responsibility extends from the county to the halls of Congress. Purely from a planning viewpoint, this country’s economy has run for the past 40 years on the consumption preferences of the baby boomer generation.  To convert that driving force almost overnight into a minimally consuming drag on the economy is foolish.  It amounts to choosing a continuing recession.  Both corporations and government share responsibility in this.  But it is government that explicitly is tasked “to promote the general welfare”, and it is government that must look beyond immediate cost cutting to the needs of the future. The impacts of the crisis will be felt across the nation and in the county.  At all levels, non-ideological planning is needed, not ideological grandstanding.  

A non-ideological case can be made for handling the health needs of the elderly poor by other than direct governmental management, just as non-ideological counter-arguments exist.  But there is no excuse for lack of thoughtful consideration of the growing needs of the poor, and how best to provide them.  Letting them “fall between the cracks” is a disastrous solution, both for them and for the country.  Whatever your ideology, they are a social issue which must be addressed.  The failure of local government last night was not just a failure of conscience – trying to operate without a heart – it was a failure of responsible planning.   It is the failure of politicians who truly have no regard for the future of the country, only for their own.  At the local and national level, it is time for such politicians to be “downsized.”

Deciding Our Future

Back in 1982, as an assignment in a graduate long-range planning course, I was asked to write a scenario describing life in the U.S. in 2025.  I got a good grade from a senior long-range planner at the Congressional Budget Office, so my techniques must have been ok.  My three major predictions were that there would be a wall along the U.S. – Mexico border, that health care costs would consume 25 percent of the federal budget and be the major budget issue and that the current public education system would mainly be replaced by in-home education via computer access to “teaching machines.”  I missed by not including climate change, but back then, who did?  The Senate is today considering an immigration bill which would lengthen the already-begun wall by several hundred miles and raise the border patrol to 40,000, health care costs are consuming headlines everywhere, and educational computer hook-ups from homes to teaching software and master teachers are already popular in Alaska and Australia and spreading (they help cope with both distance and bad weather). By the way, back then, technology forecasters were already seeing distance-independent communications via satellites and cellular technologies and essentially free massive information storage and retrieval.  With proper tools and expertise and a little vision, long-range forecasting is fairly straightforward.  It’s doing something about what you see that’s hard.  Real societal change usually involves hard choices and significant changes in the political status quo.

Policy planners talk about three basic ways of making decisions: rational “top down” decision making; disjoint incrementalism, known commonly as “muddling through”; and decision process modification, in which the focus is not on what is to be achieved, but on how the decision is to be reached – it’s what you do when all else fails. Autocratic and totalitarian governments focus on the top down approach, but it’s only as good as the vision of the people doing the planning and lacks the ability to bring everyone to agreement on critical social issues.  Democracies are great on muddling through, which is usually a “drunkard’s walk” veering one way then another until some significant long term change is achieved with a fair degree of consensus; its problem is that the results achieved are popular but not always rational, and rational but unpopular results may never be achieved.  Emotions like fear and greed count as much or more than rationality in the decision process. The border wall is a current case in point.  Where emotional considerations are important, democracies do achieve things autocratic government fails at; slavery existed for millennia under autocratic regimes and continues in some of them, but was abolished in about one hundred years in democracies after they were attained.

In  Hot,  Flat and Crowded Tom Friedman comments that if he could only be dictator for a day, many of the problems contributing to adverse climate change could be solved immediately. Of course such a process would be impossible, but Friedman puts his finger on a key issue.  Climate change is happening rapidly, and decisions about it need to be made just as rapidly.  Already New York Mayor Bloomberg has announced a plan for sea walls and other measures for ameliorating the climate change impact, a signal that we are getting past the point of stopping major climate effects and arriving at a course of dealing with them as best we can.  That seems to be a growing consensus among climate scientists.  But the democratic debate grinds on, and private greed seems to continually outweigh public rationality.  We just may never get there by muddling through.

