Renewal or Regression? (III/IV)

This is the third post in a four-part series. This post covers what the possibilities are following that (perhaps) creative destruction.

What will the changed world look like, if we peer intently at it without filtering it through a Trumpian or Resistance lens? Like this:

Geopolitics and the Military. In case you missed it, Uncle Sam walked off the beat as the world’s policeman. It didn’t happen under Trump. We got tired of the beat way back under “W,” then started taking mental health days-off under Obama. It continued under Trump’s first term and Biden’s senescence. During that period, our absence became noticeable, then obvious. Red-lines crossed, invasions met with outrage or “sanctions,” diplomatic insults ignored or endured. None of the Presidents I mentioned are to blame specifically; they each correctly intuited the American people’s view that enough was enough.

Now we are one tough opponent away from having a military humiliation. That won’t mean the end of anything, let alone the good ole US of A. But it’s a bad situation. In the past, we were able to recover quickly (see Pearl Harbor, Kasserine Pass, Pusan perimeter, the battle of Long Island, Bull Run I & II, and so on), but that is not always an option. It takes economic production and national will, two other things in short supply. Our leaders need to be clear-headed about who we are committed to defending, and why. We are not facing a global peer competitor bent on world domination (like the Nazis or the Soviet Union were). China wants to coerce the world toward its preferences, much like the US did (cooperatively) after World War II. The end result would be bad, and it is something we should oppose. But every nation is going to have to pull its own weight. And the US needs to radically restructure its armed forces quickly and efficiently, since we can’t simply throw money we don’t have at the challenge.

Economics & Trade. Economists used to talk about the “rational consumer” making informed choices as the key to understanding the markets and trade. Such economic theorists never stood outside a Best Buy in the wee hours of Black Friday. Economics may be the dismal science, but it is hardly the rational one. Economics is a subset of national security, as we recently relearned. If a country can’t make the things it needs, it may be denied those things when it most urgently needs them (medicines, computer chips, minerals). The US must recover this notion not in order to become autarchic (meeting all our needs alone), but to avoid being at the mercy of competitors, whether friends or enemies.

This will involve upending the free trade system we built. As a person who benefited greatly from the free movement of goods, services, and people, I lament its passing. As a clear-eyed observer of what’s happening, I admit it has to go. That means more border restrictions, tariffs, quotas, and restrictions. It doesn’t mean a senseless rush to impose all such things against all countries at once. Nixon may have pulled off the madmen theory of international politics with respect to bombing North Vietnam, but that doesn’t make it a viable strategy in general.

Things will cost more. Some things will be unavailable. There will be disruptions. There were under the old free-trade system, too. The fallacy of just-in-time delivery was that not everything can be planned for, let alone adjusted to. Some manufacturing will return to America; we’ll never have as many manufacturing jobs as we once did, because we are producing more things with fewer people nowadays. But there will be more opportunities for decent middle-class jobs.

Education. The American educational system has lost its way. Our brightest students do fine, and we heap resources on those who need more/different/extra help. But the vast majority of students in the middle are terribly short-changed. We spend more than most nations (per student) and get worse results. Schools have increasingly added staff for counselling and managing rather than teachers for teaching.

True story: back when the founders were “bringing forth a new nation,” there were very few public schools. The rich hired tutors, and church schools provided the primary source of education. Our early leaders knew that a Republic needs an educated polity, so they developed the notion of free public education. A (very) secondary benefit was shaping the culture of the next generation. Today we seem to have gotten things reversed. Schools spend too much time pushing cultural agendas, and not enough time ensuring basic literacy and numeracy. You don’t need to engage in a culture war while you’re learning to read-n-write (take note, Montgomery County, Maryland). You don’t learn how to deal with a different person by being told how to think about one, you learn by having a friend in your class who is different.

