America Failed to Become a Modern Society — Biden Wants to Change That

How Joe Biden’s Quietly Transforming What America Can Be

Image Credit: Doug Mills

There are moments in a nation’s history which don’t seem so at the time, but to the future, become turning points. Axes around which the wheel of progress begins to spin. Such moments are rare — and even more remarkable, they’re often barely even recognized as such at the time. America just had one such moment — and enough American don’t quite know it.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about Joe Biden’s budget. Now, before you roll your eyes, well, I heartily agree: budgets are some of the most tedious business any organization, from government to business to your household, has to tend to. And just as they’re rarely revolutionary, so, too, they’re commonly fractious, tense, and nerve-jangling. Do you particularly enjoy meeting with your accountant? I didn’t think so.

But this? Well, this is different. Before I discuss exactly how, context. Because in this case, context is everything.

I don’t have to tell you that America barely functions as a society. When I began to point this out, what, it’s been a decade now, I met all kinds of accusations, from hyperbole to exaggeration to worse. But now? Now you’re probably living it, and you have done over the last decade or so. Nobody much contests the point anymore. America doesn’t work as a society. The point isn’t contested because there we all are, paying the price.

That price is a literal one. You get sick, and that’s stressful enough — but in America, on top of that, come what might be called socioeconomic stressors. You’ve got to fight the “insurance” company to “approve” your medicine. You’ve got to deal with what’s probably an abusive culture or boss who frowns on you taking a bathroom break, as if you were a child. You have to wonder how much it’s going to cost you, money, time, job, potential — just this human act of getting sick, which is something that happens to all of us.

That’s just one example. The point is that America’s the sole society in the world in which something strange, perverse, and backwards happened. It got rich. But it never got modern. And so people don’t live like their counterparts in other — truly — rich nations. The socioeconomic stressors I described above? Get sick in Europe or Canada, and most of them simply don’t exist. The “insurance” company isn’t going to “deny” you medicine, you can’t just be fired like that from your job for everyday human fragility, and so you can focus on…getting better.

But America’s not like that. It’s the sole society in the world which failed to modernize. Which failed at the task, the act, the process, of becoming modern. Now, you might say, there are plenty of countries like that! What about, I don’t know, Somalia!! Bad comparison, my friend, because Somalia didn’t get rich and powerful. It’s dirt poor as a country. America ascended into the highest ranks of the league of nations. But it made a crucial mistake: it never modernized.

What does that mean? Well, if you read me regularly, you know. And by now, even if you don’t, you have some inkling. In America? You’re on your own. “America failed to modernize” means something precise, technical, formal. Europe and Canada spent the post-war era building something unprecedented in human history. Something the ancients, from the Romans to Dark Age peasants, would have marveled at. Great systems of public goods.