Is the United States in decline? Are we destined to become a shell of the country we once were? This underlying thought, the concern that somehow our country’s best days are behind it, I think drives the intensity of the political debate we are having. Tea Partiers and Progressives might disagree on the causes and cures but both have the sense that somehow our country is slipping. The anger, I think, is because neither side can really enunciate a compelling explanation of how our country got off track or more importantly what we need to do to get back on track. The decline, for many, is starting to feel inevitable, beyond our power to reverse.
It’s not that the left and the right are dishonest. It’s more that they are less honest. Much of what both left and right says is true. But both sides leave off a little part of the truth, because it hurts their positions, or is too harsh for the voting public. And those little, unspoken parts of the truth, and the questions they bring up, are what’s tearing our country apart. Because by leaving it unspoken, we leave it unaddressed, and it just festers. The goal of “At Least He Tells the Truth” is to tell the WHOLE truth, not just the politically expedient truth. Because it needs to be done.
Until the 1980s the wealth our economy created was broadly distributed – everybody got to benefit from our capitalist system. Over the last few decades almost all of the wealth created has gone to a small part of our population. This wasn’t a natural result of capitalism. It happened because the Keepers of Capitalism allowed a second set of rules to be slipped into different parts of our economy that only benefitted a small part of our population. We need to end this second set of rules. We need to fix our capitalism.
Fix What We Have. We don’t need to transform our country. We certainly don’t need a Revolution, whatever that means. We just need to get back to the things we know work, Democratic Capitalism, to fixing what we have.
To understand what’s gone wrong with our country, we have to start with what we got right. What we got right was a compromise in the 1930s that created the democratic capitalist system that we have today.