We could all do with a significant clarification of roles with regard to how we educate our youth. The primary role belongs to parents and teachers in local schools. School boards exist to provide the partnership necessary to enforce those roles, not to tell parents to “mind their own business” or tell teachers how to teach. School boards absolutely do decide what to teach; that is their main purpose. They do this by representing the values and desires of the people in the community. It’s not censorship, it’s local control. And it’s okay if things are different in different places. City and State governments provide funding to address imbalances, and establish requirements for accreditation/graduation. The federal government can also provide funding, and should set national educational standards for achievement. Not use that money as a means to micro-manage it.

Taxes, Spending, Regulations. This is where most of us will feel the pain. We’ve been overspending for so long, so much has to be cut, it will affect everyone. There is no single magic solution, a la “tax the rich” or a wealth tax or ending corporate welfare that will bring the federal fiscal books back near balance. They don’t have to balance exactly, they just can’t be out for whack like they have been for forty-six of the past fifty years! Yes, we should raise taxes on the rich, but we’ll need some benefit cuts, too. More programs need to be means-tested.

Take social security for example. There are many terrible memes about it, like the Ronald Reagan quote that Social Security does not add to the deficit. It was true back in 1981, it’s absolutely false today. Or the meme decrying that social security should not be called an “entitlement” because ‘I earned it.’

It’s called an entitlement because that’s a federal legal term meaning the government “has to” pay it. Still want to change the word? And unless you die early, you’ll get more from social security than you paid in (even accounting for your employers contribution AND interest). See what the problem is? If most everybody gets more than they pay in, the only way the system can work is if the population of young workers (who have not yet retired) is always growing larger than the wave of retirees they are supporting. Guess what? It isn’t anymore, and since the number of twenty-somethings in 2045 is already set, it won’t ever be so again soon.

The good news is there are many small fixes which can make the system sound once more. There’s a website you can visit (here), where you can try your hand at fixing the problem, and it doesn’t require throwing granny off the cliff. But as long as we treat all entitlement reform as untouchable, we’ll continue to hurtle toward a very real, very sizable cut within a decade or two.

As to other spending and employee reductions, here’s a simple point DOGE made which has been lost in the partisan battle. DOGE is characterizing everything as fraud/waste/abuse, and the Resistance is highlighting how each cut will hurt. Did the US Agency for International Development (USAID) really spend US $32,000 on an LBGTQ+ comic book in Peru? No, the Resistance tells us, it was the State Department (not USAID), and it was a gay character, not LBGTQ+ (Snopes says so!). But stop and consider this: in a country seriously over-spending (as measured by our deficit), the system approved funding for such things. The system (people and process, both) thought it was no big deal. Maybe because it was small, but this happens all over the government. Maybe they thought it was important, even critically so. But when you claim we don’t need to radically restructure both the people and the process the government uses to spend money, you have to defend these outcomes. Good luck!

Technology. We are on the brink of an important technological advance. Artificial Intelligence (AI) may prove as revolutionary as the printing press, or merely as important as the personal computer. But it will effect major changes in society, and we don’t know how. We just finished with a small experiment on our own children (smart phones + social media) that has not turned out well in my opinion. We currently let the Communist Party of China have direct access to the ids an egos of our children and young adults (via TikTok), in a way we never would have let the Nazis or the Soviets. The Chinese do not let their own children and young adults access the same info they peddle to ours. And now we are in a technological competition with them for AI supremacy. Did it matter who won the race for the atom bomb? Absolutely for the Nazis, not as much for the Soviets. But do we want to find out what it’s like to come in second? And are we ready in any event?

This may all seem to be bleak and overwhelming. That said, I wouldn’t trade the position of the United States for that of any competitor. Of all the nations/groups involved in this developing new world order, we have the biggest advantages, not least in that we have people on both the left and the right that realize the changes we are experiencing. Denying them, or attributing them to the passing fancies of Donald Trump, are fatal errors. And no, I’m not saying President Trump has the answers. I’m sure someone out there is readying another comment about Trump’s inadequacy or insanity, missing the global forest of challenges for the Trumpian trees.

The Trump administration may have stumbled onto some of the correct policies. They still have to implement them in ways which work. And these policies will require both legislative enactment and sustained commitments well beyond the Trump years. I’ll wrap up my thoughts on that in the final post.