“America is a
country that is now utterly divided when it comes to its society, its economy,
its politics,” wrote David Simon, author and
creator of the gritty television crime drama The Wire, in a recent article
in the UK Guardian. “There are definitely two Americas.” Indeed
there are, although Simon blames this chasm not on the political momentum of
the radical left, who are hell-bent on leading us into a post-American future, but
on the failure of a Reagan-era capitalism to build “a just society.”
Simon’s article is an extract of his presentation at this
year’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House in Australia,
which ran for two days last month. The
Festival of Dangerous Ideas saw Simon join a range of “notable thinkers” in
discussion and debate “about all sorts of ideas that are dangerous in different
ways,” said
the festival’s curator Ann Mossop. “Dangerous can be that kind of dangerous
that gets you killed, or it can be the kind that means you have to rethink your
opinion on something. But it can also be something that is quite fun, that
takes a lighter view of the kind of dangerous ideas of everyday life.” Of
course, it’s one thing for ideas to be provocative, and another for them to
actually be any good, but I digress.
The event’s thinkers included anti-bullying flagbearer, anti-Christian
bully Dan Savage, who was on hand to promote open marriages, which he claims
save more relationships than destroy them; web theorist Evgeny Morozov, who has
criticized
the United States government’s “Internet Freedom Agenda” for convincing our
enemies abroad “that Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American
imperialism”; Hanna Rosin, a Slate and
Atlantic writer whose book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
posits that the patriarchy is dead; anti-globalist ecofeminist Vandana Shiva,
whose presentation
was called “Growth = Poverty”; and Guardian
writer Erwin James, a convicted double-murderer who now advocates for prison
reform. His presentation
was entitled “A Killer Can Be a Good Neighbor.”
(In the future, if the Festival of Dangerous Ideas
organizers want to broaden the event’s range of “notable thinkers” and present
some really shocking ideas that run counter to the orthodoxy of the
self-congratulatory liberal elite, concepts that might challenge their rigid
worldview, perhaps they could consider inviting such notables as Thomas Sowell,
Mark Steyn, and David Horowitz, for some really eye-opening balance. Just a
suggestion.)
Simon’s show The Wire,
, in which his marginalized and “economically irrelevant” characters on the
streets of Baltimore butted up against government and bureaucratic forces
beyond their control, ran from 2002-2008 and was known for addressing
sociopolitical themes like the drug war and poverty. Today Simon confronts
those issues more directly in such venues as last month’s Festival or in the Guardian.
In his address, entitled “Some People Are More Equal Than Others,”
Simon excoriated capitalism’s inability to correct America’s income inequality,
solve environmental problems, and heal the racial divide. He argues that since 1980 – the
beginning of the Reagan era, though he doesn’t refer to it – we have
increasingly embraced a profit-obsessed capitalism that has severed itself from
“the social compact.” We have abandoned an American dream that was accessible
to all and that gave us “the American century,” “all because of our inability
to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse.”
The result is
that America has become “a horror show” in which family income is declining,
basic services such as public education are “abandoned,” and the underclass is
“hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war
on the poor.” He also claims that “capital” has bought the electoral process,
effectively shutting down the popular will and crushing hope. Actually, what
has shut down the popular will at the voting booth is rampant voter fraud, but
again I digress.
So I’m astonished that at this late date I’m standing here and saying we
might want to go back for this guy Marx that we were laughing at, if not for
his prescriptions, then at least for his depiction of what is possible if you
don’t mitigate the authority of capitalism, if you don’t embrace some other
values for human endeavor.
He doesn’t
describe himself as a Marxist, however:
I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we
generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. But the idea
that it’s not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute
the benefits of capitalism isn’t going to include everyone in the society to a
reasonable extent, that’s astonishing to me.
“The only thing
that actually works,” he argues, “is not ideological... It’s pragmatic, it
includes the best aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism.”
I’m not sure what the best aspects of socialistic thought are, but this country
finds itself torn in two precisely because we have at the helm a man who, like
Simon, argues for wealth distribution to build a “just society.” How does that
seem to be working out? How does the utopian impulse to mold a “just society”
always end? Not in the elimination of poverty but in less freedom and less
prosperity for all.
Simon wants to rise above ideology, but the radical left,
which ascended into power five years ago, is nothing if not ideological, and
the socio-economic horror show Simon decries has been facilitated, fed, and exacerbated, not
ameliorated, by Barack Obama and his handlers. David Simon is correct: there
are definitely two Americas, and the way to begin closing that divide and
propel us into another “American century” is to focus on keeping us a “free”
society, not a “just” one.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 12/24/13)
