Unbreaking the social contract

Jun
28
2019
by
Lynne McTaggart
/
9
Comments

After witnessing the debates for Democratic presidential candidate in the US and those for Conservative prime minister in the UK, I’m struck by one glaring omission in any discussion of what’s needed to fix the terrible polarization afflicting both countries.

Unwritten contract
The answer may lie in an article I read a number of years ago, entitled ‘The Broken Contract’ by New Yorker writer George Packer, which I want to tell you about again.
I left America for England in 1980 to research a book. I fell in love with London, and not long after fell in love, and as I got further and further entangled with the place – first with husband, then house and children, business and pets – I basically never came home.
Over the years, whenever I did get back to America, it began to resemble the place I’d left less and less. Roads and bridges and airports began to look careworn and ultimately to fall apart, but something else, more fundamental was missing that I could never put my finger on – some growing sense of absence of the whole holding it all together.
And while that uneasy feeling did not appear to extend to Britain, it began to overwhelm me ever since the Referendum result in 2016 created the huge division now present in my adopted country.
Packer wrote that the America of 1980, the America I remember before I left to live in the UK, had a ‘social arrangement,’ an unwritten social contract among labor, business and government, or as he puts it, between the elite and the masses, to ensure that the economic growth following World War II would be spread far and wide, with more shared prosperity than at any time in human history.
This ‘social arrangement’ was achieved through two factors: a balance of power and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. At the time labor laws and government policy maintained the balance of power between workers and management and owners, to restrict the amount of money that could be amassed in private hands or by higher management.
At the time, top executives earned only 40 times as much as their lowest-paid employees (a figure that would swell tenfold 25 years later). Regulation prevented the speculative bubbles and crashes like that of 2008; and banks were not casinos, but a very safe pair of hands.
Most important of all was the unwritten contract by the country’s elite – the heads of banks, corporations, universities, media as well as the government.
At the time, as Packer puts it, ‘they saw themselves as custodians of national institutions. . . they rose above the country’s conflicting interests and tried to unite them into an overarching idea of the national interest.’
A number of organizations included on their boards not only business leaders but heads of labor and civil rights activists.
From our 21st century perspective, it is almost unimaginable that the business elite supported Social Security and labor unions, but at the time they did – because they believed, says Packer, that it would ensure social peace and a productive economy: ‘This is how elites once behaved: as if they had actual responsibilities.’
Even more astonishing, at the time I left the US, bipartisanism between the two political parties was routine.
The turning point
In the midst of ‘stagflation,’ in the latter 1970s, it began to dawn on businesses that they’d survive better if they focused less on an obligation to act as custodians of the national interest and more on how to turn a profit.
At the very point I left America, the lobbying and political business, which had been a behind-smoky-doors gentlemanly activity in the early 1970s, had begun moving toward big and highly influential business; within 10 years the amount spent on political campaigning would quadruple and the number of lobbyists would increase twentyfold.
By the end of the 1970s, three very popular reform bills would have given the public an opportunity to appoint consumer advocates in government, close some small loopholes in taxation for the wealthy and make it harder for employers to circumvent labor laws.
All three had public and bipartisan support in Congress, but nevertheless got shot down in flames, the casualty of the first ferocious lobbying by big business.
Thereafter, we know the rest of the story: a widening inequality created by corporate and political interests so that while ordinary middle-class Americans observed their income rise by only 21 per cent in the 30 years since I left the US, the top one per cent has seen their incomes increase more than 10 times that – by 256 per cent. And this move toward ever greater inequality now feeds on itself.
The torn contract
Nevertheless, as Packer says, the most important change is the tearing up of the unwritten social contract – what the American elite have become willing to do compared to what they would have done before 1980.
‘In 1978 it might have been economically feasible and perfectly legal for an executive to award himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while shedding 40 percent of his work force and requiring the survivors to take annual furloughs without pay,’ says Packer. ‘But no executive would have wanted the shame and outrage that would have followed.’
Now, of course, there is no shame and outrage anymore. We have become so inured to income inequality that this kind of behavior carries on mostly unremarked upon – except by the Democratic left, who suggest that inequality is undermining America – but more to the point, as Packer says, undermining democracy.
I now recognize that what I was experiencing over the years, every time I returned to America, was a kind of shock in the growing sense that the contract – the idea that those in charge have some sort of responsibility to do something other than stick their noses in the trough – had been torn up and scattered to the four winds.
As Packer quotes a friend, speaking about America’s shoddy business dealings in Iraq, ‘We’re just not that good anymore.’
Much is being discussed about ‘uniting the country’ on both sides of the Atlantic but that battle cry is difficult to articulate in particulars, other than in promises to increase taxes and government programs or lower them and assist businesses to thrive.
What is needed is something more fundamental than government programs that penalize business (American democrats) or lower taxes to give business a boost (UK Tories).
In the debates, my friend Marianne Williamson, who’s in the presidential race, called for the need for a return to love in politics.
What we need is nothing less than the recovery of the social contract: the agreement of an overarching idea of the national interest. Only once we recover that sense of requited humanity can something resembling true unity finally re-emerge.

