By David K. Shipler
I am old
enough to remember when there were no credit cards. Yes, children, there was
such a time, in the Olden Days. Personal accounts could be arranged at some
local stores, which would note your purchases in a ledger, to be paid off
eventually. Then some department stores—Macy’s, Sears, and the like—issued
their own cards, valid for use in their stores only. Esso (now ExxonMobil) had
its card for charging gas at Esso stations.
But the
only real private borrowing people did was to buy a house or a car. Even student debt
was minuscule. The use-everywhere piece of plastic came along later, and with
it, the ease of overspending and the boom in personal debt. Under the law,
national banks’ interest rates were exempt from state restrictions on usury,
and their terms weren’t exactly transparent. Add the second mortgage and the home
equity loan, which allowed people to treat their houses like ATM machines, and
you have a nation of folks craving what they see advertised, buying insatiably,
and living beyond their means.
Now, put
that phenomenon onto the tectonic shifts in the American economy as it moves
from an industrial age to a digital robotic age, and you have an upheaval as
uncontrollable as global warming—only marginally manageable by the will of
humans to make sacrifices and alter behavior. As manufacturing declined, union
membership plummeted, eroding workers’ clout in the marketplace of labor. Wages
did not keep pace with consumers’ appetites. As high-tech jobs mushroomed, the
skills gap grew, with more and more Americans unable to compete effectively in
a global economy.
That’s
where the current politics of rage enters the picture. Donald Trump tells
people what they want to hear, but what they want to hear is a lie. It has two
parts: First, everybody is at fault except yourself. Blame Mexicans. Blame
Muslims. Blame “losers.” Blame liberal Democrats. Blame corporations that move
jobs abroad.
Second,
solve the problems with a sweep of the hand: Ban Mexicans. Ban Muslims. Discard
“losers.” Make deals. Run Democrats out of office. Isolate the U.S. from world
trade. Bar corporations from closing factories here and opening them there.
