Ch 1.5 |⏳ It's time to act

Winston Churchill once said:

You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities.

I sure hope we’ve exhausted all other possibilities because as I describe in Chapter 3 - Challenges Need Leaders, we face complex challenges, from immigration to the national debt, from Social Security to education, from gun violence to the environment and the “culture war,” from foreign policy to restoring a vibrant middle class by ensuring economic outcomes are more balanced and equitable.

We better move past this current state of play and get back to doing the "right thing."

In 2021, Tablet’s Alana Newhouse noted in her article "Everything is Broken. And How to Fix It" that brokenness has become the defining feature of much of American life: broken families, broken public schools, broken small towns and inner cities, broken universities, broken health care, broken media, broken churches, broken borders, broken government. At best, they have become shells of their former selves.

She writes poignantly:

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

But, beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart. Michael Lind explains this better than anyone else:

The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: Offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover.

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

To get back on the right course, we must break ourselves out of our echo chambers, end our partisan allegiances and reject the rank tribalism that has defined the last few decades.

Did you know that the average age of empires, according to the late Sir John Bagot Glubb, is 250 years? Empires always die, often slowly but overwhelmingly from overreaching in the search for power.

The America of 1776 will turn 250 in 2026. It’s time to act!

Friends tell me that this time it's different. We’re not like other empires. They often think our greatest threat is war, and they rest easy believing our military is too strong to be overthrown. Even if that were true, and I'm not even sure that it is, that is a flawed strategy.

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote:

[T]he destructive partisan forces who have torn our national fabric through pettiness, divisiveness, and recalcitrance have trained their small-minded mania on the military. It is a situation both dire and despiriting. We are weakened and thus more vulnerable to the adventurism of our adversaries.

They continued:

For decades, Republicans chastised Democrats for being “soft” on national defense (and not supporting “law and order,” but we will leave their hypocrisy and attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice for another column). Recent actions show how shallow that rhetoric is. When it comes to prioritizing culture wars or preparing for real ones, has the MAGA party chosen divisive demonstrations over national defense? All this from a party whose leader bowed to Putin.

This is dangerous. For one thing (and most importantly), it comes at a time when we have other powers seeking to exploit our weakness — from Beijing to Pyongyang to Tehran to Moscow. We also have the biggest war in Europe since World War II, one in which we are deeply involved.

The podcast “Honestly with Bari Weiss” hosted an interesting debate on aid to Ukraine, featuring Bret Stephens and Elbridge Colby. Stephens is a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for The New York Times. His book “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder” foresaw much of today’s world. Stephens worries that the world is on the precipice of World War III. Isolationism, he argues, only contributes to global instability. Colby is co-founder of the Marathon Initiative think tank. He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development under President Trump, and he is the author of “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.” Colby believes the United States must make difficult defense choices in an era of great power competition. Ukraine, he argues, is not the top priority.

Stephens and Colby align on one point: Our military readiness is being called into question every day, especially vis-a-vis our ability to defend our interests around the world and with respect to China's posture towards Taiwan. Having expended trillions more on military than any other country, including China, has our failure to embrace the common-sense middle left us vulnerable?

In "The Hundred-Year Marathon. China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower," Michael Pillbury examines the potential strategic mistake the United States is making when it comes to China.

Consider also the contrast between American and Chinese views about the optimum size of military forces. Many of America's greatest military triumphs were achieved through large armies. Grant overwhelmed Lee with more men and more guns. On June 6 1944, Dwight Eisenhower sent the largest armada in history to Normandy. Even in recent times, the so-called Powell doctrine has advocated the necessity of a force far larger than the enemies.

He continues:

A famous [ancient Warring States Chinese] strategy was to deplete an adversary's financial resources by tricking it into spending too much on its military. Two thousand years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed the Chinese interpretation was that the Americans had intentionally bankrupted Moscow by tricking it into spending excessively on defense.

In contrasting the U.S. to China, Pillbury points out:

The Chinese strategy has been to forstall development of global power projection forces and to maintain a curiously small arsenal of nuclear warheads perhaps numbering fewer than 300. Instead of trying to match America plane for plane and ship for ship, China has invested heavily in asymmetric systems designed to get the biggest bang for the buck. The Chinese have pioneered anti-satellite technology. Developed the means to counter stealth bombers, invested heavily in cyber intrusion and built missiles costing a few million dollars that can sink a $4 billion American aircraft carrier. The missile price was so low — and the capability so high — because the missile may have been based on stolen American technology....

... after the collapse of the Soviet Union — which had the world's 2nd mightiest military — the Chinese changed their assessment system to put more emphasis on the importance of economics, foreign investment, technological innovation and the ownership of natural resources.

