It Was Capitalism All Along

One of my favorite discoveries of the pandemic was the podcast You’re Wrong About. I describe it as MythBusters for the major media stories, scandals, and moral panics of the 1980s to 2010s. On one episode co-host, Sarah Marshall, uttered an exasperated throw-away line that has stuck with me for nearly two years. After a long retelling of a sensationalist moment of media coverage by her co-host, Sarah retorted, “come to find out, it was capitalism all along.” She nailed it, perfectly. 

So much of what we argue about in the US: the culture wars, climate inaction, housing policy, health care access, school privatization, policing, etc. are just capitalism doing its exploitive thing. The dominant class and their interests drive policymaking. When we take our eyes off that, we can end up in all sorts of weird places and tirades. I have fallen for this at times and this week I want to offer a bit of a mea culpa.

I wrote a piece in 2017 that got a fairly large online response. It  was a critique of Boomer politics but on revisiting it, it misses the mark. The culprit is neoliberalism and imperialism, not just the Boomers. Yes, the last forty plus years of US politics are basically inter-generational theft via tax cuts. Yeah, Reagan ushered in an era of disinvestment in infrastructure and the commons that leaves our roads jammed and bridges crumbling. Sure, we spent 8 trillion dollars (8,000,000,000,000 USD) on Forever Wars that could have gone to education, transit, climate mitigation, or countless other things. That’s a pretty damning list and what really irks me is that collectively we haven’t learned much of anything from any of it. 

On the other end of the generational hot-take spectrum from my piece, are people who should know better writing “what’s the matter with kids these days?” articles in US media. A generation of journalists that carried around Tamagotchis in the 90s and spent countless hours in AOL & ICQ chats unironically bemoan Gen Z’s embrace of TikTok. Listen, there’s  nothing wrong with “the kids” except what is being perpetrated on them by the exploitative practices of late-stage market capitalism.

For example, I offer you the triannual national panic over PISA scores. Each time the numbers are released the usual suspects, who want to dismantle or as they put it “reform” schooling in America, try to collectively rub the noses of the teaching profession in the wet spot of criterion-referenced test scores. These scores aren’t rocket science—they are more a manifestation of what’s happening in society than they are of what’s happening in classrooms:

Fifty-nine percent of kids from low-income families said they’d gone to school hungry, and 46% of those kids said that hunger had hurt their performance in school. Hunger impacts learning and academic performance throughout the year, not just on a specific date. Kids shouldn’t have to worry about hunger on any date—high stress, low stress, test day, normal class day. We have the tools and the resources to ensure every child in this country gets the nutrition they need to learn and grow…

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed millions of families into unemployment, food insecurity, and hardship, exacerbating already unacceptable levels of hunger and poverty. As a result, 1 in 4 kids could face hunger this year. - National Honor Society

I have seen this particular PISA scores panic cycle at least five times in my career. It’s the same routine every time: scores come out, the media runs headlines decrying American ruin, corporate reformers blame unions (even for scores in non-union states), and months of headlines and whitepapers fly to and fro. Can you tell that I am tired of it yet? 

It’s a tired merry-go-round and I want off.

As the new year approaches, I’m making some resolutions and I am going to ask you to join me (if you want):

• Let’s retire generational hot-takes. Yes, there is very likely mass lead-poisoning among Boomers but even that was due to capitalism. 

• Let’s also stop blaming individuals for systemic problems. I think I will write more on this next week.

• Lastly, I was really bothered by some of the Islamophobia and racism that I saw from self-professed progressives during the Qatar World Cup. Let’s stop holding individuals responsible for the actions of the regimes they live under. No, it wasn’t my fault that George Bush (both of them) invaded Iraq. Why should a random Qatari or Russian, for that matter, catch hell for the actions of their states? 

Fam, I’m Not Here for your Millennial Shaming

In the summer of 1946, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born. The planet may never recover.

The Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation defeated fascism, built the interstate highway system, and most of our modern infrastructure. They electrified Appalachia, ended Southern Jim Crow de jure segregation, rebuilt a third of the planet via the Marshall Plan, and artfully avoided vaporizing the planet in a nuclear holocaust in the Cold War.

In contrast, the Boomers still can’t get over Vietnam.

I was born in 1979, the tail end of Generation X and Boomers have dominated American politics my entire adult life. They’ve waged a pointless, polarizing, five decade long culture war. Boomers wasted billions in a racist and classist war on drugs that has militarized local law enforcement, and fueled mass incarceration. They’ve delayed maintenance on the infrastructure they inherited to the point that bridges are literally falling down and our rail system falls somewhere between Poland and Morrocco’s. They have poisoned our politics through congressional gerrymandering, corporate media consolidation, and dumbed-down-cable news-soundbite politics. Most damaging, they killed the idea of “Americans as Citizens” -- people with a sense of shared obligation and ushered in the period of “Americans as Taxpayers” -- atomized, lone wolves with no appreciation of history, civics nor the common good.

The evidence of decline is all around us. Our most beautiful and important bridges and infrastructure were all built decades ago. I recently returned from a trip to Eastern Washington where I visited the Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph Dams. While standing in their respective visitors’ centers, I realized that they, like almost every Park Service or Interior Department facility that I’ve visited, are frozen in amber relics from the 1980s. This is about the time Congress started taking a hatchet to the non-defense discretionary budget in order to pay for endless waves of tax cuts for Boomers.

The Laffer Curve could only come from and could only work on this silly, selfish generation. They have lavished benefits on themselves: Medicare Part D, mortgage interest deductions, and decades of war abroad -- all while demanding tax cut, after tax cut, after tax cut. This is the essence of Boomer economics: after benefiting from more taxpayer subsidies than any US generation, they’ve hollowed out of the commons in order to provide tax breaks to themselves, and debt & deficits in perpetuity for us.

From Bakersfield Observed

I am a part of the last generation of Americans who could feasibly work their way through college and graduate debt free. Somewhere in the late-aughts driven by stagnated wages and skyrocketing tuition costs, working your way through college became nearly impossible. In half a lifetime, college tuition costs have risen from under $500 per year to their current levels, where the typical graduate crosses the stage with +$37,000 in debt. Rising tuition costs are driven by declining state support for universities, which is driven by tax cuts. Boomers are the worst.

Boomers have waged inter-generational financial warfare on future generations, all the while calling them lazy, undisciplined, and impractical. How exactly do we build a future middle class if higher education is out of reach for those who need it most -- the working poor? This is a problem the Boomers lack the capacity, willingness, and empathy to solve, but it is one we must confront in the near future.

I’ve had my fill with Millennial shaming. The business press concern trolls debt-ladened Millennials (and soon Gen Z kids) with petty, hot-take articles about them destroying the diamond industry (good riddance to De Beers), bar soap (because it’s gross and unsanitary), Applebee’s (it won’t be missed), and my favorite -- the housing market (spoiler: they're delaying buying homes because of low wages and the aforementioned $37k average student loan debt).

I've met with and lobbied Boomer policymakers at every level of government. It’s an exhausting exercise. But, in my 9-5, I've spent the last eleven years teaching Millennials and now Generation Z kids. It's not even a contest. The kids are more empathetic, less judgmental, more collaborative, and more justice-oriented than the folks running our country today. They're less ideologically rigid and think the current era of partisan gridlock is dumb (which it surely is). The kids are alright. A future built by Millennials and Generation Z kids will be far brighter and egalitarian than the present. I pray I live long enough to see the world they'll create, if the Boomers don't destroy it all first.