[Q&A] Ronald Wright talks to The Mark about inequality, the Tea Party, and the decline of the American empire.
As the Occupy movement continues to evolve, The Mark caught up with esteemed novelist, historian, and essayist Ronald Wright – author of A Short History of Progress- to discuss the changes afoot in American society.
In your 2008 book What is America?, you argued that the American empire – or what you call the “Columbian Age” – is at its end. Have the past three years changed your mind?
Well, I have to say that the past few years have persuaded me that I was on the right track. I think the Columbian Age – which of course began with Europeans and was brought to its culmination by the Americans – certainly does seem to be running out of room. It is also running 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’s been a backlash from the right with the Tea Party movement, and now from the left with the emerging Occupy movement. What do you make of these movements, and what do they tell us about the state of the American empire?
The Tea Party is, to some degree, a manufactured movement. It’s been heavily financed by extremely wealthy people such as the Koch brothers, and others. It continues the neo-right confidence trick (which I think we can say really took off with Ronald Reagan) whereby the poor are persuaded that their interests lie in voting 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, which is the way democracies have to be if they’re going to work.
What do you make of the Occupy movement? Is it further proof of the declining empire?
I think it’s still too early to tell where that’s going to go – whether it’s a flash in the pan, or whether it will produce real change. I think it’s an encouraging sign that at last people are pushing back against the extreme right agenda that is running the risk of turning into something close to fascism.
Fascism isn’t a word I throw around lightly, but when I see the combination of militarism, nationalism, and the peculiarly American ingredient of fundamentalist Christianity, I see something that is worryingly reminiscent of the 1930s. Extreme movements thrive in times of economic crisis. But thinking that cutting taxes to the rich, spending heavily on weaponry, and starting foreign wars is going to solve the problem is completely the wrong answer.
The American novelist John Steinbeck hit the nail on the head when he said that the reason socialism never took hold in the U.S. is that the poor do not see themselves as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In other words, they would rather have a lottery ticket than a social safety net. Within the United States, that made a certain amount of sense when everything was growing – when there was a greatly expanding economy and new land opening up. Of course, let’s not forget that the land was opening up at the expense of the indigenous people from whom it was taken. After the white Americans finished conquering the original Americans, much of the economic growth then came from client states and de facto colonies of the United States.
But now things have stopped growing, and are unlikely to grow at anything like the sort of pace we have seen in the past 200 years.
This is likely to cause serious instability. The thing that worries 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 which led to authoritarianism. That’s the great risk when people realize there isn’t going to be enough to go around, when an element of desperation comes in because people are out of work and being dispossessed. It’s part of human nature to look for the saviour – the strongman who is going to make everything right again – and that, I think, is the great risk for the U.S. in these times. The risk of fascism is very real.
Your life and career span almost the entire western geography of the Anglo-American empire. So I’m wondering: How do you, personally, relate to it? Are you a hopeful participant, a disinterested observer, or something else?
Well, all of us are compromised – we are all on this treadmill. Even just to be able to have the luxury of being a writer depends on the continuation of this civilization. So I have a vested interest in seeing civilization succeed. But I do remember that there were different ways of doing things quite recently. Just to give you one example, at the end of the 1970s, the ratio in salary between a shop floor worker and a CEO at a major American corporation was under 40:1. By the end of the 20th century, only 20 years later, it had grown to more than 1000:1, and the gap is still getting bigger.
Corporations are incapable of looking out for the greater public good and the long-term future. This is the role for government. Somehow, through neo-conservative hysteria and propaganda, the whole idea of government has been demonized. But we don’t have anything 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, to even out the boom-and-bust cycle, and to recycle some of the wealth that would otherwise concentrate in a few hands so that everyone can live decently.
If you look at all the social markers, those countries that have resisted this great widening of the gulf between the rich and poor are the ones where quality of life is better, and where extreme political activity is much rarer.
We must remember what we learned – at such a terrible cost – in the first half of the 20th century: that rampant inequality leads to chaos, war, and revolution.
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