Popular Economics Weekly
Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.
Timothy Snyder in the introduction of On Freedom, the sequel to his
best-selling On Tyranny, tells us why we have a sociopath bordering on
psychopathy as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States
of America.
“Deep into a century that was the stuff of dreams in the 1970s, and the
subject of confident predictions in the 1990s, we find ourselves at a turning
point. Whether we will be free will depend on us—not just on what we do, but on
why we do it: our ideals.”
We will need to return to those ideals that are the basis of our democracy to
counter the nihilism displayed by a political party and candidate that is a
product of the past 40 years of wealth concentration in an economic system that
has led to many Deaths
of Despair in the Midwest and rustbelt.
It’s a sad commentary that one of our political parties chose a leader that
wants to tear down those institutions that have preserved our democracy; even
attack the Capital on January 6 to overturn the 2020 election results.
I lived that ‘stuff of dreams’ in the 1970s in public service as a Peace
Corps Volunteer, with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union, the US
Environmental Protection Agency and serving in my own community. I experienced
the heady optimism and can-do spirit that prevailed and supported my
efforts.
It was because I believed in the Peace Corps motto, Service Above Self, that
its first President Sergeant Shiver adopted from Rotary International.
But citizens without that spirit have turned to leaders that promise they
will serve them, if they obey the leader's rules, says Dr. Snyder.
What happened to those enduring ideals we lived by and are the foundation of
our democracy? Nationalism, a relic of the past, is finding favor because many
have lost faith in their democratic institutions that haven’t done enough for
those that have felt disenfranchised. They no longer trust their institutions.
They have lost faith in those ideals as well, yet having faith in ideals
enables one to fulfill them.
Snyder uses Russia as an example of what America could become if we don’t
reaffirm our ideals this November. “In Russia, we see the transitions from
the definition of freedom as the lack of barriers to a politics of fascism in
which there are no barriers to the Leader’s whims.”
He faults what has happened to the American economy. “American capitalism has
been driven toward monopoly, wealth concentration and decadence. Without ideals,
it is impossible to be a realist. If you forget about freedom, you misunderstand
the world and change it for the worst.”
Nobel laureate Joseph
Stiglitz has said as much: “The rise of authoritarian populism has been most
pronounced in countries where governments have done too little (to address
poverty, inequality, insecurity, and so forth), not where they have done too
much.”
Dr. Snyder’s antidote to the rising authoritarianism is live by our enduring
values that all Americans hold—Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—rather
than succumb to the fears and prejudices that divide us.
On Freedom is an expanded sequel to On Tyranny because he tells
us not only how to recognize tyranny but how to protect and expand the freedoms
we already enjoy because we live in a democracy whose institutions protect fact
from fiction, truth from lies; which Dr. Snyder labels as positive freedom vs.
negative freedom; the value of values, vs. just the absence of barriers; a sense
of togetherness rather than partisan divide.
Positive freedom is the most important value of all.
Nobel Prize-Winners Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in their new book,
Why Nations Fail, have studied which countries grow and nurture a greater
equality of opportunity for its citizens. It is because they have strong
democratic institutions.
Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, in
awarding the latest Nobel memorial
prize in economics to them, and Simon Johnson, said “Reducing the vast
differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest
challenges. The (Nobel) laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal
institutions for achieving this."
It is a case of the exploiters; wealthy individuals who would limit freedoms
to prevent the sharing of their wealth equitably, vs. those who want to expand
equal opportunities for all.
Weakening those constraints on the wealthiest is how the Reagan
administration and Big Business in 1980 began the deregulation of whole
industries as well as financial markets. The wall was breached between
commercial FDIC guaranteed banks and much more loosely regulated investment
banks that enabled sophisticated investors to gamble with federally insured
deposits.
Government oversight was so weakened that another Republican administration
failed to carry out its core mandate of protecting Americans. The GW Bush
administration failed to anticipate the 9/11 Twin Towers attack and the Great
Recession that followed in the same decade.
Republican economic policies have performed badly because they have lobbied
for weaker institutions; particularly in the red states they govern; as well tax
cuts that have created massive budget deficits with little to show for it. These
states have restricted many freedoms, such women’s right to make decisions about
their own body, union organizing and minimizing health care benefits for their
poorest citizens.
In fact, Republican administrations have attempted more than 30 times to
repeal Obamacare, the only health care law that makes health insurance available
to all Americans, regardless of preexisting conditions.
That is why “We need government to build the architecture of the American
Dream, whether it be autonomous and public universities or functional public
roads,” says Snyder.
Our government needs to do more to protect the constitution and our laws than
we have done in the past, that Americans thought were not needed in less
dangerous times.
We are at a turning point because such a ‘hands off’ attitude towards laws
and regulations is allowing a Republican presidential candidate who said he
admires Hitler’s generals, Vladimir Putin as a ‘genius’, and was labeled by
former Chief of General Staff Mark Milley, “fascist to the core” to possibly
become President again.
We need a government and laws representative of its citizens that is strong
enough to make the American Dream available to all Americans for democracy to
work. When it has been weakened by those wanting an autocracy over democracy, we
have the partisan divide of today that is tearing Americans apart.
Concentrating all power in the hands of the few is the goal of authoritarian
governments, and the purpose of weak democratic governments. It is what happened
to the American economy over the past 40 years when it chose to ignore the
guardrails that protected Americans.
We are at such a turning point today, says Dr. Snyder. “My kids have a
chance. We all do. This world can be ever so much better.”
We can make the American Dream we believe in work for all, not the few.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
