(Why) America’s Challenge is Building a Society Not Based on Exploitation

The Hidden Force That Defined American History — and Why it Needs to Change

I want to put what I think America’s challenge is in this little Thanksgiving essay very simply and starkly — and perhaps a little brutally.

America’s challenges feel graver than the predictable outrages of everyday politics, somehow, don’t they? Of a different quality and order altogether — more like a necessary reckoning with the force of history, the weight of truth too long suppressed, the burden of folly too long called wisdom. Why is that? How did it come to be? I think the answer is hiding in plain sight — because it’s an ugly truth that no one really wants to discuss.

America has always had a social contract — or just a society if you like — based on exploitation. This is the first time in its history that it is challenged to write a social contract, or build a society that is not based on exploitation — or go on collapsing, that is. One which transcends all that. Which really frees people from having to exploit one another, or to be exploited. If you think that sounds like an historic, epic transformation — which any nation is probably more likely to fail at than to succeed — you are not wrong. Or perhaps you think I’ve said something unfair and mistaken to begin with. Moooom!!! Umair’s being mean to me again!! Here, have some cranberry sauce. Truth — that’s for you to judge. Let me make my case.

American history can be broadly divided into three eras: slavery, segregation, and capitalism. What’s the common thread running through these? The common thread running through each great era of American history to this very day is that exploitation — only of different kinds — was its bedrock. The defining principle, the basis, the roots. Of society, life, politics, economics, culture, everything. In each age, different forms of exploitation — slavery, segregation, then capitalism — were the following things: the organizing principle of its society, the engine of its economic prosperity, the centerpoint of its cultural values and norms, and the linchpin of its psychology, too. But that is precisely the same thing as saying the following: exploitation has always been the force which has defined and…