Lending America a helping hand

Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework," has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.

The 20th century had three main approaches to political philosophy that are symbolized by three images with human hands: the hands-off laissez-faire economy, the hands controlling society model and the helping hand model.

The laissez-faire model envisions a society in which the government does not intervene in the economy or the private lives of individuals apart from some basic forms of protection for companies and individuals, including enforcing contracts, police support and defense against foreign nations. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the laissez-faire model was prominent in the United States and Western democracies, notably England, France and Germany.

By the early 20th century, the laissez-faire model in the United States started morphing into the helping hand model with the regulation of industry under Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Germany, not a democratic state, nevertheless instituted helping hand policies in Bismarck's Germany in the mid-19th century. By the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s America took a decisive turn toward the helping hand model, notably by empowering labor through the National Labor Relations Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, and jobs programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority as well as the creation of the Social Security Administration.

Simultaneously, the control model emerged in Germany, Italy, Spain and countries outside of Western Europe, especially Japan. World War II was essentially a contest between the fascist control models and the helping hand models plus the control model of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the Cold War saw helping hand America and a more robust helping hand Western Europe fighting the control model Soviet Union and its satellite countries.

The helping hand model in the United States, espoused more by Democrats than Republicans, has had its ongoing domestic struggle with the laissez-faire model — for example, the contest between Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Ronald Reagan's conservative morning in America. Although the Republican Party in the 20th century challenged the expansion of the mixed economy, the GOP typically accepted many of its main features, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and a host of federal agencies, such as the Security and Exchange Commission, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communication Commission, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education.

Republicans typically called for scaling back these federal agencies and their programs, but they rarely succeeded in closing them down even if the more right-wing members of their party called for such extreme actions. In the 21st century, an even more right-wing (more populist and libertarian than conservative) Republican Party has emerged, but laissez-faire is still not a genuine possibility. The United States is not giving up Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even if these programs need to be revamped. If anything, the control model has emerged as a realistic alternative with Donald Trump possibly returning to the White House next year. If he wins, Trump has threatened to engage in a range of actions that would violate core parts of our Constitution.

Americans born after 1990 and raised largely in the 21st century do not live with the frameworks of those born and raised earlier: World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the women's movement — these historical events and dramatic revolutions are not ingrained in their consciousness. For younger Americans, 9/11 is the starting point.

The time is right to return to the helping hand model and explore the range of examples that exist. The helping hand symbolizes government intervention in the private sector, whether it is weak or strong. Democrats, Republicans and independents need to jettison laissez-faire models and control models. Approaches to political economy and social practices that are extremist are dangerous to the well-being of the vast majority of Americans. And we certainly do not need strong-man authoritarian leaders modeled along the lines of European and Asian dictators.

Those red, orange and blue helping hands that kids saw in the windows of houses on their way home from school and on their way to school in the 1970s and 1980s were good symbols of our national life as well part of the actual system of protecting children in local communities. Let's get on the same page and explore the rival helping hand models that would help us again. There is plenty to argue about, but so long as we stay within the helping hand model, the dominant democratic values of freedom, equality, stability and safety can be sustained.