Current events suggest that the progress in American social history, recently stalled, is now being turned around.
The long-run story of the American people is of the slow, swerving, incomplete, but steady expansion of participation in its voluntaristic culture. As told in Made in America, once-dependent and subordinate categories of people–women, immigrants, employees, the propertyless and the poor, ex-slaves, youth, the very elderly–have been able over the last three centuries to become more autonomous authors of their own lives, able act both independently for themselves and freely in concert with whomever they wished to join.
This extension of independence with community depended largely on the expansion of security–security of life, of fortune, of an assured future. And that, in turn, rested on economic growth, scientific advance, and critically, government protection against life’s perils–institutions of law and order, public education, public health, disaster relief, unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and much more.
The last few decades have seen a slowdown in the underlying processes that had expanded voluntarism. The economic fortunes of working class Americans stagnated. Many both experience and anticipate a life less assured than that of their parents. Science keeps delivering, but neither the economy nor the government are currently sustaining the actual security and the sense of security that enable forceful individual and community action.
Signs
One indicator of declining security is the mortality rate. Although there is a complex controversy over what is exactly happening among the white working class, improvement in health has stopped. Moreover, Americans are in worse health than people in other wealthy nations. Another indicator of insecurity is the growing debt burden for getting what is increasingly a near-necessity in our economy, a college degree. Yet another is growing reliance on the iffy gig-economy jobs. In spite of today’s Obama economic revival, the 21st century has so far been an era of widening economic insecurity.
As security wanes, so narrows American voluntarism. There are signs, presented by scholars such as Robert Putnam and Andrew Cherlin, that more people in disadvantaged sectors of the population are becoming disengaged from community–from marriage, church, workplace, and associations. Ironically, in this era of polarized politics, these very same men may forcefully assert their claims of independence, even as their means to sustain meaningful autonomy and voluntary fellowship wane.
Many of the developments that have caused this stalling and incipient shrinkage of American voluntarism are external, such as global economic competition, but the reversal has resulted in great measure from national decisions. About 20 years ago, several colleagues and I wrote a book, Inequality by Design, arguing that the growing economic inequality of the 1990s–already greater in the U.S. than elsewhere in the developed world–largely resulted from political decisions. American policies since the 1970s concerning matters such as labor laws, business regulation, public investments, and taxes were driving inequality. American inequality was not a “natural” result of either “human nature” or “the market,” as can be seen by the differing experiences of other nations, but of political decisions.[1]
Today
Now growing inequality and widening insecurity are being blatantly designed by the current federal government: reduced health, safety, employment, and financial safeguards; decreases in programs that buffer spells of economic setbacks; cuts to public education; shifts of post-tax income (back) to the wealthiest; judicial laissez-faire-ism, and the like. Almost across the board, these initiatives weaken the security of the marginal and strengthen the advantages of the already advantaged. Some designers explicitly endorse increasing the insecurity of average Americans on the belief that security–or, at least, government-provided security (not daddy-provided security)–undermines character.
For the mass of Americans over the great course of American history, insecurity disempowered individual risk-taking and collaboration. Expanding security enabled more American voluntarism. The designs being enacted these days will not make America great again, but undermine what made America great for most Americans.
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[1] Update hot off the presses: The following chart shows how dramatically inequality has grown in the U.S. (top figure) versus in western Europe (bottom figure).