America's Locust Years

This past week I was reminded of a Winston Churchill speech where he
lamented, "these are the years that the locust hath eaten." Speaking
before the House of Commons, Churchill chronicled Hitler's rise to
power, Germany's rearmament, and England's failure to respond. He used
the locust metaphor to refer to the multiple opportunities England had
to prevent war.

I remembered Churchill's words after reading economist Joseph Stiglitz's Freefall and NEW YORK TIMES columnist Thomas Friedman's newly revised Hot, Flat, and Crowded back
to back. Stiglitz analyzes the global economic crisis and skewers the
Obama Administration for not doing more to address the root problems.
Friedman analyzes the global environmental crisis and castigates
Washington for not doing more about it.

The
Stiglitz and Friedman books make the same point Churchill did 74 years
ago. There were abundant warning signs of an impending crisis, but they
were ignored.

Answering
the rhetorical question "Can America develop a just economy?" Stiglitz
responds, "We have gone far down an alternative path -- creating a
society in which materialism dominates moral commitment, in which the
rapid growth that we have achieved is not sustainable environmentally
or socially, in which we do not act together as a community to address our
common needs..."

Focusing
on global climate change, Friedman, the more pessimistic of the two
authors, writes, "People don't seem to realize... that it is not like
we're on the Titanic and we have to avoid the iceberg. We've already
hit the iceberg."

Churchill's
speech was given in 1936, three years after Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany and three years before the invasion of Poland -- when England
finally woke up and declared war. During this six-year period, despite
obvious evidence that Germany was preparing to devour Europe, English
leaders pretended that it wasn't happening.

Historians
offer two explanations. First, England was coming out of a recession
and English political leaders felt their countrymen wouldn't be able to
handle preparation for war and economic recovery, shouldn't be asked to
sacrifice. Second, they -- Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and
Edward Halifax -- admired Hitler, felt he was good for Germany, believed
him when he said he had no intention of waging war, and regarded
National Socialism as preferable to communism. Meanwhile, the locusts
chewed away and, as a consequence, England came within a whisker of
being devoured by Hitler.

Unfortunately, the locusts are still at work. They moved on to America.

Friedman cites Kurt Andersen who last year described baby boomers as the Grasshopper Generation. Building on Andersen's influential essay, Friedman laments that baby
boomers "ate through a staggering amount of our national wealth and our
natural world in a very short period of time, leaving the next
generation a massive economic and ecological deficit."

Stiglitz
and Friedman agree that America's locust years began in 1980 with
election of Ronald Reagan. It "ushered in an age in which we told
ourselves that we did not have sacrifice anymore for a better way of
life." As a consequence, Friedman continues, "We became a subprime
nation that thought it could just borrow its way to riches." This party hearty and damn the consequences attitude prevailed for thirty years, notably with George W. Bush, who after 9/11 said the appropriate American response was not collective sacrifice but
rather to "go shopping."

While neither Stiglitz nor Friedman feels that the prospects for America are
hopeless, both recognize that we have a steep climb out of the hole
we're in. Friedman likens our condition to recovering from a serious
heart attack.

Confronted with our locusts, Americans have two choices. First, we can ignore how
bad things are: pray for the rapture or maintain that it's not as bad
as people say, that the "liberal media" had distorted the extent of
America's malaise. Those aren't locusts; they're sow bugs. The
problem with this approach is that it won't make the locusts go away
(anymore than Churchill's inept predecessors protected England by
pretending that Hitler wasn't a monster.)

Friedman brilliantly characterizes the current American ethos as IBG/YBG: "Do
whatever you like now, because 'I'll be gone' or 'you'll be gone" when
the bill comes due." Sadly, since Reagan was elected many Americans
have become moral weenies.

The second choice is to speak the truth and fight the locusts.

The American progressive tradition has to been to stand up and fight
whenever it appeared that democracy was on the ropes. This is one of
those times. America has suffered thirty years "that the locust hath
eaten." Time is running out. We may not survive another "heart attack."

There is so much that needs to be done that it is difficult to say where to
start. Each of us has to think about the moral commitment we are
prepared to make. Here are two modest suggestions: First, speak the
truth. Tell everyone you know about the locusts, about the terrible
problems that American must face. Second, prepare for sacrifice.
Dealing with these problems is going to hurt, but the pain will be
bearable if we face the locusts together.