America Ascendant Read online

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  To

  Rosa L. DeLauro

  and

  Rigby Maya Zentner

  Sadie Liberty Delicath

  Teo Isaac Zentner

  Jasper Samuel Delicath

  1 AMERICA AT A TIPPING POINT

  America is poised to lead the twenty-first century, as it led the twentieth. That will happen because America is at a tipping point in its own renewal, a renewal that will allow it to be the exceptional nation again.

  America led the Industrial Revolution that changed human history, produced once-in-a-century disruptive changes in where and how families lived and worked, and created a rising prosperity unheard of before the late nineteenth century. It was made possible by the steam engine, the railways built coast to coast, the massive immigration, the concentration of populations in burgeoning cities, and the governments that supported the new industrial monopolies. America became a magnet to the world and was poised to be the leading economic, cultural, and military power of the twentieth century.

  But those revolutionary changes left a lot of blood, and they came with a high social cost. The desperate working conditions and teeming tenements, exploitation of women, government corruption, and the inequality of the Gilded Age put it all at risk. It was the two-decade struggle for progressive reforms and government activism to mitigate those costs and renew America that allowed the twentieth century to become America’s century.

  America emerged ascendant by the turn of the twentieth century, when it became the largest industrial power. By the end of World War II, America would account for almost a half of the global economy. It became the country that produced the highest per capita income and eventually the country with the largest middle class. It remained the country where people all across the globe sought to emigrate, and the country that produced the highest per capita income and largest middle class by 1980. Starting with Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, America invested in U.S. military defenses and technology and projected a global presence in support of American interests and values. And America emerged exceptional because of what Joseph Nye called its growing “soft power”—its openness to technology and innovation and to a robust popular culture and civil society.1

  Well, America is being transformed today by revolutionary changes that are fueling the country’s growing economic and cultural dynamism. These revolutions are producing seismic changes to our economy, culture, and politics as well as disruptive, once-in-a-century changes in where we live, our way of life, the structure of families, and what are considered the ascendant values. But those revolutionary changes come with powerful contradictions: they come with a high human cost, stark inequalities, and political dysfunction. People live the contradictions, and increasingly they insist on a bold politics that can mitigate the social costs and create human possibility. That is why reformers have the opportunity to renew America and make it possible for America to be exceptional again.

  This is a very different picture than the one offered by those who are averse to government or those who think America is in decline or those who believe we are so deeply gridlocked that it cannot begin to tackle its great problems.

  * * *

  America’s economy is on the move. It is being fueled by revolutions in energy, immigration, innovation, big data, and advanced manufacturing, by revolutions in the metropolitan areas. Each is disruptive and they feed on each other to produce accelerating changes across the economy and society. America is increasingly energy independent, sending shock waves across the energy market, lowering energy costs, and making progress on climate change at the same time. America’s support of basic research, great research universities, and openness to innovation have allowed it to take advantage of the digital revolution, big data, and advanced manufacturing to attract investment from around the world and foster whole new industries.

  Just as important to America’s emerging standing are the social transformations that are making the country ever more racially and culturally diverse, younger, a home to immigrants, and located in the big metropolitan centers that are host to the rising economic and cultural dynamism. While most other countries struggle profoundly and sometimes violently with their immigrant populations and religious and racial differences, America’s path to a unified, multicultural identity makes it truly exceptional.

  America’s revolutions have produced a country where 38 percent are racial minorities and 15 percent of new marriages are interracial. Adding to the racial and cultural diversity is the influx of immigrants. The globe has witnessed a massive, growing migration, and fully one in five migrants has ended up in the United States. The foreign-born now comprise about 40 percent of the residents of New York City and Los Angeles and half of Silicon Valley’s engineers. America’s revolutions have produced a country where a growing number of people are secular, though America remains uniquely a country where 40 percent still attend religious services each week.2

  Just think of the scale of social change over the past two decades. America has grown more diverse and racially tolerant at an impressive and accelerating rate, particularly among the Millennials. The proportion of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the presidential electorate has doubled to 30 percent. Millennials will be more than a quarter of the 2016 presidential electorate and 40 percent of the eligible voting population in the election after that.3

  America is emerging as a racially blended, multinational, multilingual, religiously pluralistic society. And while these revolutions are tilting America’s trajectory upward, they are also producing sudden, sweeping, and accelerating social changes, evident in the decline of the traditional family and the struggles of working-class women and men. For all the problems, that multiculturalism grows more central to our national identity. And today’s major national leaders in politics, civil society, and big companies have accepted the call to find unity in diversity.

