Podcast: Are you politically ignorant, rationally ignorant, or actually informed?

At the height of the 1980s Reagan era, U.S. establishment leaders accepted what can only be described as a Faustian bargain—a trade in which one gains power or advantage by surrendering something essential, much like the legend of Faust, who exchanged his soul for worldly success. In pursuit of GDP growth, the economic model we now call neoliberalism became dominant. Over the following decades, laissez-faire capitalism, characterized by deregulation in a borderless, competitive market, drove the country's deindustrialization. The culmination of this process firmly established the elites as “winners” in the new information-based economy, but seemingly indifferent to the working classes. In a nutshell, in pursuit of their own wealth and power, business and political leaders exhibited an unconditional acceptance of market forces while forsaking the general welfare of millions of Americans and any sense of egalitarianism.

As a consequence of this free market orthodoxy, two distinctive American societies emerged in the subsequent decades. This civic fracturing isolated the “haves” and the “have nots” in their own respective geographic and cognitive bubbles with fewer and fewer opportunities for cultural and physical contact across the divide. Ironically, the COVID mandated social distancing had already settled in by time the pandemic hit.