Strengthen the Core

It is generally accepted that a healthy body needs a healthy core. A healthy core improves coordination, stability, and strength throughout the entire body. It is pretty likely that those who allow their core to get weak are probably suffering from other health problems.

Suffice to say, I am trying to make a greater point. If you look at both our political and economic health, it has become abundantly clear that the political center and the economic center are struggling. In the absence of these strong cores, political extremism and economic inequality have exacerbated, leading to a cascade of other attendant problems that risk the health of both.

Unfortunately, the voices of moderation, reason, and common sense in politics have been drowned out by those once considered on the margins-both left and right. People on either side have created a bunker mentality where each creates accepts their own set of facts. The effects- which include ideas like confirmation bias and the backfire effect- simply reaffirm this sense that "we are right" and that the only way to confront the opposition is through political power at all costs. In this environment the common good is seen as secondary, questionable ethics and questionable behavior are tolerated, and the willingness to "meet" the opposition "in the middle" is seen as tantamount to abandoning principle. Pragmatism isn't seen as a principle but as a sign of weakness.

In economics, the middle class of workers, entrepreneurs, and middle managers has become so severely compromised that the United States now has the worst Gini coefficient- the standard measurement of inequality in a country- of any country in the Western World and eerily similar to that of nations we generally consider to be among the most unstable on Earth. This growing abyss at the core of our economy has literally severed any connection between those at the bottom and those at the top of our economic ladder. Upward economic mobility and economic opportunity are becoming illusory ideas, and our lack of a political core means that we also lack the political will to purposefully address these problems.

Sometimes I feel like we are reliving the fall of the Roman Republic, when leaders accumulated greater autonomous power, giving the people "bread and circuses" to keep them distracted and satiated.

Our Nation is at a critical moment in its history. We are at a point that our Founders feared the most, where the consent of the governed became an empty slogan, where Machiavellianism guided our political discourse, and where the voices of moderation and reason were subsumed to the will of those expressing extreme, anti-intellectual, and intolerant beliefs.

Restoring the core to our politics and economics is the greatest challenge of our age. If we cannot, America will become a hollow place, no longer willing or able to lead the world, trapped in a vicious cycle of extremism from both the left and right, and dangerously close being a country defined by civil unrest, cynicism, and distrust. We must find a way.