GUILFORD — Bernie Sanders has been properly drawing attention to the declining standard of living for the American middle class. In the process, he has been attacking trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, for causing the loss of jobs in this country.
Is this stance not ignoring a more serious underlying reality - one that, admittedly, no politician wishes to confront in an election year lest the voters kill the messenger, yet one that sooner or later we are going to have to face?
It is unlikely that our country will ever again - certainly not in the foreseeable future - enjoy the high standard of living that we as a people enjoyed for several decades after World War II, almost certainly the highest standard of living spread across a whole population in the history of the world.
In those years, we were most likely not only the most powerful nation in the world but also the only developed nation relatively undamaged by the war.
The dollar became the dominant currency, and English became the dominant international language. The high standard of living could not last forever, however, as other nations such as China and Germany - indeed, the industrial nations of Western Europe as a whole - caught up.
Furthermore, we were all exploiting world natural resources at a greater rate than even the renewable ones could be maintained. Other nations became competitive for those same resources and could employ them even more efficiently because of lower standards of living and, therefore, lower labor costs.
In order to continue to compete, American industry has had to export much of its manufacturing to these other nations, seeking to lower its labor costs while retaining its creative edge, especially in information technology.
All this has been taking place during an international revolution in robotics and automation, making production less dependent on human labor.
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If this admittedly oversimplified explanation is essentially correct, we must face and accept the fact that not again will we have that high overall standard of living. We must then explore ways of making the adjustment so that the pain is shared fairly across all segments of the population.
At the moment, as Sanders points out, because of existing and outworn policies, the rich are becoming relatively richer and the middle class relatively poorer. The burdens are not being shared proportionally.
Even if we accept that those responsible for the economic meltdown of 2008-2009 should indeed be punished, it does not follow that we should attack the concept of Wall Street and the big banks altogether. To compete, we need both, as we need big industry.
Rather, we should seek a more equitable sharing of what diminished wealth there is.
For example, as others have proposed, there should be no ceiling to the amount individuals pay for Social Security; rather, the same percentage of income should be taxed for all.
There should also be a return to a more fair progressive tax structure so that the wealthy do indeed pay a larger share of their income in accordance with their ability to pay, yet still are left with enough to encourage them to work hard, innovate, and earn more.
These steps are not enough, however.
With economies increasingly based on robotics and automation in general, with fewer jobs depending on simple human muscle, we are entering a major change in the functioning of human society and thus human politics.
Most of all, we need to reconceive the role of human labor and human fulfillment so that we can share the more limited rewards more fairly.
All this is indeed difficult to accept, but if we continue to push the essential problem further down the road, the solution will be harder still.
A dangerous weakness in democracy can be its difficulty in facing and dealing with hard, unpleasant facts.