If the occupy traffic continues to evolve, The Mark caught up with esteemed writer, historian and essayist Ronald Wright – author ofA short history of progressto discuss the changes afoot in American society.
In what is America?your book 2008, you argued that the American Empire – or whatever you call it "Columbian Age" – is to an end. The last three years have changed your mind?
Well, I must say that the past few years have convinced me that I was on the right track. I think the Colombian age – which of course began with Europeans and was brought to its peak by the Americans – certainly seems to be turning out room. It also runs out of credibility. The land of opportunity has become a place with the greatest inequality between rich and poor in the developed world today.
In the United States, there is a recoil of right with the Tea Party movement, and now the links with the emerging Occupy movement. What makes you of these movements, and what they tell us about the State of the American Empire?
The Tea Party is, to some extent, a crafted traffic. It is heavily financed by the very rich people like the Koch brothers, and others. It remains the neo-law confidence trick (which I think we can say really took off with Ronald Reagan) which the arms are convinced that their interests lie in the votes for the Party of the rich. Due to poor public education and a very strong religious element, many Americans no longer approach politics in a spirit of enlightened, rational self-interest, that is the way democracies should be if they go to work.
What makes you the Occupy movement? Is yet another evidence of the declining Empire?
I think it is still too early to tell where they're going to go-or a Flash in the pan, or whether it will produce real change. I think it's an encouraging sign that finally people pushing back against the extreme right agenda that the risk of turning into something close to fascism.
Fascism is not a word I light around objects, but when I see the combination of militarism, nationalism and the typical American ingredient of fundamentalist Christianity, I see something that concern reminiscent of the 1930s. Extreme movements thrive in times of economic crisis. But think that tax cuts for the rich, heavy expenditure, and starting Foreign Wars weapons is going to solve the problem is completely the wrong answer.
The American writer John Steinbeck hit the nail on the head when he said that the reason socialism never took hold in the US is that the poor exploited proletariat, but if not himself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In other words, she would prefer a lottery ticket than a social safety net. Within the United States, who made a certain amount of sense – when there is a strong growing grew when everything was economy and new country opening. Of course, let's not forget that the country was opening at the expense of the indigenous people of whom it was taken. After the white Americans ready to conquer the native Americans, many of the economic growth than of client States and de facto colonies of the United States.
But now things have stopped growing, and are unlikely to grow on anything like the kind of pace we have seen in the past 200 years.
This will probably lead to serious instability. The thing that concerns me about the tea party on the right and the protests on the left is that these things could easily descend into extremism and violence of the kind we saw in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and that led to authoritarianism. That is the big risk if people realize that there will not be enough to go around, when an element of desperation comes in because people are out of work and is expropriated. It is a part of human nature to find the Savior – the strong man who comes to everything right again – and that, I think, is the big risk for us in these times. The risk of fascism is very real.
Your life and career spanned almost the entire Western Geography of the Anglo-American Empire. So I wonder: How do you, personally, to it? Are you a hopeful participant, a disinterested observer or something else?
Well, for us all in jeopardy-we are all on this treadmill. Even just to the luxury of being a writer can depending on the continuation of this civilization. So I have a vested interest in seeing civilization succeed. But I remember that there are different ways of doing quite recently. Just to give you an example, at the end of the 1970s, the ratio was in salary between a workplace employee and a CEO at a large American company under 40: 1. By the end of the 20th century, only 20 years later, it had grown to more than 1000: 1 contrast ratio, and the gap is still bigger.
Companies are unable to find the larger public good and the long-term future. This is the role of the Government. One way or another, by means of neo-conservative hysteria and propaganda, the whole idea of Government has been demonized. But we have nothing else. The only body that represents the people, in the democracies, is their Government. By the end of the Second World War, almost everyone agreed that the business of Government is to manage capitalism, even from the boom-and-bust cycle and recycle part of the wealth which otherwise would concentrate in a few hands so everyone a decent life.
If you are looking at all the social markers, the countries that this great widening of the gap between rich and poor have resisted those where quality of life is better, and where extreme political activity is much rarer.
We must not forget what we learned – on such a terrible cost in the first half of the 20th century: that rampant inequality leads to chaos, war and revolution.
Photo courtesy of Reuters.
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