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“Retirement Income Journal? Is that where you’re from? My wife keeps telling me I should retire. My CRS and CSS are getting so bad that I should probably do that,” said George Hassan, sitting in a chair on the lawn inside the low chain link fence around his used-book store on E. Fifth Street in Durango, Colorado.

I was fingering the flea-market bric-a-brac on a table outside the Southwest Book Trader. It is less a store than an uncatalogued mountain of second-hand books, old vinyl LPs, distressed camping equipment and other dusty treasures, all barely contained by the stucco shell of what must once have been a one-story house.

On tables and racks that spill from the shop’s front door, across its narrow porch and into the yard, George sells this and that. A man’s black felt fedora with a teardrop crown appealed to me. It was my size, 7 1/4.

I visit Durango about once a year to see friends and I always visit the Southwest Book Trader. On one occasion, I found a faded Paul Butterfield album in a box of vintage vinyl. George and I were clearly near-contemporaries. We have Pennsylvania in common too. He’s from Pittsburgh. I’m from the Philadelphia area. We both traveled West in the 1970s. I drifted back East, he stayed.

George Hassan. Photo by the Durango Herald.

George has a pirate’s arrrgh in his voice. He also has a satchel of yarns that he retells to tire-kickers like me.

I’ve learned, for instance, about Taj Mahal’s performance in a local bar 40-some years ago, when all the well-known troubadours stopped in a pre-Starbucks Durango. The conversation often turns to books and authors. Last fall he told me the one about his encounter with Hunter S. Thompson. 

Years ago, the great gonzo journalist walked into the store. With an antiquarian’s eye for opportunity, George brought out a first-edition of Thompson’s masterpiece, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” He asked the Great Author to sign it.

“I was selling that book for $300,” George told me. “If he signed it, would be worth ten times that.”

Thompson took the book from George, but not in an appreciative way. “Where did you get this?” the legend thundered, god-like. “I don’t even have one of these. This is my book.”

“No, it’s my book,” George said, gently retrieving it. “But I’ll sell it to you for $300.” The mood soured. George set the book aside to help another customer. Thompson stamped out, heading for the Ralph Lauren Polo outlet down the block. When George returned, the first edition of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was missing.

When George hit the street, he could hear shouting from the direction of the outlet, which was near the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge railroad station. Unhappy with the clothing selection, or whatever, Thompson was dressing down a clerk. The first-edition was in the crook of his arm. George pulled it out and left.

The first-edition remained unsigned by Thompson, who died in Woody Creek, Colorado, in 2005.

I bought the black fedora, which was perfect except for a small hole in the forehead, and a good-as-new vintage fly-fishing vest. George gave me his 10% out-of-towner’s discount.

“I should know this,” I said, as George handed me my purchases through the twin towers of books and CD cases that frame his office-alcove. “But what do CRS and CSS mean?”

“You write about retirement and you don’t know about CRS and CSS? They mean ‘Can’t Remember Sh-t’ and ‘Can’t See Sh-t.’”

“Right,” I said.

Then I touched the brim of the fedora and said, “See you next year, George.” He’ll be there, and he’ll tell me another.

© 2021 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

Most of us have seen (and re-seen) footage of angry (mostly white) men laying siege to the US Capitol on January 6. Despite the shouting and the symbolism—Confederate flags, ‘Camp Auschwitz’ t-shirts, buffalo-horn headpieces—the wellspring of their rage—if rage is the right word—isn’t clear.

Presumably, most of them pay FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) taxes every two weeks or so. With luck, most will retire someday. And they’re probably counting on Social Security and Medicare benefits when they do.

So their attitudes toward government and their outlook on the future are relevant to us. To learn more about the rationale for the rage, I attended a Zoom webinar on Wednesday called “Reconciling and Healing America: Addressing US Polarization and Extremism.” It was hosted by the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., and Brookings president John Allen moderated.

‘A poisonous way to legislate’

“There are incentives to be 100% divided,” said Joe Straus, a former Speaker of the 150-member Texas House of Representatives. “Most people who run for the state legislature or for Congress run in districts that were drawn to elect one party or the other. For that reason, most races, even races for the US Senate, aren’t all that competitive.Most candidates have more to fear in the primary than in the general election.

“In my case, I usually didn’t have a Democratic opponent in the general election, and the biggest criticism I faced was that I wasn’t conservative enough. One product of this system is that two of the most recognizable laws passed in the past 10 years, the Affordable Care Act and the 2017 tax bill, both were passed without a single vote from the other party. That’s a poisonous way to legislate,” Straus said. He cited the media’s role in reinforcing negative perceptions of the opposite side.

Brookings vice president Darrell M. West then led a group conversation with three Brookings fellows: Elaine Kamarck, Camille Busette and Carol Graham. Each specializes in one or more subcategories of politics, economics, sociology or psychology.

‘My America is white and Christian’

“Donald Trump won 2,547 counties that accounted for 29% of US gross domestic product,” Kamarck said. “Joe Biden won 509 counties that accounted for 71% of GDP. That’s a dramatic difference.” It occurred, she added, because “over the past century, Americans have concentrated on the coasts. As a result, people in states like California, Texas, New York and Florida are under-represented in American politics.”

This data implies that people in so-called Middle America are politically over-represented on a per capita basis—which is ironic, if they feel relatively disenfranchised.