Economists would hold that our fundamental decisions are always determined by private greed, but biologists might differ.  Our fundamental drive, according to them, is toward survival.  Economics, with its celebration of that private greed, is a means toward that end, not a goal in itself. And enjoyment of greed is dependent on a surrounding society.  It is impossible to maintain a luxury mansion with servants and gourmet dining when society is collapsing about your ears.  That fact may be the irresistible force needed to move the slow motion machinery of democracy.  .  Forest fires have been consuming much of Colorado; two “once a century” tornados have hit the same Oklahoma town in ten years; I just got back from a 3 to 8 inch tropical downpour, depending on where you were, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in June when such things were never supposed to happen; droughts are blanketing Africa and Australia and China and parts of the U.S., and so on.  Nature is sending us warnings daily now, and this is only the beginning.  Sea walls around New York City are just a hint of what might come.  The time for denial is past.  But the democratic process grinds on.

We use fast-track procedures for trade negotiations, an area less significant than climate change.  It’s time to consider an equivalent process for climate change issues.  A fast-track process in which proposals by the President would be subject only to veto, not modification, by the Congress may be necessary.  To achieve that will require major changes to the membership of the Congress, and that as an explicit public issue needs to become a topic for our next elections.  Climate change denial is no longer a qualification for congressional membership.  Nature is not waiting for us to muddle through.

Averages and Expectations

In our economic lives, we live and die by averages and expectations.  We follow stock markets by averages like the Dow-Jones, expect individual stocks to rise and fall based on whether their sales or profits meet some expectation, praise or deplore some figure like unemployment rate depending on whether it rises or falls according to expectations or meets some historical average, agree willingly to some extreme financial condition in the expectation it will increase GDP.  The facts that those averages reflect the life experience of millions of people or that the expectations describe the future life prospects of those millions seems to escape us.  The averages and expectations have assumed a life of their own, devoid of ties to humanity.  They form a layer that insulates us from the joys and traumas of the people in the world around us.

The Washington Post this morning reports an update from the World Bank of its expectations for the world economy, and the report is filled with satisfaction that economic growth in emerging countries has slowed to “a sustainable level.”  The U.S. economy is expected to grow by 2 percent (the Bank notes it would have been more but for the “fiscal tightening”), world trade to grow by 4 percent, energy prices to go down by 14 percent, developing world economies to grow by 6 percent. Interestingly, the sour spot in the world picture is that the EU economy, home of the great austerity exercise, is expected to contract by .6 percent, though Japan, which has just switched away from austerity, is experiencing a resurgence of growth.  U.S. and Japan use stimulus, EU uses austerity, hmm. The fact that developing nations growth of 6 percent is down from previous expectations of 9 percent is lauded as a sign of sustainable “stability without volatility.”  That the change reflects a one-third decline in the prospects for future prosperity of millions of people is ignored.  We don’t want to feed hungry people too much too fast; it might upset their banker’s digestive system.

For that of course is the issue buried in all those numbers.  Whose goals are being met by our economic policies?  If you are among the millions who have a hungry family to feed, you seek immediate relief, even at the prospect that at some future point but at a higher level of prosperity you may face economic problems.  It is the banker, not you, that gets indigestion at the “too rapid” improvement in your fortunes.  For to the banker, that rapid growth may threaten a lessening of profits.  It is natural that the World Bank, a financial institution after all, should have bankers’ values, but that should not satisfy the rest of us. Greece faces 27 percent unemployment, loss of much of its public services and loss of its national TV system, all at the behest of EU bankers and the IMF, even after the IMF has acknowledged publicly that austerity wasn’t working; Spain faces similar trauma; developing nations around the world face stunting of their growth; all this to satisfy financial averages and expectations.

We didn’t evolve from a medieval world ruled by kings and emperors just to become one ruled by bankers and CEOs.  But we have acquiesced in the growing reach of such rule by succumbing to the allure of their numbers.  We accept unthinkingly that the numbers being lauded are those expressing mainly the gains of a few, not of the many.  We forget that the bankers’ and CEOs’ profits are confined mostly to them, while the miseries of millions, and their outcomes in wars and famines and turmoil are shared among all of us.

The World Bank noted that regaining a developing world economic growth rate of 9 percent was difficult, but achievable through opening up international trade, investments in infrastructure and investments in “human capital”, i.e., such things as education and health care.  The same applies to the U.S. economy.  There is nothing wrong with seeking economic growth, but it should benefit all, not just the profits of a few.  A world divided between the very rich and the very poor is no longer viable.  We know too much about each other and are too easily reachable.  We need goals that satisfy the needs of all, and that involves going beyond financial averages alone.  The Happiness Index being developed internationally is one such measure that may satisfy our thirst for numbers in a humane way.  We need more.  And we need to remember that numbers are not people, and it is the betterment of our common humanity, not just our profit, that needs our attention.

