Parades and Infrastructure

Parades and Infrastructure

Donald Trump wants to hold a big military parade. It makes sense. The military is the most trusted institution in the US, according to polls over many years. So a controversial President might want to identify himself with the military.  He has already larded up his administration with generals.  Certainly there is little payoff in identifying with the government, or Congress, or most other US institutions that have nosedived in popular opinion. The Donald, like a lot of other Americans, looks at our government and dislikes most of it.

Maybe one reason the military stands out is that we no longer try to use government for much else.  It used to be that government led the way on big things that made Americans proud. The Panama Canal. TVA. The interstate highway system. The space program. Social Security, the GI Bill, the Great Society. We don’t do that kind of stuff any more. We have a huge military that bounces around the world–without a whole lot of success, one is forced to add—but is popular partly because there isn’t much else we do as a country.

In Canada and the UK and the Nordic states and a lot of other developed countries, their national healthcare system is tremendously popular—probably the most beloved national institution. It symbolizes something that they do together to share the wealth generated by a successful post-industrial economy.  So do other social programs that offer unemployment benefits and free higher education and family leave. One can argue about the pluses and minuses of each of these programs. But taken together they create a sense of community and shared purpose about what matters for a thriving society.

How do Americans rate our healthcare system? Not so good. It remains astronomically expensive, with mediocre performance that still leaves out a lot of Americans. Obamacare improved it, but it certainly didn’t unite the country behind a shared sense of commitment. Social Security and Medicare are popular, but the rest of our extremely complex and fragmented welfare and safety net programs are often disliked and resented.  The recipients are nickeled and dimed and scapegoated to feel small, while the donors convince themselves they are suckers.  Education costs keep rising and are outside the reach of more and more Americans.  We spend oceans of money on healthcare, education, and welfare, as much or more than the social democracies we like to scorn, but get much less, not just less actual assistance to people in need, but less trust, less sense of common purpose, less of the intangible glue that makes isolated individuals into citizens.

The Donald just floated a plan for an infrastructure program that illustrates his view of government. The idea is to throw out some small sums, a few billion a year, and have them catalyze lots of investment by states and private companies. There is no signature project and even if the idea works (and most think it won’t do much) it will result in projects that are profitable for private investors, meaning it will address only a fraction of the real needs the country faces for fixing the infrastructure we already have. As for building something new and better—high-speed rail like China, or a renewable energy system, or ways to deal with rising sea levels along the Atlantic Coast—that’s not going to happen. Having just triumphantly passed a tax bill that shifts money sharply from government to big companies, there are no resources left.

Think small and short-term and steer benefits to the investor class. Let billionaires and their fancy new foundations handle anything big.  Abroad, advertise our narrow self-interest and leave managing global institutions to China.  That’s the underlying vision.

Without vision the people perish. If the only thing we can agree on is that we love our military and want it to grow and grow and entertain us with parades, we are in serious trouble. Is there nothing else we can muster the will to do collectively to make our country a better place?