While I believe deeply that our politics have (and continue to) negatively impact our military readiness and create a muddled and confusing foreign policy, the threats that keep me up at night are not external — they are internal! We are allowing ourselves to be torn apart. If we are not aligned, we are too weak to defend ourselves from threats both foreign and domestic.

History has taught us that when governments fail to deliver for their citizens, the population frequently becomes angry and divided. If things get bad enough, citizens are willing to trade the freedom of representative government for authoritarianism. It's happened all around the world. It can happen here too!

Just look at this data The Washington Post shared. A quarter of the country thinks having an authoritarian is a good thing.

So what's behind this recent trend? In my "Recommended reading list," I include a fantastic book by Heather Cox Richardson: "Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America." In the forward to her book, she discusses the decline of American democracy:

The election and then the presidency of Donald Trump hastened that decline. When the nation's rising oligarchy met a budding authoritarian, the Republican Party embraced the opportunity to abandon democracy with surprising ease. In the four years of Trump's presidency, his base began to look much like the one post World War II scholars had identified previously. Apathetic citizens turned into a movement based in heroic personal identity. Trump discarded the idea of equality before the law and scoffed at the notion that Americans had the right to choose their government. He and his followers embraced the false past of the Confederates and insisted they were simply trying to follow the nation's traditional principles. Eventually, they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election to stay in power. And even after Trump had tried to undermine the principle of self government on which the United States was founded, his followers stayed loyal. Those justifying their embrace of authoritarianism as the future of government in the 21st century say that democracy is obsolete.

Some argue that popular government responds too slowly to the rapid pace of the modern world, and that strong countries need a leader who can make fast decisions without trying to create a consensus among the people. Critics of liberal democracy say that its focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Religious extremists in the U.S. have tried to tie their destruction of democracy into our history by insisting that the Founders believed that citizens must be virtuous and that religion alone can create virtue. By this line of thought, imposing religious values on our country is exactly what the Founders intended. I don't buy it.

The concept that humans have the right to determine their own fate remains as true today as it was when the Founders put that statement into the Declaration of Independence, a statement so radical that even they did not understand its full implications. It is as true today as it was when FDR and the United States stood firm on it. With today's increasingly connected global world, that concept is even more important now than it was when our founders declared that no one had an inherent right to rule over anyone else, that we are all created equal, and that we have a right to consent to our government.

This is a book about how a small group of people have tried to make us believe that our fundamental principles aren't true. They have made war on American democracy by using language that served their interests, then led us toward authoritarianism by creating a disaffected population and promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. As they took control, they falsely claimed they were following the nation's true and natural laws. This book is also the story of how democracy has persisted throughout our history despite the many attempts to undermine it. It is the story of the American people. Especially those whom the powerful have tried to marginalized, who first backed the idea of equality and a government that defended it, and then throughout history have fought to expand that definition to create a government that can once and for all finally make it real.

We explore many of these themes throughout Fairness Matter. I pray every day that we can turn the tide before even more Americans embrace authoritarianism over democracy.

It’s critical we make that shift because this current "crisis" is not an anomaly. And ironically, harkening back to my quote from Carl Sagan, it was predictable. Sadly, it's human nature.

To quote Ecclesiastes 3 in the King James Bible:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

As you are likely sensing as you think about where we are in this moment in time, our "winter season" is upon us.

My "Recommended Reading List" includes a book by Neil Howe and William Strauss entitled “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny.” It's a fascinating read. Howe is an author, historian, economist, and consultant who is best known for his work on social generations and generational trends. Along with the late Strauss, Howe is credited with creating the concept of generational theory and popularizing terms such as "Millennial Generation." Howe has written several books on generational trends. His work focuses on understanding the cyclical patterns of history and how different generations shape society.

A quarter of a century ago, Howe and Strauss introduced an innovative interpretation of American history. They identified a recurring pattern: Modern history proceeds in cycles, roughly 80 to 100 years long, mirroring a human lifespan (he calls them saeculum). Each cycle encompasses four distinct eras, or "turnings," each lasting about 25 years and always following the same sequence. The fourth and final turning, they found, was invariably the most tumultuous and transformative, on par with events like the New Deal, World War II, the Civil War or the American Revolution.

G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history when he says:

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.

We are in the Fourth Turning and how we exit this "turning" depends upon all of our leadership. We all have a role to play!