Data, and its Discontents

The rising fever of liberal hysteria about the NSA Prism system leaks could benefit from the cooling hand upon the brow of the Great Liberal himself, John Stuart Mill.  For he is the source from which most modern liberal thought arises, and thinking is what is sorely missing now.  By coincidence, my first encounter with Mill’s writing, his Essay On Liberty, came in 1959, the centennial of its creation.  To my young eyes it seemed at that time a quaint fossil of the Victorian age. A principal target for Mill was the ancient idea that “error has no rights”; who could possibly think that anymore?  Mill also seemed almost Libertarian rather than Liberal in his insistence that government’s intervention in any person’s activity could be legitimate only to the extent the intervention prevented harm to others. 

In my youthful naiveté, I equated harm only with physical wounds, not yet realizing that, to Mill, harm was to the full person as they could be when provided the opportunity to reach the full breadth of their humanity.  Mill would have strongly rejected Libertarian doctrine as “a polite indifference to the lives of others.”  And Mill, like Socrates, held that we, as those who have benefited from the securing of our liberty provided through government, owe a debt of reciprocity to those around us that takes two forms.  First, we owe a debt to others to conform our actions to the needs of our government for securing the liberties we enjoy. Second, and here is where Mill differs most from Libertarians, we owe to society “a disinterested benevolence” in promoting  the betterment of the lives of our fellow citizens, as our own lives have benefited, “but not with the use of whips and scourges.”  (That, by the way, is why I credit Mill as much as B. F. Skinner and behavioral psychology with my preference for positive incentives in regulation rather than the traditional “whips and scourges.”)  And to Mill, when assessing legitimacy of action, government stretched beyond the usual bureaucratic operations we call government to the coercive behaviors of community majorities suppressing minority views in conflict with those of the majority.

Ten years later, I plunged feet first into a very contemporary struggle over the same issues.  I was one of several federal monitors of an information systems research project involving design of integrated municipal government computer systems.  Part of the effort involved design of police intelligence systems, and we feds were insisting that the systems include provisions for wiping out criminal allegations history when a person was not convicted of any crime.  In addition we insisted, successfully it turned out, on enactment of what became the first municipal ordinance protecting citizens’ rights to privacy.  To east coasters the issue seemed plain, but not to city officials in a small southwestern city (if you’ve seen Hud or The Last Picture Show, you’ve been there.) Their view was that retaining the data facilitated legitimate police work, and anyway, “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.”  It was a community attitude they were seeking to enforce, not some foreign tyranny..  My fellow monitors were sophisticated easterners, while I was not that long away from life in a town not that far from where the issue had arisen.  I felt both sides of it.  But I had to agree with Mill; keeping that data with no specific basis for believing harm would come to others by its deletion would be an unwarranted invasion of the personal rights of persons to control of their own information.

Person is an interesting word.  Probably originally from the Greek, it meant the mask worn by an actor in ancient drama, then became the role played by the actor, then evolved to the “social face” we greet the world with, and nowadays it seems to loosely mean a whole human being (or even a corporation?).  But the essence of it is that social face we present the world and seek to protect from manipulation by others.  Our “person” is the data we provide to the world about ourselves.  The whole concept of privacy implies that there are data of our lives we prefer to keep out of sight from those we do not know well so that our internal processes of choice are not inhibited by the intrusion of others, and it is that instinct that is at the root of our thirst for liberty.  But we still have that obligation to our society at large that Mill cites, to participate in maintaining the security of all by conforming our actions within reasonable bounds.  And that implies certain rights of government to examine our public actions.  Mill makes a sharp distinction between public and private spheres of action.  Public spheres are those in which our actions could cause harm to others or to society at large. Private spheres are those not likely to cause harm to others.  Our bedroom is a private sphere, our email a public one.  When we place a telephone call, the record that a call has been made, but not its content, is a public record.

