The following is the opinion and analysis of the author and follows a Nov. 30 column that detailed how the U.S. got into our current state of political division.
According to recent independent surveys, only one-third of Americans can identify the three branches of our federal government: executive, legislative and judicial. Half cannot name the vice president. While the national average IQ has risen substantially over the last 50 years, the American political aptitude has tanked. This ignorance has been accompanied by a sharp decline in manners โ the basic practices that lubricate interpersonal relations.
Meanwhile, our capitalist economy has been manipulated to favor the rich more than any time in 100 years, creating a slow-boiling class conflict. Each of these problems must be attacked with substantial reforms for America to get its groove back.
Social reform is easiest to accomplish. The basic rules of socialization are crucial to the development of a healthy culture that can sustain the inevitable disputes that occur in representative government. That should be accompanied by civics courses that require a detailed knowledge of federal, state and local government in order to graduate educated voters.
That is a beginning.
โReform if you would preserve,โ counseled President Theodore Roosevelt, and itโs time we took his advice. Political and governmental reform are needed to preserve our representative form of democracy. One of the biggest mistakes my Vietnam generation made was to delegate the battlefield to a strictly volunteer force, the unintended consequence of which was to put America in a state of permanent war. It is all too easy to declare war when someone else is doing the fighting. Without a draft, presidents found little opposition to blundering into un-winnable conflicts most recently in the Middle East. The draft should be reinstated as a disincentive to war.
Elections must be publicly financed to take our government out of the hands of the rich and to fight the corrosive effects of unlimited money. The current system is nothing more than legal corruption.
Campaigns at the federal, state and local levels have become grossly expensive, requiring our very best candidates to grovel for alms. The campaigns of 1976 and 1980, conducted under a system of public financing, elected both Presidents Carter and Reagan. It worked fairly for both parties, and we should return to it.
Courts should eliminate or at least severely curtail the practice of gerrymandering, by which parties in power in each state draw congressional districts to their advantage while leaving large segments of the public unrepresented. Instead of state legislatures drawing district lines, this should be done โ as is in Arizona โ by an independent board of knowledgeable citizens or judges. We need these reforms to return equilibrium to our election system.
Reforms are not enough: We must also innovate in order to bring a sense of unity back to the U.S. We can begin by implementing a system of free โreeducationโ for the exploding populations of unemployed workers being left behind in the age of robots and artificial intelligence.
Our community colleges are well suited to carry out this assignment, provided the financial resources by Washington. Dying factories and towns would be infused with new energy and purpose. A trained workforce would attract employers.
Not since the Vietnam War, four decades ago, have young Americans been called to serve their country. I believe this has contributed heavily to a loss of national purpose and unity. Count me among many who believe that as part of their education, young people should spend two years in public service. They should have several choices working for either the military or civilian departments. They could build infrastructure, fight forest fires, work as interns in the federal departments. They will be reminded, as all Americans should, that WE are the government.
Finally, I believe we must reshape our tax system so it is fair to the middle class. Today, the U.S. tax system goes light on the super wealthy, while exacting a heavy burden on those who work for wages. The capital gains tax should be raised substantially, and the estate tax changed drastically.
The founders scorned the European aristocracies, and yet in todayโs America we are building a society of aristocrats who have every privilege of the barons and baronesses who partied at Versailles. Enormous fortunes are passed from one generation to the next along with the mansions, airplanes, and Swiss bank accounts. The top 1% of Americans now own 40% of our total wealth while the lower 80% own 7%. Such a vast difference in wealth invites resentment, anger and disunity. This problem can be partially solved by a hefty estate tax.
But how do we pay for all this? The answer lies in the trillions wasted on wars in the Middle East. What might have been accomplished with the trillion dollars we have misspent trying to turn Afghanistan into a democracy?
Where would we be today if that trillion were dedicated not to foreign infrastructure but rather to our own; if the new schools, hospitals, airports and highways now serving Kabul were instead in Detroit, St. Louis, Tucson and L.A. If our elected leaders of the future make the right decisions, especially staying out of wars of choice, America has plenty of wealth to achieve all of the programs I have discussed on the way to a true democratic renaissance.
I am not so arrogant as to suggest I have all the answers. But I am sure that if we fail to confront these fundamental issues our democracy will suffer and perhaps in time disappear.