  Religious observance has plummeted across the spectrum of religious denominations, except for white Evangelicals. Over one in five Americans is secular with no religion, and they now outnumber the mainline Protestants. And with the exception of the Evangelicals, people of all faiths now accept premarital sex and gay marriage.4

  The traditional family has given way to a country relaxed about the pluralism of family types and a revolution in the role of women. Women are pouring into the universities, where they are now a growing majority of the graduates. Three-quarters of women are now in the labor force, and two-thirds are the principal or cobreadwinner. Fully half of Americans are now not married, and 40 percent of the households include only a single person.5

  The metropolitan areas have been turned on their heads. The exurbs, Levittowns, strip malls, and automobiles are being forsaken as people move to the cities, attracted by the urbanism, the major businesses, universities and research institutions, culture, and the influx of immigrants and rac
ial diversity. Two-thirds of the college-educated Millennials now live in the fifty-one largest cities and are moving into the close-in neighborhoods. They identify with the new way of life in these cities and are contributing to the new kind of localism.6

  So America’s revolutions have America on the move in impressive ways and they are setting off waves of change that are the main story for a generation.

  But these economic and social transformations are also creating stark problems for people and the country that leave the public seething, frustrated, and pessimistic about the future of the country. That sentiment is also fostering a growing reform movement that wants to expose the dark side of America’s progress and demands political leaders take up the country’s deepest problems in order to be taken seriously.

  To begin with, this new, wondrous economy produces no wage gains for anyone except for those at the top. People distill that into a first economic principle: jobs in the new economy don’t pay enough to live on. People are on the edge financially as they cope with stagnant wages and pay cuts. This leads people to put together multiple jobs to get by. Since they are on the edge, they think they face an endemic cost-of-living crisis. They feel powerless in the face of the inexplicably high costs of child care and student debt, which can send them into ruin.

  Aspirations have been recalibrated to the times that are dramatically different. The younger generations think hardworking people can set their sights on a “more comfortable life,” but that middle-class dreams are only for the older ones.

  To add income or ease the constraints of the new economy, a growing number of people are working independently as service providers, consultants, freelancers, or in their own small businesses, though most never succeed in escaping the low-pay economy.

  And while ordinary people are scrambling, the CEOs of big businesses make 295.9 times the pay of the average worker and have emerged as the face of America’s inequality. They broke the social compact with their employees and their country. These big businesses executives use Super PACs and lobbyists to make sure government works for them. Their companies got bailed out, while ordinary people struggled and lost their homes or businesses.7

  At the same time, all these revolutions in the American economy and around the globe are producing the most vexing contradiction of all—climate change and its resulting, and now foreseeable, economic and human costs. The poor will certainly pay the highest price.

  And the social transformations that make America exceptional also come with a high price and create a lot of uncertainty about how to proceed. Social conservatives are still contesting the sexual revolution and the changes to gender roles and the traditional family. In that context, how do you begin the discussion about the surge in the number of unmarried households and children raised by a single parent? How do you deal with the social consequences of the very real demise of the traditional family and the male breadwinner role?

  The debate in the 1960s over the “crisis in the Negro family” and the mounting number of children raised by single parents was smothered by the unsettled debates over civil rights and affirmative action. At that time, the proportion of children born to single parents among blacks was 23 percent, but now the rate is higher for all races and has risen to 44 percent across the white working class.8

  The consequences of that change could not be more important. Children raised by a single parent learn fewer skills and important values at an early age and are much more likely to end up in poverty and face huge blockages to upward mobility. While middle-class men and women have been adapting by marrying later and settling into more egalitarian parenting roles, many more children are being raised by working-class single parents—mostly women.

  At the same time, working-class men have been left marginalized. In the boom decades after World War II, many of these men would have had the primary responsibility for supporting the family and its 3.8 children, the peak average in 1956. Now, with most looking at earning dramatically less than prior generations, working-class men are not rushing to get more education and many are pulling back from the labor force and marriage.9

  Working women, on the other hand, have been left on their own. America has witnessed a revolution in women’s roles in the economy and the family. Yet working mothers are managing work and family without the barest help on child care, paid sick days, and family leave. Women have obtained more education and moved into more skilled jobs. But they still dominate the lowest-paid occupations, face a wage gap relative to men, and receive lower benefits in retirement. And all of these problems are just multiplied for the majority now unmarried.