So, the questions a modern Mill would ask might be, is the data obtained by Prism in the public or private sphere, and is it reasonably necessary to guard our liberty?  If private, the action of government is illegitimate.  If public and within the reasonable bounds of the trust we have placed in government to guard our liberty, then it is legitimate.  Indications so far are that the Prism system operates within those bounds.  What we know so far is that a careful distinction has been made between "business records" - that public sphere - and content records requiring a subpoena - the private sphere.  The system could be misused to threaten our liberty, but so could a tank or rocket launcher.  It is part of the responsibility we have entrusted to government to guard against such misuse.  But it is part of our responsibilities as citizens, and the debt we owe others, to participate in guarding our liberty by not refusing government a legitimate tool. 

Snow Shovels and ObamaCare

The boys of summer are back, with all their aches and bruises and strains and trips to and from various levels of disabled lists.  The Washington Nationals are afflicted with injuries; manager Davey Johnson just sets his scowl and talks of “playing through pain”, while sports writers lament possible danger to the futures of struggling young players.  It reminds me of the famous (and my favorite) Far Side cartoon that showed two cowboys under attack from Indians with arrows flying everywhere. One cowboy with a huge arrow stuck through him is saying to the other, “Sure it hurts, Clem, but it’s a good kind of hurt.”  We laugh because it speaks to our moral ambivalence about the virtue of suffering.  Johnson obviously believes in the virtues of struggling on through pain.  He has converted in his mind a childhood game into an adult occupation requiring personal sacrifice.  So, what is a good kind of hurt anyway, and is there virtue in ignoring it?

Most economists would likely agree with Davey Johnson.  In the same newspaper, columnist Charles Lane laments attacks on the “Cadillac Tax” provision in the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.”  ObamaCare provides a tax exclusion to employers for the value of health care coverage provided employees, to encourage broad coverage. The Cadillac Tax provision places a surcharge tax on employer health care plans that are worth more annually than $10,200 for individuals or $27,500 for families. The surcharge is up to 40 percent on that part of the value over the limit, affecting about 16 percent of employer-provided health plans.  Lane notes that many economists lament the health care tax exclusion because it “unduly insulates” people from the costs of health care and “encourages excessive consumption.”  Lane thinks the Cadillac Tax is a good provision because it discourages employers from overly generous health care coverage.

Of course, citing economists as authorities on justice or generosity can be shaky.  My favorite current economist Joseph Stiglitz reports a Chicago economic survey in which people were asked whether it was fair to raise the price of snow shovels immediately after a big snow. 82 percent of the general population said no, but only 27 percent of economists thought it unfair.  Apparently, excessive consumption of economic theory without compensating ethical grounding can unduly insulate young minds from the realities of moral living.  Economists, like baseball managers, are alert to the “moral hazard” of making life too easy for struggling people, but have a tin ear for justice or for future externalities.

To his credit, Lane recognizes that an ideal solution would be national health care not tied to particular employers, but still maintains that “gold plated” health coverage is to be avoided.  The idea that all people, not just the privileged few, could merit “gold plated” health care never seems to cross his mind. He is instead concerned with excessive costs, which he equates with excessive coverage.  He seems blind to the fact that the U.S., while first by far internationally in per capita health care costs, ranks about 30^th internationally in health care efficiency. We spend over twice as much per capita on health care as do other advanced countries, for far less results.  According to a 2010 international study, “Compared with six other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives."  We in effect ration health care today by denying coverage to about 15 percent of our people, and we provide many of the rest with just enough coverage to continue “playing through pain,” not to resume healthy lives in the present or in the future.  The solution is not less coverage but more, provided at substantially lower costs though improvements in efficiency.  Then, a “Cadillac Tax” would perhaps be meaningful, but possibly unnecessary.

The avenues for such improvements are obvious, from transparency to regulation of drug developer and equipment manufacturer charges – no more “educational seminar trips to Hawaii or Bermuda” as a cost charge off – to negotiated provider rates to hospital error reduction to greater emphases on prevention.  But we fail to follow them because of self-induced ideological blindness and acceptance of inappropriate goals.  The blind acceptance of laissez-faire minimal regulation is literally killing millions of us.  And the unthoughtful acceptance of economic goals is equally dangerous. Inefficient medicine contributes to our GDP even as it weakens us, but we subsidize the organizations that provide it and applaud their contributions to GDP.  The future higher health needs of employees after retirement occasioned by current neglect due to poor coverage are just externalities to the employer. Let Medicare deal with it, so we can blame the government for its higher costs.