Kamarck explained that two structural elements of our Constitution accounted for this imbalance: the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all disposal of a state’s electoral votes, and the Senate, with its allocation of two Senate votes per state, no matter how sparsely or densely populated.

Ironically—a word that was relevant throughout this discussion—Republican voters are also significantly richer than Democratic voters, on average. “Joe Biden won among people earning less than $30,000 a year, less than $50,000 a year, and less than $100,000 a year. Donald Trump won among people making more than $100,000 a year and more than $200,000 a year,” Kamarck said.

Demographic statistics helped clarify the picture. “Biden won 64% of first time voters, many of whom were young or of color, and Trump did better among older voters,” she said. She also cited anecdotal evidence from individuals she spoke to. “One woman told me, ‘This is no longer my America. My America is white and Christian. And what’s happening today isn’t what I think America should be.’ So there are cultural as well as economic divides. And that makes it difficult to know what to do about it.”

‘Messiness comes with a multicultural society’

Building on Kamarck’s observation on the role of the Electoral College and Senate, Busette described those institutions as “chaperoning” political discourse in the US, in the sense of limiting or stifling its range. Americans may be clashing violently because they lack venues or habits for clashing peacefully, she believes.

“We don’t have a structure that engages the popular voices in the polity. We have the rise of the South, which means the rise of Black people. But we don’t have processes or structures that allow us to be comfortable with a large amount of community engagement without those guardrails. We have a hard time, as a polity, accommodating the kind of messiness that comes with a multicultural society. We have high degrees of polarization, but we don’t have a narrative that allows us to accommodate many kinds of experiences and to deal with problems as they come up.”

She empathized with white blue-collar workers—to a point. “If you’re white and you lost your job in Youngstown, you have no narrative. We have a narrative about success in the US: You do it by yourself. You pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.”

But she added that white working class folks too often believe a high school education should be enough to make it in America. “Forty years ago, they benefited from non-equitable policies, but now they have to do more in order to be competitive in the marketplace,” she said.

Minorities are more hopeful

White males are sensitive to rhetoric that piques their anger because they’re suffering, agreed Graham. They are dropping out of the workforce, living with their parents, and succumbing to opioid addiction at higher rates than people of color. They often have poor physical and mental health, and tend not to migrate geographically to pursue job opportunities.

“Deaths of despair are actually less prevalent among low-income minorities than among low-income whites,” she said. “Minorities are more objectively disadvantaged, but they tend to be more hopeful, more optimistic, more resilient and report less stress than low income whites.

“Low-income minorities believe strongly in the importance of higher education, but low-income whites are often skeptical about higher education. They think, because their fathers had good working class jobs, that there’s no need for them to go to college.” She tied this belief to their skepticism of scientific evidence about climate change and pandemics.

When blue-collar jobs provided a “stable and respectable middle-class existence,” white males with high school educations could enjoy the narrative of the American dream,” Graham added. That narrative implied that “if you’re poor, you’re a loser who didn’t try hard enough. In counties that voted for Trump, a higher percentage of people said they’ve lost hope in the past five years. They want to make America the way it was again. But obviously that’s not possible,” she said.

How much do the Brookings observations help explain what happened on January 6? The people who invaded the Capitol seemed jubilant, justified and empowered rather than despairing. Or were they just wearing the battle-masks of desperate people? Certainly there were many types of people at the siege, with different grievances and degrees of grievance.

Everyone at the Capitol on January 6 was a future retiree, if not a retiree already. In the meantime, they are taxpayers and voters. People who mistrust government will probably be more receptive to arguments to convert Social Security to private investment accounts.

More troubling are the Brookings experts’ reports of wasted human capital across America’s dominant demographic. Absence from the workforce, lack of education, lack of good physical and mental health—these don’t portray a group of people working to their potential, contributing to qualified plans, paying social insurance taxes, or progressing toward a secure retirement.

© 2021 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.

As the Biden folks settle in and the political parties assume their accustomed positions on the “issues,” it’s notable how quickly they return to familiar attitudes and arguments. It’s “Tastes Great, Less Filling” meets “Groundhog Day.”

For Democrats, federal spending stimulates the “demand side”; for Republicans, it means that a tax or inflationary ricochet will soon come our way. For Republicans, tax breaks stimulate the “supply side”; for Democrats, tax breaks encourage the wealthy to bid up the prices of fine art, tech stocks, and metropolitan condos.

Punxsutawney Phil

Anyone who has seen five, six or eight administrations come and go will smell the stale aroma of déjà vu.

Will we hear the same debates over the effects of a higher minimum wage on employment? Over the virtues of more or less regulation (as if regulation were all evil or benign)? Over the federal debt’s threat to our unborn grandchildren? Over whether universal health care is the camel’s nose of socialism? If not, we can spend more time in the permanent holding pattern over guns and abortion.

Perhaps a Biden-led Department of Labor and SEC will collaborate on a higher “best interest” standard, only to start a new round of court appeals. The Democrats appear ready to take another shot at mining the “tax expenditure” for retirement saving; we know the response by heart. Who knows—some quixotic newbie might suggest the establishment of a federal insurance regulator. The legal briefs are already written.

I dread the re-runs, as ritualized as Civil War re-enactments or Celtic Faires, of every policy dispute on which we waste countless months in one administration, only to have it ignored, contested or reversed in the next. We’ve seen this movie, and it’s a truly Sisyphean production. Actors Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell woke up from their Groundhog Day. I hope someday Congress can too. Progress would feel so novel.

© 2021 RIJ Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.