Civilizations fall when a horse’s ass sits on the throne

Enough time has passed since the murderous rampage that took the lives of seventeen high schoolers at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School to know what our right-wing Republican dominated political class is going to do about it: nothing.

Yes, oh yes, the Florida legislature and the Governor approved a new law that some are hailing as the first gun control legislation in the state in two decades. Undeserved praise: the new restrictions are so minimal they will do almost nothing to prevent other Parklands. They are mere tweaks, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And they are the first law restricting guns in Florida in twenty years only because, for the last two decades, the legislature has been busy carrying out the NRA agenda, approving law after law further loosening the weak restrictions on guns that existed before the GOP took over in Tallahassee in 1996.

With minor variations, the same scenario unfolded in Washington, DC. as Republicans gained more and more control. The key moment was when Congress allowed the ban on assault weapons to expire. Those who approved this non move have blood on their hands.

The gun issue is a prime example of a much larger problem, the inability of the dominant political class to deal with serious societal challenges, even ones for which there are proven solutions. Banning all assault weapons will help, for starters, in reducing the carnage of gun violence. But, given the balance of political forces in the national and the state capitals, the only thing that could put a dent on the problem is off the table. The one thing more dangerous than a nut with a high-powered rifle is a legislator with the NRA’s gunsights trained on his or her back. So, nothing, at least nothing effective, will be done. Expect more mass killings.

Moving on from gun policy, there is the situation where the political class deals with a problem by making it worse. That’s the case with the growing and scandalous economic gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us, a trend that accounts for a great amount of human suffering. For instance, countries with high levels of inequality have higher mortality than similar countries with less inequality. Inequality kills.

There is no shortage of policies to deal with the problem. Increase taxes on capital. Make the income tax decidedly more progressive. Tax estates heavily. Increase the minimum wage until it equals a living wage. Improve public education at all levels and fund it more generously. Appoint federal reserve governors that won’t hit the brakes on the economy just when the employment market becomes tight enough that workers can demand higher wages.

What is our benighted political class doing? Trump and the Republican Congress have done the complete opposite. The GOP’s agenda is a photographic negative of what should be done, morally and even economically. The moral case is open and shut, but the economic one needs to be explained. The mechanisms are simple.

Consumer spending is the biggest driver in the economy. Inequality concentrates money in the hands of the few who don’t spend a high percentage of their income and restricts money in the hands of the many who consume almost all their income. The result is that there is not enough demand for everything that can be produced, so huge companies sit on piles of idle cash that create no jobs or increases prosperity. Consumers try to keep up with the Jones’s and the Perez’s — and their children’s great expectations — by borrowing. This debt begins to create, then inflate, a financial bubble that eventually explodes, wiping out vast amounts of wealth. We are back to square one, or to 2008.

Take another example, the environment. Global climate change is the biggest environmental challenge of the twenty-first century but hardly the only one. Our knowledge about how to deal with the environment is much less than our knowledge of how to tackle inequality or gun violence, which are mostly problems of political power and will. Environment is much harder. There are too many variables in the environmental equation, and they interact in complex, non-linear ways. Few factors are under our control.

Still, through the work of countless scientists from dozens of disciplines, there are things we do know. Climate change is real. We are causing it. The world is warming, the seas are rising. There are things we can do to at least limit the damage, such as curbing emission of greenhouse gases. The policy of the government of the United States today is to use the absence of complete knowledge and perfect information to question the science and vilify the scientists as a smokescreen to justify enabling everything that will make the problem worse.

Civilizations are most likely to fail when they don’t act to confront critical problems or react in counterproductive ways. The Romans really should have worried more about the barbarians just beyond the horizon, and the Saxons more about the Normans on the near shore.

Our problem in the United States today is that the barbarians are already in Rome. They sit in the Senate. They control the palace. They make the laws and interpret them. They make statements that make Nero sound sane.

Like Rome’s elite, they are venal and corrupt to the marrow, swimming in wealth while using the plebes’ money to buy themselves expensive luxuries. A Roman emperor gave his horse a high appointment. Our political class appoints every horse’s ass it can find.

This is the Dark Age. If history were to repeat itself, there will be a Renaissance and an Enlightenment. They could not come too soon.