In 2023, Neil Howe published a follow-up to his previous work entitled, "The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End." I found it to be a timely refresh of his earlier work. In discussing the seasonality of life, Howe states poignantly:

... among modernity’s failures, surely the most historically consequential is the rise of the saeculum. This seasonal cadence of social time beating to the rhythm of a long human life lay largely dormant in the ancient world. Paradoxically, it was roused and awakened by the very birth of modernity, which in the societies of Western Europe happened nearly six centuries ago. Unlike other ancient cycles, the saecula did not weaken as modernity grew stronger. Instead, the saecula and modernity grew stronger together. And the saecula grew strongest in America, precisely where modernity took its earliest and firmest grip. Driving the seasons of the saecula forward are social generations which, like the saecula itself, lay largely dormant until modernity arrived. These generations, each striving to reform and improve their societies, and in modern manner give rise to the solstices and equinoxes of the saecula, and did the periodic recurrence of spring, summer, fall, and winter. The rhythm of generational change has also grown more powerful over the centuries, and along the way social generations themselves have become more self-conscious.

Over the last century, they've begun to talk and write about themselves, to give themselves names, to attract marketing brands, to assess their collective opinion and regular surveys, and to speculate on how they intend to change society and politics. The ancients were very familiar with phases of life, but they were only dimly aware of social generations. Here we find one rhythm of social life that has run counter to the prevailing modern trend. The ancients didn't know much about generations. We moderns do. Social generations and their archetypes, as they continue to gain strength, may provide the modern world a unique opportunity to do what traditional roles no longer can to reestablish our ties to both our history and our ancestors. .

In discussing where we find ourselves, Howe states:

America, along with most of the rest of the modern world, is demoralized and confused. Multiple indexes of global unhappiness have surged over the last 15 years. It is not hardship that causes this misery, but hardship without purpose. We feel disconnected in space from our broader communities. We also feel disconnected in time from our parents and our children. Linear history, which ties us to an incessant desire for novelty and progress, destroys the bond between us and those who came before us, and we fully expect it must do the same between us and those who will come after us.

He continues:

We are distressed because we have entered a season of history that we dread completing. We understand that the Fourth Turning is a season of crisis likely to bring wrenching and unwanted changes to our lives. Yet on reflection, we dread even more a future that is a linear extension of the past. This linear future is guaranteed to make us even less happy and is in any case unsustainable. In short, we know that there is nothing worse than a Fourth Turning except not having a fourth turning. But if avoiding the 4th turning is not possible or even desirable, then what should we do? We should follow ancient wisdom and conform our behavior to this season. If it's winter, we should act like it's winter. We should help our community prepare to be strong in the coming spring while allowing the least possible suffering so long as the storms rage. Though we may not be able to prevent the winter from happening, we are able to make the winter turn out better or worse. But we can't help at all unless we first acknowledge that winter has indeed arrived. Only then can we see clearly, plan responsibly and act effectively. Knowing the season, we can decide how we can best assist those around us. We may be a mother, a teenager, our grandfather. We may be as CEO, a mechanic, a Congress person, an officer or a nurse. Whatever our personal role, we went to ask ourselves how should we perform that role so that the winter season turns out well?

Thought of another way consider this from George Santayana in “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress” (1905-1906), Vol. I, “Reason in Common Sense”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

And, whether we like it or not, the winter season is definitely upon us.

As William Faulkner said:

The past is never dead. It's not even the past.

Here's another interesting way to put things in perspective about the seasonality of modern life. In "The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness," Robert Waldinger and Marc Schultz reference this photo:

To the first generation Harvard study participants who were raising their kids in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the online life we know in the 21st century would have sounded like science fiction. Back then, they didn't have to contend with the omnipresence of smartphones, the pervasive nature of social media or the overwhelming glut of information and stimuli. But, their struggles with relationships might have more in common with the struggles of today than it first appears. In 1946, a young Stanley Kubrick published a photo in Look Magazine that would be very familiar today. A subway car full of New York City commuters, heads bowed, nearly every single one of them absorbed in ... their newspapers.

And many original Harvard study families talked about having the same feelings many of us have today. Work was overwhelming, the world seemed to be going crazy, and they were worried for their children's future. Remember 89% of the study’s college men served in World War II, a catastrophic conflict the outcome of which at the time was entirely uncertain. And then raised children amidst the Cold War and pervasive fears of nuclear disaster inside the home. Instead of the Internet, parents were worried about what television was doing to their kids and to society in general.

So, while their challenges might have been different in nature and scale, and the speed of cultural change may have been at least in some ways less extreme than what we experience, the effective solutions for nourishing relationships — devoting time and attention in the present moment — were the same as they are today. Attention is the actual stuff of life and it's equally valuable no matter what era a person lives in.

Very poignant when you consider that while times do change, things do often remain the same. At least where human nature is involved.

So this is, in part, why I decided to act!

I wrote Fairness Matters from heart to persuade you to join me in trying to ensure that I "perform that role so that the winter season turns out well!"

Together, we can develop a common understanding of the history that brought us to this stage. We will explore the ways in which our political system is broken and has become a major barrier to solving nearly every challenge our nation needs to address.