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Lynne McTaggart

Lynne McTaggart is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books, including the worldwide international bestsellers The Power of Eight, The Field, The Intention Experiment and The Bond, all considered seminal books of the New Science and now translated into some 30 languages.

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9 comments on “Unbreaking the social contract”

  1. A refreshingly good article that offers a great idea rather than pointing fingers on our divisive climate today! We need to listen and work together.

  2. I agree that corporations have a total grip on the world. But I have a total dislike for all forms of politics, be it left or right wing. None of them deliver, it's all soundbites and hot air. The amount of violence and destruction in the name of left or right wing politics during the 20th century was staggering. For me, left and right wing politics are like a hangover from the beginning of the industrial revolution. It's outdated, doesn't serve the people and needs to find its place in the trashcan of history. The sooner this world can be liberated and free, the better it will be for this planet. But to be naive enough to believe left or right wing politics will deliver is not the way forward. What is the way forward? I don't know. But if, over time a movement for real change did rise up, the elite would do all that they could to stop it. However, I do feel that people are beginning to wake up more and smell the BS. Hopefully sooner rather than later, things can begin to shift for the betterment of all.

  3. Share the same feeling we have to find a bridge across divisiveness —this is the priority! Just wrote an article myself ‘from Me to We’ in Narrative Paths Journal. I love that you have shared the post war political economic history how stagnation triggered change in the 1970s fascinating. Thank you.

  4. Bringing the two ends towards the middle/centre could allieviate many social ills. Imagine corporate boards comprised of management & labour representatives. WOW!!! But, me thinks as long as greed occupies the minds of the"elite", this hope may may be long in achieving.

  5. Bless dear Marianne for putting herself out there. Unfortunately subjecting herself to the ridicule of the media elite who respond to people on the level of middle schoolers. There were actually three candidates in both debates that had good plans but they were also dismissed and ridiculed.
    I agree with all you points on the social contract but if we can’t go beyond a two party system in our politics I see no hope.
    My biggest concern at the moment is the attack on free speech which has led to censorship of some of our most forward thinking citizens. It’s altogether chilling. Shades of “1984” to say the least. This is what true fascism looks like, contrary to current public opinion. Let’s wake up to these very real dangers!

  6. Lynne, THANK YOU for saying this and for saying it so articulately. This is one of many reasons I’ve followed Marianne Williamson‘s work for many years and why I fully support her run for the Democratic nomination. http://www.marianne2020.com

  7. We the people are helpless before the huge power of the establishment. But maybe our power is the power of eight, to the tenth power, to send healing to those who have only their selfish interests at heart. If we think of their actions as sickness, like other physical sicknesses, we may have a chance at healing the world as it has become.
    As for Marianne Williamson, altho they laughed at her in the media, they mentioned her! They quoted her! And they learned from her. I think the mark she made was very impressive. Go Marianne!

  8. Lynne, great piece of writing. Technology, cell phones, media, etc. have all changed dramatically since the 1980's which has allowed the Public Relations People to take greater control over delivering staged events where it is almost impossible to discern what is true and what is not without doing some deep investigation. It is people like you though that help to bring the duality of good and evil back into balance. Thank you for all that you do.

  9. Lynne you have succinctly pointed out in an non-aggressive manner the outcomes of the neoconservatives policies on both sides of the Atlantic, said outcomes resulting in greater wealth inequality, and a reduced sense of happiness. The Scandinavian countries regularly appear in high positions in the world ranking of happiness, and it is perhaps no surprise that they have far less wealth inequality than countries such as Britain, the USA, Russia and many more. This polarisation of wealth doesn't make anyone truly happy, but it is highly addictive. Wealth is power. Power is addictive, and once we've tasted it we are reluctant to give it up.
    I agree with the commentator who decried the traditional left right division in politics. I no longer consider it relevant, though socialism did much to raise the standards of the poorest sections of society in the 19th and 20th centuries. I now support the Green party.

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