Robert Reich, in his July 21, 2013 article “Detroit, and the Bankruptcy of America’s Social Contract” has an important point to make. I’d like to set his ideas in a slightly different context.
There is no "social contract," and never has been. Hobbes was wrong, and Americans have never agreed on who pays for anything. It's always been a matter of compromise during the moment; we lurch from crisis to crisis.
For example, the invention of the so-called "welfare state" during the New Deal years was made without having secured in advance a consensus of citizen opinion about the ways we should address capitalism’s penchant for crashing and burning every so many years. We were in an emergency situation and deadlocked by strong opposing views on what should be done. Fortunately, FDR had the good sense to make the decisions he did, but he had to fight hard for each one, and the process wasn't the result of a democratic consensus.
In the late 1960s as peaceful demonstrations in the streets, complimented by occasional eruptions of militant violence, subsided, the matter of "rights" and "who's footing the bill" became less of a priority for policymakers as they began to concentrate on conservative backlash. In yet another example, when the neoliberals and corporations trashed our labor unions, workers suddenly had very little power, and now they don't count in Wall Street lairs and corporate board rooms.
Our policymaking, at all levels of government, seems to involve no more enlightened approach than who’s got what power at the moment a decision must be made. Those who say “that’s just the way things are” silently admit that they don’t share a vision of democracy that really works for a nation’s citizens, but there’s a larger vision that’s being missed.
We're so impatient, and in a hurry to get on with whatever the next crisis is, that we've never really allowed ourselves the luxury of developing democratic consensus on much of anything. And now today we don’t even have the ability to have a national discourse on any issue because citizen views are fashioned by corporate-owned communication media.
Consequently, we find ourselves repeatedly addressing a series of crises as if each one was facing us for the first time. We kick the can down the road a lot, and we seek out others to make the decisions for us – like judges in bankruptcy court, for instance.
The same is true with regard to the boom-and-bust cycles caused by capitalism. No time to develop consensus, no political will to find solutions that express our common purpose and any shared values we might have as diverse citizens, because we've no patience for the process through which that needs to happen.
I applaud Reich when he comments that Detroit’s situation is “roughly analogous to a Wall Street bank drawing a boundary around its bad assets, selling them off at a fire-sale price, and writing off the loss.” But let’s take that further, and question why it is that nearly all policy decisions today are oriented around commercial values, not values that put people above commerce. Isn’t that why we keep coming up with the same set of solutions that put commerce above people?
Corporate interests (in Detroit’s case, largely the auto industry) are responsible for having created our urban ghettos, and for having made America's inner cities the repositories for our minorities, the poor, the uneducated and unskilled. But they have no stomach for stepping up to their responsibility to clean up after this or any other mess they make. That might be maximizing social responsibility, and Milton Friedman gave industry the perfect excuse to avoid that when he advised that corporations have no social responsibility, and that they need not consider what happens to the communities in which they exist. Meanwhile American citizens languish, not only in Detroit, but in many other cities because a key player in creating these complex problems won’t come to the table offering to be part of the solution.
We’ve been slow to develop the ability as a nation to use the processes of democracy to really create a democracy. We just keep flailing around about social issues with a power-and-money perspective because we're too much in a hurry to get on with the process of striving for the ever-more-elusive "American Dream" of material success. That's how Detroit "happened."
I know... I've been part of southeast Michigan and Detroit for more than a quarter century, and I've seen it happen, and am directly affected by what happens with regard to Detroit's bankruptcy proceedings. The way the Detroit situation was created is not simple, and neither will the solutions be easy.
Reich concludes his article by saying that Detroit’s “upcoming fire sale will likely result in even worse municipal services, lousier schools, and more crime for those left behind in the city of Detroit. In an era of widening inequality, this is how wealthier Americans are quietly writing off the poor.” I think his conclusion is on the mark, because of the way the matter is being handled. No one bothers to consult the people, and involve the area's citizens in the process because they don't know how to do it. As evolving human beings, we may have developed a lot of tools in the last five thousand years or so, but our ability to do “democracy” remains largely undeveloped.
