OPINION: Why is American capitalism so rotten?

By ROBERT REICH

The stakes could not be higher.

How Americans vote in the upcoming election may determine whether our democracy survives.

How we respond to the excesses of wealth and selfishness in this second Gilded Age will help determine whether our economy and democracy can coexist.

How we deal with the accelerating climate crisis will determine whether human life on Earth endures.

Donald Trump is not the cause of the crisis we find ourselves in, but the consequence.

The last five decades have been marked by growing distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society: government, the media, corporations, big banks, police, universities, charities, religious institutions, the professions.

There is a wide and pervasive sense that the system as a whole is no longer working.

NEGLECTED AND POWERLESS
A growing number of Americans have felt neglected and powerless. Some are poor. Some are Black or Latino. Others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Many in the middle feel stressed and voiceless.

Whether we call ourselves Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, we have shared many of the same anxieties and felt much of the same distrust toward the establishment.

Joe Biden is trying to remedy many of these deeper, structural problems. His support for Labor, his worker-centered economic policies (such as forgiving student debt and reducing drug prices), and his attacks on corporate monopolies are all moving in the right direction. But he doesn’t yet have the political support he needs to transform the economy.

WHAT HAS GONE WRONG
Trump, meanwhile, epitomizes what has gone wrong. He and his enablers in the Republican Party are offering a “strongman” alternative to American democracy that can best be described as neofascist. His viciousness and loathsomeness have brought us back to first principles. Do we prefer democracy to tyranny? Freedom to fascism? Tolerance to bigotry?

Is our economy dysfunctional because our democracy isn’t working, or is our democracy dysfunctional because our economy is flawed?

(Robert Reich is the chancellor’s professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a senior fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.)