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The tragedy of this American moment: Populism, elites, and the 2020 election | Anand Giridharadas

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Anand Giridharadas: You know that old saying about the fox guarding a henhouse? So I like to tell a different version of that story with a backstory.
We’re the hens, regular people trying to live our lives. And we had a guard of the henhouse—it was the government. It wasn’t perfect but it did a reasonable job of protecting us from each other, guarding equality, making sure none of the hens were pecking the other hens too much. And then came along the last 30 to 40 years a fox, and the fox is big business and wealthy people. And the fox didn’t like the guard because the fox kind of... wanted the hens to itself. And so what did the fox do? Bit that guard in the leg.
It argued that government was bad, “The government was the enemy,” and defunded government, had fought for lower taxes so government could do less stuff. Then the guard starts stumbling away and bleeding out. Off the scene the hens are unguarded, and the fox presents itself to the hens and says, “What a shame! Government is just not what it used to be, not protecting you! Not fighting for you. It’s so inefficient. It’s so, gosh, that’s so sad. Well, let me step in! I’m rich and I’m here to help.”
Well, rich people and wealthy corporations spent a generation waging a war on government, defunding government, allowing social problems to fester and allowing their own profits to soar.
And then, with government weakened, social problems multiplying and their own pockets full, they reinvent themselves as the new replacement of government, which is—instead of trickle down economics we now have trickle down change: Let them make their fortune, and then they’ll just throw some social change down from the mountain.
Well we have to decide in America if that’s the kind of change we want. But what I do know is if you project that kind of change backwards throughout time we wouldn’t have created most of the change that we all take for granted today. I mean if—there would, frankly, have been no New Deal. There’s be no modern American economy if we had depended on the powerful to throw down scraps.
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