It’s funny. Every day, I watch the news, read the headlines, scan the tweets, and I see something peculiar. This weekend, it was nonstop coverage of…tweets. Trump said, Comey said, Haberman responded, oh my God! It goes on around the clock. But have you ever wondered what’s missing in all this? Or what “this” really is, anyways?

Gossip. Scandal. Intrigue. It is infotainment as spectacle masquerading as governance.

What don’t I see? America has real problems. Big ones. Existentially threatening ones. Inequality. Stagnation. Extremism. Generations without savings who will never retire. Young people who can’t afford to have families. That is reality. Those are the unforgiving facts of American life. That is what people live. Do you see the gap between scandal, intrigue, spectacle — and reality?

Now. It’s not just that I don’t ever see solutions to these problems proposed — “Hey, Anderson Cooper — here’s how we can fix our healthcare system. Did you know that in Switzerland, they also have exchanges — but they’re regulated against poor quality insurance, and everyone gets a subsidy to use them, less if you’re wealthy, more if you’re poor?” Ah, then America might go somewhere.

It’s not just that I don’t see these problems debated. “Listen, Anderson. I don’t think the Swiss solution is as good as the British one. The NHS delivers far better healthcare outcomes — more healthy years — for every dollar spent on it.” See how enlightening that might be?

The problem is deeper, more dangerous, and even more toxic.

I don’t see America’s problems even acknowledged at all. Ever. Not once a week, not once a month — not once a day. “Hey Anderson — do you think we could ignore these foolish tweets tonight, and talk about, say skyrocketing inequality, falling life expectancy, or corroded trust?”

Do you see what I mean? Reality —as in real-world problems which need answers — simply appears not to exist to American elites, who are blissfully ignorant, or in profound denial, happily bickering over who said what about nothing that matters at all. Hence, what should be governance has degenerated into gossip.

What happens when a country’s elites — from journalists to pundits to politicians to economists — won’t acknowledge its real problems? But will endlessly obsessively focus on, well, gossip? Every day? While those problems — like inequality, stagnation, indignity, never retiring, no safety nets, declining life expectancy — grow worse by the day?

No one can then take responsibility for a society failures. Not as in people, but as in ideas, systems, institutions. When no one is willing to say, “it was these ideas. These ideologies. These institutions. They just didn’t work. Let’s try something else.” — because problems apparently don’t exist at all — then how is progress possible? How can a society grow, mature, develop? That was the story of the Soviet Union, too. Comrades!! All is well! Meanwhile, the walls were about to fall.

If no one is willing to take responsibility for what is broken, then how can anything ever be fixed? The result is a vacuum. A vacuum of ideas, history, systems, thought. My imaginary conversation about Swiss versus British healthcare systems can’t happen — because no one’s willing to own up to the fact that the American one is badly broken in the first place. In that way, a stunning, systemic, catastrophic lack of responsibility for today’s failures prevents Americans from creating a better tomorrow.

Do you think I overstate it? Have you ever seen a single leader hold their hands up and say — “Sorry. We failed you. Here is how we hope to do better.” But isn’t society self-evidently in a downward spiral? Can those two things not be intimately linked? Perhaps you see the problem. Why don’t you and I see imaginary conversations like the one above — ever, anywhere, by anyone?

American leadership has abdicated its responsibility. To what? To govern its society. It has replaced governance with gossip, scandal, spectacle. You are right to say that is one of the failings of a profit-maximizing media — but it is also the job of leaders to guide and orient it towards higher and nobler things. And yet those very leaders appear to be uninterested in reality at all. They are willfully detached from it.

Perhaps the theory is “we will unseat them by shaming them!” Ah, but that overlooks the greatest historical truth about authoritarians. They have no shame, and therefore cannot be defeated that way. It takes solving the problems that cause people to lose faith in democracy to turn the authoritarian tide around. And if you are ignoring those problems, then no one can take responsibility for them, and that way, authoritarianism will only grow. That is the story of the 1930s.

It’s obvious that American institutions have failed. Failed badly, systemically, and ruinously. It is ranked as a second rate democracy, becoming a third rate one. Its economy is profoundly broken. Society is declining into a caste system. The rule of law no longer works. Its old have no optimism in the future, and its young have no belief in its past.

Yet there its elites are. Pretending happily that gossip is a substitute for governance. To abdicate responsibility in this way — history laughs. But for the average American, who is suffering the results of this catastrophic, stunning lack of leadership, whose life is in freefall, it is something like an epic tragedy. And the lesson for the world is not to make the same mistake. Do not let gossip become a substitute for real problems, no matter how tempting it seems. A society’s future hinges on resolving today’s ills — not merely squabbling over which courtier holds the mad king’s favour today.

Umair

April 2018