Summer, with its vacation schedules and cook outs and baseball games is a good time to reflect on the joys of places other than the office.  Lemonade and snow shovels both remain cheap.  Personal sacrifice may involve giving up a nap to go to a festival.  We appreciate that life means more than “playing through pain.”  It’s time we realign our health care aspirations and priorities to reflect that also.

Two Nations

When reading either Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, it’s interesting that you almost never meet a really poor person, except those recently made so by their own fault, in Austen, and rarely meet a really rich person in Dickens, except the benevolent deus ex machina who resolves many of his stories or the villainous Scrooge who finally reforms.  The bridge between those two different worlds was Benjamin Disraeli, the author/Prime Minister who, while a leader of the conservative Tory party, also wrote about the “two Englands” of the rich and the poor and the distance between them and set off a social revolution in his own flamboyantly quiet way.  “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets. The rich and the poor.” was the aristocratic Disraeli’s observation, and the many results included the Primrose (Disraeli’s favorite flower) League, a society of working class and middle class English which endured until 2004 and featured a conservative point of view that believed in uniting both rich and poor in defense of Britain’s traditional values.  Defense of the Empire was its highest value, not defense of the wealthy.  At its height, the Primrose League included 2 million members at a time when the total English electorate was 7 million, and much of their membership were people deemed liberal territory in America.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates come from a socially conscious wealth archetype with long historical roots; the Roman poet Martial wrote a short poem chiding his host at a dinner party for selling a slave in order to fund the dinner, pointing out that they would be feasting not just on mullet but on the life of a human being.   How’s that for a hostess gift?  But it’s much easier to be like Jane Austen, simply unaware of that “other Nation” out there.  Of course Scrooges go back a long way too.  But Disraeli, and Buffet and Gates, show that being wealthy doesn’t have to preclude having a social conscience.  The scalpel that cuts the heart out of wealthy conservatives is an ideological one, the blind belief in merit-based individualism to the point of assuming anyone who has suffered misfortune had it coming to him.  And ideologies can be replaced by better ones.  But it will require great leadership among them.

A recent comment by a Republican party leader was that they should put out a sign saying “closed for repair” for a year, while they examine themselves and figure out ways to remain viable in the face of changing ethnic demographics, increasing voter dissatisfaction with “no, no, never” politics and a growing sense that time and outdated ideas have relegated them to becoming at best a regional party, at worst one of grumpy old southern white men.  There is only one Republican House representative from New England, a former bastion of theirs, and almost none from the west coast.  Their current basic excuse is that they are forced by their base to remain negative, but leadership means persuading your base to follow you, not acting like a lemming.  In the eyes of an increasing number of people, they embody Adam Smith’s wry observation that the principal role of government is to defend the rich against the poor, but following current Republican practices and values, the poor are beginning substantially to outnumber them.

The English had Disraeli, who led conservatives eventually to a dominance in British politics that lasted most of a hundred years, building it on a coalition of rich and poor, aristocrats and laborers, who shared a common vision about preserving the value of traditional English ways.  That uniting vision, not the divisive one of rich against poor, is what their conservative politics were built on.  What the Republicans need is leadership that focuses on what unites us all, not what divides us, i.e., they need to focus on coalition building across the socioeconomic and ethnic spectrums, and then to persuade their true believers to follow them to the Promised Land. There’s plenty of room for positive ideas and values that are not just carbon copies of ideas already taken by the Democrats.  It does not mean always agreeing with Democrats, but it does mean working and arguing with Democrats about how best to build a better future, not just hang on to everything they’ve got now, even at the expense of all others.

And it means updating their individualistic ideology to a 21^st century urban, global world.  It would be wonderful to have a party committed to the ideals of our Founding Fathers, but still able to translate them into positive steps toward a better future.  If they manage to do so, they too, along with America, will share that future.  If not, they will more and more be just a relic, like the Know-Nothings and anti-Masons, in the museum of lost political parties.