Let’s start with the optimism captured in America’s informal motto – E Pluribus Unum – i.e. One from Many (as expanded from its original reference to the thirteen colonies). Some would argue, yes, but only if the Pluribus is somewhat aligned in vision.  

They see a Pluribus beset by snarling parties who'd just as soon tear each other apart. Not since the Civil War of 1860, it seems, has the country been so divided. Some even regard the event of January 6 a year ago to have been a mere dress rehearsal for what might come. A dysfunctional Pluribus, they would say, portends, not Unum, but Bellum.

Talk of civil strife, even war, has now moved from backroom conspiratorial whispers to the edges of the mainstream as evidenced by the work of a member of the C.I.A. advisory committee called the Political Instability Task Force (The New Yorker: Is A Civil War Ahead?). The cited book takes pains to avoid fear-mongering but the message, while couched in clinical terms, is clear: we now hang in the balance between democracy and autocracy. The author foresees the real possibility of a future – while perhaps not one of the symmetrical conflict that played out on the battlefields of the Civil War – marked by acts of scattered violence including bombings, political assassinations, and other asymmetric types of warfare.

Our discussion might begin with another look at MM 7/26/21 Four Americas in which we’d contemplated the country, not in terms of a single but rather four co-existing concepts: Freedom America (a Constitutional Republic, limited federal powers); Smart America (embracing more concentrated power, CBDC, even a global orientation); Real America (small-town, rural, feeling left behind); Just America (CRT, overcoming real or perceived structural oppression). A Pluribus, so divided, fosters the kind of paranoia rooted in shared and mutual incomprehension that could lead to battle lines being drawn such that  . . . nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. 

Add to that, then, the power of big-hype social media and it’s no wonder we end up with so many potential fault lines: limited vs. an overarching and intrusive government (looming big brother, national mandates); an unaccountable foreign policy (Vietnam or, for that matter, most ensuing ill-fated military incursions); and the looming existential risk of climate change. One major fault line must surely lie in the country’s obscene and growing income and wealth gap. The tectonic plates there have been sliding against each other now for decades. 

We might begin with the cost to the American worker of the upward unequal redistribution of income cumulatively since 1975 – in aggregate $50 trillion – a number so staggeringly large that it fails the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) test and makes sense only in the context of a granular demographic detail to which the notional Pluribus can relate. That’s what the 2020 working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation accomplished in their analysis of the past two-and-a-half decades.

The beginning date of 1974 was chosen as the point up to which, over the preceding three decades (i.e. post WWII), real incomes grew in percentage terms roughly equal to the rate of per capita economic growth across all income levels.  As such, it meant the low-wage worker was treated somewhat the same as the high-wage employee. That changed sometime in 1975 when this idea of a broadly shared prosperity ended and the wealthiest Americans, particularly those in the top one (and especially one-tenth) percent, began capturing an ever-increasing share of the growing economic pie. 

The resulting inequality price tag to the employee was calculated in terms of the specific income penalty/benefit in real (i.e. all in 2018 dollars) terms measured at varying income levels e.g. the penalty to the median income full-time worker was $42,000 a year (i.e. actually received $50,000 versus the hypothetical $92,000 under the pre-1975 shared-prosperity reckoning) while the benefit to the top one percent was $754,000 (actually received $1,384,000 instead of the would-have-been $630,000 per the shared-prosperity methodology).

And, then, on top of this $50 trillion income disparity we add those factors which have contributed to wealth disparity, one kicker being the effect of the artificially-suppressed interest rates. Even as that distortion drives unnatural asset inflation (thereby enriching the likes of stock option holders as corporations repurchase their own elevated shares using cheap money), the notional Pluribus saver has been starved of interest income even while confronting an ever-accelerating CPI. 

No wonder the late, great middle class appears doomed now that so much of the country’s talent has been redirected from wealth creation to wealth extraction. It sometimes seems as though the last of the breed whose actions were motivated primarily by the desire to promote the long-term betterment of the Unum was Paul Volcker. And, yet, the fact of the matter is that all of us ultimately suffer as the soul of the Unum is sucked dry and it then becomes a shell of its former self. Just see the wolf frisking the door with the steady encroachment of those tent encampments. How to make sense of it all?  

Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

(The next following Member Monday discussion will address another potential fault line i.e. the topic of MM 2/7/22 E Pluribus Bellum II is that of a hollowed-out middle class witnessing the breakdown of law-and-order and traditional values even as it warily eyes the prospect of an autocracy).