American Values
What happens to a country when it disregards its founding value system? I remember as a child going with my parents to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home, and my father telling me the famous fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. In the story, according to Mason Locke Weems who first wrote down this fable in 1800, six year old George Washington accidentally damaged his father’s favorite cherry tree with his new axe. Washington was so driven by his conscience and his ability to know right from wrong that he immediately went to his father and in Weems’ words said,
‘I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”
Weems’ tale became the moral code for American leadership throughout the 19th and 20th century, told to millions upon millions of school children. The idea of a leader being at least perceived to be honest was a key public criterion for American leadership. Just look at Lincoln whose campaign song for the presidency in 1860 was entitled, Honest Old Abe. Or John Kennedy where the press was ecstatic because he personally took responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
However, we just had an election, where the majority of Americans voted for a man for the presidency who openly and unabashedly lies; whose explicit lack of honesty was ignored as a leadership value. The lies ran the gamut from
the irrelevant, such as the size of a crowd, to the much more important, such as upholding the rule of law through the validation of an election or saying that rioters who were sent out to prevent the rule of law from being followed were freedom fighters. Or that those same “freedom fighters” who are now in prison are actually hostages. And if the leader openly lies or bends the law to the extreme, it gives permission for members of society at large to follow suit.
Of course, one needs to be extremely naive to believe that political leaders always tell the full truth. In fact, sometimes the exaggerated or misstated truth is necessary in leadership. But what I am talking about is consistently lying and consistently trying to find larger and larger loopholes within our system of the rule of law.
Whether it was being uncomfortable and afraid because of the rapid changes in society caused by technology, or the unchecked economic disparity that those changes brought about, or the influence of social media, or a myriad of other reasons, America voted not only to change parties but also to disregard a foundational plank in America’s traditional political value system.
Obviously, a country’s values evolve. Look, how gay marriage is now accepted by most Americans. But rarely are the traditional values rejected overnight by a vote. And rarely is the rejected value so tied into the basic character of the country and to its economic system.
America’s society had been based on shared trust, a general understanding of truth. Everything from our currency to our financial system to our courts and even the basic idea of stopping at a traffic light, is based on trust and the rule of law.
One of the main components of America’s great economic success is its unique ability to harness entrepreneurial creativity without entrapping it while at the same time sidelining the fake patent medicine types; the P.T. Barnum, alchemist fringe, that by human nature often are the sidekick of entrepreneurship. The ability to do this is based on the concept of the rule of law, the idea of shared trust and the checks and balances created both within our system of government and by the competitiveness of the marketplace. It is a system that rejects and obstructs the crony capitalism of China, Russia and many other parts of the world in favor of for the free market of entrepreneurialism.
But what if the P.T Barnum’s are not sidelined, what if the checks fail? We now have the populist party controlling the White House, the Supreme Court and both houses of Congress. Ironically, the only semi-independent institution of power left in Washington is the Federal Reserve, where President Powell has two more years left in his term.
And the marketplace is only a check on power if its monopolistic instincts can be controlled and if it is free to make economic decisions and investments and reap the benefits from those investments -- based on the value of the project and not based on whether the project is politically well-connected. Sadly, we have already seen a willingness by the first Trump administration to pressure Amazon over its defense contracts because of the editorial policy of its subsidiary, the Washington Post. And we will soon have one of the largest government defense contractors in charge of government efficiency. Somehow that sounds like the fox guarding the hen house.
Many changes will occur because of the election on November 5, but it is easy to see now, that as a result of the changes that have been ratified in our value system, America in the future will develop in a very different way.
