Fractured

People in the United States spend a lot of time arguing about Capitalism. There are two broad camps, and they tend to ask different questions. For one camp the question boils down to: "Capitalism: Wonderful or terrific?" while the other tends to ask: "Capitalism: Threat or menace?" Each side understands its particular worldview as self-evident, and so reacts with mistrust to those people who share the opposite view. Or any other view, for that matter.

Many of the people I know tend to lean Liberal in their politics, and so suspicion of Capitalism runs high. Mainly because of ideas that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively opposes that purpose. On the Conservative side of my social circles, things are a little less clear. Most of the Conservatives I know as less economically conservative than they are religiously conservative, and a lot of their opposition to what they understand as "Socialism," comes from the fact that the government of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was, and the government of the People's Republic of China is, officially atheist. (Although perhaps simply non-Christian is a better way of putting it.) Therefore there is a certain degree to which their support for Capitalism comes across as because "God wills it." However, a case can be made that they also believe that a) the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members and b) Capitalism actively promotes that purpose.

For my own part, I am dubious of both sets of claims. Mainly because I have long been of the opinion that there is no set of institutions or ideologies that humans can create that will substantially alter the motivations and goals of the humans that comprise them.

In other words, the problem with America is the Americans, and changing the system(s) of economics and/or governance is not going to solve that particular problem. While some of my more Progressive friends hold up the Scandinavian nations as examples of what a well-functioning and caring society could (and should) look like in the United States, the social democracies of the Nordic countries did not create the impulse for their citizens to take an active interest in each other's well-being. Rather that impulse shaped the social democracies they created. Likewise, the counter-example than many Reactionaries cite, Venezuela, wasn't brought down because they were doing Socialism as intended; the problem was that late President Hugo Chavez instituted his reforms as a means of class warfare, and the classes (and a lot of other Venezuelans, it seems) are still at war. By the same token, the constant conflicts that ripple across the United States are not the result of either too much, or not enough, Capitalism or Socialism, but because of a general inability of the people of the United States to see one another as all having a certain shared set of interests. And, as much as I dislike the phrasing, I suspect one could go so far as to say that Americans routinely fail to credit one another with even shared humanity.

And without that underlying unity, the rest of it simply doesn't matter. No form of government, economics or religion (or lack thereof) is going to change the degree to which Americans see one another as worthy of having their well-being and actualization cared for.

The problem with premise a) which I put as: the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of their members is not that many think of it as false. Rather, the premise is somewhat overly broad. Because I think that a lot of people feel that the primary purpose of societies should be to care for the well-being and actualization of the just, law (and/or norms)-abiding and right-thinking among them. And in this sense, the degree to which Liberals feel that they fare poorly under Capitalism and Conservatives fear that Socialism would be punitive and impoverishing for them are features, rather than bugs. And no system can create unity and shared prosperity when the motivation behind implementing it is to punish those who dissent from The Right Way of Doing Things.

The history of the United States is rife with examples of one group of people doing better for themselves by shifting the costs of their benefits to one or more other groups of people, either because it was presumed that them bearing those costs was simply their natural lot in life, that they had otherwise shown themselves undeserving of prosperity or were simply out of sight and out of mind. And the discussion of who should pay for the benefits of others has yet to be taken off the table.