  Working women are on the edge of revolt and poised to demand reform, though it is not clear yet whether the single working-class mothers raising children on their own or the men who are being marginalized will rise up and demand help.

  People are living these changes and adapting to the new economy and society, but they are also judging leaders and parties on whether they “get it” and whether they will address these accumulating problems. Is their agenda relevant and bold enough for these times? And that is why it seems like the country is at a tipping point very much like the one it came to in 1900 that led America’s leaders to move over two decades toward progressively bolder reforms in our economy, society, and politics and that allowed the twentieth century to become America’s century.

  * * *

  America led the global economy in the last two decades of the nineteenth century because it was better able to translate technological discoveries into economic practice than England, Germany, or France. The steam engine and portable power fueled the Industrial Revolution like computers and the Internet fuel the digital revolution today, Walter Isaacson writes. Economic output tripled, and America would soon lead the world in the “age of oil, automobiles, and aircraft.”10

  To fuel the steam-powered economy, America sucked in immigrants from all across Europe to work in the mines and factories and build the railroads from coast to coast. A country where two in every three people were employed in agriculture fell to four in ten as people rushed to America’s cities. New York City’s population grew to 2.5 million in 1890, and Chicago grew from a “prairie town” to the home of 1.7 million by the turn of the century, more than three-quarters of them first-generation immigrants. With poverty and starvation the backdrop, the Irish led the rush of one in five in Great Britain who immigrated to America, followed by the Germans and Scandinavians, Italians and eastern Europeans.11

  But the surging populations were jammed into tenements that were often swept by contagious diseases. Factories and housing were built shoddily as building codes were often ignored and local party bosses were bought off to cater to businesses’ needs.

  The new working-class people that crowded into the cities were recruited as families, and the roles of men and women in the family were changed abruptly and radically in the process. The husband was the breadwinner and the unions and reformers worked for a family wage that could support the new family. Single women worked in the lowest-paid jobs, where the hours were long. Married women were expected to wash clothes, raise children, sell rags, do piecework from home, and handle boarders to help the family get to bare subsistence.12

  Beyond the teeming slums and inhumane working conditions, America’s Industrial Revolution also produced political corruption on a massive scale, market monopolies, squeezed incomes for laborers and farmers, and a level of inequality not seen before in America.

  Atop this new economic order stood the industrialists, such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and John Pierpont Morgan. These entrepreneurs created huge trusts to eliminate competitors and used their monopoly power to set prices. The trusts were products of corrupt deals between business and government at the highest and lowest levels. The federal government used tariffs to protect these industries from foreign competition, and their market power meant rigged prices for farmers and consumers. Before the turn of the century, “muckraking” investigative jour
nalists would expose special deals between businessmen and local party bosses that corrupted both parties.

  During America’s first century, the top 1 percent owned between 25 and 32 percent of the country’s wealth, but that doubled to 45 percent between 1870 and 1910. That earned this era the name “Gilded Age.”13

  With rising opposition to the new industrial order, industrialists mobilized to defend tariffs, trusts, and the big banks in the 1896 presidential election. The Republicans raised more money as a percent of GDP than has ever been raised on a U.S. campaign to maintain control of the federal government. That might even embarrass the billionaire donors in the post–Citizens United era, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given billionaires legal permission to make unlimited contributions to the new Super PACs.14

  America first began to confront the dark side of its growth from the bottom up. Factory workers organized, and local charities, settlement houses, and parishes began to grapple with the overwhelming social cost of growth; investigative journalists—“muckrakers”—forced leaders to address the worst abuses, and ultimately the reform-minded leaders in cities and states came to power and created models of reform. They consciously expanded the role of government, and made gradual steps to reform democratic participation so it could not be captured by powerful business interests. It would take not one but four elections and three presidents to achieve the bold reforms necessary for America’s renewal at the turn of the twentieth century. And ultimately, it would take President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal to establish legal protections for labor unions and to create a system of social insurance.

  Teddy Roosevelt achieved some reforms during his time as president, and by 1912, when he ran as an independent, he was insisting we “must drive the special interests out of politics”—an evil he put on the same level as slavery. He embraced the whole emerging progressive agenda of minimum wages, maximum workweeks, workplace safety regulations, graduated income, workmen’s compensation, child labor laws, tariff reform, direct Senate elections, voter referendums and recalls, inheritance taxes, public disclosure of campaign donations, and even environmental conservation.15