Ch 2.1 | Once the envy of the world

A bit of background & context to set the stage.

In verse 61 of the “Tao Te Ching” Lao Tzu writes (as translated by Stephen Mitchell):

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

That is the standard we should be striving for! We once pursued such lofty goals. We were once the “envy of the world” and the “last best hope of earth.” It’s time to regain our footing and once again strive towards a higher purpose.

🌍 The last best hope of earth

Let me begin with a quote from Abraham Lincoln. A month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to think of what would become of the Union after the war:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

I firmly still believe that America can once again become "the last best hope of earth." And now is the time to act to preserve our nation!

As Katherine M. Gehl & Michael E. Porter state in their book, "The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy":

Citizens accept as normal the system’s decades-long retreat from deliberation and problem solving and its advance toward today’s self-service and hyper-partisanship.

We accept this new normal, in part, because we are conditioned to helplessness. We assume that our political system, warts and all, is a public institution governed by impartial laws dating back to the Constitution.

But we would be wrong. Much of what makes up today’s political system has no basis in the Constitution at all.

There are only six tiny paragraphs in the Constitution detailing how Congress should work, and only a few sentences describe how Congress is to be elected. Most of the rules that shape the day-to-day behavior and outcomes in the political system are perversely optimized—or even expressly designed—by and for politicians themselves as well as their allies in the larger political-industrial complex. The average American citizen today is rarely a beneficiary.””

Here's an excerpt from the keynote speech that Barack Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 when he was still a junior senator from Illinois. For the record, I never voted for him because I didn’t agree with his domestic politics and, in particular, his foreign affairs agenda. That said, this passage not only describes how I feel about America, but it is also my hope for the future of our country.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

I’m not talking about blind optimism here, the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t think about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too.

Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation. A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

I believe that we can give our middle-class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.

I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.

I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.

Love him or hate him, agree with his partisan politics or disagree, I hope you can agree that those are wonderful sentiments and, in a perfect world, the vast majority of us would embrace them!

So, I believe it’s time once again to strive to be the envy of the world! We can't get there unless we "unrig" the system! But we must acknowledge that we have a long way to go!

🤪 American "exceptionalism" 

Let’s just take a moment to look at American exceptionalism on a global scale. Since the duopoly began reshaping policy, we are lagging much of the world in most measurements of exceptionalism. This is one of my favorite media portrayals on this concept:

If you haven’t researched this commentary by Jeff Daniels’ character, I’ve got your back. I did the research and can assure you that Aaron Sorkin wasn’t fabricating these facts in “The Newsroom”.

• On literacy, we are #36, with more than 20% of adults illiterate.

• We are 18th (changed from 1st from 2012) in math scores. 

• We are 9th on mean performance on reading, behind Singapore, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, Estonia and Canada, among others.

• We are 47th in life expectancy, behind the likes of Slovenia, Kuwait and the Czech Republic. 

• We are 50th in infant mortality (up from 178th in 2012). 

• We are 4th (down from 3rd) on median household income. 

• We are 2nd (up from 4th) in exports.

• Overall, we are ranked as 5th in overall rankings, behind Switzerland, Canada, Sweden and Australia. 

He is also correct of course we are:

• #1 on defense spending.

• Sadly, we also have the highest incarceration rate.

• America is ranked 9th in GDP per capita below Monaco, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Cayman Islands and Singapore. 

Oh, and although not mentioned, for purposes of this project it's important to note that the U.S. ranks 29th of 167 countries according to the latest edition of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, sandwiched between Malta and Israel, when measuring electoral process, government functionality, political participation, political culture and civil liberties. That put the United States in the “flawed democracy” category.

Since I’ve tried to be “fair and balanced,” here is a counterpoint that I read but it falls flat for me and feels like a superficial response. The innovation concept is one of my favorite GOP talking points because it ignores the fact that so much of our innovation actually comes as a result of our SB-1 visa program and if we were to “close our borders'' we would quickly lose our competitive edge. More on that in my chapter on immigration.

I include all this information because if you look at the countries that are leading the world in all these critical areas — places like Finland, South Korea, Canada, Australia, Germany and Switzerland — they all have some of the most comprehensive welfare systems in the world and they are beating us on almost every measure that matters. 

Here are the top countries ranked social spending as a share of GDP. 

And most of those countries are some of the “happiest” in the world! We rank 19th! 

Jonathan Haidt published an insightful article in The Atlantic that helps explain why we are at this precipice. In "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid," he expounds upon a metaphor regarding the Tower of Babel in the Bible.

Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past. It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Call me a wide-eyed optimist, but I still believe we have the capacity to break this cycle but we need to act before it's too late. It's on the silent majority to take our country back.