Once Again, America Does Just Enough
Once Again, America Does Just Enough
We never really solve our problems — we do the minimum necessary to muddle through
If America were a college student, it would be the kid who doesn’t start writing the term paper until eight hours before it’s due.
You know — the kid who plays chicken with the deadline, whose friends are asking him for days, “shouldn’t you really start that paper?” The kid who pulls an all-nighter, riddled with caffeine and stress, and manages to turn something in to his professor two minutes before the assignment is due. The paper doesn’t turn out to be particularly good, the writing of it was unnecessarily agonizing, and there were some moments at four in the morning when it looked like it wasn’t going to get done. But, in the end, the kid passes the class with a D because he did just enough.
We have a long history in this country of procrastinating on important issues until the last possible moment and then doing the bare minimum necessary to avoid disaster. We get things done, somehow, but it’s not pretty.
The 2022 midterms are America’s latest entry into this category. Democrats, and, more generally, people who think democracy is a good thing, are breathing a sigh of relief. This year, Democrats narrowly won enough races to keep our system of government relatively intact. Most of the worst election-denying candidates — especially the Secretary-of-State candidates who were promising to undermine future elections — lost to people who did not lie about voter fraud and the outcome of past elections.
Pundits have been telling us all year that voters didn’t care about preserving the democratic system as much as they cared about the price of gasoline. It was the conventional wisdom; I believed it. But it turns out that Americans did mostly reject candidates that were beyond the pale — January 6th participants, bald-faced liars about the election, skeevy fascist wanna-bes, etc.
I’ll take it. The outcome of the 2022 election is much better than the alternative. Had things gone the other way, we might have seen a number of states — especially swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — fall under the sway of leaders who were willing to undermine democracy. Instead, Americans stood up and, by a distressingly small margin, rejected a future in which the truth doesn’t matter and Republicans would have the power and the inclination to ignore the will of the voters whenever they felt like it.
It didn’t need to be this difficult! The glass-half-full version of 2022 is that truth and democracy won. The glass-half-empty version is equally valid: why did lies and authoritarianism even have a shot in the first place? Had Republican elites shown a shred of backbone over the last few years, had the media not allowed these lies to spread, had social media not amplified toxic ideologies, had many of our fellow Americans exhibited critical-thinking skills, we wouldn’t have needed a last-gasp push to preserve what’s left of our democratic norms.
This is part of an American tradition of muddling through in a barely adequate way. Our politics almost never demonstrates far-sighted preparedness. We generally let problems fester and multiply until it’s almost too late — then we pull a frantic all-nighter to avoid the worst.
This has been a worrying pattern in recent decades. We have so many mounting problems — guns, economic inequality, a casino-like economy, an overloaded immigration system — that we refuse to address until moments of crisis. Two of the most egregious examples of America doing just enough and no more are health care and the climate.
It’s long been clear that the American healthcare system is a mess — we pay far too much, the outcomes are bad, and the system is staggeringly unequal. Every year, many Americans go bankrupt because of their medical bills, while others die because they can’t afford to treat their illnesses. But we’ve never really wrestled with the core problems. Rather than undertake a systematic overhaul of our healthcare system, we’ve nibbled around the edges.
The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) did just enough at a late moment, creating a system in which people could access (somewhat) affordable insurance outside of employer benefits and preventing insurance companies from behaving in cartoonishly evil ways. It was enough to kick the healthcare can down the road for a few more years, but nothing more.
On another of our most crucial problems, climate change, we’ve done much the same. For decades, the United States was the world’s worst carbon polluter and breezily chose to ignore the mounting scientific warnings. We waited over 30 years after the first UN report on the dire effects of climate change to take any serious federal action. Finally, we passed the Inflation Reduction Act — just barely, after larding it with things that would please the deciding Senator, a guy who makes much more money from his coal business than he does from being a Senator.
Is the Inflation Reduction Act enough? Just barely. It might almost get us to our stated short-term climate goals (which could be inadequate anyway) in the short term, but much more remains to be done. Had we tackled climate change proactively — say, back in the 1990s — we’d be in a much better position. But we let the problem fester.
Thanks to American voters, this year’s elections mean that we get to enjoy a somewhat-functioning democracy for a while longer. It would be nice if we proactively addressed some of the system’s weaknesses or if political elites would directly disavow anti-democratic ideas. But it’s better than nothing. I guess the best thing to do is to get some rest before we have to pull an all-nighter to stave off the next disaster.