When I was in graduate school, my friends and I would jokingly classify the utility of research in terms of the order the researcher would be killed after the revolution. So, for physics, if you were working on say galaxy formation in the early universe you would be killed before someone working on the properties of hydrogen at low temperatures, who would be killed before someone working on building a fusion reactor. This was during the cold war and thus the prospect of Stalin and Mao still loomed large. We did not joke this way with fear or disdain but rather with a somewhat bemused acknowledgment that we were afforded the luxury to work on esoteric topics, while much of the world still did not have running water. In those days, the left-right divide was between the small government neoliberals (conservatives in those days who advocated for freer and more deregulated markets) and the bigger government New Deal liberals (those for more government action to address economic inequities). We certainly had fierce debates but they were always rather abstract. We never thought our lives would really change that much.
By the time I had finished and started my academic career, it was clear that the neoliberals had prevailed. The Soviet Union had collapsed, AT&T was broken up, and the Democratic president proclaimed the era of big government was over. Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History and the Last Man" arguing that western liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and would be the last form of government. I was skeptical then because I thought we could do better but I really didn't consider that it could get worse.
But things got worse. We had the bursting of the dot com bubble, 9/11, the endless wars, the great recession, and now perhaps the twilight of democracy as Anne Applebaum laments in her most recent book. We can find blame everywhere - globalization, automation, the rise of China, out of touch elites, the greedy 1%, cynical politicians, the internet, social media, and so forth. Whatever the reason, this is an era where no one is happy and everyone is fearful.
The current divide in the United States is very real and there is fear on both sides. On one side, there is fear that an entire way of life is being taken away - a life of a good secure job, a nuclear family with well defined roles, a nice house, neighbors who share your values and beliefs, a government that mostly stays out of the way but helps when you are in need, the liberty to own a firearm, and a sense of community and shared sacrifice. On the other side, there is the fear that progress is being halted, that a minority will forever suppress a majority, that social, racial, and economic justice will never be achieved, that democracy itself is in peril, and that a better future will always be just out of reach.
What is most frustrating to me is that these points of view are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I don't know how we can reconcile these differences but my biases and priors incline me to believe that we could alleviate some of the animosity and fear if we addressed income insecurity. While I think income inequality is a real problem, I think a more pressing concern is that a large segment of the population on both sides of the the divide lives continuously on a precipice of economic ruin, which has been made unavoidably apparent by our current predicament. I really think we need to consider a universal basic income. I also think it has to be universal because suspicion of fraud and resentment is a real issue. Everyone gets the check and those with sufficient incomes and wealth simply pay it back in taxes.
